This article presents the inaugural memorial lecture at the Nicos Poulantzas Institute in Athens.... more This article presents the inaugural memorial lecture at the Nicos Poulantzas Institute in Athens. It examines and extends the work of the eponymous Greek legal and political theorist, political economist, and communist intellectual, Nicos Poulantzas, who radically transformed Marxist state theory, made major contributions to the critique of political economy for the era of Atlantic Fordism and postwar American imperialism, and called for a judicious balance between representative and direct democracy to secure a democratic transition to democratic socialism. It first offers some general reflections on the originality, legacy and actuality of Poulantzas's work in these respects and then reconstructs his later views on the critique of political economy before his death in 1979. Noting his neglect of the environment and issues of political ecology, which was typical of the French and Greek left in the 1970s and also rooted in more general features of Marxist theorizing on nature and the environment, the article elaborates a Poulantzasian view of political ecology based on key arguments from his work. The article concludes by reasserting the validity of his vision of democratic socialism, indicating that it would have become a critique of political ecology, and suggests that he would have approached this in the same spirit of romantic public irony that was advocated by one of his major theoretical and political influences – Antonio Gramsci.
Cet article présente la première conférence commémorative à l'Institut Nicos Poulantzas à Athènes. Il examine et étend le travail du théoricien juridique et politique grec, Nicos Poulantzas, économiste politique et intellectuel communiste, qui a radicalement transformé la théorie de l'Etat marxiste et apporté une contribution majeure à la critique de l'économie politique pour l'ère du fordisme atlantique. Il réclame un équilibre judicieux entre démocratie représentative et démocratie directe pour assurer une transition démocratique vers le socialisme démocratique. J'offre quelques réflexions générales sur l'originalité, l'héritage et l'actualité de l'oeuvre de Poulantzas à cet égard, puis reconstruit ses vues ultérieures sur la critique de l'économie politique avant sa mort en 1979. L'article élabore une vision poulantzasienne de l'écologie politique fondée sur des arguments clés De son travail. Il note sa négligence par rapport à l'environnement naturel et les questions d'écologie politique, typiques de la gauche française et grecque dans les années 1970, et visible dans la théorie marxiste sur la nature et l'environnement. L'article conclut en réaffirmant la validité de sa vision du socialisme démocratique, indiquant qu'il serait devenu une critique de l'écologie politique, et suggère qu'il aurait abordé cela dans le même esprit d'ironie romantique et publique qui a été préconisé par l'un de ses grandes influences théoriques et politiques-Antonio Gramsci.
Este artículo presenta la conferencia inaugural conmemorativa en el Nicos Poulantzas Institute en Atenas. Aquí se examina y profundiza en el trabajo del epónimo griego, Nicos Poulantzas, quien transformó radicalmente el estado del Marxismo teórico. La mayor contribución del teórico político y legal, economista político, y comunista intelectual, fue su crítica a la política económica de la era del Fordismo Atlántico y el Imperialismo estadounidense de la post-guerra, e invitó a un perspicaz balance entre la democracia representativa y la democracia directa para asegurar la transición social demócrata. Este artículo ofrece, primeramente, reflexiones generales sobre la originalidad, legado y actualidad del trabajo de Poulantza, y también reconstruye sus últimos acercamientos a la crítica de la política económica antes de su muerte en 1979. Notando su falta de atención en el medio ambiente y asuntos de ecología política, producto de la izquierda Francesa y Griega de los años setenta y aspectos generales del marxismo teórico sobre naturaleza y medio ambiente, este artículo elabora una perspectiva desde Poulantzas sobre ecología política y con base en los principales argumentos de su trabajo. El artículo concluye con una recopilación de la validez sobre su visión respecto al socialismo democrático, indicando que se habría convertido en una crítica sobre ecología política, y sugiere que Poulantzas se habría aproximado con el mismo espíritu de la romántica ironía pública que fue promovida por uno de sus mayores influencias teóricas y políticas: Antonio Gramsci.
Το άρθρο αυτό παρουσιάζει την ετήσια διάλεξη στο Ινστιτούτο Νίκος Πουλαντζάς στην Αθήνα, προς μνήμη του Νίκου Πουλαντζά, του οποίο το έργο εξετάζει και αναπτύσσει. Ο Πουλαντζάς, ένας θεωρητικός της πολιτικής επιστήμης, οικονομολόγος και κουμουνιστής διανοούμενος, μεταμόρφωσε ριζοσπαστικά την μαρξιστική θεωρία για το κράτος, και συνέβαλλε καθοριστικά στην κριτική της πολιτικής οικονομίας την περίοδο του ατλαντικού φορντισμού και του μεταπολεμικού αμερικανικού ιμπεριαλισμού, καλώντας για μια προσεκτική ισορροπία μεταξύ αντιπροσωπευτικής και άμεσης δημοκρατίας, εχέγγυο για την δημοκρατική μετάβαση σε έναν δημοκρατικό σοσιαλισμό. Το άρθρο αυτό προσφέρει σκέψεις σχετικά με την πρωτοτυπία, ιστορική σημασία, και επικαιρότητα του έργου του Πουλαντζά, ανασυνθέτοντας τις ύστερες θέσεις του στην κριτική στην πολιτική οικονομία πριν τον θάνατό του το 1979. Αν και είναι δεδομένη στο έργο του η παράλειψη της διάστασης του περιβάλλοντος και της πολιτικής οικολογίας, χαρακτηριστική της γαλλικής και της ελληνικής αριστεράς την δεκαετία του 70 και με ρίζες στην μαρξιστική θεωρητική προσέγγιση της φύσης, το παρών άρθρο επεξεργάζεται μία κατά Πουλαντζά θεωρία της πολιτικής οικολογίας, αντλώντας επιχειρήματα από το έργο του. Επιβεβαιώνεται εδώ η εγκυρότητα του οράματος του Πουλαντζά για τον δημοκρατικό σοσιαλισμό το οποίο θα μπορούσε να είχε εξελιχθεί σε μία κριτική της πολιτικής οικολογίας, την οποία ο Πουλαντζάς θα είχε προσεγγίσει με το ίδιο πνέυμα της ρομαντικής και δημόσιας ειρωνείας την οποία πρότασσε ο θεωρητικός και πολιτικός ο οποίος περισσότερο τον επηρέασε, ο Αντόνιο Γκράμσι.
This paper presents a theoretical critique and reformulation of the concept of the developmental ... more This paper presents a theoretical critique and reformulation of the concept of the developmental state from a regulationist perspective and applies the new notion to the changing role of the developmental state in the emerging period of the so-called knowledge driven economy. The analysis can be divided into five sections: (a) reflections on political economy of market forces and state power; (b) the specificities of the developmental state; (c) the periodisation of capitalism; (d) the emerging knowledge-driven economy; and (e) the changing role of the state in regard to the ‘new economy’. Following a discussion of these issues, I offer some more general conclusions on the developmental state in East Asia.
Governance is clearly a notion whose time has come. It appears to move easily across philosophica... more Governance is clearly a notion whose time has come. It appears to move easily across philosophical and disciplinary boundaries, diverse fields of practical application, the manifold scales of social life, and different political camps and tendencies. This terminological mobility enables it to organize significant narratives about contemporary social transformation. Yet it is also clear that governance is a polyvalent and polycontextual notion. Its meaning varies by context and it is being deployed for quite contrary, if not plain contradictory, purposes. And, by virtue of these terminological uncertainties, it is doubtful whether governance sans phrase can really provide a compelling theoretical entrypoint for analysing contemporary social transformation or a compelling practical entrypoint for coping with complexity. It is this paradox that I wish to pursue and resolve in the following reflections on governance, with the ultimate intention of providing a clear account of the nature and limitations of governance and metagovernance in a complex world. I will illustrate my more general arguments as appropriate from the case of ‘good governance’, which provides an interesting example of the constitutionalization and ethicalization of governance discourse and practices.
Conjunctural analysis is useful in many fields but has special theoretical and practical signific... more Conjunctural analysis is useful in many fields but has special theoretical and practical significance for critical political economy and left strategy. For the pursuit of politics as " the art of the possible " depends heavily on correct conjunctural analysis and is practised by most successful political forces. Its central role for left politics is seen in the analyses of Hall, among many others. For Lenin, the central focus of political analysis and action is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation (1920: 165) oriented to the correlation of forces. And, for Althusser, the key concept of a Marxist science of politics is the conjuncture: " the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied " (1970: 311). A sound conjunctural analysis depends on: (a) an appropriate set of concepts for moving from basic structural features to immediate strategic concerns; (b) the spatio-temporal horizons of action that define the conjuncture; (c) a clear account of medium-and long-term goals that should guide strategy and tactics in the current moment; and (d) ethico-political commitments that set limits to acceptable action in particular contexts on the grounds that the ends do not always justify any means. Moreover, because one's strategy depends on the likely responses of other key social forces, one must map their conjunctural analyses too. There is scope for infinite reciprocal regress here but it is lower in periods of relative stability that promote stable expectations or, conversely, in the face of urgent crises calling for immediate action. Multi-faceted crises that build over time with sudden, acute phases are more disorienting and place the heaviest demands on conjunctural analysis.
The regulation approach (hereafter 'RA') has enjoyed acclaim for some twenty years as a leading p... more The regulation approach (hereafter 'RA') has enjoyed acclaim for some twenty years as a leading paradigm in the revival of institutional and evolutionary economics and the more general development of 'new political economy'. Its several schools all adopt a heterodox account of capital accumulation and emphasise the latter's socially embedded, socially regularized nature. They focus on the historically contingent ensembles of complementary economic and extra-economic mechanisms and practices which enable relatively stable accumulation to occur over relatively long periods despite the fundamental contradictions, crisis-tendencies, and conflicts generated by capitalism (on different schools, see Jessop 1990). These ideas have been applied most famously to 'Fordism' and 'post-Fordism' and extensive interest therein from the mid-80s to mid-90s certainly contributed to the RA's popularity. But even the initial Parisian work addressed other topics and subsequent work has seen a real deepening and widening of the regulation approach far beyond issues of Fordism and/or post-Fordism.
These more recent trends are my primary concern below. Since a short survey cannot cover all relevant material, I will provide a general account of the RA's successive generations and developmental trajectories. I then illustrate this account by reviewing the Parisian 'state of the art' and the theoretical innovations introduced by other theorists. I also consider the RA's responses to the failure of its initial alternative economic strategy (due, it should be noted, to lack of adoption rather than subsequent implementation failure) and its relative isolation within mainstream economics; and I also examine how the RA's message has been received and understood outside the discipline of economics. I conclude by asking whether the twenty years of research, scholarship, and exposition invested in the RA have been worth the effort (the standard RA survey is Boyer 1990; on more recent work, see also Boyer and Saillard 1995a).
Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspe... more Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspect of their post-socialist transformation. The full range of problems involved here emerges most clearly when one recognizes at the outset that economic activities themselves are always socially embedded and socially regulated and that they are also overdetermined by various geo- political, socio-cultural, and other non-economic factors. There are no pure market economies nor could there be. This enables us to identify at least four major problem-complexes which affect economic restructuring in post-socialist conditions. First, any post-socialist transformation would involve not only structural disembedding of emergent market forces from their erstwhile state socialist straitjacket but also re-embedding them into an institutional framework which could help to regularize accumulation. Second, post-socialist economies must escape from one- sided economic dependence on their inherited links to former Comecon economies and move towards closer integration in the world capitalist system. This process is complicated by the problems involved in managing the economic (and political) disintegration of the Soviet bloc (cf. Andreff 1993) as well as the uncertainties related to major changes occurring in capitalism independently of those provoked by the Soviet collapse. A third problem-complex is tied to the collapse of the bipolar security regime which emerged during the Cold War and the resulting need to build a post-socialist security order for Eurasia which recognizes various ‘spheres of interest’ and the legitimate security needs of the USA, West European states, and the successor states in the Soviet bloc (cf. Tökés 1991: 102-105). And, fourth, there are serious problems for any economic transformation rooted in the complex and controversial politics of post-socialist identity construction, nation-building, and state formation.
The conference which inspired this collection was explicitly concerned with the direction of cont... more The conference which inspired this collection was explicitly concerned with the direction of contemporary capitalism. Its final plenary session, to which my own contribution was presented, addressed the historical place and destiny of capitalism. Surprisingly, few papers at the conference explored the basic nature of capitalism, its genesis, overall dynamic, or future. Yet only by examining such issues can one usefully comment on the historical place, the direction, or destiny of capitalism or draw relevant political conclusions. Thus I first consider whether capitalism has a distinctive dynamic and, if so, what this might mean for its future. I argue that it does, indeed, show important developmental tendencies. However, as these are not linked to any final telos, capitalist development remains open within very broad limits. Accordingly I do not try to forecast the long-run future or ultimate destiny of capitalism. Instead I discuss several major economic changes in contemporary capitalism, consider whether they involve a break in capitalist development, and suggest some medium-term implications for the national state and governance mechanisms.
This article explores the roles of markets, states, and partnerships in economic coordination and... more This article explores the roles of markets, states, and partnerships in economic coordination and considers their respective tendencies to failure. The first section addresses the growing interest in governance and seeks explanations in recent theoretical developments. The second section then asks whether the rise of the governance paradigm might also reflect fundamental shifts in economic, political, and social life, such that governance will remain a key issue for a long time, or is a response to more cyclical shifts in modes of coordination. The third section considers the logic of ‘heterarchic governance’ in contrast to anarchic, ex post coordination through market exchange and imperative ex ante coordination through hierarchical forms of organization. It also offers some preliminary reflections on the nature, forms, and logic of ‘governance failure’. The final section addresses the state’s increasing role in ‘meta-governance’, i.e., in managing the respective roles of these different modes of coordination.
This paper presents the relations among agency (A), structure (S), institutions (I) and discourse... more This paper presents the relations among agency (A), structure (S), institutions (I) and discourse (D) and their analytical relevance for socioeconomic development. It argues that an adequate account of these relations must recognize their inherent spatio-temporality and, hence, their space-time dynamics. This is not an optional extra but a definite descriptive and explanatory requirement. Moreover, while structure is recognized as a product of path-dependent institutionalization and path-shaping (collective) agency, agency is seen in turn as discursively and materially reproduced and transformed. This approach treats structure in terms of a differential spatio-temporal configuration of constraints and opportunities, reference to which informs the empirical analysis of strategic agency within the overall ASID heuristic. The paper concludes with an eightfold typology of particular combinations of ASID features to guide analyses of socioeconomic development in all its (dis-)junctural complexity.
This article explores depoliticization in relation to the three domains of polity, politics, and ... more This article explores depoliticization in relation to the three domains of polity, politics, and policy, distinguishing its different meanings in these three contexts, identifying different strategies of depoliticization corresponding to each domain, and exploring their interconnections. Politicisation and repoliticization can be explored in the same manner. The analysis is illustrated from the strategies of depoliticization pursued in relation to the fiscal cliff debate in the USA and the constitutionalization of the Fiscal Compact in the Eurozone, Some general conclusions are also offered.
This article describes the meta-theoretical and theoretical foundations of one approach to critiq... more This article describes the meta-theoretical and theoretical foundations of one approach to critique that moves through up to eight analytically distinct steps. This critique begins with the identification of specific discourses and discursive practices and moves progressively towards a critique of ideology and domination and then to a critique of the factors and actors that, through diverse mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention, reproduce these ideological effects and patterns of domination as a basis for proposing and acting upon emancipatory projects that involve a variable mix of reform and revolution. An important part of these procedures is to deconstruct and demystify sedimented, naturalized discourses and social practices and to propose alternatives based on explicitly stated principles of justice and fairness.
Faced with the devastating electoral and political successes of Thatcherism in the past five year... more Faced with the devastating electoral and political successes of Thatcherism in the past five years, the British Left responded in various ways. Some activists anticipated the imminent collapse of Thatcherism due to a sudden upsurge of union militancy, popular disturbances, or urban riots; or due to a Conservative U-turn prompted by rising unemployment and political unrest. Others called for the Labour Party to adopt more radical economic and political policies and to restructure itself as a vehicle for the eventual implementation of a socialist alternative economic strategy. They hoped that this would undermine Thatcherism by refuting its claim that there is no alternative; or that it would at least give the left the initiative when Thatcherism collapsed for other reasons. Yet others concentrated on the ideology of Thatcherism and called for a similarly ideological strategy from the Left. They attributed Thatcherism's success to the initiatives of the new Right in constructing a new hegemonic project and mobilizing popular support for a right-wing solution to the economic and political crisis. Complementing this apparent celebration of Thatcherism is the charge that the Left has failed to adopt a 'national-popular' approach of its own to ideological and political struggle and has fallen back on economistic or voluntaristic analysis of the growing crisis of social democracy and the Left in Britain. This last approach is represented above all in the work of Stuart Hall, but it has since been adopted quite widely on the left. The guiding thread of Hall's work is the argument that Thatcherism rests on 'authoritarian populism'. He argues that 'authoritarian populism' (hereafter 'AP') successfully condenses a wide range of popular discontents with the postwar economic and political order and mobilizes them around an authoritarian, right-wing solution to the current economic and political crisis in Britain. This success is regarded with begrudging admiration because Thatcherism took the ideological struggle more seriously than the Left and has reaped the reward of popular support. Some conclude that the Left must articulate Thatcherite themes into its own discourse, but others, such as Hall, insist that Thatcherism can best be defeated by developing an alternative vision of the future, a socialist morality, and a socialist common-sense. Thus the apparent ideological
In this excellent book Brett Christophers offers an intriguing, historically informed but partial... more In this excellent book Brett Christophers offers an intriguing, historically informed but partially inadequate response to a significant deficit in the regulationist analysis of political economy. Regulationists ask why, despite its inherent contradictions and crisis tendencies, capital accumulation proceeds relatively smoothly for significant periods in specific spatio-temporal settings. They explain this through the trial-and-error emergence and consolidation of specific growth regimes and corresponding modes of re ́ gulation-cum- governance that, together, create complementary institutional forms and social norms and values that facilitate the integration of different circuits of capital and the development of a workable social compromise. Christophers notes correctly that regulationists often neglect the role of law, litigation, and judicial decision-making in securing this improbable result. This deficit is unfortunate because, as he rightly claims, law has a key role in modulating the balance between simultaneous tendencies to competition and monopoly in ‘capitalist regimes of profitability and growth’. He then explores this topic in two steps: a theoretical account of the complex dialectics of competition and monopoly that frames detailed studies of three successive periods in the development of anti-trust law, which aims to limit monopoly in favour of competition, and of intellectual property rights (IPRs), which are intended to fashion and protect monopoly. (2016: 4).
