The capitalist state in Open Marxism: Primitive accumulation,historical specificity,and social form

Introduction

Capitalist society is reproduced through, and subordinated to, the accumulation of capital through the competitive pursuit of surplus value. Capitalists engage in this pursuit by investing in the production of commodities. These are realised as values through money-mediated exchange relations between legally equal purchasers and sellers. This monetary mediation of generalised commodity production is the basis for social individuals’ subjection to the impersonal economic compulsion of capitalist social relations. Few of the desiderata of living, prospering, or flourishing are free gifts of nature; most must be acquired through exchange. Economic compulsion arises from the separation of the producers from the means of production and subsistence, a frontier that social individuals can cross only with money. Money mediates the exchange that establishes socially necessary labour time, coordinates the activities of competitive and autonomous units of production, and is a pervasive barrier between social individuals and their wants and needs, which are available only in the form of commodities.

Compulsion is pervasive in and foundational to such a society. The distinctive character of the compulsion experienced by the dispossessed is vividly expressed in the double freedom of the worker. Capitalist production is premised on the availability of labour-power as a commodity. It is a ‘presupposition of capitalism that labour is, as a rule, done by (free) wage labourers’ (Murray, 2016: 187). The compulsion to sell labour-power is socially objective. It is rarely imposed directly, either by capitalists or the state. It is instead the impersonal domination of value relations, in which relations between persons assume inverted forms as relations between things. It is not the result of many agents actively willing the compulsion of others (although interpersonal coercion is certainly present in capitalist society as well). In their competitive investment in production in the pursuit of surplus value, capitalists do not routinely threaten violence as a worker recruitment strategy. Instead, they are in the business of purchasing labour-power from free labourers with whom they stand in a relationship of legal equality.

The abstract compulsions of capital are experienced by everyone. Such compulsions are not ordinarily felt as a result of the threat of direct violence. And yet organised violence is an unmistakable feature of capitalist society (Chorley-Schulz, 2024; Khatib, 2018). Violence is immanent to capitalist social relations: ‘the violence of capital lies not only in its origins, but is repeated in various forms at every stage of its expanded reproduction’ (Clarke, 2002: 55). Ours is a world where ‘violence is social’ and ‘hidden in plain sight’—because it is directed at no one in particular, and yet felt by everyone (Bonefeld, 2023: 21). ‘Violence isn’t just lurking beneath the surface of voluntary exchange; it’s embedded within those seemingly bloodless relationships’ (Battistoni, 2025: 25, original emphasis). How should we make sense of this?

Much of this violence is found in the activity of the capitalist state. In capitalist social relations, the state appears as ‘the concentrated and organized force of society’—its specifically political form (Marx, 1990: 915). This article develops and clarifies the distinctiveness of the Open Marxist critique of the state, along with its resonances with related arguments in Political Marxism. It emphasises the Open Marxist tradition’s investigation of the capitalist state as an essential social form of capitalism, without which it is not possible to apprehend adequately the antagonistic social constitution of capitalist social relations. State intervention continues to pervade capitalist social relations, even in the aftermath of historical processes of primitive accumulation and the global generalisation of commodity production and exchange. In generalised and developed capitalist social relations, such intervention appears in fetishised or reified forms, rather than the forms characteristic of primitive accumulation; but it has not ceased.

In the first section of this article, ‘The origins and reproduction of dispossession’, I survey the contested interpretation of primitive accumulation in the critique of political economy, arguing for the concept’s importance in the historical specification of capitalist social relations. The second section, ‘Open Marxism and Political Marxism on primitive accumulation’, develops this argument by drawing upon Open Marxist and Political Marxist interpretations of primitive accumulation and dispossession. Both traditions emphasise the social transformation inherent in the historical emergence of capitalist production. Open Marxism, in particular, draws attention to the development of the capitalist state in such processes. The third section, ‘The capitalist state’, considers the Open Marxist tradition’s critique of the state as the political form of appearance of capitalist society, one that is constituted through and conditioned by social antagonism. The fourth section, ‘The state and struggles over the reproduction of capital’, brings together and extends the arguments from the previous two sections, arguing that, in consolidated capitalist social relations, the capitalist state may be apprehended as tending to contribute to the reproduction of that separation, typically in depoliticised or fetishised ways. The activity of the capitalist state is one of the necessary presuppositions of commodity labour-power’s general availability. The capitalist form of the state does not cause economic compulsion or capital accumulation. Instead, it is a moment in the reproduction of each. Its interventions are expressions of its historically specific form; it is neither autonomous to intervene arbitrarily, nor subordinated to the agendas of particular capitals or class fractions.

