The State-Capital Relationship And The Significance Of Incorporating The Role Of Labor

The unsettled opposing conclusions reached by a number of scholars about the remaining significance and/or weakness of the nation-state and its conflict and/or coalition with global capital represent an analytical and theoretical impasse. These contradictory views have been contested in the literature leaving no clear methodological and analytical guidance on how to examine the state-capital relationship in any specific area in the era of globalization. This paper suggests that the contradiction and change in the relationship between the nation-state and capital is rooted in the contradictory needs of labor versus capital. However, the role of labor and its contradiction with capital has been absent from most state-capital analyses or is treated as a background variable. To help overcoming this analytical impasse, the paper calls for re-conceptualizing the role of labor on the global level and for incorporating this role within the state-capital relationship. The paper first provides a critical appraisal of the opposing views of the state-capital relationship and pinpoints problems in their analytical logics of contradictions and structural determination. The basic contradiction between labor and capital is restated and the ways in which different approaches had incorporated (or ignored) labor in relation to capital and the state are criticized. The critique covers mainstream and recent synthesized approaches but focuses more on post-Marxist political economy. The paper concludes with some suggested directions for research for addressing the capitalist state contradictions.