The State

The Miliband-Poulantzas stalemate and the crisis of the welfare state defined the intellectual and political context in which the journal Kapitalistate first introduced derivationism—also known as the capital logic school—to Anglo-American scholars. Derivationism emerged from the West German student movement in 1969, but it did not have an impact outside Germany until the translation and publication in 1978 of several essays by John Holloway and Sol Picciotto. The central axiom of the derivationist approach is that the analysis of the relation between state and society must be deduced from contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production. The rationale for this claim is that if capitalism were in fact a spontaneous and self-regulating economic system as stipulated by neoclassical economics, there would be no logical rationale for state action in relation to capital accumulation. Yet, the state routinely intervenes in economic relations in all capitalist societies. Therefore, derivationists posit the state as a logically necessary instance of capitalist society that must perform for the capitalist class those tasks that it inherently cannot perform for itself. These tasks, whatever their nature at any given historical period, define the general interests of the capitalist class.

Derivationism was viewed briefly as a way to transcend the methodological antinomies of the Miliband-Poulantzas debate because it focused state theory on the limitations imposed on state policies by its relation to the process of capital accumulation. Derivationism seemed to offer a more dynamic approach to the state that would explain the relationship between the state's historical political development and the underlying contradictions of the capitalist mode of production in contrast to the static models proposed by Miliband and Poulantzas. Paradoxically, the major objection to derivationism was that it tended to remain ahistorical and nonempirical in its approach to the state and thus provided little guidance to scholars who were interested in studying the historical political development of actually existing states.

The derivationists' main contribution was to call attention to the possibility that systematic and insurmountable limitations on state policy may be imposed by the developing contradictions of the capital accumulation process. It could no longer be assumed that the state would automatically succeed in maintaining the equilibrium of the capitalist system or resolve the underlying political conflicts generated by that process. Thus, state theorists increasingly searched for a theory of the state that could identify the limits of its policy-making capacities and that could conceptualize, anticipate, and explain the crisis tendencies of late capitalist societies, rather than describe its maintenance and stabilization mechanisms.