KEIR STARMER and Kemi Badenoch appear in agreement — the British state needs “rewiring.”
One can see why they might think so. Whatever it is you want the state to do, it isn’t doing it properly.
Insolvent local authorities. Overflowing prisons. Poisoned rivers and seashores. Inadequate flood defences. Universities in meltdown. Incapacity in removing unsafe cladding from homes. Black holes here, a tottering NHS there.
The list is a long one. But the question being asked is the wrong one. What is the state, however wired, actually for?
The short answer is to ensure the reproduction of existing social relations. That is true of all states everywhere, with one important caveat.
That reservation — a socialist state oriented to the dissolution of itself into society — is not applicable to contemporary Britain. Here and now, the state is oriented towards maintaining the conditions needed for the accumulation of capital.
That has been the British state’s role since the 17th century, despite the preservation of several feudal forms. It has taken on and discarded specific functions, including under the pressure of class struggle, but all within that overarching framework.
The core requirements — a labour force excluded from the means of production and independent sustenance while coerced to work, the preservation of private property rights, the contractual framework required for commodity exchange, a reliable currency — are invariable.
They inform everything Starmer and Reeves are doing, from welfare reform to public debt management to the vain endeavours to keep Thames Water both solvent and in private hands.
Strengthening the world position of British capital ultimately conditions the subordinate alliance with the United States, with all the consequential conflict.
The state is like this not because its leading personnel are overwhelmingly bourgeois, nor because the capitalist class is a powerful pressure group. These are reformist arguments, that assume the state can be transformed through mass pressure or different people.
The state is as it is because that is the organic requirement of a capitalism which, like all systems of exploitation, cannot be sustained without a special coercive and administrative function.
It is alienated from society, a fact which bourgeois politicians are happy to play on in pushing back against the exercise of state functions they find intrusive or unnecessary. To that extent, it is contested space.
The Corbyn experience, replete with warnings from retired security and intelligence chiefs and threats by generals, dramatised by footage of soldiers using a picture of the then-Labour leader as target practice, illustrated the anti-democratic and anti-popular nature of state power.
The state today is squeezed. In a globalised capitalist economy largely run on neoliberal precepts, British capital is a runner-up. Even the Stock Exchange is losing its global allure. Concessions made in previous generations in response to popular pressure now demand renegotiation or negation.
The answer to this from Starmer and Reeves is “growth.” That is growth that yields a competitive rate of return on capital for private investors, even with the state offering incentives both direct — grant aid, tax breaks; and indirect — infrastructure spending, labour skills upgrades.
None of this ensures that the state can secure enough resources to meet public expectations of the services it must perforce provide to avert social discontent. The only response from mainstream politics is to make Britain still more attractive for private investment, setting the state on a doom loop of dysfunctionality.
This is not a state that can be restored by rewiring. It requires not the attentions of an electrician but of a demolition and reconstruction team, working to designs for a working-class public power, expressing the unmediated interests of society rather than capital.
