I agree with Rakesh's main points, including his characterization of my work with Anwar (originally started with Anwar's unpublished 1987 manuscript on National Income Accounts and continued with my dissertation, an article in RRPE and later with our joint book). In my dissertation, I formulated our concern about the limits of the capitalist state within the context of marxist theories of the state (Poulantzas/Miliband/Gough/O'Connor/Bowles/Gintis and even German Capital Logic School!) and also within the so-called "Plan Problem." However, even there I didn't extensively go into "an actual theory of the nature of the state."
Secondly, and more importantly, our goal was to understand the limitations of the capitalist state by focusing on the redistrubitive activities of the state, which in turn empirically demonstrated that first, such functions are directly determined by capital accumulation, and second, the standard of living of workers is mostly shaped by labor-capital relations rather than labor-state, at least in the case of the US. The following last paragraph of our article says this clearly.
"Perhaps the most important result of our study is that it yields a clear sense of the limits to the capitalist state. It is striking to note when one compares the real wage of workers adjusted for the net social wage is not very different from the unadjusted real wage, i.e. from real employee compensation per worker (Figure 4). Thus in spite of the welfare state, the real basis of the standard of living of workers remains the wage they are able to win from their employers. Its steady rise over the boom phase, followed by its stagnation and decline in the subsequent crisis phase, forcibly remind that class struggle and of the reserve army of labor continue to play a central role as ever in its determination."
Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
Interesting that while Noam Chomsky is understood to be (or understands himself as) an anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist, he seems to support Robert Pollin's and Robin Hahnel's attempts to specify the essence of the rational state in terms of which the actual state is .... Given, then, the specifically bourgeois form of the state--and I admit to being hardly clear as to what these "structural" limits on real democracy are, but this is what I would like to investigate--perhaps we should not be surprised by both (a) the limits on state stabilization policy and its increasingly class biased form (predicted by Mattick Sr, Mario Cogoy, Joachim Hirsch) and (b) Shaikh and Tonak's very important finding that the welfare state never redistributed income downward even in the so called Golden Age, working class taxes may have exceeded transfers even before 'social democracy' was blamed for stagflation, and the regressive nature of the so called welfare state has only since worsened with relative cuts in social expenditures and regressive increases in the payroll and sales tax paying for tax breaks not even for investment (as recommended by Paul O'Neill who was run out of town) but for the consumption of the rich (Bob Jessop refers to transition from Keynesian welfare state to Schumpeterian workfare state).
I would imagine that for Shaikh and Tonak that this would not be evidence of the corruption of the state by private interest but rather (in a Marxian vein) evidence of the corruption of the state, given its form in a bourgeois society. But I do not think their findings are supplemented by an actual theory of the nature of the state.
E. Ahmet Tonak Professor of Economics
Simon's Rock College of Bard 84 Alford Road Great Barrington, MA 01230
Tel: 413 528 7488 Fax: 413 528 7365 www.simons-rock.edu/~eatonak
