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C. Legitimation Crisis
State capitalism involves "[r]e-coupling the economic system to the political.... The state apparatus no longer, as
in liberal capitalism, merely secures the general conditions of production..., but is now actively engaged in it."20
That is, capitalism abandons the "laissez-faire" model of state involvement mainly through the enforcement of a general legal
framework, and resorts instead to direct organizational links and direct state inputs into the private sector.
To the extent that the class relationship has itself been repoliticized and the state has taken over market replacing as
well as market supplementing tasks..., class domination can no longer take the anonymous form of the law of value. Instead,
it now depends on factual constellations of power whether, and how, production of surplus value can be guaranteed through
the public sector, and how the terms of the class compromise look.21
The direct intervention of the state on behalf of corporate elites becomes ever greater, and impossible to conceal. This
fundamentally contradicts the official ideology of "free market capitalism," in which the state simply acts as a neutral guarantor
of a social order in which the most deserving win by their own efforts. Therefore, it undermines the ideological basis on
which its popular legitimacy depends. Thus, parallel to the fiscal crisis of the state, state capitalism likewise moves towards
what Habermas called a "legitimation crisis."
According to bourgeois conceptions that have remained constant from the beginnings of modern natural law to contemporary
election speeches, social rewards should be distributed on the basis of individual achievement.... Since it has been recognized,
even among the population at large, that social force is exercised in the forms of economic exchange, the market has lost
its credibility as a fair... mechanism for the distribution of life opportunities conforming to the system.22
When the state capitalist system finally reaches its limits, the state becomes incapable of further increasing the inputs
on which the system depends. The fundamental contradictions of the system, displaced from the political/administrative realm,
return with a vengeance in the form of economic crisis. The state capitalist system will reach its breaking point.
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