Three clarifications are in order. First, the argument of this article focuses on state violence with respect to dispossession and to the antagonism inherent in the capital relation. It explores the genesis of dispossession in primitive accumulation, as well as the role of the capitalist state in the antagonism between capital and labour. Such violence is ‘not a substance or a well-defined content but a relational concept’ (Khatib, 2018: 608). A distinction must be drawn between ‘objective’ violence ‘in its “congealed” or “frozen” form as law, regulation and norm’ and the ‘subjective’ character of ‘exceptional’ violence that makes and preserves law (Khatib, 2018: 608). This article is concerned primarily with the former—that is, objective or systematic violence. In Walter Benjamin’s (2004: 243) words, such violence is a ‘nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence’ in capitalist social relations. Second, the discussion of state violence in this article does not exhaust its object’s scope. I do not address directly questions of racialisation, imperialism, or genocide, for example. ¹ My account is not a comprehensive theory of state violence. Finally, although I speak generally in terms of ‘Open Marxism’ and ‘Political Marxism’, let me insist here that both terms refer to internally diverse bodies of scholarship and debate. I do not mean to suggest that either of them are monoliths. A small number of cited authors must suffice for developing the argument, but should not be conflated with the full breadth of scholarship and discussion in either tradition. ²

The origins and reproduction of dispossession

There is ‘no capital without dispossessed labor’ (Bonefeld, 2011: 392). The dispossession of the direct producers from the means of production and subsistence has its origins in ‘so-called primitive [or original] accumulation’ (Marx, 1990: 874). ³ The enclosure of the commons, the dispossession of direct producers, and the expansion of world market relations were the (bloody) business of law and the state (Marx, 1990: 873–940). The generalisation of commodity production through concrete historical activity is premised on antagonism and violence, in direct contravention of the Edenic principles of liberal social theory: Marx ‘stressed [primitive accumulation] because he wanted to underline the role of force in creating the capital relation’ (Heller, 2011: 94).

For Marx (1990), ‘[a]s soon as capitalist production stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation [between producers and production], but reproduces it on a constantly expanding scale’ (p. 874). This claim has been the focus of a debate structured through attraction to two distinct poles of interpretation, which have been termed ‘historical primitive accumulation’ and ‘inherent-continuous primitive accumulation’ (cf. Arboledas-Lérida, 2024; De Angelis, 2001: 3–4; Ince, 2018; Jaffe, 2024; Roberts, 2017; Singh, 2016). The former presents primitive accumulation as a historical process in which organised violence secures the preconditions for generalised commodity production. Capital’s beginnings were written in ‘letters of blood and fire’ (Marx, 1990: 875); but capital accumulation occurs through the exploitation of free labourers, not the extra-economic coercion of unfree labourers: ‘when violence has done its job, another form of power can take over’ (Mau, 2023: 3). Advocates of the ‘inherent-continuous’ interpretation, however, emphasise the spectacular as well as the mundane violence that are readily apparent in contemporary capitalism. They argue that primitive accumulation qua plunder and direct coercion has never ceased. ⁴ What Marx describes as ‘moments of primitive accumulation’—the imperialist and colonialist violence that European powers wreaked upon the rest of the world in the consolidation of capitalist production, and the ‘extirpation, enslavement, and entombment’ of non-Europeans (Marx 1990: 915)—are treated as permanent features of capital accumulation, which is a persistent condition of ‘predation, fraud, and violence’ (Harvey, 2004: 74).

The historical interpretation hinges on the argument that primitive accumulation is a category marking the historical specificity of capitalism. It is the process of rupture and social transformation that marks capital accumulation’s origins in concrete social activity and struggles. This violence is not itself the engine of capital accumulation. Once commodity production is generalised, ‘the direct physical violence of “primitive accumulation” is partly transformed into the less visible systemic violence of the capitalist working day’ (Khatib, 2018: 608). This does not mean that primitive accumulation is somehow trivial or irrelevant to contemporary capitalism. Far from it:

The separation of the labourer from the means of production and subsistence, which is the basis of the class relation between capital and the working class, is both the historical presupposition and the constantly repeated result of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. (Clarke, 2002: 55)

In other words ‘the persistent violence of primitive accumulation . . . is suspended but not superseded’ in the movement from historical dispossession to dispossession’s contemporary reproduction (Ince, 2018: 3, original emphasis). Without the violence of primitive accumulation, there could be no capitalism. But capital accumulation does not occur through the violence of primitive accumulation.

The inherent-continuous interpretation renders the concept of primitive accumulation less precise and meaningful, rather than more so (Bonefeld, 2023; Ince, 2014 p. 123). It conflates the violent expropriation of primitive accumulation with the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of free labourers (Roberts, 2017). It centres ‘capital’s social violence, but de-centre[s] the epochal transformation of social orders that make its specific shapes possible’ (Jaffe, 2024: 191). In so doing, it obscures the historical distinctiveness of capitalism, positing ‘the violent force of primitive accumulation in a trans-historical way as an ever-present constant’ (Jaffe, 2024: 205). In capitalist society, social reproduction is not anterior to the production and exchange of commodities. The reproduction of our society occurs through and not despite capitalist production: ‘the dominant form of social reproduction’ is the capital relation itself (Smith, 2017: 195). Persistent primitive accumulation is not reproductive of capitalist society, which is reproduced through the social violence and inherent antagonism of capitalist production itself.

