Capital and Politics

Roger King, Roger King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135025939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The main theme of this book is the relationship between capital and government in Britain, particularly the practice and organisation of capital in both national and local political processes. The chapters are primarily empirical in focus and deal with such topics as power, policy and the City of London and the role of the CBI in representing capital. Major theoretical themes are also discussed and these include de-industrialisation, corporatism, and the role of government in the development of pressure group habit.

Chapter 1

Corporatism, Competitive Politics and Class Struggle

Alan Cawson and Peter Saunders

It is time that we gave up the struggle to fit the state into the Procrustean bed of a single theory but recognized … the need for a typology of kinds of power and forms of social control (Ray Pahl, 1977b, p.12).

Five Related Questions

Compared with only ten years ago, the level of theoretical argument and debate on questions of political domination and ideological hegemony is today quite sophisticated. No longer can it be simply asserted that the capitalist class controls and manipulates the state apparatus in its own interests, nor that it manipulates a ‘false consciousness’ among the working class by virtue of its cunning and conscious direction of the schools and the media. Things, it seems, are more complicated than that; capitalist societies are not generally run by huddled cliques of conspiring business leaders; capitalist interests sometimes lose as a result of state policies while working-class interests sometimes win; dominant ideologies may contain and express elements of working-class life experience and working-class values; and so on.

Much of the credit for recent theoretical advances lies with two traditions of Marxist thought – the French ‘structuralism’ of Poulantzas and his disciples such as Castells, and the German ‘critical theory’ of Habermas and Offe. However, although the problems have been posed within Marxist theory, it is clear that they have not been resolved there. As Poulantzas himself recognises, the problem of establishing the relation between the economic, the political and the ideological still remains.

In this chapter, we seek to re-examine this problem in the context of our recent concerns with questions of corporatism, social policy and the local state (see Cawson, 1978, 1982; Saunders, 1979, 1980). More precisely, we shall consider the problem in terms of five related questions:

(i)	How does the State Operate ‘Relatively Autonomously’?

As a description of what the state does, the Poulantzian ‘relative autonomy’ concept seems to us entirely appropriate. Thus, while the capitalist state does and must function in the long-term interests of large capital (since any state must secure the conditions of existence of continued productive activity which, in the context of a capitalist society, means the maintenance of levels of profitability which are adequate to attract new investment), it is also clearly the case that it may and often does respond to the political demands and grievances of other interests in society, and that this may involve short-term erosion rather than support of private-sector profitability.

As an analysis of how this ‘relative autonomy’ comes about, however, the Poulantzian schema is woefully inadequate. As Clarke (1977) and others have shown, the basic problem concerns the relation between structural determination and class struggle. Put simply, if (in Poulantzas’s well known formulation) the state is to be understood as the ‘political condensation of class struggle’, then how does the cause (class struggle) necessarily result in the function the state has to perform in the overall structure (i.e., regulation of class struggle and maintenance of the long-term interests of the capitalist class)? Not only does this point to the familiar problem of teleology which arises in other functionalist theories, but it also suggests a strong tautological element in Poulantzas’s reasoning in that the concept of relative autonomy turns out to be an infinitely malleable explanatory device. Armed with this theory, it becomes possible to ‘explain’ any given intervention by the state, for policies which favour non-capitalist interests can be accounted for by the state’s autonomy from capital, while those which favour capital are just as easily explained in terms of the fact that this autonomy is only relative.’ The concept thus explains everything and nothing. As a description it is undoubtedly valid, but as a causal explanation it is fatuous and empty.

(ii)	Is a Unitary Theory of ‘the’ State Appropriate?

Later in the chapter we shall propose a solution to this question of how the state comes to act relatively autonomously by suggesting that different functions serving different interests tend to be discharged in different ways and often through different levels of the state apparatus. What this argument amounts to is that we should not expect to be able to develop a single general theory of ‘the’ state if different processes requiring different modes of theoretical explanation are at work at different points in the state apparatus. What is particularly significant from our point of view is the relation between central and local state organs.

Although we began by pointing to the increased sophistication of recent (mainly Marxist) work on the state and ideology, it is nevertheless the case that Marxist writing on the so-called ‘local state’, is ‘relatively undeveloped and based on fairly crude notions of central-local government relations, emphasising broad structure much more than detail and variety’ (Boddy and Fudge, 1980, p.11). Since Cockburn first coined the term, the assumption seems to have been that the ‘local state’ can be analysed and explained simply by applying general theories of the state to local political processes. Although the specificity of the local state in terms of its function (i.e., consumption provisions aiding the reproduction of labour-power) has often been noted, there has been a conspicuous failure in the Marxist literature to take account of its specificity in terms of its mode of operation.

If our argument that different agencies of the state are subject to different political determinations is accepted, then our argument against a unitary theory of ‘the’ state follows logically. It is in this way that we shall propose a tentative solution to the problem of explaining the relative autonomy of the state ‘as a whole’, for the overall picture of what the state does can only be explained through an appreciation that capitalist interests may operate successfully in relation to certain areas of policy generated at particular levels of government, but that other interests may prevail in other areas and at other levels.

