ABSTRACT
Introduction In the previous chapter, we initiated an attempt to recapture Marx’s exposition of the capitalist state by tracing his critique of capitalist social relations. Marx’s critique of the labour theory of value and commodity fetishism offered us a basis for a critique of the capitalist state by explaining the social organism governing the reproduction of capitalist social relations. According to our reading of Marx, the law of value is the most abstract law governing the reproduction of social relations in commodity-producing society based on the movement of the inversion of social relations between people into material relations between things. The social reality of the commodity-producing society is built on those social forms, through which the social relations between labouring individuals appear and exist. A serious attempt to relate the particular form of the capitalist state in the context of Marx’s critique of the abstract nature of the reproduction of relations of commodity production has been made by the ‘German derivation debate’. In this chapter, we critically engage with the debate in an attempt to develop an understanding of the contradictory form of the capitalist state as a particular moment of the reproduction of the capital relations, the formation of which is rooted in class struggle as a concrete manifestation of the general law governing the inversion of social relations within capital relations as fully developed relations of commodity production. By doing so, we will defi ne the relation between the state and capital as complementary-but-differentiated forms of totality of capital relations. This will show the irrelevance of the developmental state theory as a basis of a critique of the Korean state.