It should be granted, however, that the inherent-continuous view proceeds from a recognition that ‘the peaceful semblance of the market and its contractual relations cannot fully obscure the structural violence at the bottom of every economic transaction’ (Khatib, 2018: 612). It is vital to ‘centr[e] the ongoing violence that the [historical] view risks missing’ (Jaffe, 2024: 191). Capitalism’s social violence remains unexplained if we do not investigate the relationship between primitive accumulation as a historical process and the reproduction of the dominant and dominating abstractions of capital in the present day. And for that very reason, it also remains unexplained if we do not attend to ‘the concentrated and organized force of society’—the capitalist state (Marx, 1990: 915).

Open Marxism and Political Marxism on primitive accumulation

Revisiting the Political Marxist and Open Marxist traditions helps to clarify that primitive accumulation is both a determinate historical process and a presupposition of capitalist social relations. Both traditions reject the apriorism inherent in treating historical processes as ordained either by inevitable historical laws or by the autonomous development of productive forces. Such notions ‘naturalize capitalism [and] disguise its distinctiveness as a historically specific social form’ (Wood, 2002: 74). Instead, both traditions emphasise capital’s ‘distinctiveness as a historically specific social form’ (Wood, 2002: 74).

Primitive accumulation is centred definitively in Political Marxist arguments for capitalist social relations’ historical specificity. For example, it plays a central role in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s (2002) exploration of ‘Marx’s insistence on the historical specificity of capitalism’ (p. 37). ‘What transformed wealth into capital was a transformation of social property relations’ effected through organised violence; it did not come about through a mere concentration of goods to ‘a point at which it was sufficient to permit substantial investment’ in production (Wood, 2002: 36, 35, original emphasis). It was realised in and through the separation of the economic and the political that is peculiar to capitalist society—in which the capitalist class ‘relinquishes direct political power’ over the dominated producers, in favour of ‘indirect class control’ through the ‘“impersonal” hands of the state’ (Wood, 1995: 43). This argument is similar to one often made in Open Marxism that such ‘struggles simultaneously abolished the direct political character of civil society while creating the modern state’ (Burnham, 2002: 121).

For Wood, primitive accumulation established the society-pervading pursuit of surplus value through investment in production (Wood, 2002: 35), and catalysed the transformation of large numbers of peasants—‘the vast majority of the inhabitants of the world in any period between the Neolithic and the twentieth century’ (Wickham, 2021: 9)—into unpropertied wage-labourers. The latter are socially separated from the means of production, and encounter capitalists in a relationship of legal equality between the owners of property (in labour-power and the means of production, respectively). They produce neither for their own subsistence, nor for the fulfilment of seigneurial demands, but with the aim of acquiring the money necessary to reproduce themselves in a society whose wealth appears in the form of commodities. What they produce are commodities that may be realised as exchange values in monetary exchange. This ‘positing of the individual as a worker, in this nakedness, is itself a product of history’; it is specific to a particular historical epoch (Marx, 1973: 472, original emphasis). Proletarians are ‘free in the double sense’: they are ‘free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own’; and they are free to sell their only possession, labour-power, as a commodity (Marx, 1990: 272, 874). Only capitalist social relations are characterised by the almost total exclusivity of this survival strategy. Subsistence agriculture, pastoralism, transhumance, or communal exploitation of shared resources are generally no longer available as alternative strategies. Subsistence agriculture is not an option for most of those driven off the land; pastoralists and transhumants will tend to run afoul of totalising and zealously enforced property claims; and most shared resources have long since been appropriated or enclosed. The predominant remaining option is to live by selling labour-power.

Wood describes this state of affairs as ‘market dependence’, in which ‘the requirements of competition and profit-maximisation are the fundamental rules of life’ (cf. Brenner, 2007; Wood, 2002: 2). Social individuals’ market dependence leaves them few choices other than to participate in the valorisation of capital by selling their labour-power. Individuals cannot hope to reproduce themselves—let along pursue their own desired ends or flourish—except insofar as they participate in an ‘impersonal social system’ (Wood, 2002: 180). They must subordinate their ends to those of capital.

But why does the separation of the producers from the means of production continue indefinitely—a fortiori since Wood emphasises that social forms are historically constituted? In Wood’s account, primitive accumulation is an event or a process, while market dependence is a persistent condition or structure. If the former is simply a periodisation, then it cannot account for the historical specificity of capital’s essential social forms (cf. Hunter, 2023: 257–262). Periodisation amounts to a ‘static fetishism’ that ‘can only embrace historical specificity in the mutually exclusive forms of historical contingency and structural inevitability’; an insistence on historical contingency (against structuralist or teleological conceptions of historical development) reproduces the problems of a rigid conception of history ‘neatly packaged into structurally distinct periods’ (Clarke, 1992: 149). What is needed is the critique of social forms as they are constituted through concrete social activity in history.

