The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form

The periodisation of the capitalist mode of production is an attempt to find a middle way between empiricism, which stresses historical contingency in order to legitimate a political opportunism, and reductionism, which stresses the unchanging laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production in order to legitimate a dogmatic fundamentalism. The ‘periodisation’ of the capitalist mode of production is supposed to provide a way of defining ‘intermediate structures’ which determine the regularities and systematic features pertaining in a particular historical epoch so as to provide scientific foundations for a political strategy which can engage with the current conjuncture. The basis of the various periodisations which have been proposed over the years has been the periodisation of the dominant forms of accumulation, but the primary purpose of such periodisations has been to relate the changing forms of accumulation to changing forms of the state and of the political class struggle. However the simplistic conceptions of the state on which the dominant periodisations have been based have undermined their theoretical coherence, their empirical applicability, and the political validity of their conclusions. This is as true of the recent periodisations proposed by ‘regulation theory’ and the ‘social structures of accumulation’ approach as it was of the orthodox theory of state monopoly capitalism, all of which have rested on a simple functionalist theory of the state, which reduces the activity of the state to an expression of the functional needs of accumulation, expressed in the interests of capital, and which presumes that the state can, at least in principle, meet those needs by intervening to resolve the contradictions of capitalist accumulation. This narrow conception of the state is associated with an inadequate theorisation of the inherent contradictions of accumulation, which underlies the presumption that the state can indeed resolve those contradictions. The aim of this paper is to ask whether a more adequate theorisation of the contradictory form of accumulation, and a more sophisticated theorisation of the capitalist state, can provide the basis for a more adequate periodisation of the capitalist mode of production and of the capitalist state form. The starting point of my attempt is the state debate of the 1970s, which appears at first sight to offer a fruitful way forward, but which failed to provide an adequate account of the contradictions inherent in capitalist accumulation. On the basis of an alternative account of the realtionship between the state and the contradictory form of capitalist accumulation I will then outline what appears to be a theoretically coherent and