This article relates changes in higher education and research in East Asian societies to recent t... more This article relates changes in higher education and research in East Asian societies to recent trends in political economy and, in particular, the reorientation of developmental states in the region. The developmental state is oriented to catch-up competitiveness and, as the horizon of development shifts, so do its appropriate institutional forms and strategies. Catch-up competitiveness is guided by economic imaginaries, often linked to geoeconomic, geopolitical, and broader societal imaginaries, whose hegemony depends on particular discursive and disciplinary practices. The shift in the roles of HE and research is related to the reorientation of developmental states from export-oriented, investment-led growth to knowledge- intensive, investment-led growth, supplemented in some cases by efforts to create international financial hubs to exploit a global trend towards financialisation. These themes are explored through comparison of selected East Asian economies/societies. The article ends with some general conclusions about the state’s continuing role in higher education and its internationalisation in the region.
The Brexit vote was a singular event that is one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the Br... more The Brexit vote was a singular event that is one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the British state and society and a stimulus for further struggles over the future of the United Kingdom and its place in Europe and the wider world. This crisis previously enabled the rise of Thatcherism as a neoliberal and neoconservative project (with New Labour as its left wing) with an authoritarian populist appeal and authoritarian statist tendencies that persisted under the Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition (2010 – 2015). The 2015 election of a Conservative Government, which aimed to revive the Thatcherite project and entrench austerity, was the immediate context for the tragi-comedy of errors played out in the referendum. The ensuing politics and policy issues could promote the disintegration of the UK and, perhaps, the EU without delivering greater political sovereignty or a more secure and non-balkanized place for British economic space in the world market.
Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspe... more Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspect of their post-socialist transformation. The full range of problems involved here emerges most clearly when one recognizes at the outset that economic activities themselves are always socially embedded and socially regulated and that they are also overdetermined by various geo-political, socio-cultural, and other non-economic factors. There are no pure market economies nor could there be. This enables us to identify at least four major problem-complexes which affect economic restructuring in post-socialist conditions. First, any post-socialist transformation would involve not only structural disembedding of emergent market forces from their erstwhile state socialist straitjacket but also re-embedding them into an institutional framework which could help to regularize accumulation. Second, post-socialist economies must escape from one-sided economic dependence on their inherited links to former Comecon economies and move towards closer integration in the world capitalist system. This process is complicated by the problems involved in managing the economic (and political) disintegration of the Soviet bloc (cf. Andreff 1993) as well as the uncertainties related to major changes occurring in capitalism independently of those provoked by the Soviet collapse. 3 A third problem-complex is tied to the collapse of the bipolar security regime which emerged during the Cold War and the resulting need to build a post-socialist security order for Eurasia which recognizes various 'spheres of interest' and the legitimate security needs of the USA, West European states, and the successor states in the Soviet bloc (cf. Tökés 1991: 102-105). And, fourth, there are serious problems for any economic transformation rooted in the complex and controversial politics of post-socialist identity construction, nation-building, and state formation. It is impossible for this chapter to deal with all four sets of issues. Instead it focuses on the former Comecon (or CMEA) countries and reviews the relations between their attempts to move from state socialism to capitalism and proposals for regional
The two studies included in this issue of the IJPE focus on the public finances of post-socialist... more The two studies included in this issue of the IJPE focus on the public finances of post-socialist Poland at a turning point, or better, an epochal shift, which, if it does not yet signal the ‘end of history’, clearly marks the beginning of a new, world-historical period in capitalist development. Moreover, as Schumpeter’s remarks clearly anticipated, the crisis of post-socialist public finances not only reflects events beyond the state but also has its own effects on the crisis dynamics in these societies. It is in this spirit that Stanislav Owsiak and Jerzy Hausner seek to explain the origins and causal impact of the crisis in public finances in post-socialist Poland. Although Owsiak focuses on the transitional deficit in public finances and Hausner on the deeper-seated structural contradictions, strategic dilemmas, and competing paths involved in moving from a command to a market economy, their studies complement each other and provide a good overall picture of the financial crisis of the post-socialist state from both economic and political aspects.
Among the most important factors generating this financial crisis they cite: (a) various economic and political difficulties inherited from the ‘shortage economy’ associated with state socialism; (b) the economic disruption and transitional deficit occasioned by the abandonment of state socialism and neo-liberal efforts to move towards a market economy; (c) economic policy mistakes which have aggravated this inevitable disruption and its associated financial deficit and thereby further worsened the political crisis; (d) political commitments to various forms of economic and social expenditure required by a transitional political regime desperate to secure its legitimacy; and (e) the political crises provoked by badly flawed efforts to democratize the political system at the same time that efforts are being made to liberalize the economy. In addition to identifying various causal factors contributing to the financial crisis of the post-socialist state, they also trace the reciprocal influence of this crisis on the economic and political difficulties now affecting post-socialist Poland. They conclude, hardly surprisingly, that, given the lack of system integration (‘systemic vacuum’) and the failure to develop any coherent hegemonic project for restructuring post-socialist societies (‘strategic vacuum’), the financial crisis tends to make things worse rather than better. In particular it reduces the prospects of effective co-ordination of economic and political reform and also necessitates cuts in public expenditure which threaten the legitimacy of the overall transformation process.
In a number of articles and two recent books Joachim Hirsch and his colleagues have developed a n... more In a number of articles and two recent books Joachim Hirsch and his colleagues have developed a novel Marxist approach for analyzing capitalist societies (Esser and Hirsch, 1984, 1985, 1987; Haeusler and Hirsch, 1987; Hirsch, 1980, 1983a, 1983b, 1984; and Hirsch and Roth, 1980 and 1986). They combine a fresh perspective on the political economy of capitalism with their own theoretical work on the capitalist state; and apply this approach to a wide range of phenomena - from the nuclear family and the city through party systems and corporatist arrangements to social movements and new forms of subjectivity. Since the scope of these studies is too wide for a comprehensive review in a short article, my critique focuses on their general theoretical strengths and weaknesses and their implications for analyzing the crisis of Fordism and the transition to post-Fordism.
Despite their very different assumptions and principles of explanation, monetarists, Keynesians a... more Despite their very different assumptions and principles of explanation, monetarists, Keynesians and Marxists share a concern with the nature and impact of state intervention in capitalist economies. Yet, in contrast to the study of market forces, the state itself is strangely neglected as a field of analysis. This is as true of theories that presuppose an active role for the state as of those that entail a more limited role. Indeed, even though Marxists have long claimed special knowledge of the strategic significance of the state in class struggle, it is only in the last ten years that they have rediscovered the state as a problem in political economy. The resulting discussion has ranged from the most abstract methodological issues to quite specific historical problems and has generated a variety of hypotheses and insights. It is unfortunately true that much of the Marxist debate is esoteric and often inaccessible and/or irrelevant to those working in other traditions. But, in the absence of any comparable reappraisal of the state, this debate merits wider consideration. Moreover, since Marxism has long been concerned with the state as well as with production and exchange, it is surely worth assessing to what extent an integrated approach can illuminate economic analysis. Such an enquiry is particularly germane in the current period of continuing world economic crisis and increasing state intervention to restructure the industrial and financial system.
It should be emphasized that the present survey is not concerned with Marxist economics as such. Instead it instead on some recent Marxist theories of the capitalist state. Nor does it develop a new approach; it simply considers these theories in terms of certain given criteria. These comprise general criteria such as logical consistency and theoretical determinacy, as well as more specific criteria relevant to an evaluation of Marxist theories. The latter can be stated quite briefly as follows. A Marxist theory of the capitalist state will be considered adequate to the extent that (a) it is founded on the specific qualities of capitalism as a mode of production, (b) it attributes a central role to class struggle in the process of capital accumulation, (c) it establishes the relations between the political and economic features of society without reducing one to the other or treating them as totally independent and autonomous, (d) it allows for historical and national differences in the forms and functions of the state in capitalist societies, and (e) it allows for the influence of non-capitalist classes and non-class forces in determining the nature of the state and the exercise of state power. To justify the choice of these particular criteria would sidetrack the discussion before it begins; it is hoped that their relevance and importance will emerge as we proceed.
The paper starts with a short review of the approach of Marx and other classical Marxist theorists to the capitalist state. Several different themes in their work are specified and their merits and demerits considered. This provides a framework within which to assess recent developments. Some variations on the themes of the classical texts are then examined and criticized for their failure to advance the Marxist theory of the state. This brings us to the central part of the paper, which deals with recent theories of the capitalist state, evaluated in the light of our criteria. The paper concludes with some general remarks on Marxist analyses of state power in capitalist societies and their implications for other theoretical approaches.
Capitalist growth regimes are analysed drawing on Marx's insights into capital's fundamental cont... more Capitalist growth regimes are analysed drawing on Marx's insights into capital's fundamental contradictions, regulation theoretical arguments about the five basic structural forms of accumulation regimes and their modes of regulation, historical geographical materialism's emphasis on spatio-temporal fixes, and state-theoretical accounts of government and governance in the shadow of hierarchy. This framework is then applied to four growth regimes: Atlantic Fordism, two (among many) alternative post-Fordist trajectories-the knowledge-based economy, finance-dominated capitalism-and a radical 'no-growth' variant of the 'Green New Deal'. The article highlights the crisis-tendencies of the first three and assesses whether the Green New Deal represents an alternative route out of crisis or is the capture of an eco-social project by the forces that brought us finance-dominated accumulation. It concludes with a future research agenda.
This article presents the inaugural memorial lecture at the Nicos Poulantzas Institute in Athens.... more This article presents the inaugural memorial lecture at the Nicos Poulantzas Institute in Athens. It examines and extends the work of the eponymous Greek legal and political theorist, political economist, and communist intellectual, Nicos Poulantzas, who radically transformed Marxist state theory, made major contributions to the critique of political economy for the era of Atlantic Fordism and postwar American imperialism, and called for a judicious balance between representative and direct democracy to secure a democratic transition to democratic socialism. It first offers some general reflections on the originality, legacy and actuality of Poulantzas's work in these respects and then reconstructs his later views on the critique of political economy before his death in 1979. Noting his neglect of the environment and issues of political ecology, which was typical of the French and Greek left in the 1970s and also rooted in more general features of Marxist theorizing on nature and the environment, the article elaborates a Poulantzasian view of political ecology based on key arguments from his work. The article concludes by reasserting the validity of his vision of democratic socialism, indicating that it would have become a critique of political ecology, and suggests that he would have approached this in the same spirit of romantic public irony that was advocated by one of his major theoretical and political influences – Antonio Gramsci.
Cet article présente la première conférence commémorative à l'Institut Nicos Poulantzas à Athènes. Il examine et étend le travail du théoricien juridique et politique grec, Nicos Poulantzas, économiste politique et intellectuel communiste, qui a radicalement transformé la théorie de l'Etat marxiste et apporté une contribution majeure à la critique de l'économie politique pour l'ère du fordisme atlantique. Il réclame un équilibre judicieux entre démocratie représentative et démocratie directe pour assurer une transition démocratique vers le socialisme démocratique. J'offre quelques réflexions générales sur l'originalité, l'héritage et l'actualité de l'oeuvre de Poulantzas à cet égard, puis reconstruit ses vues ultérieures sur la critique de l'économie politique avant sa mort en 1979. L'article élabore une vision poulantzasienne de l'écologie politique fondée sur des arguments clés De son travail. Il note sa négligence par rapport à l'environnement naturel et les questions d'écologie politique, typiques de la gauche française et grecque dans les années 1970, et visible dans la théorie marxiste sur la nature et l'environnement. L'article conclut en réaffirmant la validité de sa vision du socialisme démocratique, indiquant qu'il serait devenu une critique de l'écologie politique, et suggère qu'il aurait abordé cela dans le même esprit d'ironie romantique et publique qui a été préconisé par l'un de ses grandes influences théoriques et politiques-Antonio Gramsci.
Este artículo presenta la conferencia inaugural conmemorativa en el Nicos Poulantzas Institute en Atenas. Aquí se examina y profundiza en el trabajo del epónimo griego, Nicos Poulantzas, quien transformó radicalmente el estado del Marxismo teórico. La mayor contribución del teórico político y legal, economista político, y comunista intelectual, fue su crítica a la política económica de la era del Fordismo Atlántico y el Imperialismo estadounidense de la post-guerra, e invitó a un perspicaz balance entre la democracia representativa y la democracia directa para asegurar la transición social demócrata. Este artículo ofrece, primeramente, reflexiones generales sobre la originalidad, legado y actualidad del trabajo de Poulantza, y también reconstruye sus últimos acercamientos a la crítica de la política económica antes de su muerte en 1979. Notando su falta de atención en el medio ambiente y asuntos de ecología política, producto de la izquierda Francesa y Griega de los años setenta y aspectos generales del marxismo teórico sobre naturaleza y medio ambiente, este artículo elabora una perspectiva desde Poulantzas sobre ecología política y con base en los principales argumentos de su trabajo. El artículo concluye con una recopilación de la validez sobre su visión respecto al socialismo democrático, indicando que se habría convertido en una crítica sobre ecología política, y sugiere que Poulantzas se habría aproximado con el mismo espíritu de la romántica ironía pública que fue promovida por uno de sus mayores influencias teóricas y políticas: Antonio Gramsci.
Το άρθρο αυτό παρουσιάζει την ετήσια διάλεξη στο Ινστιτούτο Νίκος Πουλαντζάς στην Αθήνα, προς μνήμη του Νίκου Πουλαντζά, του οποίο το έργο εξετάζει και αναπτύσσει. Ο Πουλαντζάς, ένας θεωρητικός της πολιτικής επιστήμης, οικονομολόγος και κουμουνιστής διανοούμενος, μεταμόρφωσε ριζοσπαστικά την μαρξιστική θεωρία για το κράτος, και συνέβαλλε καθοριστικά στην κριτική της πολιτικής οικονομίας την περίοδο του ατλαντικού φορντισμού και του μεταπολεμικού αμερικανικού ιμπεριαλισμού, καλώντας για μια προσεκτική ισορροπία μεταξύ αντιπροσωπευτικής και άμεσης δημοκρατίας, εχέγγυο για την δημοκρατική μετάβαση σε έναν δημοκρατικό σοσιαλισμό. Το άρθρο αυτό προσφέρει σκέψεις σχετικά με την πρωτοτυπία, ιστορική σημασία, και επικαιρότητα του έργου του Πουλαντζά, ανασυνθέτοντας τις ύστερες θέσεις του στην κριτική στην πολιτική οικονομία πριν τον θάνατό του το 1979. Αν και είναι δεδομένη στο έργο του η παράλειψη της διάστασης του περιβάλλοντος και της πολιτικής οικολογίας, χαρακτηριστική της γαλλικής και της ελληνικής αριστεράς την δεκαετία του 70 και με ρίζες στην μαρξιστική θεωρητική προσέγγιση της φύσης, το παρών άρθρο επεξεργάζεται μία κατά Πουλαντζά θεωρία της πολιτικής οικολογίας, αντλώντας επιχειρήματα από το έργο του. Επιβεβαιώνεται εδώ η εγκυρότητα του οράματος του Πουλαντζά για τον δημοκρατικό σοσιαλισμό το οποίο θα μπορούσε να είχε εξελιχθεί σε μία κριτική της πολιτικής οικολογίας, την οποία ο Πουλαντζάς θα είχε προσεγγίσει με το ίδιο πνέυμα της ρομαντικής και δημόσιας ειρωνείας την οποία πρότασσε ο θεωρητικός και πολιτικός ο οποίος περισσότερο τον επηρέασε, ο Αντόνιο Γκράμσι.