(iii)

What is the Relation of Political Struggles to Class Struggles?

In Poulantzas’s work, the concept of ‘relative autonomy’ performs a dual role. On the one hand, it applies to the relation between structures and practices (i.e., in the argument that, although class practices correspond to each level or ‘instance’ of the structure, class struggles cannot simply be read off from structural contradictions). On the other, it refers to the relation between different instances of the structure and different levels of class practice (i.e., the argument that the state has a certain autonomy vis-à-vis the economy, or that political struggles cannot simply be reduced to economic class categories).

We shall not be concerned with the first sense of relative autonomy, except merely to note that the recognition by Poulantzas that the intensification of contradictions within the capitalist system may provoke a range of different responses (and non-responses?) on the part of non-capitalist interests effectively re-poses the familiar problem of how a class-in-itself becomes a class-for- itself – a problem which Poulantzas himself claims to have transcended and which necessitates analysis of human agency and human consciousness which his work is intent on ignoring. Quite simply, if contradictions give rise to, but do not determine the pattern of, class struggles, then we need to know what affects people’s responses to system crises.

More interesting from our present perspective, however, is the application of the relative autonomy concept to the relation between political struggles and economic class categories. As Hirst (1977) has competently demonstrated, Poulantzas fudges the issue by introducing the notion of ‘representation’ of classes in political struggles (i.e., the argument that political groupings somehow represent classes but cannot be reduced to the class categories of capital and labour). Posed starkly, the question which this formulation fails to address is whether and under what conditions political issues can be analysed in class terms. In other words, we need to be able to identify those situations in which the functional interests of capital and labour are directly represented in political struggle, and to distinguish these from those cases where political mobilisation takes place on other than a class base.

The contemporary significance of this question is obvious (e.g., witness the debates over the relation between the women’s movement and the labour movement). Its significance for our own concerns with the politics of public service provision is also apparent, for we have seriously to examine the question of whether campaigns and struggles waged around issues of collective consumption and the social wage bear any ‘necessary correspondence’ to the fundamental class categories of Marxist political economy.

(iv)	What is the Relation of Consumption Struggles to Class Struggles?

We argue that the realm of class politics, where representatives of capital and labour mobilise politically, relates to the production activities of the state (i.e., those policies and interventions bearing on the capital-labour relation – incomes policies, investment grants, trade-union legislation, provision of physical infrastructure, etc.) which are generally organised at national and regional levels of government, displaying what Middlemas (1979) has termed a ‘corporate bias’.

Those struggles which arise around other aspects of the state’s role (e.g., its consumption function as expressed in housing provisions, education, health care and so on) cannot be analysed in class terms even though they may draw upon an homogenous class base for their support (e.g., fights against council-house rent rises are likely to draw almost exclusively on a working-class constituency) and may have significant implications for the capital-labour relation (e.g., in terms of the cost of reproducing labour-power). In arguing thus, we follow Poulantzas to the extent that we agree that classes are constituted in and through struggle (they do not first ‘exist’ and then ‘act’). The classes grounded in the capital-labour relation thus exist in struggles constituted around that relation, whether they be economic (e.g., wage bargaining), political (e.g., social contracts) or ideological (e.g., anti-nationalisation propaganda). It follows that other struggles which are constituted around other relations (e.g., relations of domination based on gender categories, distribution relations based on consumer categories, etc.) cannot be seen as class struggles but have their own specificity. The fact that it is mainly working-class people who mobilise over council-house rents does not therefore make rent issues class issues. This argument obviously has important implications for local anti-cuts movements, and we consider these later.

(v)	How do we Explain the Relative Autonomy of Ideology?

The Poulantzian concept of relative autonomy applies not only to the political level, but also to the level of ideology. In other words, just as the state is seen as relatively autonomous from any one class, so too is the dominant ideology; in the same way as the state is a condensation of political class struggles, so the dominant ideology’ i6 a condensation of the ideologies and life experiences of all the classes in the social formation. As Poulantzas points out, it could hardly be otherwise since the working class is unlikely to endorse a system of values and beliefs which fails to correspond at all to their direct experience of the world.

Again, however, we find that Poulantzas’s concept of relative autonomy provides a fruitful description but falls short in its explanatory power. Just as we suggest that the explanation for the relative autonomy of the state must be located in an analysis of the different ways in which different functions come to be discharged through different levels of government, so too we suggest in this chapter that it is possible to identify different ideological traditions grounded in different sets of core values which have today become insulated from each other through their association with different aspects of state provision. Ideologies of need and social rights thus exist side by side with ideologies of profit and rights of private property, and the subordination of the former to the latter is a function of the subordination of consumption (use values) to production (exchange values), democratic politics to corporate politics, local government to central government.

A Note on Methodology

Before proceeding, it is necessary to preface our analysis with three methodological points which may serve as a guide through what is to follow.

