The state is the executive committee of the ruling-class, but, this ruling-class itself, in relation to any given state, is geographically defined. Prior to the development of the bourgeois-nation state, the ruling-class, a feudal landlord class, derived its revenues, and power, from the ownership of land. Similarly, it mobilised armies of retainers, and the greater the number of subjects it had, the greater number of retainers it could muster.
As noted earlier, it is the development of commodity production, and consequent expansion of the market that creates the dynamic in which these old geographic limits become a fetter. But, the process by which this fetter is burst asunder, is, also, one which sees competition between different fractions of the new (bourgeois) ruling class, to assert their dominance. The most obvious example, previously cited, is the role of the Prussian bourgeoisie in asserting itself, in the forging of the German state.
But, similarly, the extension of this same process, the creation of multinational states, as the expression of the objective necessity of capital, in its imperialist stage, to operate in an ever expanding single-market, with a level playing field, a single set of rules, regulations, taxes, and currency, takes the form of a struggle of existing powerful nation states for dominance within it. Frequently, that struggle breaks out from the realm of economic and political struggle, into military conflict. These conflicts are driven by the objective needs of industrial capital, and the state in each existing geographical unit continues to seek dominance.
However, as, also, noted earlier, the ruling bourgeois-class, today, is not the ruling bourgeois class of industrial capitalists it was in the 19th century. Today's ruling class is not a bourgeois class of owners of industrial capital, but of owners of fictitious-capital (shares, bonds, and their derivatives), and it is from that they derive their huge revenues, in the form, not of profits, but of interest, rent and increasingly, as this process becomes decadent, from realised speculative capital gains. The owners of industrial capital, today, (other than from the dwarfish industrial capitals, owned by the petty-bourgeoisie) are the associated producers, as Marx described them, i.e. the workers and managers within each company. They only need to realise it to assert their rightful control over each company, to demand the extension of the struggle for political freedom and democracy begun in the 18th century, to its completion, in the struggle for economic freedom, and industrial democracy.
Similarly, the ruling bourgeois class of owners of fictitious-capital, is, now, objectively, a global class. It can buy shares, bonds or property anywhere in the world, and does so, just as it can live anywhere in the world, and does so. What it cannot do, is to break the link between its own revenues (interest, rent) from its ownership of this fictitious-capital, and the source of those revenues, which continues to depend on surplus-value being produced by industrial capital, and which takes the form of profit.
It has tried to do so, by continually increasing the proportion of profits going to dividends/interest from 10% of profits in the 1970's, to 70% of profits, today. But, that simply reduced real capital accumulation accordingly, and so reduced the increase in production of surplus value, compounding the problem. So, in response, as rising interest rates, then, led to astronomically inflated asset prices crashing, every few years, starting as far back as 1987, it could only respond by inflating the currency supply to depreciate the standard of prices, and reflate the asset price bubbles. As with the old feudal landlord class, which not only became socially redundant, but also became a decadent parasitic excrescence on society, so too, today with the bourgeois ruling-class owners of fictitious-capital.
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