This paper presents a theoretical critique and reformulation of the concept of the developmental ... more This paper presents a theoretical critique and reformulation of the concept of the developmental state from a regulationist perspective and applies the new notion to the changing role of the developmental state in the emerging period of the so-called knowledge driven economy. The analysis can be divided into five sections: (a) reflections on political economy of market forces and state power; (b) the specificities of the developmental state; (c) the periodisation of capitalism; (d) the emerging knowledge-driven economy; and (e) the changing role of the state in regard to the ‘new economy’. Following a discussion of these issues, I offer some more general conclusions on the developmental state in East Asia.
Governance is clearly a notion whose time has come. It appears to move easily across philosophica... more Governance is clearly a notion whose time has come. It appears to move easily across philosophical and disciplinary boundaries, diverse fields of practical application, the manifold scales of social life, and different political camps and tendencies. This terminological mobility enables it to organize significant narratives about contemporary social transformation. Yet it is also clear that governance is a polyvalent and polycontextual notion. Its meaning varies by context and it is being deployed for quite contrary, if not plain contradictory, purposes. And, by virtue of these terminological uncertainties, it is doubtful whether governance sans phrase can really provide a compelling theoretical entrypoint for analysing contemporary social transformation or a compelling practical entrypoint for coping with complexity. It is this paradox that I wish to pursue and resolve in the following reflections on governance, with the ultimate intention of providing a clear account of the nature and limitations of governance and metagovernance in a complex world. I will illustrate my more general arguments as appropriate from the case of ‘good governance’, which provides an interesting example of the constitutionalization and ethicalization of governance discourse and practices.
Conjunctural analysis is useful in many fields but has special theoretical and practical signific... more Conjunctural analysis is useful in many fields but has special theoretical and practical significance for critical political economy and left strategy. For the pursuit of politics as " the art of the possible " depends heavily on correct conjunctural analysis and is practised by most successful political forces. Its central role for left politics is seen in the analyses of Hall, among many others. For Lenin, the central focus of political analysis and action is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation (1920: 165) oriented to the correlation of forces. And, for Althusser, the key concept of a Marxist science of politics is the conjuncture: " the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination of the contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics must be applied " (1970: 311). A sound conjunctural analysis depends on: (a) an appropriate set of concepts for moving from basic structural features to immediate strategic concerns; (b) the spatio-temporal horizons of action that define the conjuncture; (c) a clear account of medium-and long-term goals that should guide strategy and tactics in the current moment; and (d) ethico-political commitments that set limits to acceptable action in particular contexts on the grounds that the ends do not always justify any means. Moreover, because one's strategy depends on the likely responses of other key social forces, one must map their conjunctural analyses too. There is scope for infinite reciprocal regress here but it is lower in periods of relative stability that promote stable expectations or, conversely, in the face of urgent crises calling for immediate action. Multi-faceted crises that build over time with sudden, acute phases are more disorienting and place the heaviest demands on conjunctural analysis.
The regulation approach (hereafter 'RA') has enjoyed acclaim for some twenty years as a leading p... more The regulation approach (hereafter 'RA') has enjoyed acclaim for some twenty years as a leading paradigm in the revival of institutional and evolutionary economics and the more general development of 'new political economy'. Its several schools all adopt a heterodox account of capital accumulation and emphasise the latter's socially embedded, socially regularized nature. They focus on the historically contingent ensembles of complementary economic and extra-economic mechanisms and practices which enable relatively stable accumulation to occur over relatively long periods despite the fundamental contradictions, crisis-tendencies, and conflicts generated by capitalism (on different schools, see Jessop 1990). These ideas have been applied most famously to 'Fordism' and 'post-Fordism' and extensive interest therein from the mid-80s to mid-90s certainly contributed to the RA's popularity. But even the initial Parisian work addressed other topics and subsequent work has seen a real deepening and widening of the regulation approach far beyond issues of Fordism and/or post-Fordism.
These more recent trends are my primary concern below. Since a short survey cannot cover all relevant material, I will provide a general account of the RA's successive generations and developmental trajectories. I then illustrate this account by reviewing the Parisian 'state of the art' and the theoretical innovations introduced by other theorists. I also consider the RA's responses to the failure of its initial alternative economic strategy (due, it should be noted, to lack of adoption rather than subsequent implementation failure) and its relative isolation within mainstream economics; and I also examine how the RA's message has been received and understood outside the discipline of economics. I conclude by asking whether the twenty years of research, scholarship, and exposition invested in the RA have been worth the effort (the standard RA survey is Boyer 1990; on more recent work, see also Boyer and Saillard 1995a).
Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspe... more Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspect of their post-socialist transformation. The full range of problems involved here emerges most clearly when one recognizes at the outset that economic activities themselves are always socially embedded and socially regulated and that they are also overdetermined by various geo- political, socio-cultural, and other non-economic factors. There are no pure market economies nor could there be. This enables us to identify at least four major problem-complexes which affect economic restructuring in post-socialist conditions. First, any post-socialist transformation would involve not only structural disembedding of emergent market forces from their erstwhile state socialist straitjacket but also re-embedding them into an institutional framework which could help to regularize accumulation. Second, post-socialist economies must escape from one- sided economic dependence on their inherited links to former Comecon economies and move towards closer integration in the world capitalist system. This process is complicated by the problems involved in managing the economic (and political) disintegration of the Soviet bloc (cf. Andreff 1993) as well as the uncertainties related to major changes occurring in capitalism independently of those provoked by the Soviet collapse. A third problem-complex is tied to the collapse of the bipolar security regime which emerged during the Cold War and the resulting need to build a post-socialist security order for Eurasia which recognizes various ‘spheres of interest’ and the legitimate security needs of the USA, West European states, and the successor states in the Soviet bloc (cf. Tökés 1991: 102-105). And, fourth, there are serious problems for any economic transformation rooted in the complex and controversial politics of post-socialist identity construction, nation-building, and state formation.
The conference which inspired this collection was explicitly concerned with the direction of cont... more The conference which inspired this collection was explicitly concerned with the direction of contemporary capitalism. Its final plenary session, to which my own contribution was presented, addressed the historical place and destiny of capitalism. Surprisingly, few papers at the conference explored the basic nature of capitalism, its genesis, overall dynamic, or future. Yet only by examining such issues can one usefully comment on the historical place, the direction, or destiny of capitalism or draw relevant political conclusions. Thus I first consider whether capitalism has a distinctive dynamic and, if so, what this might mean for its future. I argue that it does, indeed, show important developmental tendencies. However, as these are not linked to any final telos, capitalist development remains open within very broad limits. Accordingly I do not try to forecast the long-run future or ultimate destiny of capitalism. Instead I discuss several major economic changes in contemporary capitalism, consider whether they involve a break in capitalist development, and suggest some medium-term implications for the national state and governance mechanisms.
This article explores the roles of markets, states, and partnerships in economic coordination and... more This article explores the roles of markets, states, and partnerships in economic coordination and considers their respective tendencies to failure. The first section addresses the growing interest in governance and seeks explanations in recent theoretical developments. The second section then asks whether the rise of the governance paradigm might also reflect fundamental shifts in economic, political, and social life, such that governance will remain a key issue for a long time, or is a response to more cyclical shifts in modes of coordination. The third section considers the logic of ‘heterarchic governance’ in contrast to anarchic, ex post coordination through market exchange and imperative ex ante coordination through hierarchical forms of organization. It also offers some preliminary reflections on the nature, forms, and logic of ‘governance failure’. The final section addresses the state’s increasing role in ‘meta-governance’, i.e., in managing the respective roles of these different modes of coordination.
This paper presents the relations among agency (A), structure (S), institutions (I) and discourse... more This paper presents the relations among agency (A), structure (S), institutions (I) and discourse (D) and their analytical relevance for socioeconomic development. It argues that an adequate account of these relations must recognize their inherent spatio-temporality and, hence, their space-time dynamics. This is not an optional extra but a definite descriptive and explanatory requirement. Moreover, while structure is recognized as a product of path-dependent institutionalization and path-shaping (collective) agency, agency is seen in turn as discursively and materially reproduced and transformed. This approach treats structure in terms of a differential spatio-temporal configuration of constraints and opportunities, reference to which informs the empirical analysis of strategic agency within the overall ASID heuristic. The paper concludes with an eightfold typology of particular combinations of ASID features to guide analyses of socioeconomic development in all its (dis-)junctural complexity.
This article explores depoliticization in relation to the three domains of polity, politics, and ... more This article explores depoliticization in relation to the three domains of polity, politics, and policy, distinguishing its different meanings in these three contexts, identifying different strategies of depoliticization corresponding to each domain, and exploring their interconnections. Politicisation and repoliticization can be explored in the same manner. The analysis is illustrated from the strategies of depoliticization pursued in relation to the fiscal cliff debate in the USA and the constitutionalization of the Fiscal Compact in the Eurozone, Some general conclusions are also offered.
This article describes the meta-theoretical and theoretical foundations of one approach to critiq... more This article describes the meta-theoretical and theoretical foundations of one approach to critique that moves through up to eight analytically distinct steps. This critique begins with the identification of specific discourses and discursive practices and moves progressively towards a critique of ideology and domination and then to a critique of the factors and actors that, through diverse mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention, reproduce these ideological effects and patterns of domination as a basis for proposing and acting upon emancipatory projects that involve a variable mix of reform and revolution. An important part of these procedures is to deconstruct and demystify sedimented, naturalized discourses and social practices and to propose alternatives based on explicitly stated principles of justice and fairness.
Faced with the devastating electoral and political successes of Thatcherism in the past five year... more Faced with the devastating electoral and political successes of Thatcherism in the past five years, the British Left responded in various ways. Some activists anticipated the imminent collapse of Thatcherism due to a sudden upsurge of union militancy, popular disturbances, or urban riots; or due to a Conservative U-turn prompted by rising unemployment and political unrest. Others called for the Labour Party to adopt more radical economic and political policies and to restructure itself as a vehicle for the eventual implementation of a socialist alternative economic strategy. They hoped that this would undermine Thatcherism by refuting its claim that there is no alternative; or that it would at least give the left the initiative when Thatcherism collapsed for other reasons. Yet others concentrated on the ideology of Thatcherism and called for a similarly ideological strategy from the Left. They attributed Thatcherism's success to the initiatives of the new Right in constructing a new hegemonic project and mobilizing popular support for a right-wing solution to the economic and political crisis. Complementing this apparent celebration of Thatcherism is the charge that the Left has failed to adopt a 'national-popular' approach of its own to ideological and political struggle and has fallen back on economistic or voluntaristic analysis of the growing crisis of social democracy and the Left in Britain. This last approach is represented above all in the work of Stuart Hall, but it has since been adopted quite widely on the left. The guiding thread of Hall's work is the argument that Thatcherism rests on 'authoritarian populism'. He argues that 'authoritarian populism' (hereafter 'AP') successfully condenses a wide range of popular discontents with the postwar economic and political order and mobilizes them around an authoritarian, right-wing solution to the current economic and political crisis in Britain. This success is regarded with begrudging admiration because Thatcherism took the ideological struggle more seriously than the Left and has reaped the reward of popular support. Some conclude that the Left must articulate Thatcherite themes into its own discourse, but others, such as Hall, insist that Thatcherism can best be defeated by developing an alternative vision of the future, a socialist morality, and a socialist common-sense. Thus the apparent ideological
In this excellent book Brett Christophers offers an intriguing, historically informed but partial... more In this excellent book Brett Christophers offers an intriguing, historically informed but partially inadequate response to a significant deficit in the regulationist analysis of political economy. Regulationists ask why, despite its inherent contradictions and crisis tendencies, capital accumulation proceeds relatively smoothly for significant periods in specific spatio-temporal settings. They explain this through the trial-and-error emergence and consolidation of specific growth regimes and corresponding modes of re ́ gulation-cum- governance that, together, create complementary institutional forms and social norms and values that facilitate the integration of different circuits of capital and the development of a workable social compromise. Christophers notes correctly that regulationists often neglect the role of law, litigation, and judicial decision-making in securing this improbable result. This deficit is unfortunate because, as he rightly claims, law has a key role in modulating the balance between simultaneous tendencies to competition and monopoly in ‘capitalist regimes of profitability and growth’. He then explores this topic in two steps: a theoretical account of the complex dialectics of competition and monopoly that frames detailed studies of three successive periods in the development of anti-trust law, which aims to limit monopoly in favour of competition, and of intellectual property rights (IPRs), which are intended to fashion and protect monopoly. (2016: 4).
This article relates changes in higher education and research in East Asian societies to recent t... more This article relates changes in higher education and research in East Asian societies to recent trends in political economy and, in particular, the reorientation of developmental states in the region. The developmental state is oriented to catch-up competitiveness and, as the horizon of development shifts, so do its appropriate institutional forms and strategies. Catch-up competitiveness is guided by economic imaginaries, often linked to geoeconomic, geopolitical, and broader societal imaginaries, whose hegemony depends on particular discursive and disciplinary practices. The shift in the roles of HE and research is related to the reorientation of developmental states from export-oriented, investment-led growth to knowledge- intensive, investment-led growth, supplemented in some cases by efforts to create international financial hubs to exploit a global trend towards financialisation. These themes are explored through comparison of selected East Asian economies/societies. The article ends with some general conclusions about the state’s continuing role in higher education and its internationalisation in the region.
The Brexit vote was a singular event that is one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the Br... more The Brexit vote was a singular event that is one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the British state and society and a stimulus for further struggles over the future of the United Kingdom and its place in Europe and the wider world. This crisis previously enabled the rise of Thatcherism as a neoliberal and neoconservative project (with New Labour as its left wing) with an authoritarian populist appeal and authoritarian statist tendencies that persisted under the Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition (2010 – 2015). The 2015 election of a Conservative Government, which aimed to revive the Thatcherite project and entrench austerity, was the immediate context for the tragi-comedy of errors played out in the referendum. The ensuing politics and policy issues could promote the disintegration of the UK and, perhaps, the EU without delivering greater political sovereignty or a more secure and non-balkanized place for British economic space in the world market.
Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspe... more Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspect of their post-socialist transformation. The full range of problems involved here emerges most clearly when one recognizes at the outset that economic activities themselves are always socially embedded and socially regulated and that they are also overdetermined by various geo-political, socio-cultural, and other non-economic factors. There are no pure market economies nor could there be. This enables us to identify at least four major problem-complexes which affect economic restructuring in post-socialist conditions. First, any post-socialist transformation would involve not only structural disembedding of emergent market forces from their erstwhile state socialist straitjacket but also re-embedding them into an institutional framework which could help to regularize accumulation. Second, post-socialist economies must escape from one-sided economic dependence on their inherited links to former Comecon economies and move towards closer integration in the world capitalist system. This process is complicated by the problems involved in managing the economic (and political) disintegration of the Soviet bloc (cf. Andreff 1993) as well as the uncertainties related to major changes occurring in capitalism independently of those provoked by the Soviet collapse. 3 A third problem-complex is tied to the collapse of the bipolar security regime which emerged during the Cold War and the resulting need to build a post-socialist security order for Eurasia which recognizes various 'spheres of interest' and the legitimate security needs of the USA, West European states, and the successor states in the Soviet bloc (cf. Tökés 1991: 102-105). And, fourth, there are serious problems for any economic transformation rooted in the complex and controversial politics of post-socialist identity construction, nation-building, and state formation. It is impossible for this chapter to deal with all four sets of issues. Instead it focuses on the former Comecon (or CMEA) countries and reviews the relations between their attempts to move from state socialism to capitalism and proposals for regional
The two studies included in this issue of the IJPE focus on the public finances of post-socialist... more The two studies included in this issue of the IJPE focus on the public finances of post-socialist Poland at a turning point, or better, an epochal shift, which, if it does not yet signal the ‘end of history’, clearly marks the beginning of a new, world-historical period in capitalist development. Moreover, as Schumpeter’s remarks clearly anticipated, the crisis of post-socialist public finances not only reflects events beyond the state but also has its own effects on the crisis dynamics in these societies. It is in this spirit that Stanislav Owsiak and Jerzy Hausner seek to explain the origins and causal impact of the crisis in public finances in post-socialist Poland. Although Owsiak focuses on the transitional deficit in public finances and Hausner on the deeper-seated structural contradictions, strategic dilemmas, and competing paths involved in moving from a command to a market economy, their studies complement each other and provide a good overall picture of the financial crisis of the post-socialist state from both economic and political aspects.
Among the most important factors generating this financial crisis they cite: (a) various economic and political difficulties inherited from the ‘shortage economy’ associated with state socialism; (b) the economic disruption and transitional deficit occasioned by the abandonment of state socialism and neo-liberal efforts to move towards a market economy; (c) economic policy mistakes which have aggravated this inevitable disruption and its associated financial deficit and thereby further worsened the political crisis; (d) political commitments to various forms of economic and social expenditure required by a transitional political regime desperate to secure its legitimacy; and (e) the political crises provoked by badly flawed efforts to democratize the political system at the same time that efforts are being made to liberalize the economy. In addition to identifying various causal factors contributing to the financial crisis of the post-socialist state, they also trace the reciprocal influence of this crisis on the economic and political difficulties now affecting post-socialist Poland. They conclude, hardly surprisingly, that, given the lack of system integration (‘systemic vacuum’) and the failure to develop any coherent hegemonic project for restructuring post-socialist societies (‘strategic vacuum’), the financial crisis tends to make things worse rather than better. In particular it reduces the prospects of effective co-ordination of economic and political reform and also necessitates cuts in public expenditure which threaten the legitimacy of the overall transformation process.
