The capitalist state and the local economy: ‘restructuring for labour’ and beyond

Abstract

The first half of the 1980s saw the development by a number of Left Labour local authorities of radical local economic strategies aimed at ‘restructuring for labour’ rather than for capital. But while these strategies often reflected a quite sophisticated marxist-based analysis of capital, their failure to develop an adequate critique of the State has meant that the debate about local economic policy has remained largely in a Left Keynesian paradigm of ‘State intervention’. Basing his own argument on a conceptualization of the capitalist State as a particular form of the capital relation, and of the crisis of the Fordist State, Geddes criticizes this politics of using the State against capital rather than struggling to transform the State itself.