This apparent impasse can be resolved through inquiring into the logic of capital’s reproduction. Wood’s account of primitive accumulation as a process of social transformation—leading to the condition of market dependence—‘trac[es] the historical origins of what Marx would come to term “simple reproduction”’ (Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, 2015: 149). Marx argues that capitalist production ‘reproduces in the course of its own process the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour’ (Marx, 1990: 723). The key insight is that ‘class relations are not only [capitalist production’s] presupposition but also its result’ (Clarke, 1991a: 124, original emphasis). This is ‘the characteristic result of capitalist production, a result which is constantly renewed and perpetuated’ (Marx, 1990: 716). It is not simply a matter of workers leaving the hidden abode of production as dispossessed as they were upon entering it. More fundamentally, within the expanded reproduction of capital, capitalist production is the production not only of commodities but of the antagonistic relation between capital and labour. Capital ‘posits its historical precondition in the existence of a class of propertyless labourers as the result of its own (expanded) reproduction’ (Bonefeld, 2023: 125).

It is at this point that consideration of the capitalist state is essential. ‘[I]n principle, as Marx shows in Capital, it is conceivable for capital to be self-reproducing’ (Clarke, 1991b: 192, original emphasis). However, the foundations of that process are constantly contested through class struggle: ‘[i]n reproducing itself capital also reproduces the working class . . . as the barrier to its own reproduction’ (Clarke, 1991b: 190, emphasis added). This state of affairs cannot reproduce itself peaceably—meaning that something like Wood’s ‘market dependence’ cannot be treated as a self-reproducing state of affairs outside of historically specific social antagonism. For many Open Marxists, the antagonistic separation of producers from the means of production is ‘the constitutive presupposition of the class antagonism between capital and labour’ and the availability of labour-power as a commodity; ‘[t]his presupposition has constantly to be posited in the process of capitalist reproduction’ (Bonefeld, 2002: 87, 89). The separation of the direct producers from the means of production and subsistence, considered as a presupposition of the capital relation, cannot be assumed as a given. As a definite, historically specific social process, it was inaugurated by primitive accumulation. But dispossession is also a constitutive premise of value relations in the world of generalised commodity production and exchange. It is an essential moment in the inverted totality of capitalist social relations: ‘[p]rimitive accumulation . . . led to the complete separation of labor from its means of existence, and this separation . . . capitalist reproduction perpetuates and maintains on an expanding scale’ (Bonefeld, 2011: 386). This reproduction occurs through capitalist production itself—and through the capitalist state as a moment in capital’s own reproduction (Clarke, 1991b: 189).

The capitalist state

The Open Marxist critique of the state rests on the argument that the capitalist state is the necessary political appearance of capitalist social relations. It proceeds from the recognition that the capitalist state emerges within and through histories of class struggle. ‘[T]he development of the state’ emerges through ‘social conflict over the imposition of the value form upon social relations’ (Bonefeld, 1995: 196). In other words, the ‘the class character of the capitalist state must be understood as a historically specific form that is open to the class struggle between capital and labour’ (Memos, 2025: 120). This conflict is constitutive of what Wood (1995: 23) calls the ‘real appearance’ of the separation of the political and the economic. But this real appearance is not ‘a given structural feature of the capitalist mode of production’; instead:

the ‘separation of the economic from the political’ is a permanent object of class struggle, which the state seeks to impose on working class struggles in order to confine those struggles within the limits of private property and capitalist reproduction. (Clarke, 1991c: 34)

This means that ‘the state itself is a moment of the process of [capital’s] reproduction’ (Clarke, 1991b: 189). In fact, the development of the capitalist form of the state is implicated in both the ‘revolutionary’ emergence of capitalism and in capital’s contradictory reproduction after it is established on a world scale:

[w]hile the origins of the modern state lay in the beginnings of commodity circulation and the appropriation of the means of production as private property, its full development presupposed the generalisation of commodity relations with the generalisation of wage labour. (Clarke, 1988: 130)

Organised violence is at the root of the separation of the direct producers from the means of production. This was the occasion for exceptional and direct state intervention, coercion, and violence. But knowing the present is key to the interpretation of this past; primitive accumulation ‘did not prefigure capitalism’ (Bonefeld, 2023: 126). Determinate historical processes of primitive accumulation may be recognised as being episodes of primitive accumulation only from the perspective of the form of society upon which they were founded (Bonefeld, 2014: 82–87, 2023: 122–126).

In consolidated capitalist social relations, in which ‘the force of value vanishes in the law of value’ (Bonefeld, 2014: 94), the state continues to intervene in the civil society from which it is apparently separate—depoliticising economic relations, policing the boundaries of proletarian dispossession, and serving as the focus for the organisation and concentration of capitalist society’s immanent violence. The mediation of class struggle by the form of the state tends to contribute to the reproduction of the double freedom of the workers, such that they are unencumbered by possession of the means of subsistence and production. Labour-power’s general availability as a commodity is a premise of generalised commodity production and exchange, and it is also premised upon the separation of direct producers from the means of subsistence and production. Such dispossession is ‘the constituent premise and the incessantly reproduced social foundation’ of capital accumulation (Bonefeld, 2023: 126). Without the separation of the producers from the means of production, workers would no longer be doubly free to sell their labour-power as a commodity. The capital relation would collapse. The reproduction of society through capital accumulation—itself premised on value relations, that is, the generalised production and exchange of commodities in the pursuit of surplus value—would not be possible.