In a number of articles and two recent books Joachim Hirsch and his colleagues have developed a n... more In a number of articles and two recent books Joachim Hirsch and his colleagues have developed a novel Marxist approach for analyzing capitalist societies (Esser and Hirsch, 1984, 1985, 1987; Haeusler and Hirsch, 1987; Hirsch, 1980, 1983a, 1983b, 1984; and Hirsch and Roth, 1980 and 1986). They combine a fresh perspective on the political economy of capitalism with their own theoretical work on the capitalist state; and apply this approach to a wide range of phenomena - from the nuclear family and the city through party systems and corporatist arrangements to social movements and new forms of subjectivity. Since the scope of these studies is too wide for a comprehensive review in a short article, my critique focuses on their general theoretical strengths and weaknesses and their implications for analyzing the crisis of Fordism and the transition to post-Fordism.
Despite their very different assumptions and principles of explanation, monetarists, Keynesians a... more Despite their very different assumptions and principles of explanation, monetarists, Keynesians and Marxists share a concern with the nature and impact of state intervention in capitalist economies. Yet, in contrast to the study of market forces, the state itself is strangely neglected as a field of analysis. This is as true of theories that presuppose an active role for the state as of those that entail a more limited role. Indeed, even though Marxists have long claimed special knowledge of the strategic significance of the state in class struggle, it is only in the last ten years that they have rediscovered the state as a problem in political economy. The resulting discussion has ranged from the most abstract methodological issues to quite specific historical problems and has generated a variety of hypotheses and insights. It is unfortunately true that much of the Marxist debate is esoteric and often inaccessible and/or irrelevant to those working in other traditions. But, in the absence of any comparable reappraisal of the state, this debate merits wider consideration. Moreover, since Marxism has long been concerned with the state as well as with production and exchange, it is surely worth assessing to what extent an integrated approach can illuminate economic analysis. Such an enquiry is particularly germane in the current period of continuing world economic crisis and increasing state intervention to restructure the industrial and financial system.
It should be emphasized that the present survey is not concerned with Marxist economics as such. Instead it instead on some recent Marxist theories of the capitalist state. Nor does it develop a new approach; it simply considers these theories in terms of certain given criteria. These comprise general criteria such as logical consistency and theoretical determinacy, as well as more specific criteria relevant to an evaluation of Marxist theories. The latter can be stated quite briefly as follows. A Marxist theory of the capitalist state will be considered adequate to the extent that (a) it is founded on the specific qualities of capitalism as a mode of production, (b) it attributes a central role to class struggle in the process of capital accumulation, (c) it establishes the relations between the political and economic features of society without reducing one to the other or treating them as totally independent and autonomous, (d) it allows for historical and national differences in the forms and functions of the state in capitalist societies, and (e) it allows for the influence of non-capitalist classes and non-class forces in determining the nature of the state and the exercise of state power. To justify the choice of these particular criteria would sidetrack the discussion before it begins; it is hoped that their relevance and importance will emerge as we proceed.
The paper starts with a short review of the approach of Marx and other classical Marxist theorists to the capitalist state. Several different themes in their work are specified and their merits and demerits considered. This provides a framework within which to assess recent developments. Some variations on the themes of the classical texts are then examined and criticized for their failure to advance the Marxist theory of the state. This brings us to the central part of the paper, which deals with recent theories of the capitalist state, evaluated in the light of our criteria. The paper concludes with some general remarks on Marxist analyses of state power in capitalist societies and their implications for other theoretical approaches.
Capitalist growth regimes are analysed drawing on Marx's insights into capital's fundamental cont... more Capitalist growth regimes are analysed drawing on Marx's insights into capital's fundamental contradictions, regulation theoretical arguments about the five basic structural forms of accumulation regimes and their modes of regulation, historical geographical materialism's emphasis on spatio-temporal fixes, and state-theoretical accounts of government and governance in the shadow of hierarchy. This framework is then applied to four growth regimes: Atlantic Fordism, two (among many) alternative post-Fordist trajectories-the knowledge-based economy, finance-dominated capitalism-and a radical 'no-growth' variant of the 'Green New Deal'. The article highlights the crisis-tendencies of the first three and assesses whether the Green New Deal represents an alternative route out of crisis or is the capture of an eco-social project by the forces that brought us finance-dominated accumulation. It concludes with a future research agenda.
Nuevos enfoques para el estudio de los Estados Latinoamericanos, 2020
El libro reúne un conjunto de artículos sobre los Estados latinoamericanos en el presente. Cada c... more El libro reúne un conjunto de artículos sobre los Estados latinoamericanos en el presente. Cada capítulo ofrece una exploración en formas de pensar las relaciones estatales en América Latina. El énfasis del libro en su conjunto es teórico, pero también contiene ejercicios aplicados de estudio de caso para Chile, Brasil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Bolivia y Venezuela.
Jessop examina en esta obra la crisis del Estado de Bienestar, las transformaciones del sistema c... more Jessop examina en esta obra la crisis del Estado de Bienestar, las transformaciones del sistema capitalista, los problemas contemporáneos del Estado capitalista y el surgimiento de nuevas teorías del Estado
This book has been an unconscionably long time in the making. My interest in theories of the stat... more This book has been an unconscionably long time in the making. My interest in theories of the state and state power dates back some twelve years or more and my interest in epistemological and methodological issues in theory construction is even longer-lived. But the immediate stimulus to undertake a theoretical investigation into recent Marxist analyses of the capitalist state came from two discussion groups in which I have been involved during the last five years: the Conference of Socialist Economists group on the capitalist state and the ‘Problems of Marxism’ seminar at the University of Essex. Some preliminary results of this investigation were published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics in 1977 and I have since published several other papers on various aspects of postwar Marxist theories of the state, law, and politics. Nonetheless the greatest part of the current book is newly published here and the book as a whole draws together for the first time the principal theoretical and methodological conclusions of my various studies to date on these matters. [...]
Preface
The idea for this book first took shape in early 1979 and it has been some five years in ... more Preface The idea for this book first took shape in early 1979 and it has been some five years in coming to fruition. I have long been interested in theories of the capitalist state in general and the work of Poulantzas in particular. I was able to meet Poulantzas for the first time in April 1979 when he addressed the annual conference of the British Sociological Association at Coventry. There I participated in one of his final interviews (see 1979I.a) and mentioned that I had been approached to write a book on his life and work. With characteristic modesty Nicos thought that it was overdoing things to devote a book to such matters but a month later he wrote saying that he had changed his mind. He declared that no author was completely contemporary with his own intellectual development and that his own work was often hard to understand. Someone who could stand back from it and write a critical interpretation would probably discover hidden aspects and implications and draw out new lines of investigation. Nicos added that he would like to reach a wider audience and hoped that my critique would be less difficult than his own work. Thus encouraged I corresponded further with Poulantzas and we agreed that I should undertake a study with full critical freedom – this was in no way to be an ‘official’ or ‘authorised’ account and no punches were to be pulled. In turn Poulantzas promised every co-operation and offered to reply to any criticisms in an interview to be included at the end of the book.
Some months afterwards, Poulantzas took his own life. The hopes of many that he would continue to make an important contribution to theoretical and political debate on the left were shattered. But his example as a committed intellectual and political comrade still lives on. Although I was unable to proceed with this work as we had planned, I have received much help from Nicos’s wife, Annie Leclerc, and his father, Aristides Poulantzas. Many colleagues, friends, and comrades of Poulantzas also gave much support and encouragement. In particular I would like to thank Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Constantine Tsoucalas for their generous help and support. I also gained much from interviews and discussions with Etienne Balibar, Pierre Birnbaum, Isidoro Cheresky, Georgos Dimitrarkis, Angelos Elephantis, Emilio de Ipola, Kostas Filinis, Nicos Mouzelis, Theodoros Pangalos, Goran Therborn, and Henri Weber. Nonetheless, given the significant theoretical and political differences among them as well as the likely divergences between their views and mine, I take full responsibility for the interpretations and arguments presented below.
Choosing an approach to a theoretical and political work which is as rich and complex as that of Poulantzas is always difficult. As my studies proceeded it became increasingly apparent that many interpretations of his work were fundamentally misleading. Accordingly this book concentrates on presenting as full and accurate an account of Poulantzas’s theoretical and political development as possible. No account can really be theoretically and political innocent, of course; and I do write from the viewpoint of one who believes that Poulantzas has made a substantial contribution to postwar Marxist theory and whose own work has clearly been influenced by his various studies. It is for this reason that the substantive chapters first offer a reconstruction of Poulantzas’s views and then present my own criticisms of some, if not all, of these same arguments. Hopefully readers can then form their own judgements independently of my commentaries and take the opportunity to disagree with my criticisms.
The need to set the record straight explains why I have not dealt at length with the many commentaries and criticisms of Poulantzas’s work or the numerous studies which claim to apply it to specific case studies. For the account presented here is often at odds with the received wisdom about Poulantzas’s work. It would have extended this book inordinately to have replied to each and every critique and I have dealt only with criticisms which help to illuminate the present study. This means that I ignored the most famous critique of all. For the debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas is fundamentally misleading about the theoretical issues and political implications at stake -largely because of the complicity between both protagonists in over-stating the structuralist character of Poulantzas’s arguments. Hopefully this claim will be justified in my comments on Political Power and Social Classes in subsequent chapters. Similar considerations apply to many other commentaries and I hope that, if the current work puts an end to some lines of criticism, it will stimulate many others. Poulantzas himself certainly welcomed ideological contestation as a key to theoretical and political progress and one can only commend this stance.
In writing this book I have received much support and advice from my own friends and colleagues as well as those of Poulantzas. For help with the documentation I would particularly like to thank Petros Stamoulis for his unstinting work in translating many articles, journalism, and interviews of Poulantzas from the Greek and for tracing some of them; George Anagnostopoulos and Grigoris Ananiadis for tracing and translating other pieces by Poulantzas; Annie Leclerc for lending me her archive of Nicos’s French articles, journalism, and interviews; Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Isidoro Cheresky for providing two worthwhile articles at a late stage; and Noelle Burgi for chasing references in France when all else seemed to have failed. For help with the argumentation I would particularly like to acknowledge the many comments received from Simon Bromley, who suggested — within one week — both how to start and to end the book; Steven Kennedy, who made several valuable comments on the penultimate draft and whose editorial patience I hope to have rewarded with the final version; and Ruthy Laniado, whose questioning sharpened the ideas on strategy in the concluding chapter. I have also gained much from discussions with Grigoris Ananiadis, Kevin Bonnett, Anthony Giddens, Joachim Hirsch, Ernesto Laclau, Tom Ling, Harold Wolpe, and Tony Woodiwiss. The students on my courses at the University of Essex probably also heard rather more about Poulantzas than they would always have liked and gave me the opportunity to try out ideas. For other kindnesses which have helped to sustain me during this study I would like to thank Kevin Bonnett for his friendship and encouragement over many years; Petros and Angeliki Stamoulis for guiding me round Athens, conducting the Greek interviews, and offering my family their parents’ hospitality; Grigoris Ananiadis and Blanca Muniz for many conversations about the Greek political conjuncture and much else besides; Noelle Burgi for hospitality whilst I was conducting interviews in Paris and Jean-Yves Pôtel for sharing her burden; and, last but not least, Suzanne Bailey for helping to see the book to completion at a crucial stage in my life.
Finally I would like to thank New Left Books and New Left Review for permission to quote from the English translations of Poulantzas’s books and his critical response to Miliband and Laclau (1976a) Pamela and Julian Jessop helped with the preparation of the final typescript and provide a constant source of inspiration. It is to them that I dedicate this book on the fifth anniversary of Poulantzas’s death and in the hope that they will one day see the better future for which he struggled.
Page 1. STATE THEORY Putting Capitalist States in their Place BOB JESSOP Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. ... more Page 1. STATE THEORY Putting Capitalist States in their Place BOB JESSOP Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. tate Theory utting the Capitalist State in its Place ob Jessop This book makes a very substantial contribution to ic literature on the state. ...
Contents List of figures and tables vii Preface viii Abbreviations xii Acknowledgements xiv Introd... more Contents List of figures and tables vii Preface viii Abbreviations xii Acknowledgements xiv Introduction 1 PART I ON THE REGULATION APPROACH 1 Early regulation approaches in retrospect and prospect 13 2 Fordism and post-Fordism 58 3 Fordism, post-Fordism and the capitalist ...
First published in 1974, this study of British political culture provides a radical critique of c... more First published in 1974, this study of British political culture provides a radical critique of contemporary theories of working class deference and voting patterns. Drawing not only on previously unpublished opinion poll data but also the evidence of his own surveys, the author provides convincing evidence for his reformulation of the deference and civility themes, which he sees in terms of a theory of social order in class stratified societies. Comparative data from other European countries support this approach. The book ends with some incisive comments on the implications of the revised class perspective for comparative political research and future studies of British political culture.
Neither Luhmann nor Laclau-Mouffe take the state as their principal theoretical object. Luhmann a... more Neither Luhmann nor Laclau-Mouffe take the state as their principal theoretical object. Luhmann aimed to develop a universal systems theory in which politics was one among several important functional systems; and Laclau-Mouffe have been more interested in developing an ontology of ‘the political’ than in theorizing the state as a distinct ontic structural ensemble. Indeed, although he later modified this view, Luhmann initially presented the state as no more than the self-description of the political system (contrast 1990a with 2000b: 116-118, 244f, 392).; and, although Laclau and Mouffe each referred to the state in different respects before their joint discourse-analytical turn, they subsequently focused on hegemony and radical democracy. Thus we must explore the relevance of their more general arguments to Marx’s state theory.
This chapter offers an alternative regulationist analysis of Fordism and the transition to post-F... more This chapter offers an alternative regulationist analysis of Fordism and the transition to post-Fordism based on a strategic-relational re-interpretation of the capital relation. In so doing, it seeks to steer a middle course between the overly economistic 'hard political economy' of the Parisian regulation approach with its solid roots in institutional and evolutionary economics and the overly politicistic 'soft economic sociology' of the regulation approach as interpreted by many non- Marxist political scientists, geographers, and other social scientists. To date the regulation approach has proved itself good at analysing the origins of Fordism, its heyday, and its crisis mechanisms. It has been less good at analysing the development of the crisis of Fordism in real time (as had once been proposed, see Boyer 1990: 111) and even less so in predicting what is likely to replace it. My aim below is to provide an alternative framework for thinking through this issue by returning to Marx's critique of political economy and its concern with the contradictions of the capital relation considered as an economy of time. But it also seeks to extend and concretize Marx's critique through a periodization of capitalism. This is based on the more 'middle-range' institutional analyses of the regulation school, the insights of Gramscian and Poulantzasian state theory, and recent work on the narrative features of the social world. For such an approach allows a positive content to be given to the otherwise vague notion of post- Fordism in terms of multiple strategies for securing a transition to a globalizing knowledge-based economy and the widespread transformation of the social formation to facilitate this. It also allows us to identify some of the obstacles to this transition and the principal contradictions and lines of conflict that would shape the dynamics of the knowledge-based economy and learning society. And it allows us to examine the continuities as well as discontinuities and the 'conservation-dissolution' effects with which the transition to post-Fordism is associated.
Globalization has a multitude of contested meanings. Moreover, considered as an allegedly existin... more Globalization has a multitude of contested meanings. Moreover, considered as an allegedly existing process, it lacks any clear causal status. This makes it hard to relate globalization to cities and social movements -- especially as the natures of cities and social movements are themselves disputed. These difficulties have shaped the order of argument in the following discussion. First, before addressing entrepreneurial cities and the scope they might offer to social movements to expand the social economy, I offer some general remarks on the 'chaotic concept' of globalization. I also comment on some of the complex processes which are currently shaping globalization. The second topic is the highly mediated, but nonetheless real, relationship between globalization and the changing economic and social problems said to confront mature welfare states in advanced capitalist societies. After considering the specific ideal-typical features of these welfare states, the emerging features of a new type of welfare regime are briefly discussed. These economic and social problems and their reflection in new forms of economic and social reproduction are especially evident in cities. Thus a third concern is the rise of so-called 'entrepreneurial cities' in response to the manifold crisis of Atlantic Fordism and their efforts to maintain or enhance their position in an intensifying inter-urban competition. A fourth topic is the limits to any and all attempts to enhance the competitiveness of cities within the framework of a globalizing economy. Even successful cities face problems in this regard; and, of course, there are always losers in this process too. One response to these problems provides the focus for the fifth part of the chapter: the renewed interest on the part of some social movements and some urban authorities in the social economy. The concluding section offers some general observations on the role of the social economy in the re-scaling of economic and social life within a global society.
