State Power

Bob Jessop

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745633213, 9780745633206
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Bob Jessop presents an up-to-date account of his distinctive approach to the dialectics of structure and strategy in the exercise of state power. While his earlier work critically surveys other state theories, this book focuses on the development of his own strategic-relational approach. It introduces its main sources, outlines its development, applies this approach to four case studies, and sketches a strategic-relational research agenda. Thus the book presents a comprehensive theoretical statement of the approach and guidelines for its application.

Key features of the book include: an account of the authors theoretical development; a review of recent developments in state theory and the cultural turn in political economy; critical strategic-relational re-readings of major state theorists Marx on political representation, Gramsci on the spatiality of state power, Poulantzas on the state as a social relation, and the later Foucault on statecraft; applications of the strategic-relational approach to important issues concerning the contemporary state: its gendered selectivity, the future of the national state, the states temporal sovereignty, and the relevance of multi-scalar meta-governance in Europe for the more general future of the state. The book concludes with recommendations for future strategic-relational research in political economy and state theory.

Part I

Theorizing the State

1

The Development of the Strategic-Relational Approach

The primary focus of my work since 1975 has been the critique of political economy. This has involved both theoretically informed and theoretically informative studies of three interrelated themes: first, the dynamic of the profit-oriented, market-mediated economies associated with the capitalist mode of production; second, the capitalist type of state and, more generally, the nature of politics in societies dominated by capitalist relations of production; and, third, the path-dependent structural coupling between these economic and political orders and the limits to any and all efforts to coordinate them in order to shape the development of capitalist social formations. Although different themes have been pursued more intensely at different times, interest in the state and state power has been present from the beginning. Indeed my personal ‘knowledge interest’, to use Habermas’s term (1987), in this long-term project is the origins, trajectory, crisis, and subsequent structural transformation and strategic reorientation of the type of state that was beginning to emerge in Britain during the immediate post-war years. Thus my original project, first envisaged over thirty years ago, was to write a critical political economy of post-war Britain. While this has been achieved only in part, I hope to complete it within the next ten years. There have been many detours on the way, some necessary, some accidental, as the problems involved in producing a theoretically and empirically adequate historical analysis became evident. While beginnings may well be hard in scientific development, so are conclusions. For it is always possible to re-specify the problem to be explained to make it more concrete and more complex, thereby requiring the introduction of additional concepts, assumptions, arguments, stylized facts, and empirical details (see Jessop 1982, 2002a). Moreover, given the inexhaustible complexity of the real world, there are many alternative starting points for such a movement. It follows that an adequate explanation is also one that is aware of some of its blind spots and what is at stake in choosing one or another starting point from those available.

The general line of attack that I have been developing to address such problems and to advance the longer-term project can be described with the benefit of hindsight as a critical realist, strategic-relational, form-analytical approach that is pre-disciplinary in inspiration and post-disciplinary in practice. It is premised on a critical realist philosophy of social science, adopts a dialectical approach to the material and discursive interdependence of structure and strategy and their co-evolution, and draws on the concepts, assumptions, and arguments of many disciplines in order to provide totalizing (or integrative) accounts of particular problems without being committed to the idea that social reality comprises a closed totality. This approach can be applied to many types of problem, but the present work focuses on its implications for the nature of the state and state power. Thus it aims to present the basic outlines of this approach, especially its strategic-relational dimensions, in successive steps. This chapter presents the general background to the SRA and distinguishes its four overlapping phases of development to date.

Three Sources of the Strategic-Relational State Approach

The strategic-relational approach as understood and presented in this work was first introduced in connection with debates in state theory and, somewhat later, analogous debates in critical political economy more broadly. It was then extended to issues of structure and agency in general and their spatio-temporal aspects. More recently still, it has informed a new theoretical orientation that Ngai-Ling Sum and I describe as ‘cultural political economy’, thereby returning to the SRA’s initial field of application but in more complex terms (see Jessop and Sum 2001; Sum and Jessop 2008). The successive application of the strategic-relational approach to state theory, political economy, social theory, and cultural political economy can be said to emerge from my successive exposure to three different intellectual influences. But this reading depends on the benefit of hindsight because no theorist can be completely contemporary with his or her own theoretical development. Lenin claimed there were three major sources of Marxism: German philosophy, English economics, and French politics (Lenin 1913). Louis Althusser, a French structuralist Marxist, added many years later that Marx’s ability to synthesize them was rooted in his commitment to proletarian revolution (Althusser 1976). My work takes Marx’s critique of political economy as a primary reference point (without, however, reading it in either orthodox Marxist-Leninist or Althusserian structuralist terms) and is therefore imprinted in a path-dependent manner by his three sources too. But it also has its own set of secondary sources. These can be described, in the spirit of Lenin’s remark and only half-jokingly, as post-war German politics, postwar French economics, and post-war Chilean biology (see below). Moreover, alongside the intellectual issues that drew me to these particular sources, the peculiarities of post-war British history have also played their own role. For much of my work, as noted above, has been driven by the attempt to understand issues such as Britain’s flawed Fordism, its Keynesian Welfare National State, the rise, consolidation, and subsequent crisis of Thatcherism, and the rise and trajectory of New Labour (for a first account, see Jessop 1980; for later work, see, e.g., Jessop et al. 1988; Jessop 2002c, 2002d, 2003a, 2006a).