Within Open Marxism, the reproduction of this separation is frequently explained with reference to ‘[t]he state form of the class struggle’ (Clarke, 1991b: 194). This is the political appearance of the struggle over the reproduction of the capital relation. Such reproduction is contested, and not guaranteed:

[T]he circuit of capital does have certain presuppositions—in particular it presupposes the separation of the labourer from the means of production and subsistence that provides the material basis for the subordination of the working class to capital. However, this separation is not an externally given circumstance; except in the phase of ‘primitive accumulation’ when it is created by the dissolution of feudal society, it is a relation that has constantly to be reproduced. . . . It is only on this basis that capital, and the reproduction of the separation of the workers from the means of production and subsistence, can be reproduced. (Clarke, 1991b: 192)

In other words, the antagonistic separation of producers from production is a constitutive element of capitalism as we live it today, and not simply an episode in its prehistory. Direct producers who lack access to the means of subsistence must constantly re-enter the sphere of exchange—to sell their labour-power—if they are to reproduce themselves. This is a historically specific social form, through which ‘value . . . confronts living labour-power as an autonomous power’, and does so with seeming objectivity ‘in so far as it confronts the worker as the property of another’ (Marx, 1991: 502–503). Capital qua value as self-valorising value, then, is at the root of economic compulsion, rather than primitive accumulation.

Here we see capitalist society’s apparent division between the political and the economic at work. The capitalist state does not continuously legislate the forms of value into being. Instead, ‘[t]he legal form of private property presupposes the social relation of alienated labour’ (Clarke, 1991a: 67). Capital accumulation is reproduced through value’s apparent self-valorisation and the mediating role of money—the ‘central nervous system’ of capitalist production relations (Copley and Moraitis, 2021: 2). In developed capitalist social relations, capital’s essential forms—the commodity, value, and money—are paramount. The rule of capital’s forms may be observed in the generalisation of the production and exchange of commodities, mediated by the money-form of value (Bonefeld, 2023: 42–66). As Wood rightly insists, staying alive in capitalist society—let alone flourishing—requires that one has money with which to purchase commodities. This is not merely because exchange mediates access to life’s necessities in the form of commodities. More fundamentally, money-mediated exchange is the only means by which a commodity may become ‘the embodiment of abstract, socially necessary labour-time’, as ‘a portion of the labour of society as a whole’ (Clarke, 1991a: 105, 106). Value appears only in the form of money; abstract labour is socially validated through money-mediated exchange. In this sense, ‘[i]nstead of simply veiling value relations, money is generative of them’ (Copley, 2024: 237). And the (re-)imposition of money upon society occurs through the activity of the specifically capitalist state—which itself presupposes the money-form (Clarke, 1988; Copley, 2024; Copley and Moraitis, 2021).

Capital, with its apparent capacity for self-valorisation, stands athwart the reproduction of individuals and society alike—not law or policy:

[a]lthough expressed in property rights and enforced by law, the social relations of production are not constituted and reproduced by the threat of state violence; rather, the social reproduction of capital and of the working class is the other side of the material reproduction of society. (Clarke, 1991b: 187)

Instead, the capitalist state imposes the abstraction of money and the violence of law on the society of which it is itself a form of appearance. ‘The state secures the reproduction of civil society by enforcing the rule of money and the law’ and it is ‘in turn subordinated to the rule of law and of money’ (Clarke, 1988: 127, 129). The relation between capital and labour is inherently antagonistic and contradictory, a fortiori insofar as it is premised on the separation of the direct producers from the means of production and subsistence. The law of value does not ‘instantiate itself—just like that’ (Bonefeld, 2014: 11). Instead, it takes as a condition of possibility the reproduction of the separation of the mass of direct producers from the means of production and subsistence. But the course of such reproduction is antagonistic. It is a matter of class struggle, in which the state is persistently implicated.

‘If there were no class struggle, if the working class were willing to submit passively to their subordination to capitalist social relations, there would be no state’ (Clarke, 1991b: 190, original emphasis). The capitalist state reproduces the conditions of possibility for the ongoing dispossession of the working class from the means of production and subsistence. State intervention is regularly required to prevent the antagonism inherent in the capital relation from threatening to endanger the prospects for continued capital accumulation; ‘[b]y upholding the rule of law and money, the state maintains the formal discipline of the market’ (Burnham, 2002: 121). Intervention by the capitalist state is a necessary—even banal—phase in the reproduction of capital. This includes the maintenance of the availability of labour-power as a commodity.