Marxist approaches to power are distinctive in focusing on its relation to class domination in ca... more Marxist approaches to power are distinctive in focusing on its relation to class domination in capitalist societies. Power is linked to class relations in economics, politics, and ideology. The aim of much recent Marxist analysis has been to show how class power is dispersed throughout society, in order to avoid economic reductionism. In capitalist societies the state is considered to be particularly important in securing the conditions for economic class domination. Marxists are also interested in why dominated classes collude in their oppression and address issues of resistance and strategies to bring about radical change. In this chapter, as well as a summary of the main trends in contemporary Marxism, Jessop also offers a brief assessment of its disadvantages as a sociological analysis of power: its neglect of social domination that is not directly related to class; a tendency to over-emphasize the coherence of class domination; the continuing problem of economic reductionism; and the opposite danger of a voluntaristic account of resistance to capitalism.
Poulantzas claimed that State, Power, Socialism, his last major work, completed the theory of th... more Poulantzas claimed that State, Power, Socialism, his last major work, completed the theory of the capitalist type of state that Marx and Engels had left unfinished (1978a). While this immodest but provocative claim certainly merits discussion, it cannot be seriously evaluated in a short essay. Instead I will advance four main arguments. First, Poulantzas developed a major original contribution to the theory of the capitalist type of state that goes well beyond most conventional Marxist analyses and contrasts markedly with studies of the state in capitalist society. Second, he developed a broader approach to the state as a social relation that holds for the capitalist type of state, diverse states in capitalist social formations, and statehood more generally. Third, he adopted both approaches in his own theoretical and historical analyses. And, fourth, his analysis of the current form of the capitalist type of state was highly prescient, with ‘authoritarian statism’ far more evident now than when he noted this emerging trend in the 1970s. After I have advanced all four arguments, I will also note some basic limitations to Poulantzas’s approach to materialist state theory, concluding that State, Power, Socialism should be regarded as a modern classic.
Corporate governance and its regulation are continuing concerns in modern market economies. Nonet... more Corporate governance and its regulation are continuing concerns in modern market economies. Nonetheless the salience of these issues varies – conjuncturally according to the incidence of scandals at the level of the rm or sector and structurally with the outbreak of crises in the overall design and implementation of corporate governance regimes and their regulation. This temporal differentiation is linked to variations across economic sectors and varieties of capitalism. Responses to crisis also vary in these terms. In the spirit of the present book, this chapter develops a general meso- and macro-level account of corporate governance and its regulation (or metagovernance) that builds on complementary perspectives on the political economy of the economy and the political economy of the political. These are the regulation approach in evolutionary and institutional economics and the strategic- relational approach respectively. Both adopt a methodological relational approach and recognize the continued relevance of the critique of political economy. It is nonetheless worth distinguishing them because one is more sensitive to the logic of the pro t-oriented, market-mediated process of accumulation and the other to the logic of the policy-oriented, territorially-grounded exercise of political power. The relative importance of these logics, their structural coupling and their strategic coordination are crucial issues for a coherent account of the form and function of corporate governance regimes, which are located at the intersection of the political economy of the economy and the political.
The regulation approach to capitalism is a leading paradigm in the revival of institutional and e... more The regulation approach to capitalism is a leading paradigm in the revival of institutional and evolutionary economics as well as in the more general development of the 'new political economy'. Moreover, although it originated in economics and many of its principal advocates are still based largely in this discipline, it has also spread well beyond economics. Indeed it has a major role in heterodox analyses of diverse topics in the political, social, and cultural spheres as well as contributing to post-disciplinary studies at the interface of several academic fields. This expansion of the regulation approach beyond economics can be related to its concern to develop a critical political economy of contemporary capitalism that emphasises the role of extra-economic as well as economic factors in the alternation of periods of relatively stable capital accumulation and of its crisis-induced restructuring, re- scaling, and re-regulation. Not only do the various schools and tendencies of the regulation approach (or RA) take extra-economic and economic institutions seriously but they also recognise the transformative role of social action. For regulationists deny that there is anything automatic about periods of stability (capitalism is not self- stabilising) or about capitalist restructuring in response to crises (capitalism is not self-healing). Instead they see a crucial role for social agency in both regards. This interest in social agency extends beyond a concern with likely future scenarios in capitalist development and the social forces that might be mobilised behind them to include, for some contributors at least, spirited advocacy of real emancipatory alternatives -- inspired by socialist, ecological, feminist, or other social movements.
This article develops a strategic-relational approach to the gender selectivities of the state – ... more This article develops a strategic-relational approach to the gender selectivities of the state – an approach that I first developed to analyze the complex relations between the economy and the state. Although the substantive theme differs, the general line of argument is the same. In applying it to this topic, I have drawn freely from feminist theorists, recent work on masculinity, and some of the insights of "queer theory".1 My aim is to show the contingently necessary nature of the gender biases involved in the state's institutional architecture and operation and suggest ways to explain this. The essay has four main parts. These deal with (a) the nature of the strategic-relational approach (hereafter SRA); (b) its implications for analyzing gender selectivities; (c) basic aspects of the gender selectivities of advanced capitalist democratic states; and (d) some implications of strategic selectivity for feminist action. The article ends with some general observations on the complexities of describing and explaining gender selectivities within an anti-essentialist framework.
This chapter relates four main forms of neoliberalism and their development to the interaction of... more This chapter relates four main forms of neoliberalism and their development to the interaction of capital's economic logic and the territorial logic of imperialism in the world market and interstate system. An important, but by no means exclusive, role is played by US transnational capital and imperial interests. For, despite the loss of American economic hegemony and multiple challenges to its domination from the 1980s onwards, the ideational and structural capacity of US economic and political power to shape the world remains preponderant on a global scale. This is related to the active and/or reactive integration of key features of US economic paradigms into strategies pursued by many of the key economic and political forces in other economies and to the formation of transnational blocs organized under US hegemony (or, at least, dominance) that promote policies on scales ranging from the global to the local that tend to favour the interests of an imperial USA and its major economic and political allies. This reflects and tends to reproduce the continuing 'ecological dominance' (see below) of forms of financial innovation that have been promoted by the US federal government, related international economic apparatuses, and transnational financial capital.
To re-read the Communist Manifesto today is to engage in a strange and paradoxical encounter in t... more To re-read the Communist Manifesto today is to engage in a strange and paradoxical encounter in time and space. There are some passages which seem so prophetic that they could have been written just a few years ago and others that are clearly dated, if not antiquated or plain wrong. The language of the Communist Manifesto is certainly not that of the media-hungry politician of today's audio-visual age nor is it that of today's ‘value-neutral’ social scientist. But who can deny the vivid imagery of the Communist Manifesto or the power of its arguments? Another text by Marx, the 1859 Preface to a ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, which is more theoretical than political, has also significantly influenced the interpretation of Marx’s intellectual project, historical materialism, and Marxism more generally. This chapter considers both texts and asks, among other things, whether they offer useful guidelines for the transition from capitalism to socialism or, conversely, from state socialism to capitalism.
This chapter is not directly concerned with the emergence of sub-regionalism in East Asia or its ... more This chapter is not directly concerned with the emergence of sub-regionalism in East Asia or its relationship to the so-called 'Asian Crisis'. Instead it offers some conceptual and theoretical ground-clearing both to clarify what is at stake in studying sub-regionalism and to relate the latter phenomenon to the more general re-scaling of economic, political, and social processes that has recently been occurring. It suggests how sub-regionalism can be studied as the product of interaction among the wide range of processes and strategies that are often subsumed under the popular, if vague, labels of globalization and regionalization. And it proposes some ideas about how the resulting 'politics of scale' are being resolved through the restructuring of the state, politics, and policy-making. In this context my remarks are organized around three main issues.
This article examines the social embeddedness and governance of economies from three apparently c... more This article examines the social embeddedness and governance of economies from three apparently contrasting but potentially complementary viewpoints. These comprise: first, Polanyi's pioneering historical analyses of the institutedness, general embeddedness, and the dis- and re-embedding of substantive economic activities; second, the French 'régulation approach' to the socially embedded and socially regularized nature of the capitalist economy; and, third, systems-theoretical accounts of the operational autonomy of the modern economy, its material, social, and temporal interdependence with other systems, and the problems that these properties pose for the governance of the interrelations among these functionally differentiated systems.
This chapter considers selected aspects of welfare state restructuring in Britain and certain oth... more This chapter considers selected aspects of welfare state restructuring in Britain and certain other advanced western capitalist economies. More specifically it identifies some major shifts in the functions, the scale and modes of delivery of the state's involvement in securing the economic and social conditions for capital accumulation. It explains these shifts in terms of some general economic, political and sociocultural changes in advanced capitalist societies and their implications for economic and social policies. My analysis has three implications for issues relevant to this volume: the relation between changes in social and economic policy; how the territorial scale on which social policies are designed and implemented has changed in line with the re-scaling of the economic and political systems; and the changing balance between market, state and civil society in social policy delivery. In particular, I argue that, relative to the earlier post-war period, social policy is becoming more closely subordinated to economic policy; it is acquiring increasingly important supra- and sub-national dimensions; and its delivery has been subject to a partial rollback of the state in favour of market forces and civil society. Unfortunately a brief chapter requires a one-sided, over-simplied approach. This does not imply that social policy can be explained only through capitalism’s changing dynamic nor that given policy changes always have identical causes or follow the same course. Rather, this chapter aims to reveal aspects of welfare that other accounts overlook. In particular it illuminates Claus Offe’s paradoxical claim that ‘while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state’
The state is a complex institution that has been studied from diverse entrypoints and standpoints... more The state is a complex institution that has been studied from diverse entrypoints and standpoints. No single theory could ever exhaust its intricacies. This chapter defines its core features and presents five approaches that provide some theoretical and empirical purchase on its roles in local and regional development. It also advocates studying the state in terms of its central role in meta-governance, i.e., in articulating government and governance at different scales and across different social fields. Analyses should also draw on several disciplinary perspectives, consider different kinds of state and political regime, and explore how they are embedded in wider sets of social relations. These suggestions imply that, despite recurrent tendencies to reify the state and treat it as standing outside and above society, the state and its projects cannot be adequately understood apart from their relations to wider sets of social relations.
I would like to advance three theses on Poulantzas’s State, Power, Socialism (SPS 1978). First, P... more I would like to advance three theses on Poulantzas’s State, Power, Socialism (SPS 1978). First, Poulantzas formulated a contribution to the theory of the capitalist type of state that goes well beyond conventional Marxist analyses of the state in capitalist society. Second, he conceived the state as a social relation, a concept that holds for the capitalist type of state, diverse states in capitalist social formations, and statehood more generally. Third, his analysis of the current form of the capitalist type of state was highly prescient, with ‘authoritarian statism’ far more evident now than when he noted this emerging trend in the 1970s. Despite some basic limitations, SPS should be regarded as a modern classic.
There has been growing interest in the past twenty years or so in the potential contribution of n... more There has been growing interest in the past twenty years or so in the potential contribution of new forms of governance to solving co-ordination problems in and across a wide range of specialised social systems (such as the economy, the legal system, the political system, and the health system) and in the life world (or, broadly understood, civil society). This interest is reflected in growing ambiguities about the meaning of governance. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I adopt a relatively narrow definition of governance. Thus governance is defined as the reflexive self-organisation of independent actors involved in complex relations of reciprocal interdependence, with such self-organisation being based on continuing dialogue and resource-sharing to develop mutually beneficial joint projects and to manage the contradictions and dilemmas inevitably involved in such situations. Governance organised on this basis need not entail complete symmetry in power relations or complete equality in the distribution of benefits: indeed, it is highly unlikely to do so, almost regardless of the object of governance or the ‘stakeholders’ who actually participate in the governance process. All that is involved in this preliminary definition is the commitment on the part of those involved to reflexive self-organisation in the face of complex reciprocal interdependence.
Poulantzas wrote well before the current hype about globalization took off and before claims abou... more Poulantzas wrote well before the current hype about globalization took off and before claims about the death of the nation-state had become common. But his work during the 1970s did address some key issues involved in a serious Marxist analysis of the relation between (a) changes in the capitalist economy on a world scale and (b) the basic form and functions of the contemporary capitalist national state. These issues were first broached in a lengthy and important essay on ‘The Internationalization of Capitalist Relations and the Nation State’ (1973b in French, 1974b in English, but cited below from 1975, 37-88). They were further discussed in three books, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1975), Crisis of the Dictatorships (1976), and State, Power, Socialism (1978). My contribution to this volume will review Poulantzas’s overall argument in the 1970s, noting how it changed in some key respects during this period, and distinguishing between his general theoretical approach and its particular application to Europe (especially France, Greece, Portugal, and Spain) in a specific phase of imperialism. I argue that Poulantzas’s general approach is theoretically more sophisticated and strategically more relevant to the left than much of the current ‘globaloney’ over the future of the national state in an era of globalization. However, I also suggest that his general approach was marred by class reductionism and that he also failed to anticipate future changes in the internationalization of capital. This in turn meant that his specific prognoses were, in key respects, mistaken. Nonetheless his analyses can be improved by introducing additional theoretical considerations which are consistent with the overall Poulantzasian approach as well as by noting certain novel features of the current phase of imperialism. Accordingly, my paper is divided into two main parts: first, a critical appreciation of Poulantzas’s arguments and, second, an account of current changes in the national state from a modified Poulantzasian stance. It concludes with some more general comments on the relevance of Poulantzas’s work and my own remarks to possible changes in the European Union considered in state-theoretical terms.
Complexity is complex. This is reflected, especially in the social sciences, in the status of com... more Complexity is complex. This is reflected, especially in the social sciences, in the status of complexity as a chaotic conception. Thus, I must first reduce the complexity of complexity in order to connect it to governance rather than another topic. Indeed, faced with complexity, such acts of simplification are inevitable for any agent or operating system. This is because ontological complexity enforces selection on natural and social systems alike. One way to classify and interpret such systems is in terms of how they select selections. For social systems this involves simplification through specific meaning systems, forms of representation and limited action repertoires. Thus, we should examine the selectivity of systems and the reflexivity of agents, and explore the dialectic between the complexity of the real world and the manner in which the real world comes to be interpreted as complex. Issues of governance enter here because, if complexity is a feature of the real world (and not just a social construction of particular observers of that world), it has serious implications for attempts to govern complexity. This section revisits arguments about the governance of complexity presented 10 years ago and argues for ‘romantic public irony’ as a response to recognition of the complexity of governance.
British Marxist Bob Jessop on David Cameron, New Labour, and the best way to take on global capit... more British Marxist Bob Jessop on David Cameron, New Labour, and the best way to take on global capitalism
This article begins with a brief review of research on the development of ideas about the knowled... more This article begins with a brief review of research on the development of ideas about the knowledge-based economy (analysed here as 'economic imaginaries') and their influence on how social forces within and beyond the academy have attempted to reorganize higher education and research in response to real and perceived challenges and crises in the capitalist order since the mid-1970s. This provides the historical context for three 'thought experiments' about other aspects of the development of academic capitalism. The first involves a reductio ad absurdum argument about different potential steps in the economization, marketization and financialization of education and research and is illustrated from recent changes in higher education. The second maps actual strategies of the entrepreneurial university and their role in shaping academic capitalism. The third speculates on possible forms of 'political' academic capitalism and their changing places in the interstices of the other trends posited in these thought experiments. The article ends with suggestions for a research agendum that goes beyond thought experiments to substantive empirical investigations.
This online paper may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. You... more This online paper may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. You may also download it for your own personal use. This paper must not be published elsewhere (e.g. mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.
Utopía y praxis latinoamericana: revista internacional de filosofía iberoamericana y teoría social, Oct 29, 2014
El presente artículo explora las dificultades básicas que se presentan al estudiar el estado y el... more El presente artículo explora las dificultades básicas que se presentan al estudiar el estado y el poder del estado, así como su relación con el sistema político y los conjuntos más amplio de relaciones sociales. No existe una perspectiva única que pueda dar cuenta de estas complejidades. Tal problema se ve reflejado en las definiciones y aproximaciones rivales sobre la materia. Luego de revisar algunas de estas cuestiones, el artículo presenta un enfoque "estratégico-relacional" (SRA), a partir del cual se analiza el poder del Estado como una condensación institucionalmente mediada del equilibrio cambiante de fuerzas políticas. Desde tal perspectiva se asume que el poder del estado es mejor entendido como explanandum que como un principio explicativo independiente. El artículo concluye con una breve agenda de investigación.