German politics refers in this context to post-war German state theory. This influence emerged indirectly in the mid-1970s through the Conference of Socialist Economists in the United Kingdom and, in particular, its introduction – through interested members – of the German state debate to Anglophone readers. I soon pursued this source more directly through German-language texts and contacts with German theorists. Their influence is especially clear in my work on the changing forms and functions of the capitalist state, but it co-existed with the influence of Antonio Gramsci, a pre-war Italian Communist, who is particularly associated with the concepts of ‘integral state’ and hegemony, and Nicos Poulantzas, a post-war Greek Marxist theorist who was closely identified with interest in the capitalist state (Jessop 1977, 1982, 1985a; see also chapter 5). It was Poulantzas’s influence that prompted some Marxist critics, notably Bonefeld, Clarke, and Holloway, to accuse me of ‘politicism’. For them, this deviation accords primacy in theory and practice to the state and politics without grounding these in the capital relation and/or its associated class struggle. Above all, politicism is said to derive from taking for granted the separation of the economic and political institutional orders of modern societies rather than seeing them as deeply interconnected surface forms of capitalist social formations and, in this context, from focusing one-sidedly on the political realm to the detriment of these interconnections and the determining role of the capital relation vis-à-vis its economic and political moments considered in isolation. This leads in turn, it is claimed, to voluntarism in theory and practice because it focuses on the power of political action to transform the world (cf. Bonefeld 1987; Clarke 1977; Holloway 1988).

These were important challenges and, whilst I did not accept that Bonefeld, Clarke, and Holloway had characterized my work accurately, I did wonder how to analyse the economy in a manner consistent with my emerging ‘strategic-relational’ approach to the state. Initially my ideas developed through reading contemporary debates on the significance of the commodity form (with its dialectically interrelated use-value and exchange-value aspects) in the Marxist critique of political economy (Marx 1867) and rereading Gramsci’s work on Americanism and Fordism (Gramsci 1971). This led to my account of accumulation strategies as means of imposing a provisional, partial, and unstable ‘substantive unity’ on the various interconnected formal manifestations of the capital relation and thereby securing the conditions for relatively stable periods of economic growth. These ideas originated in an analogy between Gramsci’s analyses of lo stato integrale (the integral state) and what I termed l’economia integrale (the integral economy). While Gramsci defined ‘the state in its inclusive sense’ as ‘political society civil society’ and saw state power in Western societies as based on ‘hegemony armoured by coercion’, my strategic-relational account defined the ‘economy in its inclusive sense’ as ‘an accumulation regime social mode of economic regulation’ and analysed capital accumulation as ‘the self-valorization of capital in and through regulation’. This analysis was combined with interest in state projects and hegemonic visions and an attempt to ensure the commensurability of all three concepts within a strategic-relational approach (Jessop 1983).

