[Wellsy]

Anti-politics, the early Marx and Gramsci’s ‘integral state’
I was reading this article which asserts that Marx's view of the state in his criticism of Hegel is complimented by Gramsci's concept of 'integral state.
For Marx, he is critical of Hegel's view that the modern state arises to form some sort of general will to accommodate for civil society's conflict of individual interests.

Marx agreed with Hegel (1967) when the latter insisted that because modern (bourgeois) civil society is atomistic and composed of competing particular, private, individual interests, there is a necessary separation between civil society and the universal or common social interest implied in the form of the state. Hegel argued that modern society allowed individual freedom unthinkable in previous social formations, but also recognised that the constant competition between private individuals in civil society – Hobbes’s (1997) ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ or ‘war of all against all’ – produced unceasing social instability. He argued this necessitated some kind of organism to hold society together: the modern state.

While Marx saw Hegel as the most advanced theorist of the modern state, he took Hegel to task for claiming that the state could truly express the universal social interest.
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Marx identified that the antagonism between civil society and the state was unable to be resolved, precisely because in a society composed of competing particular interests, the state itself would be just another particular interest – even if in a formal or abstract way it claimed to stand for the general or collective interest of the society that it governed over.

For Gramsci however, he emphasizes how the state envelopes civil society so that it's not simply a matter of violence but consent/legitimization. So the state = political society (domination/violence) + civil society (Consent/Hegemony).

Far from civil society and political society only being in contradistinction, civil society is (in Gramsci’s conception) in dialectical unity with the state. Civil society and political society are better conceptualised not as geographical locations, but as different sites of social practice: civil society is the location of hegemonic practice and political society is the site of direct domination.
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Thus, as soon as a social movement starts to contest bourgeois rule on the terrain of civil society, it will come into contact with political society and the state.
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In the era of mass politics in the advanced capitalist countries, for most of the 20th century, formations such as trade unions and membership based political parties, alongside broader citizen engagement in electoral processes and the state, allowed an incorporation of the social (i.e. of civil society) into the political process.

Marx lived during a time where the state clearly stood above any collective interest whilst Gramsci had to argue for why the state came to absorb mass movements. The era of Gramsci is a time in which civil society had institutions and strong leadership which could impact political society within the necessary limits of capitalist production and so the state was seen as an extension of civil society compared to Marx's time where it clearly did not reflect a universal will but was itself particular class rule.
The point now today is the anti-politics of those as sceptical of politics and its institutions are more akin to the emergence of the state in a competition of wills than of Gramsci's time where civil society was more composed and unified. We're back to the fragmented state and as such the idea is that much of the 20th century was more the anomaly than is the present situation.

The current era is marked precisely by a breakdown of these institutional structures, which previously facilitated the complex and profound imbrication of statal and political imperatives with living civil society groups and blocs. Put another way, the separation and antagonism between social and political interests that Marx theorised, and as outlined above, is in the process of becoming the dominant form of state–civil society relations again. The integration or enwrapping that Gramsci called attention to in his concept of the integral state is now eroding.

Anti-politics is understood as popular detachment from, distrust of, and contempt for political elites and their activities (Burnham, 2014; Flinders, 2016; Hay, 2007; Mair, 2013). The phenomenon of anti-politics is increasingly recognised in mainstream debate, and has emerged, in various forms and levels of intensity, across the advanced capitalist countries over the last 30 years. Peter Mair, in his posthumously published Ruling the Void (2013), surveyed the state of politics across the European Union and concluded that across a wealth of empirical data – voter turnout, party allegiance, electoral volatility, party membership, and membership of civil society organisations such as trade unions – there has been an unmistakable trend towards popular disengagement from politics. In advanced capitalist countries fewer citizens are voting and engaging with political parties, voting patterns are increasingly volatile, and distrust of political elites is on the rise. Citizens are less partisan to traditional political parties, and although recent economic chaos has accelerated these processes of decline, the phenomenon long predates the current era of ‘austerity’. In many ways anti-politics predates the neoliberal period in general, although the phenomenon has accelerated in that period.
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As such, this detachment is not caused by the political class being less ‘representative’ of their social base than in some previous era, but instead its lack of a social base makes the political class’s actual role in representing the interests of the state (and the political society around it) within civil society more apparent. The separation of the state from civil society creates the appearance of representation, one that masks the underlying social relations of domination. Marx and Gramsci help to illuminate that it is this appearance that is now breaking down, rather than a situation where inherently stable political structures are unexpectedly becoming disconnected from interests within civil society. On this analysis, social democratic political cohesion should not be taken as the norm from which we assess anti-political divergence in the contemporary period. Any Marxist analysis of anti-politics needs to explain not only why there is growing hostility to formal politics, but how the operations of politics have successfully ensured that this antagonism and opposition has been largely muted and eschewed for a prolonged historical period. To put it another way, a key question is not simply why anti-politics developed over the last decades but why we did not have it earlier

Bascially are we back to the more essential character of politics amidst a capitalist society characterized by the Hobbsean war of all against all?
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=rel_fac_pub

In September of 1995 the Associated Press released a wirephoto showing Russian lawmakers of both genders in a punching brawl during a session of the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.' Is this behavior an ethnic idiosyncrasy? Do only government officials duke it out over matters of great importance? Or have fisticuffs suddenly become politically correct? No, on all counts.