The Pedagogy of Economic, Political and Social Crises, 2018
The Chinese ideogram for crisis combines two characters: danger and opportunity. This indicates t... more The Chinese ideogram for crisis combines two characters: danger and opportunity. This indicates the duality of crisis and suggests several important issues for current and future analyses of crisis, crisis construals, and crisis lessons. First, the ideogram signifies that crises have both objective and subjective aspects corresponding to danger and opportunity respectively. Building on Régis Debray, we can say that, objectively, crises occur when a set of social relations (including their ties to the natural world) cannot be reproduced (cannot "go on") in the old way. Subjectively, crises tend to disrupt (even "shock") accepted views of the world and create uncertainty on how to "go on" within it. For they threaten established views, practices, institutions, and social relations calling into question theoretical and policy paradigms as well as everyday personal and organizational routines. Second, in this sense, crises do not have predetermined outcomes: how they are resolved, if at all, depends on the actions taken in response to them. They are potentially path-shaping moments with performative effects that are mediated through the shifting balance of forces competing to influence crisis construal, crisis-management, crisis outcomes, and possible lessons to be drawn from crisis. Third, without the objective moment, we have, at worst, deliberately exaggerated or even manufactured "crises", at best, unwarranted panic based on mis-perception or mis-recognition of real world events and processes. 1 Sometimes, crises may be manufactured or, at least exaggerated, for strategic or tactical purposes not directly related to immediate events or processes. Agents may, for "political" motives, broadly interpreted, conjure crises from nowhere or exaggerate the breadth, depth, and threat of an actual crisis (Mirowski, 2013). After all, "one should never let a serious crisis go to waste" (cf. Rahm Emanuel's comment, made on the Bloomberg television channel in November 2008 in his capacity as transition manager for President-elect Barack Obama). 2 A rigorous analysis of crises, crisis construals, and crisis-management must be able to distinguish these alternatives or it could fall into a simplistic form of constructivism. Fourth, without the subjective moment, while disinterested observers may perceive a crisis developing either in real time or after the "event", the crisis will have insufficient resonance for relevant participants to spur them into efforts to take decisive action. Yet the notion of critical moment and turning point is a key feature of crises as conventionally understood. Fifth, from this perspective, then, crises are
The world market provides the ultimate horizon of economic analysis just as 'world society' is th... more The world market provides the ultimate horizon of economic analysis just as 'world society' is the ultimate horizon of social analysis. In neither case does this mean that the world scale is the primary (let alone sole) locus of globally significant causal mechanisms or social forces. One should not mistake the field on which economic or social processes unfold with their causal dynamics. For example, the global financial crisis did not originate at some global scale above or beyond specific circuits of capital anchored in particular places and networks. It was made in the USA, broke out there, and has spread unevenly through a mix of contagion and endogenous vulnerabilities around the globe. Even in the midst of the most severe global economic crisis since the 1930s, some locales, regions, and national economies have expanded and, indeed, the origins and effects of the crisis have contributed to the shift in the economic centre of gravity of the global economy after some five centuries back to what Europeans and Yankees call 'the East'. This poses the question of whether there are other spatial dynamics at work too and, if so, how they interact. One locus of such dynamics is the region and this contribution aims to provide some useful concepts and guidelines from the perspective of cultural political for the analysis of regional dynamics within the bigger picture of the world market. 1 Although there is wide interest nowadays in post-national political constellations, the following reflections will focus on economic dynamics at the sub-national and crossnational regional levels. The chapter has five main parts: (1) a brief introduction to cultural political economy; (2) a discussion of lived experience and imaginaries that addresses economic and regional imaginaries and the conditions for their translation into stable economic and/or regional orders; (3) remarks on the problems of locating regions in the tangled hierarchy of local-regional-national-triad-global dynamics; (4) comments on the relativization of scale, regional strategies, and the challenges of governing the logics of territory and the space of flows; (5) some observations on multi-level governance and network governance in regard to regions. The sequence of arguments and the examples given to illustrate them reflect the concerns of the
This article interrogates the concepts in this journal's title and, drawing on the strategic-rela... more This article interrogates the concepts in this journal's title and, drawing on the strategic-relational approach in social theory, explores their interconnections. This conceptual re-articulation is then contextualized in regard to the European Union (EU) as a political regime that serves as a real-time laboratory for experiments in government and governance with implications for redesigning polities, politics, and policies, especially in response to symptoms of political and policy failures and other crises. Mobilizing the territory-place-scalenetwork schema, and drawing on critical governance studies, this article offers an alternative account of these developments based on (1) their sociospatial and temporal complexities, (2) recognition that socio-spatial relations are objects and means of government and governance and not just sites where such practices occur, and (3) extension of this approach to multispatial meta-governance, that is, attempts to govern the government and governance of socio-spatial relations. The article ends with suggestions for future research on the state and state power, governance of the EU, and the role of Territory, Politics, Governance as a major forum for future discussion on multispatial metagovernance.
Cultural Political Economy, Spatial Imaginaries, Regional Economic Dynamics Bob Jessop The world ... more Cultural Political Economy, Spatial Imaginaries, Regional Economic Dynamics Bob Jessop The world market provides the ultimate horizon of economic analysis just as 'world society' is the ultimate horizon of social analysis. In neither case does this mean that the world scale is the primary (let alone sole) locus of globally significant causal mechanisms or social forces. One should not mistake the field on which economic or social processes unfold with their causal dynamics. For example, the global financial crisis did not originate at some global scale above or beyond specific circuits of capital anchored in particular places and networks. It was made in the USA, broke out there, and has spread unevenly through a mix of contagion and endogenous vulnerabilities around the globe. Even in the midst of the most severe global economic crisis since the 1930s, some locales, regions, and national economies have expanded and, indeed, the origins and effects of the crisis have contributed to the shift in the economic centre of gravity of the global economy after some five centuries back to what Europeans and Yankees call 'the East'. This poses the question of whether there are other spatial dynamics at work too and, if so, how they interact. One locus of such dynamics is the region and this contribution aims to provide some useful concepts and guidelines from the perspective of cultural political for the analysis of regional dynamics within the bigger picture of the world market. 1 Although there is wide interest nowadays in post-national political constellations, the following reflections will focus on economic dynamics at the sub-national and crossnational regional levels. The chapter has five main parts: (1) a brief introduction to cultural political economy; (2) a discussion of lived experience and imaginaries that addresses economic and regional imaginaries and the conditions for their translation into stable economic and/or regional orders; (3) remarks on the problems of locating regions in the tangled hierarchy of local-regional-national-triad-global dynamics; (4) comments on the relativization of scale, regional strategies, and the challenges of governing the logics of territory and the space of flows; (5) some observations on multi-level governance and network governance in regard to regions. The sequence of arguments and the examples given to illustrate them reflect the concerns of the 3 present volume. In other contexts it would be more appropriate to address their implications and provide examples for quasi-continental regional blocs (such as the European Union), larger triad regions, or even bilateral or trilateral cooperation among triad regions. I nonetheless hope to indicate how this can be done through the general remarks in the first two parts of the contribution.
Neoliberalism is variegated as different types of neoliberalism co-exist in a world market that i... more Neoliberalism is variegated as different types of neoliberalism co-exist in a world market that is organized in the shadow of a neoliberalization process that began with neoliberal regime shifts in the USA and UK. This article provides a periodization of neoliberal regime shifts within this context, starting with their prehistory up to the point of no return and then tracing their roll-back, roll forward, blowback, 'Third Way', moments of financial crisis, and crisis of crisis-management phases. It argues that neoliberal regime shits were associated from their prehistory onwards with intertwined authoritarian populist and authoritarian statist discourses and practices. Nonetheless, the intensification and interaction of crisis-tendencies of different kinds in different phases and changing forms of resistance have led to an increasingly authoritarian statist form of neoliberal regime, characterized by a state of permanent austerity that requires increased surveillance and policing to maintain it. This illustrates Nicos Poulantzas's suggestion in the 1970s that authoritarian statism is becoming the normal form of the capitalist type of state but rests on the intensification of features normally associated with exceptional regimes. This article updates Poulantzas's argument to an era of finance-dominated accumulation and provides a new characterization of authoritarian neoliberal statism.
Neoliberalism is variegated as different types of neoliberalism co-exist in a world market that i... more Neoliberalism is variegated as different types of neoliberalism co-exist in a world market that is organized in the shadow of a neoliberalization process that began with neoliberal regime shifts in the USA and UK. This article provides a periodization of neoliberal regime shifts within this context, starting with their prehistory up to the point of no return and then tracing their roll-back, roll forward, blowback, 'Third Way', moments of financial crisis, and crisis of crisis-management phases. It argues that neoliberal regime shits were associated from their prehistory onwards with intertwined authoritarian populist and authoritarian statist discourses and practices. Nonetheless, the intensification and interaction of crisis-tendencies of different kinds in different phases and changing forms of resistance have led to an increasingly authoritarian statist form of neoliberal regime, characterized by a state of permanent austerity that requires increased surveillance and policing to maintain it. This illustrates Nicos Poulantzas's suggestion in the 1970s that authoritarian statism is becoming the normal form of the capitalist type of state but rests on the intensification of features normally associated with exceptional regimes. This article updates Poulantzas's argument to an era of finance-dominated accumulation and provides a new characterization of authoritarian neoliberal statism.
For both Marx and Gramsci, the separation between the economic and political spheres was a key fe... more For both Marx and Gramsci, the separation between the economic and political spheres was a key feature of bourgeois societies. Marx saw the conflict between bourgeois and citoyen as requiring resistance to this separation as crucial to democratic emancipation and wrote that the Paris Commune realized this. He also saw social emancipation in terms of the expansion of free time rather than work time. Gramsci argued that civil society became more important in the 1870s as the masses gained the vote in political rights. They both argued that democracy could not be restricted to the political sphere but should also involve economic democracy. This is undermined by the expansion of the world market and survival of national states.
This five-volume collection (with individual volumes available separately) provides a comprehensi... more This five-volume collection (with individual volumes available separately) provides a comprehensive overview of the regulation approach to capitalism and its crisis-tendencies. Edited by a major British contributor to the approach, the collection includes not only key theoretical and empirical works from leading French regulationists but also representative work from other regulation schools and scholars. It also includes major critiques of the approach. Topics covered include regulationist approaches to the labour process, accumulation regimes (especially Fordism and post-Fordism), modes of social regulation, forms of state intervention, and the crisis tendencies of capitalism. Contributions cover different periods and different countries as well as different sectors and the changing global economy as a whole. The set includes both pioneer works and recent theoretical innovations and also explores the links between regulationism and other approaches, such as institutionalism, radical geography, critical discourse analysis, and feminism. This collection will be an essential reference work in institutional and evolutionary economics, in radical political economy, and in all social science disciplines concerned with capitalism and its crisis-tendencies.
This book interprets civil society both as a shifting horizon of action and as an ensemble of gov... more This book interprets civil society both as a shifting horizon of action and as an ensemble of governance arrangements with diverse agents rather than as a fixed reality with a definite substance. Its focus is not so much on civil society as it is on governance, metagovernance, and their forms of failure. These phenomena are examined from a governance theoretical viewpoint concerned with the coordination through self-organizing networks, partnerships and other forms of reflexive collaboration and, relatedly, in terms of an alleged ‘shift from government to governance’ in the polity and similar shifts from hierarchical authority to networked or ‘heterarchical’ coordination in many other social fields. After exploring these themes, the book presents the two phases of the WISERD civil society research programme and locates it in terms of Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault. The book then presents Bob Jessop’s own case studies of the role of governance in tackling economic and social problems and the limits and failures of economic and social policy in various styles of governance. It concludes with remarks on the struggle to integrate civil society into governance, and the power of social networks and solidarity within civil society. It thereby provides a comprehensive review of the factors that influence their success and identifies lessons for future social innovation.
This article interrogates the concepts in this journal's title and, drawing on the strategic-rela... more This article interrogates the concepts in this journal's title and, drawing on the strategic-relational approach in social theory, explores their interconnections. This conceptual re-articulation is then contextualized in regard to the European Union as a political regime that serves as a real-time laboratory for experiments in government and governance with implications for redesigning polities, politics, and policies, especially in response to symptoms of political and policy failures and other crises. Mobilizing the territory-place-network-scale schema, and drawing on critical governance studies, this article offers an alternative account of these developments based on (1) their sociospatial and temporal complexities, (2) recognition that sociospatial relations are objects and means of government and governance and not just sites where such practices occur, and (3) extension of this approach to multispatial meta-governance, i.e., attempts to govern the government and governance of sociospatial relations. The article ends with suggestions for future research on the state and state power, governance of the European Union, and the role of Territory, Politics, Governance as a major forum for future discussion on multispatial metagovernance. 2 Territory, Politics, Governance and Multispatial Metagovernance Bob Jessop This article addresses some theoretical and empirical connections among the terms, Territory, Politics, Governance, in the light of the strategic-relational approach to structure-agency dialectics as developed in sociology and political science and applied by some geographers. In the inaugural issue, its editor described the journal's remit as 'territorial politics, spaces of governance, and the political organization of space' (AGNEW 2013, p. 1). Yet, on my reading, these three themes are rarely investigated together in TPG and their mutual implications are neglected. I suggest ways to remedy these deficits below. First, for territorial politics, I supplement the Continental European traditions of general state theory and classical geopolitics by noting the non-territorial aspects of state power and adding the role of state projects and political imaginaries. Second, I consider the kind of politics, whether territorial or non-territorial, at stake in these areas. Specifically, I use the polity, politics, and policy triplet to explore how state power reorders the polity, which is the strategically-selective terrain on which politics occurs as well as a crucial site for contesting policies. Third, for governance, inspired by Antonio GRAMSCI (1975) and Michel FOUCAULT (2007, 2008), I redefine state power as 'government + governance in the shadow of hierarchy'. The conjunction of the first two terms in this redefinition signifies that spaces of governance are not exclusively territorial and reference to hierarchy indicates the key role of state power in metagovernance, that is, the governance of governance. This has various forms, including, notably, what, after Andrew DUNSIRE (1996), I term collibration. In developing these arguments and exploring their interconnections, I suggest that the socio-spatial arrangements of the state and state power (as redefined above) involve more than the capacity to territorialize, and hence to 'contain', political authority and thereby define the terrain within which state powers are exercised and from and among which interstate relations are conducted. For the 'political organization of space' is by no means confined to territory but extends, almost by definition, to all dimensions of sociospatial relations. This points not only beyond 'territorial politics' to the complex politics of place, scale, and networks considered individually but also to their variable articulation with territory in sociospatial imaginaries, spatial strategies,
It is not just market forces and imperative coordination that fail; civil society as a mode of go... more It is not just market forces and imperative coordination that fail; civil society as a mode of governance at the intersection of networks and solidarity is also prone to failure. This claim is illustrated from four case studies. First, recent work on global social policy; second, a critique of the literature on the neoliberal project of ‘good governance’ to solve the problems of local economic development; third, a study of the difficulties of economic governance in Dartford (regarding the London Science Park) and Greater Manchester (its Olympic Bid); and, fourth, a periodization of corporatism and social economy models. In each case, the focus is on the discourses and multi-spatial character of the social problem and the dynamics of policy failure.
Jessop, Bob. 2005. ‘Marx, L’État et la politique by Antoine Artous.’ Historical Materialism 13(2)... more Jessop, Bob. 2005. ‘Marx, L’État et la politique by Antoine Artous.’ Historical Materialism 13(2): 241 – 251 DOI: 10.1163/1569206054127282
Artous’s detailed and meticulous book seeks to test the common arguments that Marx either failed to develop a coherent account of the state and politics and/or laid the theoretical foundations for the rise of totalitarianism. Some claim that his work was incomplete, inconsistent, and lacked explanatory power; others, that he could not explain the autonomy of the political and political class struggle but dissolved them into the economic or, at least, the social; yet others, that his ideas about the end of (class) politics, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eventual withering away of the state created the space for a totalitarian political régime. In contrast, Artous sides with those that regard the early Marx as a convincing thinker of the autonomy of the political and as a passionate advocate of the democratic self-institution of the social against the bureaucratic formalism of the modern state; with those that regard the later Marx as a rigorous investigator of bourgeois law, the capitalist state, and their respective roles in the expanded reproduction of capitalism; with those that praise Marx’s analyses of the specificity and effectivity of different political régimes and political class struggles; and with those that regard Marx as a consistent supporter of democratic self-government and the self-constitution of the people. In exploring these issues and debates, Artous has three main objectives: first, to provide a critical exegesis of Marx’s work on the forms of the modern state, law, and political representation, their impact on the nature and dynamics of political struggle, and the prospects for a democratic order that transcends bourgeois liberal democracy; second, to comment on and refute various other interpretations of Marx’s work, primarily those of other Francophone Marxists and social scientists but also of other leading scholars, such as Max Weber, György Lukács, Ernest Mandel, and Jürgen Habermas, whose work has been translated into French; and, third, to outline his own suggestions on the form and functions of the modern state as derived logically from capitalist relations of production. While Artous achieves the first and second aims relatively successfully, he falls seriously short on the third aim, when his arguments are compared to alternative attempts to complete Marx’s theory of the capitalist state, for reasons to be explored below.
This is a curious collection of essays by a prominent contemporary historical sociologist of the ... more This is a curious collection of essays by a prominent contemporary historical sociologist of the state. Hall's earlier work has been quite influential in the study of state formation and one opens this book with high expectations. The topics that the author addresses are certainly important, controversial, and topical; all but one of the essays were penned in the 1990s. Sandwiched between a brief introduction and short conclusion, there are eight essays covering: the rise and consolidation of capitalism in the west and its failure in the Chinese empire, the political stability of liberal democracy, the collapse of state socialist regimes, the role of 'bounded autonomy' in shaping patterns of late development in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the problems of democratic transition and the consolidation of democracies, the historical trajectory of nationalisms, and problems of hegemonic decline in Britain and the USA. Given this wide range of major topics and the author's penchant for historical sociology, one might expect trenchant comments on alternative perspectives and powerful new insights into these problems. Although some readers may find such expectations satisfied, this reviewer was left frustrated and disappointed.
