Opening Up Open Marxist Theories of the State: A Historical Materialist Critique

Since the late 1980s, Open Marxism has focused on the conceptualisation of the relationship between global capital, the international system and the state—therein lies its original contribution to knowledge. This essay offers a sympathetic reflection on Open Marxist approaches to the state, which emphasises the strength of the definition ‘organisation of subjection’, yet argues that its validity is undermined by inadvertent structural-functionalist applications, by a tendency to view organisations of subjection as unitary ‘political forms’ and by assertions that the emergence of the international system is necessarily correlated to the historical globalisation of capital. The article offers a more nuanced alternative as fluid, contradictory organisation of subjection: as a social relation constituting and constituted by broader production relations, the state is a terrain of systematic intra-elite and class struggles.