These self-evidently neo-Gramscian concepts were later refined through my encounter with post-war French economics in the guise of the Parisian regulation school in institutional economics. This interest was reinforced through my membership of the organizing committee of the first International Conference on Regulation, which was held in Barcelona in June 1988. This enabled me to meet leading regulation theorists from all the main approaches (for a review originating from this conference, see Jessop 1990a). A sustained theoretical engagement with the work of different regulationist schools followed. In general, this approach provides specific institutional answers to the old Marxist question of how, despite its structural contradictions and class conflicts, capitalism can continue to expand for relatively long periods. It stresses that economic activities are socially embedded and socially regularized and that stable economic expansion depends on specific social modes of economic regulation that complement the role of market forces in guiding capitalist development. Unsurprisingly, the state has a key role in the mode of regulation, and I am particularly interested in regulationist work that explores its changing role in securing the extra-economic as well as economic conditions for capital accumulation and in institutionalizing class compromises that facilitate accumulation. This is reflected in my work on the crisis of Atlantic Fordism and the transition to post-Fordism and the possibilities of delineating a post-Fordist form of state analogous to the Keynesian Welfare National State. More generally my concern with regulation has evolved in dialogue not only with French economics but also with some German state theorists whose work on the state’s changing forms and functions has also been informed by regulationism (see, most recently, Jessop and Sum 2006). This engagement with another German debate once again provoked strong criticisms, this time for taking Marxist state theory in a reformist direction and for confirming rather than resisting the transition to post-Fordism (Bonefeld 1994; Holloway 1988).

At the time I thought these reflections could provide a neo-Gramscian perspective on the economy (or, better, capital accumulation) analogous to that generated by the earlier strategic-relational argument that the state (or, better, state power) is a social relation. With hindsight, however, these reflections were also politicist, albeit in a different way, because they focused on the national state’s role in formulating accumulation strategies and regulating capitalism. In this sense, this new approach was guilty of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Taylor 1996), even though it had begun to take seriously the economic moment of political economy. Indeed, it ignored not only political scales other than the historically constituted national territorial state and its associated national economy and national society, but also the role of firms, fractions of capital, and other economic, political, and social forces in developing alternative accumulation strategies. These problems have been addressed in my work on the political economy of scale, inter-scalar articulation, and, in particular, the significance of spatio-temporal fixes for securing such improbable outcomes as relatively stable capital accumulation, relatively coherent state action, and social cohesion in class-divided societies marked by other sources of social division and friction too (see, e.g., chapters 4, 8, and 9; see also Jessop 1999, 2003d, 2004g, 2007a).

Whilst working on regulation, I continued to reflect on the relative autonomy of the state and the problem of ‘politicism’ and began to consider their relation to the apparently autonomous logic of profit-oriented market forces. This posed interesting issues about how the economic and political orders, despite their formal institutional separation and their organization under different types of social logic, may come to be structurally coupled to produce a relatively unified ‘historical bloc’. This is Gramsci’s term for the mutually reinforcing correspondence between what classical Marxism conventionally describes as the economic base and its politico-ideological superstructure. At the same time I became interested in the conditions, if any, under which economic and political structures and operations can be coordinated strategically by a power bloc (comprising dominant class fractions and political elites) to guide economic and political development. These are important questions from a strategic-relational viewpoint and lend themselves to a strategic-relational inquiry.

Finally, as I was attempting to combine relevant concepts from German politics and French economics I came across Chilean biology, if not directly, at least through German social theorists, especially Niklas Luhmann, Gunther Teubner, and Helmut Willke (Luhmann 1982a, 1982b, 1986, 1989,1990b, 1990c, 1995; Teubner 1993; Willke 1983, 1986). From them I took the concept of ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘self-production’ and several related notions. Transposed (some would say illegitimately) from cell biology to sociology, autopoietic theory suggests that major societal subsystems (such as the economy, law, politics, and science) can be studied as self-referential, self-reproducing, and self-regulating. A close analogy can be found in Marx’s analysis of the apparent self-closure and self-valorization of the circuit of capital that is enabled by the generalization of the commodity form to labour power (Marx 1867). Marx and Engels also described the modern legal system in similar terms (see especially Engels 1886). A key conclusion of autopoiesis theorists is that such systems function according to their own operational codes and programmes rather than obeying an external logic or being readily steered from outside. Despite the operational autonomy of these functional systems, however, they are materially interdependent. One consequence of this, which is especially important for a materialist-discursive strategic-relational approach, even though almost completely absent in the source theory, is the scope it creates for the logic of one system to dominate the overall development of what could be described as the self-organizing ecology of self-organizing systems (cf. Jessop 1990a: 327–33; 2007b, 2007f; and Schimank 2005).