This edited collection presents eighteen selected papers from a conference organized by the edito... more This edited collection presents eighteen selected papers from a conference organized by the editor at Rutgers University in 1998; it appeared in hardback in 2000 and was re-issued in paperback in 2002. It is yet one more contribution to the rapidly expanding literature on globalization with the additional but by no means distinctive selling points that it also deals with regionalism and includes another major buzzword in its title, namely, the increasingly ubiquitous term, ‘knowledge based economy’ (hereafter also KBE). Indeed, its title could be said to encapsulate the currently hegemonic discourse for the after-Fordist era, namely, the globalizing knowledge-based economy. Whether the book delivers on this promise or the title is better interpreted as a marketing device is another matter.
This book is a worthy successor in ambition, theoretical rigor, and empirical grounding to Peck's... more This book is a worthy successor in ambition, theoretical rigor, and empirical grounding to Peck's earlier study, WorkPlace: the Social Regulation of Labor Markets (1996). It not only builds directly on that major intervention into the economic geography of labour markets but also extends it in new theoretical and empirical directions. In particular, Peck now emphasizes the discursive dimensions of the overall reshaping of labour market regimes and the disciplining of workers. He also highlights the role of political struggles, policy making, policy learning, and policy transfer as well as the many scales on which labour market policies are (re)made. In these respects Workfare States addresses what one might call the 'cultural political economy' of the increasingly evident transition in the anglophone economies from the familiar, but apparently discredited, postwar Fordist welfare states towards the naturalization of new workfare regimes that are purportedly more suited to the contemporary era of globalization and neo-liberal hegemony. Peck explores incisively the discursive struggles over the crisis of the welfare state and workfare's contribution to its resolution – initially in the USA and then, spreading through various discursive, economic, and policy channels, in Canada and the United Kingdom and even some social democratic welfare regimes in Continental Europe. He also presents a series of well-researched case studies on the complex political economy of local workfare experiments in Massachusetts and California, their adoption elsewhere in the United States, their translation to Canada (especially in Ontario) and Britain. And he dissects their economic context, their regulatory logic, their role in reinforcing contingent labour markets, their role in reinforcing gender and ethnic stereotypes and differences in the marginal labour force, and their current limits and likely future difficulties. This is an especially important contribution to the overall merit of the work because it enables Peck to interweave his discourse analysis, political analysis, and policy analysis with a detailed account of local labour markets and their place within a broader macroeconomic context.
The two books reviewed here both come from a series edited by Joel Mokyr on the economic history ... more The two books reviewed here both come from a series edited by Joel Mokyr on the economic history of the western world. But they do not seek to provide exclusively economic explanations for economic history –instead they look to political factors such as territorial organization, taxation, trade, and warfare. Indeed, a key feature of both studies is their critical engagement with issues of socio-spatiality, especially terrestrial and maritime distance, the role of city-states and city-state networks, the territorialization of political power, and centre-periphery relations. Although Grafe focuses primarily on the development of the Spanish state over a 150-year period and Stasavage has far broader canvass geographically and presents data for a 500-year period, both authors mention the influence of the late Stephan Epstein's work on the jurisdictional fragmentation of states and the problems that this poses for centralized political control and the capacity to raise revenues through predation and taxation. Conversely, although both authors refer to the new institutional economics of North and Weingast on the role of elected assemblies in enabling states to raise revenues from taxes rather than predation, Grafe regards their work as an elegant but historically erroneous model whereas Stasavage uses game theory and case studies to provide qualified support for their analysis. Each author not only draws on archival research but also deploys original data sets to challenge conventional wisdom (notably about the role of warfare in territorial state formation), to test old ideas, and develop new insights. They are excellent examples of trans-disciplinary scholarship that employs qualitative and quantitative analysis to produce important revisionist readings of the historical record. This review summarizes the arguments of each text and then draws some general conclusions about the importance of these studies for our understanding of the socio-spatiality of state formation and the key role of representation, taxation, and trade in this regard.
This book, originally published in hardback in 1997, has now appeared in a very welcome paper bac... more This book, originally published in hardback in 1997, has now appeared in a very welcome paper back edition. Its author, Fritz Ringer, is well-versed in German intellectual history. This enables him to offer the reader an excellent reconstruction of Weber's views on methodology, situate them in the major contemporary debates in Weber's Germany, and assert their continuing (and, indeed, insufficiently appreciated) relevance to current issues in the cultural and social sciences. Ringer's approach is influenced in part by Bourdieu's notion of the intellectual field.1 He therefore interprets Weber's attempt to unify the methodologies of the historical, cultural and social sciences in the light of the specific debates that structured Weber's own formulation of problems and his attempts over time to respond to the issues raised therein. In this context, Ringer sees Weber as a good example of 'the clarifying critic who restates, rationalizes, and thus partly transcends the assumptions of his own culture' (Ringer 2000: 168). Thus he was 'at once a causalist and a sophisticated interpretationist, and he simultaneously renewed and transformed his methodological heritage' (Ringer 2000: 6). In reviewing this work I have three aims: first, to set out the main arguments, second, to locate them in relation to contemporary debates in critical realism, and, third, to show the relevance of Weber's work to a reconstruction of Marxism and historical materialism.
This article presents some background information on the work of Jack Rasmus, summarizes his work... more This article presents some background information on the work of Jack Rasmus, summarizes his work on crisis, especially the concept of systemic fragility, and his criticisms of alternative approaches, and offers some comments on the overall approach proposed by Rasmus.
This book, originally published in hardback in 1997, has now appeared in a very welcome paper bac... more This book, originally published in hardback in 1997, has now appeared in a very welcome paper back edition. Its author, Fritz Ringer, is well-versed in German intellectual history. This enables him to offer the reader an excellent reconstruction of Weber's views on methodology, situate them in the major contemporary debates in Weber's Germany, and assert their continuing (and, indeed, insufficiently appreciated) relevance to current issues in the cultural and social sciences. Ringer's approach is influenced in part by Bourdieu's notion of the intellectual field. 1 He therefore interprets Weber's attempt to unify the methodologies of the historical, cultural and social sciences in the light of the specific debates that structured Weber's own formulation of problems and his attempts over time to respond to the issues raised therein. In this context, Ringer sees Weber as a good example of 'the clarifying critic who restates, rationalizes, and thus partly transcends the assumptions of his own culture' (Ringer 2000: 168). Thus he was 'at once a causalist and a sophisticated interpretationist, and he simultaneously renewed and transformed his methodological heritage' (Ringer 2000: 6). In reviewing this work I have three aims: first, to set out the main arguments, second, to locate them in relation to contemporary debates in critical realism, and, third, to show the relevance of Weber's work to a reconstruction of Marxism and historical materialism.
Cultural Political Economy (CPE) is an emerging approach with post-disciplinary horizons. It enga... more Cultural Political Economy (CPE) is an emerging approach with post-disciplinary horizons. It engages with ‘cultural turns’ in the study of political economy to enhance its interpretive and explanatory power. Intellectually it arose from a synthesis of critical discourse analysis, critical political economy, neo-Gramscian state theory, neo-Gramscian International Political Economy, feminism, post-colonialism, governmentality and governance studies. This three-day conference and associated workshop gives researchers and post- graduate students an opportunity to take issues in/ with CPE in philosophical, methodological and empirical terms. It invites discussions at the interface of ‘cultural turns’, critical realism, critical discourse analysis and political economy. Specifically, it focuses on the cultural (and semiotic) dimensions of political economy considered both as a field of inquiry and as an ensemble of social relations. In the light of multiple crises at many sites and scales in the global economic, political, and social order, the organizers invite papers that address theoretical or substantive aspects of the changing nature and dynamic of neoliberalism and democracy.
Lively debates on the spatiality of social relations occur regularly in the social sciences. Howe... more Lively debates on the spatiality of social relations occur regularly in the social sciences. However, these debates often run their course without major impact on empirical inquiries into matters spatial, especially where they appear too abstract, abstruse, or one-dimensional to bear on concrete research. This essay seeks to reframe these debates. As previous advocates of a scalar turn, we now question the privileging, in any form, of a single dimension of sociospatial relations, scalar or otherwise. (1) We believe that this contributes to an unreflexivèchurning' of spatial turns, leading to short intellectual product life cycles for key sociospatial concepts, limiting opportunities for learning through theoretical debate, empirical analysis, and critical evaluation of such concepts. The limits of one-dimensionalism are also reflected in several method-ological tendencies in contemporary sociospatial theory, including: theoretical amnesia and exaggerated claims to conceptual innovation; the use of chaotic concepts rather than rational abstractions; overextension of concepts and their imprecise application; concept refinement to the neglect of empirical evaluation; and an appeal to loosely defined metaphors over rigorously demarcated research strategies. (2) After sketching Abstract. This essay seeks to reframe recent debates on sociospatial theory through the introduction of an approach that can grasp the inherently polymorphic, multidimensional character of sociospatial relations. As previous advocates of a scalar turn, we now question the privileging, in any form, of a single dimension of sociospatial processes, scalar or otherwise. We consider several recent sophisti-cated`turns' within critical social science; explore their methodological limitations; and highlight several important strands of sociospatial theory that seek to transcend the latter. On this basis, we argue for a more systematic recognition of polymorphyöthe organization of sociospatial relations in multiple formsöwithin sociospatial theory. Specifically, we suggest that territories (T), places (P), scales (S), and networks (N) must be viewed as mutually constitutive and relationally intertwined dimensions of sociospatial relations. We present this proposition as an extension of recent contributions to the spatialization of the strategic-relational approach (SRA), and we explore some of its methodological implications. We conclude by briefly illustrating the applicability of thèTPSN framework' to several realms of inquiry into sociospatial processes under contemporary capitalism. (1) This paper derives from many years of intermittent and frequently intense discussion among its authors beginning at the 2000 IBG/RGS conference in Brighton. From initial agreement on the need for a scalar turn and a new political economy of scale, we gradually recognized the limitations of too sharp a sociospatial turn (of any kind) and the need for a multidimensional account of sociospatial relations. (2) On metaphors in general and on the scale debate in particular, see Howitt (1998).
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Articles by Bob Jessop
Cet article présente la première conférence commémorative à l'Institut Nicos Poulantzas à Athènes. Il examine et étend le travail du théoricien juridique et politique grec, Nicos Poulantzas, économiste politique et intellectuel communiste, qui a radicalement transformé la théorie de l'Etat marxiste et apporté une contribution majeure à la critique de l'économie politique pour l'ère du fordisme atlantique. Il réclame un équilibre judicieux entre démocratie représentative et démocratie directe pour assurer une transition démocratique vers le socialisme démocratique. J'offre quelques réflexions générales sur l'originalité, l'héritage et l'actualité de l'oeuvre de Poulantzas à cet égard, puis reconstruit ses vues ultérieures sur la critique de l'économie politique avant sa mort en 1979. L'article élabore une vision poulantzasienne de l'écologie politique fondée sur des arguments clés De son travail. Il note sa négligence par rapport à l'environnement naturel et les questions d'écologie politique, typiques de la gauche française et grecque dans les années 1970, et visible dans la théorie marxiste sur la nature et l'environnement. L'article conclut en réaffirmant la validité de sa vision du socialisme démocratique, indiquant qu'il serait devenu une critique de l'écologie politique, et suggère qu'il aurait abordé cela dans le même esprit d'ironie romantique et publique qui a été préconisé par l'un de ses grandes influences théoriques et politiques-Antonio Gramsci.
Este artículo presenta la conferencia inaugural conmemorativa en el Nicos Poulantzas Institute en Atenas. Aquí se examina y profundiza en el trabajo del epónimo griego, Nicos Poulantzas, quien transformó radicalmente el estado del Marxismo teórico. La mayor contribución del teórico político y legal, economista político, y comunista intelectual, fue su crítica a la política económica de la era del Fordismo Atlántico y el Imperialismo estadounidense de la post-guerra, e invitó a un perspicaz balance entre la democracia representativa y la democracia directa para asegurar la transición social demócrata. Este artículo ofrece, primeramente, reflexiones generales sobre la originalidad, legado y actualidad del trabajo de Poulantza, y también reconstruye sus últimos acercamientos a la crítica de la política económica antes de su muerte en 1979. Notando su falta de atención en el medio ambiente y asuntos de ecología política, producto de la izquierda Francesa y Griega de los años setenta y aspectos generales del marxismo teórico sobre naturaleza y medio ambiente, este artículo elabora una perspectiva desde Poulantzas sobre ecología política y con base en los principales argumentos de su trabajo. El artículo concluye con una recopilación de la validez sobre su visión respecto al socialismo democrático, indicando que se habría convertido en una crítica sobre ecología política, y sugiere que Poulantzas se habría aproximado con el mismo espíritu de la romántica ironía pública que fue promovida por uno de sus mayores influencias teóricas y políticas: Antonio Gramsci.
Το άρθρο αυτό παρουσιάζει την ετήσια διάλεξη στο Ινστιτούτο Νίκος Πουλαντζάς στην Αθήνα, προς μνήμη του Νίκου Πουλαντζά, του οποίο το έργο εξετάζει και αναπτύσσει. Ο Πουλαντζάς, ένας θεωρητικός της πολιτικής επιστήμης, οικονομολόγος και κουμουνιστής διανοούμενος, μεταμόρφωσε ριζοσπαστικά την μαρξιστική θεωρία για το κράτος, και συνέβαλλε καθοριστικά στην κριτική της πολιτικής οικονομίας την περίοδο του ατλαντικού φορντισμού και του μεταπολεμικού αμερικανικού ιμπεριαλισμού, καλώντας για μια προσεκτική ισορροπία μεταξύ αντιπροσωπευτικής και άμεσης δημοκρατίας, εχέγγυο για την δημοκρατική μετάβαση σε έναν δημοκρατικό σοσιαλισμό. Το άρθρο αυτό προσφέρει σκέψεις σχετικά με την πρωτοτυπία, ιστορική σημασία, και επικαιρότητα του έργου του Πουλαντζά, ανασυνθέτοντας τις ύστερες θέσεις του στην κριτική στην πολιτική οικονομία πριν τον θάνατό του το 1979. Αν και είναι δεδομένη στο έργο του η παράλειψη της διάστασης του περιβάλλοντος και της πολιτικής οικολογίας, χαρακτηριστική της γαλλικής και της ελληνικής αριστεράς την δεκαετία του 70 και με ρίζες στην μαρξιστική θεωρητική προσέγγιση της φύσης, το παρών άρθρο επεξεργάζεται μία κατά Πουλαντζά θεωρία της πολιτικής οικολογίας, αντλώντας επιχειρήματα από το έργο του. Επιβεβαιώνεται εδώ η εγκυρότητα του οράματος του Πουλαντζά για τον δημοκρατικό σοσιαλισμό το οποίο θα μπορούσε να είχε εξελιχθεί σε μία κριτική της πολιτικής οικολογίας, την οποία ο Πουλαντζάς θα είχε προσεγγίσει με το ίδιο πνέυμα της ρομαντικής και δημόσιας ειρωνείας την οποία πρότασσε ο θεωρητικός και πολιτικός ο οποίος περισσότερο τον επηρέασε, ο Αντόνιο Γκράμσι.
These more recent trends are my primary concern below. Since a short survey cannot cover all relevant material, I will provide a general account of the RA's successive generations and developmental trajectories. I then illustrate this account by reviewing the Parisian 'state of the art' and the theoretical innovations introduced by other theorists. I also consider the RA's responses to the failure of its initial alternative economic strategy (due, it should be noted, to lack of adoption rather than subsequent implementation failure) and its relative isolation within mainstream economics; and I also examine how the RA's message has been received and understood outside the discipline of economics. I conclude by asking whether the twenty years of research, scholarship, and exposition invested in the RA have been worth the effort (the standard RA survey is Boyer 1990; on more recent work, see also Boyer and Saillard 1995a).
Among the most important factors generating this financial crisis they cite: (a) various economic and political difficulties inherited from the ‘shortage economy’ associated with state socialism; (b) the economic disruption and transitional deficit occasioned by the abandonment of state socialism and neo-liberal efforts to move towards a market economy; (c) economic policy mistakes which have aggravated this inevitable disruption and its associated financial deficit and thereby further worsened the political crisis; (d) political commitments to various forms of economic and social expenditure required by a transitional political regime desperate to secure its legitimacy; and (e) the political crises provoked by badly flawed efforts to democratize the political system at the same time that efforts are being made to liberalize the economy. In addition to identifying various causal factors contributing to the financial crisis of the post-socialist state, they also trace the reciprocal influence of this crisis on the economic and political difficulties now affecting post-socialist Poland. They conclude, hardly surprisingly, that, given the lack of system integration (‘systemic vacuum’) and the failure to develop any coherent hegemonic project for restructuring post-socialist societies (‘strategic vacuum’), the financial crisis tends to make things worse rather than better. In particular it reduces the prospects of effective co-ordination of economic and political reform and also necessitates cuts in public expenditure which threaten the legitimacy of the overall transformation process.