The state and struggles over the reproduction of capital

The activity of the capitalist state tends to limit patterns of class struggle that might threaten the separation of the political and the economic (such as struggles to secure direct access to the means of subsistence, or to pursue provision for need that is not mediated by the commodity form). It does so by seeking to prevent class antagonism from taking courses that might result either in direct access to the means of production and subsistence, or in the disruption of money’s mediation of social production. State intervention may take the form of welfare or the provision of health care or education, which may be considered as attempts to secure the reproduction of labour-power through policies confined within the limits of the capitalist state form. Such provision tends to ‘fragment, divide, demobilise, and demoralise the working class, eroding [its] collective strength’ (Clarke, 1991c: 60). But intervention is not restricted to inadvertent ‘promot[ion] of the disorganisation of labour’ (Burnham, 2002: 123). The capitalist state also intervenes whenever economic relations risk becoming politicised directly. In moments of crisis, state managers will feel compelled to pursue authoritarian and coercive policies if they seem necessary: intensification of policing and extension of carcerality and penality; restrictions on the movement of persons (rather than capital) and the curtailment of rights and liberties; exclusion and abandonment. Those who cannot find buyers of their labour-power are ‘shut out from the “community of the free” [and] are exposed to naked state violence’ (Alami et al., 2024).

Three broad categories of examples may be considered here. First, the capitalist state makes constant political interventions into economic relations precisely in order to inhibit the politicisation of economic relations. It secures money’s mediation of exchange, and it preserves the apparent separation of the economic and the political, by depoliticising ‘the economy’ as a seemingly distinct and autonomous realm. Here, depoliticisation refers not merely to a tendency to treat social forms as trans-historically valid rather than historically constituted through antagonism; it also refers to particular approaches to statecraft, through which politicians state managers attempt to navigate the tension between the state’s semblance of abstract neutrality and the social imperative that capital continue to accumulate. Such approaches to statecraft are themselves only possible because of the historically specific form of the capitalist state. Depoliticisation in this latter sense is apparent in the tendency for contemporary states to pursue ‘the displacement of crisis from the economic to the political (from the market to the administrative system)’ as a strategy for managing crises (Burnham, 2017: 360). The insulation of monetary policy from mass democratic control is an exercise in ‘(re)producing capitalism’s monetary circuitry’ in order to ‘effectively subordinate all political objectives to the cardinal purpose of securing’ the conditions for capital accumulation (Copley, 2024: 245). Policy agendas for neoliberalisation, austerity, and financialisation must be understood as historical appearances of ‘the violence of capital and the capitalist state’ in the process of reproducing capital accumulation (Memos, 2021: 107). A frequently cited example is the effort made by New Labour to place aspects of economic management outside the scope of conventional policymaking processes (Burnham, 2001), itself a single instance of a more general trend towards the insulation of economic policy from (formally) democratic political processes. Such ‘depoliticized discipline’ (Copley, 2022: 15 ff) can take the form of trade liberalisation agreements, state membership in supranational institutions, or simply in persistent rhetorical appeals to the fetishised authority of ‘the economy’ against domestic political pressure. Alternatively, it can consist in discursive attempts to ‘pass the ball of responsibility’ on the part of state managers, as seen during state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (Kettell and Kerr, 2022: 11).

Second, the form of the state tends to restrict political contestation within purely parliamentary parameters. The state reproduces the separation of the producers from the means of subsistence and the means of production—enforcing, codifying, and juridifying the commodification of the means of subsistence and production (Bonefeld, 2023: 34–35). Attempts to overcome the separation of the dispossessed from the means of subsistence tend to provoke swift state responses. As the ‘concentrated and organized force of society’ (Marx, 1990: 915), the state intervenes when social antagonism threatens to collapse the apparent separation of the political and the economic—in extremis, with organised violence:

Should things go to the wire, as invariably they do in antagonistic society, a power is required to . . . depoliticize the social relations if need be by use of force, and preserve the rule of law by suspending it in order to do what is necessary to overcome the disorder and re-establish for the rule of law the social order upon which it rests. (Bonefeld 2021: 128–183)

This is nowhere more evident than when policing exceeds the apparent limits of the law, whose content is produced rather than violated by state violence (Bonefeld, 2025; Tomba, 2009). The ‘militarized policing of the poor’ (Alami et al., 2024) that is increasingly characteristic of contemporary capitalist states is not an aberration. It is an expression of the inherently contradictory character of their historically specific form, and can only intensify in the face of ongoing crises and deepening immiseration.

Third, the state is always mediated by, and under the compulsion of, the abstractions that it imposes upon society (Clarke, 1988: 126–129, 1991b: 193–198; Copley and Moraitis, 2021). The role of fetishism here is key. State managers can only typically formulate and execute policy through attempting to secure the conditions for the reproduction of the capital relation. They respond to the contradictions of capital as they appear in the form of seemingly disparate crises or emergencies, which in turn pose threats to the reproduction of states themselves (Alami et al., 2024). And not only state managers but states themselves are dominated by the socially constituted abstractions that they impose on the society of which they are a form of appearance: ‘the state reproduces the law of value on a global scale—an “Invisible Leviathan” that subordinates states to its dictates’ (Copley, 2024: 229; cf. Copley and Moraitis, 2021). The relationship of the capitalist state to catastrophic climate change provides a vivid concrete example. It is no accident that state-led or -proposed responses to catastrophic climate change are typically couched in terms of market-oriented policies and technocratic fixes, and decidedly not in terms of broader social transformation. It could hardly be otherwise. For any capitalist state, any serious attempt to tackle the central role of capitalist production itself in climate change would be tantamount to that state’s own self-abolition (cf. Smith, 2017: 190). More generally, while the content of state policies cannot be predicted unerringly, the specifically capitalist form of the sharply delimits the scope of that content: ‘while state power undergirds every moment in the circuit of capital, state action also accidentally creates a system of abstract compulsions that in turn dominates states’ (Alami et al., 2024).