Drawing on these ideas suggests that the ‘historical blocs’ formed through the reciprocal consolidation of economic, legal, political, and certain cultural institutions could be understood in autopoieticist terms. Thus they would derive from the interactions among (a) the path-dependent ‘structural coupling’ of several operationally autonomous but substantively interdependent subsystems, (b) the path-shaping efforts of economic, political, and other social forces to influence (or govern) the nature and direction of this co-evolution, and (c) the ‘ecological dominance’ of the market-mediated, self-valorizing capitalist economy. These arguments prompted me to propose that the orthodox Marxist concept of economic determination in the last instance can be fruitfully replaced by ‘ecological dominance’. This refers to the capacity of one system in a self-organizing ecology of self-organizing systems to cause more problems for other systems than they can cause for it. Recontextualized in geographical historical materialism, it can provide a more rigorously strategic-relational concept that can resolve many of the problems associated with economic determinism ( Jessop 1990b, 1992b, 2000a, 2002d, 2007b, 2007f ). In contrast with the influence of German state theory and the French regulation approach, however, which provided concepts that were easily integrated into the strategic-relational approach to political economy, my engagement with autopoietic systems theory has been more problematic. For the effective integration of concepts from the theory of self-organizing systems into a critical realist, strategic-relational framework required far more work than was needed for the influence of German politics and French economics. Thus my work with this source might be dismissed from some perspectives as flirtatious, analogous to the mature Marx’s identification with Hegel and his coquetting ‘here and there . . . with the modes of expression peculiar to him’ (Marx 1873: 29). But it actually goes beyond mere playfulness. For my autopoietic theories have ‘irritated’ me, as Luhmann might have put it, into a radical rethinking of some key concepts for a critique of political economy. This has required the disembedding of the source ideas from their autopoietic systems context and an effort to break with their autopoietic mode of expression so that they can be more adequately integrated in the strategic-relational approach.

It has also been claimed that Marx’s ability to produce a creative synthesis from German philosophy, French politics, and English economics involved more than his capacity to develop boils on the backside by spending long days in the British Museum Library. It was due to his identification with the class struggle of the proletariat (Althusser 1976). In a more modest (and, for orthodox Marxist critics, reformist) context, my interest in combining arguments from German politics, French economics, and Chilean biology (or, more accurately, modern systems theory) to produce a new theoretical synthesis is grounded in commitment to the ideological and political contestation of Thatcherism and its neo-liberal New Labour successor. For it is this commitment that has shaped my continuing personal ‘knowledge interest’ in understanding the specificity of the multiple crises of post-war British political economy, the changing significance of the Thatcherite response, and its legacies in New Labour’s neo-liberal policies and attempts to sustain them through additional flanking and supporting measures. Rather than reflect on the successive steps in the development of British politics, however, let me now outline instead the successive steps in the development of the SRA under their indirect influence.

The First Phase in the Strategic-Relational Approach

The first steps in the first phase of the development of the SRA long predate the interaction between these three sources and the related work of theoretical synthesis. They began with my initial engagement with the question of the state in the Essex State Theory Group (1975–8), for which I prepared a critical review of recent Marxist theories ( Jessop 1977; reprinted in 1990b: 24–47). This concluded that

their overall effect has been to redefine the problem of the state in capitalist society in a way that makes theoretical and political progress possible once more. They have dissolved the orthodox approaches in terms of the state as a thing or a subject that is external to the capitalist mode of production. In their place, they have focused attention on the social nature of capitalist production and its complex economic, political and ideological preconditions. This means that the state and state power must assume a central role in capital accumulation, even in those apparently counterfactual cases characterized by a neutral, laissez-faire state, as well as those where the state is massively involved in the organization of production. Moreover, because the state is seen as a complex institutional system and the influence of classes is seen to depend on their forms of organization, alliances, etc., it is also necessary to reject a crude instrumentalist approach. It is no longer a question of how pre-existing classes use the state (or the state itself acts) in defence of capitalism defined at an economic level. Henceforth it is a question of the adequacy of state power as a necessary element in the overall reproduction of the capital relation in different societies and situations. And state power in turn must be considered as a complex, contradictory effect of class (and popular-democratic) struggles, mediated through and conditioned by the institutional system of the state. In short, the effect of these studies is to reinstate and elaborate the idea that the state is a system of political domination. (1977: 371; 1990b: 45)

The Capitalist State (1982) elaborated this preliminary conclusion through an expanded critique of the substantive arguments associated with three methodological approaches to Marxist state theorizing: subsumption, derivation, and articulation. It also offered methodological remarks on each approach and concluded with an extended set of ontological, epistemological, methodological, and substantive remarks for a research agenda. In particular, it reje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Boxes, Figures, and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Part I Theorizing the State
• Part II Sources of the Strategic-Relational Approach
• Part III Applying the Strategic-Relational Approach
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index