>I understand there is a new edition of this coming out. >I'm thinking of doing a piece on it and would like to know >of references to other works that refer or react directly >to O'Connor's book. > >mbs
1. a long footnote reference in Mario Cogoy, International Journal of Political Economy, vol 17, no 2 (1987) see last article. 2. i believe that there was an article by james miller in review of radical political economy analyzing different marxist theories of the state. 3. i believe o connor has had a close relationship with the german state theorist claus offe, so the latter may have some interesting discussion somewhere of o connor 4. bob jessop makes brief reference to o connor in his state: putting capitalist states in their place. Jessop attempts to replace o'connor's dual categorization of state expenditures in terms either 'accumulation' or 'legitimation' with the couplet 'accumulation strategy' and 'hegemonic project'. 5. best of all is o'connor's own attempt to locate his state theory vis a vis other theories in The Meaning of Crisis: A Theoretical Introduction, pp. 99ff. criticizing mattick, o connor argues that state expenditures are socialized forms of capital costs. by this i think he means that the state pools surplus value from individual capitalists and then invests it on their behalf in the form of public forms of constant capital the value of which is thus somehow transferred to the commodity output, so that capitalists recover the surplus value that had been extorted by the state. but several problems: a. if the state borrows, it owes interest. where does the money to back the interest come from? b. how is the value of roads and harbors transferred by workers to commodities that are owned by private capitalists? c. what happens in the case of the state building useless infrastructure (like in Japan today) or arms? How are these costs transferred to the commodity output? Rakesh
