Integral State

Contextual Quote

"The dense network of cultural, educational, religious, and intellectual institutions through which a class formation reproduces its own ideological substrate as common sense. The integral state is not the legislative-administrative state narrowly conceived; it is the wider network through which political society and civil society interpenetrate, such that the cultural-hegemonic work of reproducing a class formation’s worldview happens across an institutional ecology far broader than the formal apparatus of government."

- Erik Haines [1]

Stephen Maher's Update to Gramsci's Integral State concept

Erik Haines:

"Stephen Maher’s Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave, 2022) is the contemporary extension of Gramsci’s apparatus that does the work the present diagnostic requires. Maher’s institutional-Marxist framework develops the integral state as the wider network through which state power traverses and interpenetrates state bureaucracy, legislature, industrial policy apparatus, and corporate governance—the institutional networks through which, as Alfredo Saad-Filho puts it in the book’s reception, corporate power is transformed into class power. Maher’s archival case study of General Electric tracks the integral state across three periods—the finance-capital period (1880–1930), the managerial period (1930–1979), and the neoliberal-financialization period (1979–present)—showing the state as active organizer of the political power of the capitalist class rather than passive responder to interest-group pressure. What Maher’s account makes available, beyond the Gramscian framework on its own, is the contemporary institutional analysis the present moment requires: the integral state as it actually operates in advanced corporate capitalism, with the cultural-hegemonic infrastructure progressively absorbed into platform capitalism’s algorithmic substrate. The diagnostic extends across the Anglo-American transatlantic. Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom are all suffering from forms of the integral state Maher anatomizes—the structural transformation that the late Habermas was already diagnosing in the 2022 New Structural Transformation, the colonization of the public sphere that Saul has been tracking in the Canadian case for three decades, and the institutional capture that Brooks’s Against the Web and McManus’s work on postmodern conservatism document on the right-pole side of the formation. The Liminal Web, Perspectiva, the Daily Wire podcast network, the CIIS-Integral Life cluster, and the broader meaning-crisis ecosystem are all, in different inflections and from different political positions, attempts to respond to the integral state Maher anatomizes—attempts to find the cultural-philosophical resources for civic and spiritual renewal under conditions where the integral state has progressively colonized the institutional spaces through which democratic public life was historically sustained."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/on-enchanted-flatland-iain-mcgilchrist)

More information

• Book: Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)