It should be emphasized that the present survey is not concerned with Marxist economics as such. Instead it instead on some recent Marxist theories of the capitalist state. Nor does it develop a new approach; it simply considers these theories in terms of certain given criteria. These comprise general criteria such as logical consistency and theoretical determinacy, as well as more specific criteria relevant to an evaluation of Marxist theories. The latter can be stated quite briefly as follows. A Marxist theory of the capitalist state will be considered adequate to the extent that (a) it is founded on the specific qualities of capitalism as a mode of production, (b) it attributes a central role to class struggle in the process of capital accumulation, (c) it establishes the relations between the political and economic features of society without reducing one to the other or treating them as totally independent and autonomous, (d) it allows for historical and national differences in the forms and functions of the state in capitalist societies, and (e) it allows for the influence of non-capitalist classes and non-class forces in determining the nature of the state and the exercise of state power. To justify the choice of these particular criteria would sidetrack the discussion before it begins; it is hoped that their relevance and importance will emerge as we proceed.
The paper starts with a short review of the approach of Marx and other classical Marxist theorists to the capitalist state. Several different themes in their work are specified and their merits and demerits considered. This provides a framework within which to assess recent developments. Some variations on the themes of the classical texts are then examined and criticized for their failure to advance the Marxist theory of the state. This brings us to the central part of the paper, which deals with recent theories of the capitalist state, evaluated in the light of our criteria. The paper concludes with some general remarks on Marxist analyses of state power in capitalist societies and their implications for other theoretical approaches.
Cet article présente la première conférence commémorative à l'Institut Nicos Poulantzas à Athènes. Il examine et étend le travail du théoricien juridique et politique grec, Nicos Poulantzas, économiste politique et intellectuel communiste, qui a radicalement transformé la théorie de l'Etat marxiste et apporté une contribution majeure à la critique de l'économie politique pour l'ère du fordisme atlantique. Il réclame un équilibre judicieux entre démocratie représentative et démocratie directe pour assurer une transition démocratique vers le socialisme démocratique. J'offre quelques réflexions générales sur l'originalité, l'héritage et l'actualité de l'oeuvre de Poulantzas à cet égard, puis reconstruit ses vues ultérieures sur la critique de l'économie politique avant sa mort en 1979. L'article élabore une vision poulantzasienne de l'écologie politique fondée sur des arguments clés De son travail. Il note sa négligence par rapport à l'environnement naturel et les questions d'écologie politique, typiques de la gauche française et grecque dans les années 1970, et visible dans la théorie marxiste sur la nature et l'environnement. L'article conclut en réaffirmant la validité de sa vision du socialisme démocratique, indiquant qu'il serait devenu une critique de l'écologie politique, et suggère qu'il aurait abordé cela dans le même esprit d'ironie romantique et publique qui a été préconisé par l'un de ses grandes influences théoriques et politiques-Antonio Gramsci.
Este artículo presenta la conferencia inaugural conmemorativa en el Nicos Poulantzas Institute en Atenas. Aquí se examina y profundiza en el trabajo del epónimo griego, Nicos Poulantzas, quien transformó radicalmente el estado del Marxismo teórico. La mayor contribución del teórico político y legal, economista político, y comunista intelectual, fue su crítica a la política económica de la era del Fordismo Atlántico y el Imperialismo estadounidense de la post-guerra, e invitó a un perspicaz balance entre la democracia representativa y la democracia directa para asegurar la transición social demócrata. Este artículo ofrece, primeramente, reflexiones generales sobre la originalidad, legado y actualidad del trabajo de Poulantza, y también reconstruye sus últimos acercamientos a la crítica de la política económica antes de su muerte en 1979. Notando su falta de atención en el medio ambiente y asuntos de ecología política, producto de la izquierda Francesa y Griega de los años setenta y aspectos generales del marxismo teórico sobre naturaleza y medio ambiente, este artículo elabora una perspectiva desde Poulantzas sobre ecología política y con base en los principales argumentos de su trabajo. El artículo concluye con una recopilación de la validez sobre su visión respecto al socialismo democrático, indicando que se habría convertido en una crítica sobre ecología política, y sugiere que Poulantzas se habría aproximado con el mismo espíritu de la romántica ironía pública que fue promovida por uno de sus mayores influencias teóricas y políticas: Antonio Gramsci.
Το άρθρο αυτό παρουσιάζει την ετήσια διάλεξη στο Ινστιτούτο Νίκος Πουλαντζάς στην Αθήνα, προς μνήμη του Νίκου Πουλαντζά, του οποίο το έργο εξετάζει και αναπτύσσει. Ο Πουλαντζάς, ένας θεωρητικός της πολιτικής επιστήμης, οικονομολόγος και κουμουνιστής διανοούμενος, μεταμόρφωσε ριζοσπαστικά την μαρξιστική θεωρία για το κράτος, και συνέβαλλε καθοριστικά στην κριτική της πολιτικής οικονομίας την περίοδο του ατλαντικού φορντισμού και του μεταπολεμικού αμερικανικού ιμπεριαλισμού, καλώντας για μια προσεκτική ισορροπία μεταξύ αντιπροσωπευτικής και άμεσης δημοκρατίας, εχέγγυο για την δημοκρατική μετάβαση σε έναν δημοκρατικό σοσιαλισμό. Το άρθρο αυτό προσφέρει σκέψεις σχετικά με την πρωτοτυπία, ιστορική σημασία, και επικαιρότητα του έργου του Πουλαντζά, ανασυνθέτοντας τις ύστερες θέσεις του στην κριτική στην πολιτική οικονομία πριν τον θάνατό του το 1979. Αν και είναι δεδομένη στο έργο του η παράλειψη της διάστασης του περιβάλλοντος και της πολιτικής οικολογίας, χαρακτηριστική της γαλλικής και της ελληνικής αριστεράς την δεκαετία του 70 και με ρίζες στην μαρξιστική θεωρητική προσέγγιση της φύσης, το παρών άρθρο επεξεργάζεται μία κατά Πουλαντζά θεωρία της πολιτικής οικολογίας, αντλώντας επιχειρήματα από το έργο του. Επιβεβαιώνεται εδώ η εγκυρότητα του οράματος του Πουλαντζά για τον δημοκρατικό σοσιαλισμό το οποίο θα μπορούσε να είχε εξελιχθεί σε μία κριτική της πολιτικής οικολογίας, την οποία ο Πουλαντζάς θα είχε προσεγγίσει με το ίδιο πνέυμα της ρομαντικής και δημόσιας ειρωνείας την οποία πρότασσε ο θεωρητικός και πολιτικός ο οποίος περισσότερο τον επηρέασε, ο Αντόνιο Γκράμσι.
These more recent trends are my primary concern below. Since a short survey cannot cover all relevant material, I will provide a general account of the RA's successive generations and developmental trajectories. I then illustrate this account by reviewing the Parisian 'state of the art' and the theoretical innovations introduced by other theorists. I also consider the RA's responses to the failure of its initial alternative economic strategy (due, it should be noted, to lack of adoption rather than subsequent implementation failure) and its relative isolation within mainstream economics; and I also examine how the RA's message has been received and understood outside the discipline of economics. I conclude by asking whether the twenty years of research, scholarship, and exposition invested in the RA have been worth the effort (the standard RA survey is Boyer 1990; on more recent work, see also Boyer and Saillard 1995a).
Among the most important factors generating this financial crisis they cite: (a) various economic and political difficulties inherited from the ‘shortage economy’ associated with state socialism; (b) the economic disruption and transitional deficit occasioned by the abandonment of state socialism and neo-liberal efforts to move towards a market economy; (c) economic policy mistakes which have aggravated this inevitable disruption and its associated financial deficit and thereby further worsened the political crisis; (d) political commitments to various forms of economic and social expenditure required by a transitional political regime desperate to secure its legitimacy; and (e) the political crises provoked by badly flawed efforts to democratize the political system at the same time that efforts are being made to liberalize the economy. In addition to identifying various causal factors contributing to the financial crisis of the post-socialist state, they also trace the reciprocal influence of this crisis on the economic and political difficulties now affecting post-socialist Poland. They conclude, hardly surprisingly, that, given the lack of system integration (‘systemic vacuum’) and the failure to develop any coherent hegemonic project for restructuring post-socialist societies (‘strategic vacuum’), the financial crisis tends to make things worse rather than better. In particular it reduces the prospects of effective co-ordination of economic and political reform and also necessitates cuts in public expenditure which threaten the legitimacy of the overall transformation process.
It should be emphasized that the present survey is not concerned with Marxist economics as such. Instead it instead on some recent Marxist theories of the capitalist state. Nor does it develop a new approach; it simply considers these theories in terms of certain given criteria. These comprise general criteria such as logical consistency and theoretical determinacy, as well as more specific criteria relevant to an evaluation of Marxist theories. The latter can be stated quite briefly as follows. A Marxist theory of the capitalist state will be considered adequate to the extent that (a) it is founded on the specific qualities of capitalism as a mode of production, (b) it attributes a central role to class struggle in the process of capital accumulation, (c) it establishes the relations between the political and economic features of society without reducing one to the other or treating them as totally independent and autonomous, (d) it allows for historical and national differences in the forms and functions of the state in capitalist societies, and (e) it allows for the influence of non-capitalist classes and non-class forces in determining the nature of the state and the exercise of state power. To justify the choice of these particular criteria would sidetrack the discussion before it begins; it is hoped that their relevance and importance will emerge as we proceed.
The paper starts with a short review of the approach of Marx and other classical Marxist theorists to the capitalist state. Several different themes in their work are specified and their merits and demerits considered. This provides a framework within which to assess recent developments. Some variations on the themes of the classical texts are then examined and criticized for their failure to advance the Marxist theory of the state. This brings us to the central part of the paper, which deals with recent theories of the capitalist state, evaluated in the light of our criteria. The paper concludes with some general remarks on Marxist analyses of state power in capitalist societies and their implications for other theoretical approaches.
The idea for this book first took shape in early 1979 and it has been some five years in coming to fruition. I have long been interested in theories of the capitalist state in general and the work of Poulantzas in particular. I was able to meet Poulantzas for the first time in April 1979 when he addressed the annual conference of the British Sociological Association at Coventry. There I participated in one of his final interviews (see 1979I.a) and mentioned that I had been approached to write a book on his life and work. With characteristic modesty Nicos thought that it was overdoing things to devote a book to such matters but a month later he wrote saying that he had changed his mind. He declared that no author was completely contemporary with his own intellectual development and that his own work was often hard to understand. Someone who could stand back from it and write a critical interpretation would probably discover hidden aspects and implications and draw out new lines of investigation. Nicos added that he would like to reach a wider audience and hoped that my critique would be less difficult than his own work. Thus encouraged I corresponded further with Poulantzas and we agreed that I should undertake a study with full critical freedom – this was in no way to be an ‘official’ or ‘authorised’ account and no punches were to be pulled. In turn Poulantzas promised every co-operation and offered to reply to any criticisms in an interview to be included at the end of the book.
Some months afterwards, Poulantzas took his own life. The hopes of many that he would continue to make an important contribution to theoretical and political debate on the left were shattered. But his example as a committed intellectual and political comrade still lives on. Although I was unable to proceed with this work as we had planned, I have received much help from Nicos’s wife, Annie Leclerc, and his father, Aristides Poulantzas. Many colleagues, friends, and comrades of Poulantzas also gave much support and encouragement. In particular I would like to thank Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Constantine Tsoucalas for their generous help and support. I also gained much from interviews and discussions with Etienne Balibar, Pierre Birnbaum, Isidoro Cheresky, Georgos Dimitrarkis, Angelos Elephantis, Emilio de Ipola, Kostas Filinis, Nicos Mouzelis, Theodoros Pangalos, Goran Therborn, and Henri Weber. Nonetheless, given the significant theoretical and political differences among them as well as the likely divergences between their views and mine, I take full responsibility for the interpretations and arguments presented below.
Choosing an approach to a theoretical and political work which is as rich and complex as that of Poulantzas is always difficult. As my studies proceeded it became increasingly apparent that many interpretations of his work were fundamentally misleading. Accordingly this book concentrates on presenting as full and accurate an account of Poulantzas’s theoretical and political development as possible. No account can really be theoretically and political innocent, of course; and I do write from the viewpoint of one who believes that Poulantzas has made a substantial contribution to postwar Marxist theory and whose own work has clearly been influenced by his various studies. It is for this reason that the substantive chapters first offer a reconstruction of Poulantzas’s views and then present my own criticisms of some, if not all, of these same arguments. Hopefully readers can then form their own judgements independently of my commentaries and take the opportunity to disagree with my criticisms.
The need to set the record straight explains why I have not dealt at length with the many commentaries and criticisms of Poulantzas’s work or the numerous studies which claim to apply it to specific case studies. For the account presented here is often at odds with the received wisdom about Poulantzas’s work. It would have extended this book inordinately to have replied to each and every critique and I have dealt only with criticisms which help to illuminate the present study. This means that I ignored the most famous critique of all. For the debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas is fundamentally misleading about the theoretical issues and political implications at stake -largely because of the complicity between both protagonists in over-stating the structuralist character of Poulantzas’s arguments. Hopefully this claim will be justified in my comments on Political Power and Social Classes in subsequent chapters. Similar considerations apply to many other commentaries and I hope that, if the current work puts an end to some lines of criticism, it will stimulate many others. Poulantzas himself certainly welcomed ideological contestation as a key to theoretical and political progress and one can only commend this stance.
In writing this book I have received much support and advice from my own friends and colleagues as well as those of Poulantzas. For help with the documentation I would particularly like to thank Petros Stamoulis for his unstinting work in translating many articles, journalism, and interviews of Poulantzas from the Greek and for tracing some of them; George Anagnostopoulos and Grigoris Ananiadis for tracing and translating other pieces by Poulantzas; Annie Leclerc for lending me her archive of Nicos’s French articles, journalism, and interviews; Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Isidoro Cheresky for providing two worthwhile articles at a late stage; and Noelle Burgi for chasing references in France when all else seemed to have failed. For help with the argumentation I would particularly like to acknowledge the many comments received from Simon Bromley, who suggested — within one week — both how to start and to end the book; Steven Kennedy, who made several valuable comments on the penultimate draft and whose editorial patience I hope to have rewarded with the final version; and Ruthy Laniado, whose questioning sharpened the ideas on strategy in the concluding chapter. I have also gained much from discussions with Grigoris Ananiadis, Kevin Bonnett, Anthony Giddens, Joachim Hirsch, Ernesto Laclau, Tom Ling, Harold Wolpe, and Tony Woodiwiss. The students on my courses at the University of Essex probably also heard rather more about Poulantzas than they would always have liked and gave me the opportunity to try out ideas. For other kindnesses which have helped to sustain me during this study I would like to thank Kevin Bonnett for his friendship and encouragement over many years; Petros and Angeliki Stamoulis for guiding me round Athens, conducting the Greek interviews, and offering my family their parents’ hospitality; Grigoris Ananiadis and Blanca Muniz for many conversations about the Greek political conjuncture and much else besides; Noelle Burgi for hospitality whilst I was conducting interviews in Paris and Jean-Yves Pôtel for sharing her burden; and, last but not least, Suzanne Bailey for helping to see the book to completion at a crucial stage in my life.
Finally I would like to thank New Left Books and New Left Review for permission to quote from the English translations of Poulantzas’s books and his critical response to Miliband and Laclau (1976a) Pamela and Julian Jessop helped with the preparation of the final typescript and provide a constant source of inspiration. It is to them that I dedicate this book on the fifth anniversary of Poulantzas’s death and in the hope that they will one day see the better future for which he struggled.
Artous’s detailed and meticulous book seeks to test the common arguments that Marx either failed to develop a coherent account of the state and politics and/or laid the theoretical foundations for the rise of totalitarianism. Some claim that his work was incomplete, inconsistent, and lacked explanatory power; others, that he could not explain the autonomy of the political and political class struggle but dissolved them into the economic or, at least, the social; yet others, that his ideas about the end of (class) politics, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eventual withering away of the state created the space for a totalitarian political régime. In contrast, Artous sides with those that regard the early Marx as a convincing thinker of the autonomy of the political and as a passionate advocate of the democratic self-institution of the social against the bureaucratic formalism of the modern state; with those that regard the later Marx as a rigorous investigator of bourgeois law, the capitalist state, and their respective roles in the expanded reproduction of capitalism; with those that praise Marx’s analyses of the specificity and effectivity of different political régimes and political class struggles; and with those that regard Marx as a consistent supporter of democratic self-government and the self-constitution of the people. In exploring these issues and debates, Artous has three main objectives: first, to provide a critical exegesis of Marx’s work on the forms of the modern state, law, and political representation, their impact on the nature and dynamics of political struggle, and the prospects for a democratic order that transcends bourgeois liberal democracy; second, to comment on and refute various other interpretations of Marx’s work, primarily those of other Francophone Marxists and social scientists but also of other leading scholars, such as Max Weber, György Lukács, Ernest Mandel, and Jürgen Habermas, whose work has been translated into French; and, third, to outline his own suggestions on the form and functions of the modern state as derived logically from capitalist relations of production. While Artous achieves the first and second aims relatively successfully, he falls seriously short on the third aim, when his arguments are compared to alternative attempts to complete Marx’s theory of the capitalist state, for reasons to be explored below.