Domination by such abstract compulsions originates in the activity of real people, albeit in a mediated and inverted fashion. Essences do not precede appearances; social forms are not anterior to their own concrete appearance in history. They are not a priori constructs but the determinate products of—and conditions for—concrete activity by real social individuals (Clarke, 1991c: 63). The essential forms of capitalist society are socially constituted by the activity of real individuals, who in turn find their activity mediated and conditioned by the same social forms constituted through their activity. Being constituted behind the backs of the direct producers, but also constraining and mediating their awareness and activity, value, and its forms—commodities, money, capital—cannot be adequately grasped in isolation, but only in relation and contradiction with the other moments of the totality of capitalist social relations. This is not a matter of simply having a ‘false’ understanding of what is going on. Far from being a simple illusion, ‘fetishism is real’ (Bonefeld, 2014: 93). It is constitutive and reproductive of capital as a social relation. It is in this sense that the separation of the political and the economic may be seen as a necessary and constitutive appearance of the reproduction of capital as a social relation.

The separation of the producers from production is a socially constituted category that becomes reified and dominates social individuals. It is continuous with the depoliticisation inherent in the apparent separation of the political and the economic. As such, the double freedom of the worker is fetishised and appears as though it were trans-historical. The mediation of class antagonism through the money form and the legal form is in turn treated as an essential aspect of human sociality, rather than as something that is historically specific. Likewise, the social objectivity of dispossession ‘vanishes in its own social world’ (Bonefeld, 2011: 386). It acquires the semblance of naturalness, of trans-historical objectivity. The double freedom of the worker does not appear as destitution through extraordinary expropriation, as primitive accumulation did. It is part of the background hum of pervasive compulsion and exploitation. Its own appearance is seemingly natural or invisible.

However, it is a ‘key idea for Open Marxism’ that fetishism is not a fact but a ‘process’ (Grollios, 2017: 243). Its reproduction is always uncertain and mediated by struggle. The ‘state (and its policies) need to be understood in the context of the crisis of the capital relation itself of which the “economic” and the “political” are a part’ (Burnham, 2017: 376). ‘Capitalism’s politics/economy divide is perpetually contested, as various groups strive to (re)politicise the economy in their favour’ (Copley, 2024: 238). The state is compelled to ‘depoliticise’ economic relations—itself a consummately political activity (Burnham, 1995: 101)—so as to preserve the monetary mediation of production and hence social reproduction itself. ‘The state must continually rid the market sphere of directly political forms of economic reproduction, such that the principles of competition, contract, and exchange may reign supreme’; despite its apolitical appearance, ‘[t]his is a class politics’, one centred on the formally neutral and seemingly ‘universal’ abstract state specific to capitalist society (Copley, 2024: 242). However, it is a contested and antagonistic class politics. State intervention is always contradictory or incoherent, sometimes to a considerable degree. There is a wide range of possibility here: ‘from arson attack to class solidarity . . . from destitution to collective bargaining . . . from strike-breaking to collective action’ (Bonefeld, 2020: 165).

The capitalist state’s capacity to (attempt to) secure the conditions for capital accumulation—including the maintenance of the availability of commodity labour-power as a consequence of double freedom—is an expression of its historically specific form. State intervention crossing the apparent separation between the political and the economic is ‘inherently an exercise in self-discipline’ (Copley, 2024: 231, original emphasis) rather than an expression of unrestricted freedom to act. As the political form of appearance of capitalist social relations, the state is not autonomous from economic relations such that state managers’ capacities for intervention are unbounded. At the same time, the bounded scope of the content of state policy does not imply that the state is subordinated to particular capitals or class fractions; ‘[t]he state is not an agent of capital’ (Bonefeld, 1995: 196, original emphasis). Instead, intervention by the capitalist state is a consequence of it ‘enforcing the rule of money and the law, which are at the same time its own supposition’ (Clarke, 1988: 127, 1991b).