Pick a topic, any topic-abortion, euthanasia, welfare reform, military intervention in the Balkans-and initiate discussion with a group of reasonable, well-educated people and observe the outcome. Chaos ensues. Of course the volume of the debate may vary according to how "close to home" the issue hits the participants. But any moral discussion, given a group of sufficient diversity, has the potential of escalating into a shouting match ... or worse.

An even more striking feature of moral debates is their tendency never to reach resolution. Lines are drawn early, and participants rush to take sides. But in taking sides they appear to render themselves incapable of hearing the other. Everyone feels the heat, but no one sees the light.

[Wellsy]

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/reuten.htm

On p. 307, Reuten correctly points to the fact that the feudal state in England “collaborated” with the bourgeoisie, having been obliged to chiefly because of the exigencies of war, making it possible for capitalism to develop even whilst the feudal state remained in place. As a result, the feudal state was gradually transformed into a state serving the interests of mercantile capitalism. And these development took place in a Europe in which states were perpetually at war with one another. My point being that there is in fact more to the state than the demands of bourgeois economy.
A remarkable feature of Reuten’s book is that it claims to derive both the capitalist state and the capitalist economy as a unity, rather than, as Marx had done, first abstracting economic activity from the state, family, science, religion, etc., and dealing only with the tendencies inherent in the economy. Marx never found the opportunity to write his theory of the state. The closest he came was in his journalism in which he developed his theory of Bonapartism and Imperialism (See Spencer, 2023), both of which were a far cry of the conception of a state which is a simple instrument for easing the way to capital accumulation.
Reuten’s argument is plausible. For example, the bifurcation requires that a person has a right to own parts of the natural world as their private property and that a person has the right to appropriate the product of the labour of another if that other uses means of production which they own. Presumably, these practices emerged historically in a context in which they were novel, and consequently may have been objected to by those who missed out under such arrangements. Presumably landowners had game-keepers just as factory owners had guards and supervisors. However, it is clear that, for the accumulation of capital to continue and be secure, a state is required to enforce these rights claims as law.
Reuten says: “to the extent that the state grants these (bourgeois) rights in particular, it is identified as a ‘capitalist state’, which constitutes a unity with the capitalist economy.” (p. 6).
Generally speaking, these needs arise from economic activity; the state serves these needs. But the development of the state also has its own logic. For example, as Reuten highlights, taxation to fund the state’s interventions requires an imposition upon the rights of capital. Consequently, the state faces the need for legitimation, and duly engages in all sorts of activity which have the function of winning consent to their right to extract taxes from everyone.
In the context of the Functionalist exposition this all makes abundant sense. After all, once the capture of the state by the bourgeoisie has been completed then we have ministers, civil servants and lobbyists who perfectly self-consciously diagnose the needs of capital accumulation and take legislative and administrative action to serve those needs.
However, much about reality makes no sense by these lights. For example, it is only in Chapter 11 that the fact of the state being one among many states appears in the analysis. This draws attention to the fact that the state - not a capitalist state, but a state of some kind - long pre-existed bourgeois society. The state, generally speaking, was the work of nobilities who sought a monopoly over exploitation of certain people and resources, generally but not exclusively in some geographical domain, and was specifically motivated by rival nobilities (or barbaric hordes) seeking to deprive them of that monopoly. In other words, before the state became a capitalist state it was already a national state as against other nation-states, and remains so.
Here is the issue of theorising by this Functionalist approach the unity of two institutions which have separate roots. Reuten’s points to the demand of the capitalists for certain services to be delivered by the state and their consent to the state imposing on their free market activity in so doing. What in fact happens, is that a state which the bourgeoisie first encountered as an protagonist with which it had to plead and bribe to get its needs met, and ultimately captured, a state which had already made its relationship with it citizenry on the basis of historically earlier relationships, had to be moulded to its will by the capitalists under conditions where a multiplicity of classes compete for hegemony in the state.
Insofar as the state has been captured, and is compliant to the needs of capital accumulation and is well-advised, then we have a class-subject. In the extreme conception, the capitalist state is that self-conscious class-subject. But in actuality this is never quite the case. Government and even the state itself is ever the subject of contest by competing classes in capitalist nation states.
Here is where the attempt to render the dialectical reconstruction by “building upon” Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence is so wildly misconceived. The Subjective Logic, the Concept Logic in other words, is the appropriate logic for dealing with the process where a subject develops while being continuously challenged by other subjects, and entering into a process in which the various competing concepts in some way and to some degree merge with one another. It seems to me impossible to develop a practical and realistic theory of the state on the flat, dogmatic assertion that it is a capitalist state. It is always necessary and wise to recognise the multiplicity of interests which are at play in the political sphere. Long gone now are the days when only property-owners voted and only the children of the wealthy held high office in the state. The state is an arena of struggle. To paint the state as an out-growth or even epiphenomenon of the process of capital accumulation is to disarm those who would seek another kind of state.