private capitalist, that profit interests still play a significant role, and that it is not socialism'. ²²

State capitalism radically transforms the functions of the market. The market no longer acts as the co-ordinator of production and distribution. This function is now assumed by a system of direct controls. 'Freedom of trade, enterprise and labor are subject to governmental interference to such a degree that they are practically abolished. With the autonomous market the so-called economic laws disappear.' ²³ If free trade, enterprise, and freedom to sell one's labourpower -- in short, the exchange market -- are becoming a thing of the past, then the critique of the emergent social and political order can no longer take the form of the critique of political economy. First, the institutional structure of this new social order can no longer be defined in relation to the laws of the marketplace, and to the impersonal administration of the rule of law by the state. The increasing etatization of society, and the new prerogatives of the state, create institutional structures whose sociological significance requires new categories of analysis besides those of political economy. ²⁴ Second, if with the 'autonomous market' the so-called economic laws disappear as well, then the dynamics and crisis potentials of the new social order cannot be presented as contradictions immanent in the functioning of the economy alone. ²⁵ Under state capitalism, economic crises are either suspended or transformed. Third, if freedom of exchange in the marketplace once actualized the normative ideals of liberal bourgeois society -- individualism, freedom, and equality -- with the disappearance of the market behind a system of direct controls, the normative ideals of liberalism also disappear. The critique of political economy alone can no longer offer access to the institutional structure, normative ideologies, and crisis potentials of the new social order.

The Marxian critique of political economy was at the same time a critique of the capitalist social formation as a whole. In the period of liberal capitalism, a critique of this social formation could be presented via a critique of political economy for two reasons: first, according to Marx, social relations of production defined the institutional backbone of liberal capitalism by legitimizing a certain pattern of the distribution of wealth, power, and authority in the society. Under capitalism, the economy was not only 'disembedded' from the restraints of the social and political domain, but this 'disembedded economy' in turn provided the mechanism for the redistribution of social power and privilege. Second, exchange relations in the capitalist market supplied normative legitimation for this society to the extent that ensuing differentials of social power and privilege were viewed as consequences of the activities of freely contracting individuals. The 'autonomous market' embodied

-72-