The capitalist state is not exterior to capitalist society, nor is it anterior to capitalist production (Bonefeld, 2014: 182–185). It is not deformed by capitalist society’s reproduction through capital accumulation (Hunter, 2023: 264–268). As the political form of appearance of capitalist society, the state is ‘not only an institution but . . . an active process’ (Burnham, 2002: 123). It stands in mutual presupposition with the other determinations of capitalist society. ‘There is only one social reality’, and none of its essential determinations is unmediated or self-sustaining (Bonefeld, 2014: 166). The state is not autonomous from ‘the economy’ precisely because they are both moments in a single contradictory totality (Bonefeld, 2014: 165–185; Burnham, 1995: 93). While the state appears as though it stands over and against society, it can only be adequately apprehended as the form of appearance of an inverted social totality. This apprehension is achieved only by examining histories of class struggle and the abstractions that are both constituted by and in turn mediate that struggle. Put simply, the Open Marxist approach to the critique of the state:

is not to deny its existence prior to the development of capitalism, nor is it to say that the state exists independently of social relations, but instead that the state only exists in and through temporally and spatially conditioned social relations. (Dönmez and Sutton, 2016: 694)

Conclusion

The capitalist state is the political appearance of an antagonistic social totality. It is a moment in the reproduction of capital. Rather than violating capitalism’s apparent separation of the political and the economic, state intervention tends to sustain it. Capitalist states act to secure the conditions for accumulation—including the reproduction of labour-power as a generally available commodity. This availability appears as the double freedom of the workers, who are impersonally compelled to participate in the valorisation of capital. The class struggle that is immanent to, and constitutive of, the antagonistic relationship between capital and labour is always a potential threat to the apparent boundary between the political and the economic. State managers are hardly able to ignore such a threat.

The Open Marxist critique of the state helps to illuminate the conundrum described at the beginning of this article. Direct violence does not compel participation in the valorisation of capital; the abstract domination of capital’s essential forms does. And it is not dispossession itself, but exploitation, that underlies the accumulation of capital. And yet capitalist society is inherently antagonistic—and the capitalist state has considerable capacities for violence at its disposal. If compulsion is caused by capital’s essential social forms, and not by direct, organised coercion, how do we make sense of such capacities? We can begin to answer this question through an appreciation of Open Marxism’s emphasis on social (and socially constitutive) antagonism. Both the separation of the direct producers from the means of production and subsistence and the relation between capital and labour are inherently antagonistic, as is their reproduction. Contrary to the inherent-continuous view of primitive accumulation, the specifically Open Marxist claim is that the capitalist form of the state does not cause economic compulsion; it responds to the necessary and constitutive antagonism inherent in capitalist society’s reproduction. Open Marxism (like Political Marxism) places great emphasis on the historical specificity of capitalist social relations, whose emergence occurred through historical episodes of primitive accumulation. The separation of the producers from the means of production has its origins in primitive accumulation, but the latter is not the cause of the compulsion experienced by capitalist subjects. The value-form of capitalist society, not the state as its political form of appearance, is the cause of economic compulsion. But struggles over the reproduction of dispossession—which is a presupposition of labour-power as a commodity, and hence of the capital relation—prompt the intervention, coercion, and violence of the capitalist state.

Capitalist society is one in which violence is objectified and fetishised. The violence of the capitalist state is inherent to the reproduction of capitalist society itself. The reproduction of mass dispossession from the means of production and subsistence expresses the transformation of primitive accumulation from a concrete historical process to a constitutive, fetishised premise of capitalist social relations (Bonefeld, 2011: 389–390). Put differently: Primitive accumulation appears in history as a discrete process of dispossession and expropriation. With the advent of the consolidation and globalisation of commodity relations, however, the separation of workers from the means of subsistence and production is not simply consigned to the historical record. Instead, ‘[t]he history of capitalism is the history of dispossessed labour’ (Memos, 2021: 18). Dispossession is a continually posited and reproduced premise of the capital relation and hence of social reproduction through value’s self-valorisation. The activity of the capitalist state contributes to the reproduction of the separation of the direct producers from the means of subsistence and production. The reproduction of that separation occurs antagonistically, and such struggles must be depoliticised and policed.

The separation of workers from the means of subsistence and production is a constantly reproduced presupposition of capital’s own reproduction. The passage from histories of primitive accumulation to conditions of continually reproduced dispossession and exploitation is an essential premise of a society reproduced through the valorisation of capital (Bonefeld, 2011: 385–390). Labour-power as a commodity is an inescapable presupposition of the generalised production and exchange of commodities. ‘The violence of capital’s original beginning’ is ‘posed as the foundation of its constituted existence where the pleasant norms of equality and freedom obtain as the rights of private property’ (Bonefeld, 2002: 88–89). Such violence has not been abolished but sublated. In place of the violent transformation of peasants into proletarians through the sustained deployment of extra-economic coercion, there is now the objectified and impersonal coercion of capital’s abstract compulsions. The antagonism inherent in the capital relation requires constant intervention by the capitalist state qua capitalist society’s political form and objectification of that society’s organised force.

The capitalist state is essential to capital’s continued, and necessarily antagonistic, reproduction. Like the separation of producers from the means of production, it is immanent to the social relations of generalised commodity production. They must both be accounted for in the historical specification of capital as a peculiar form of society. Otherwise, it is not possible to apprehend adequately either the historical processes through which commodity production and exchange became generalised, or the social constitution of the fetishised economic categories through which capitalist domination is experienced and reproduced.