(i)	Testability and the Need for Counterfactuals

We noted that Poulantzas’s proposed explanation for the relative autonomy of the capitalist state is tautologous in that it can be used retrospectively to cover any state intervention. To say that the state is relatively autonomous is simply to say that the capitalist class may win or the working class may win – i.e., it says nothing.

To achieve explanatory power it is necessary to specify those situations in which different class interests may be expected to prevail and thus to stipulate counterfactual conditions which enable empirical investigation. As it stands, the concept of relative autonomy is inherently immune from empirical evaluation of any sort because it combines two opposing theoretical traditions – instrumentalism (according to which the state is simply a tool of capitalist interests) and pluralism (according to which the state responds to different interests on different issues according to the strength and intensity of political mobilisation). On their own, each of these traditions is in principle open to some form of empirical evaluation – if capitalists lose out, we may come to doubt the instrumentalist case, whereas if they come to prevail in many different issues we may come to doubt the pluralist position. In other words, these two theoretical traditions provide the counter-factual conditions of each other (if not instrumentalism, then pluralism, and vice versa – hence the long and bitter community power debate in America during the 1950s and 1960s). When they are effectively fused, as they are in Poulantzas’s work, this mutual counterfactuality is cancelled out and the possibility of empirical evaluation disappears.

We believe that one of the strengths of the framework to be developed below is that by breaking with a unitary theory of the state it is possible to identify specific areas of policy, levels of government and so on where we would expect to find capitalist interests prevailing, and other areas/levels where other interests may achieve success. In this way it is possible to re-establish the conditions of counterfactuality, and thus the possibility of empirical evaluation, while still recognising that neither the instrumentalist nor the pluralist positions on their own provide an adequate explanation of the political process.

We are, of course, aware of the fact that counterfactuality in’ principle does not guarantee empirical testability in practice, and we would certainly wish to distance ourselves from a naive Popperian position of falsifiability. The fact that the community power debate dragged on for so long in the USA should itself be enough to alert us to the fact that evidence does not speak for itself in adjudicating between different theories. Nevertheless, we do believe that testability is an important condition of theoretical adequacy and that a theory, such as that of Poulantzas, which is inherently immune from empirical evaluation should be rejected on that ground alone. Our position, in other words, is that any theory should be expected to identify the sort of evidence (and the criteria for recognising such evidence) which would be inconsistent with its key postulates.

(ii)	The Compatibility of Paradigms

While recognising that observation will always be theory-dependent, and hence that criteria of empirical testability and of empirical adequacy must therefore be embedded within particular perspectives (i.e., there is no independent and universal criterion of empirical adequacy), we would nevertheless wish to point to the degree of commensurability which undoubtedly exists between different traditions or ‘paradigms’ within the social sciences. As Sayer (1979) has shown, theory-dependency does not imply theory-determinacy of observation, and different perspectives may well see much of the world in much the same way. For example, while one theorist may ‘look’ at the growth of the welfare state in Britain and ‘see’ working-class incorporation while another ‘sees’ working-class advance and the progressive erosion of a capitalist order, both are likely to agree on a range of ‘facts’ concerning the level of services, patterns of expenditure and so on. Very rarely in the social sciences do disputes approximate the famous gestalt metaphor in which the protagonists literally cannot see what the other sees.

The particular significance of this for our chapter is that we seek to bring together different theories to explain different aspects of the state’s activities, and that we see these theories as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive. In particular, we do not believe that Marxist analysis is incompatible with so-called ‘bourgeois’ theories, and we would suggest that it is precisely such a belief which has prevented recent Marxist work from confronting and possibly resolving some of the key problems which now beset it. Put explicitly, our suggestion is that insights gleaned from the Marxist tradition may prove valuable in analysing some aspects of state activity and some types of political struggles, but that they must be complemented by other work from other traditions which have hitherto often been seen as incompatible.

(iii)

The use of an Ideal Type Framework

The core of the analysis which follows consists of the development of an ideal-type framework, on the basis of which we attempt to construct a theoretical approach to the analysis of the state, political struggle and ideology. To avoid subsequent confusion, it is necessary to emphasise here that our ideal type is not an empirical statement and makes no claim to empirical validity (although it is, of course, grounded in prior empirical observation). Nor is it a model which attempts to replicate empirical reality on a more manageable scale, nor a theoretical statement, nor an hypothesis (although it can be used to generate theories and hypotheses). Like all ideal types, it is a tool of analysis whose function is to simplify the complexity of the real world to facilitate our understanding of it. It is the product of a selection of certain aspects of social reality according to what Weber termed the criterion of ‘value relevance’ (i.e., we are focussing on those aspects which we consider interesting and important), and of a deliberate exaggeration and logical purification of those aspects. The world is not like our ideal type, but we will only begin to understand that world through the conceptual clarity which such an ideal type provides. Like Weber, therefore, we see such a conceptual exercise as an essential precondition to the development of knowledge although the exercise itself cannot add to ...