Class, Crisis and the State

Erik Olin Wright

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780860917199
• eBook ISBN: 9781784787868
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

One of the major works of the new American Marxism, Wright's book draws a challenging new class map of the United States and other, comparable, advanced capitalist countries today. It also discusses the various classical theories of economic crisis in the West and their relevance to the current recession, and contrasts the way in which the major political problem of bureaucracy was confronted by two great antagonists - Weber and Lenin. A concluding essay brings together the practical lessons of these theoretical analyses, in an examination of the problems of left governments coming to power in capitalist states.

1

Methodological
Introduction

The essays in this book have been heavily shaped by the academic context in which they were written. As a graduate student in sociology I constantly confronted the hegemony of an empiricist, positivist epistemology in the social sciences. In virtually every debate over Marxist ideas, at some point I would be asked, “prove it!” To the extent that Marxist categories could be crystallized into “testable hypotheses”, non-Marxists were willing (sometimes) to take those ideas seriously; to the extent that debate raged simply at the level of theory, non-Marxists found it relatively easy to dismiss our challenges.

Marxists in the social sciences reacted to these pressures in several distinct ways. Perhaps the dominant response was to dismiss the attacks of non-Marxist social scientists as reflecting bourgeois ideology and/or a positivist methodology. It was common in Marxist student circles to argue that the very enterprise of formulating “testable hypotheses” was inimical to a Marxist methodology. Historical and dialectical explanation was counterposed to predictive, linear explanations. Particular hostility was reserved for the battery of quantitative techniques used in American sociology: even to use regression equations in a research project was to abandon the essence of Marxism. The demand that we prove theoretical claims through empirically testable propositions, therefore, was treated as purely ideological. To accept the demand would be to give up the battle by accepting the methodological principles of positivist social science.

A second response was to try to generate empirical studies which would prove our arguments to even the most stubborn opponent. Of particular importance in this vein was the large number of “power structure” studies produced in the 1960s and early 1970s criticizing pluralist interest-group theory. Such studies contributed greatly to legitimating the use of certain Marxist categories in social research and to demonstrating the ideological character of much pluralist theory. But as many Marxist critics of such research have stressed, much of the dialectical character of Marxist theory was lost in the process. In a sense, a large part of such Marxist empirical work can be seen as using Marxist categories without using Marxist theory.

Naturally, there is a third alternative: the attempt to develop empirical research agendas firmly rooted within not only the categories, but the logic, of Marxist theory. Such an approach would reject the positivist premise that theory construction is simply a process of empirical generalization of law-like regularities, but would also insist that Marxist theory should generate propositions about the real world which can be empirically studied.

This third strategy is only beginning in the United States. In effect it is an attempt simultaneously to engage in debate with mainstream social theory and to develop a style of empirical research which advances Marxist theory. Potentially, the research generated by this orientation may become an important contribution by North American Marxists to Marxist social science.¹

The essays in this book should be seen, in part, as contributing to the formation of this third response to positivist social science. While none of the essays constitutes an empirical investigation of a specific historical or structural problem, they are all intended to help establish the theoretical preconditions for such investigations.

The development of a stronger tradition of theoretically-structured empirical investigation within Marxism has three important preconditions: first, it is necessary that Marxists develop a broad range of research competences so that they can in fact conduct empirical investigations in a sophisticated and sensitive way. Second, it is essential to have a deep grasp of Marxist theory, so that the propositions developed do not merely tap the surface level of Marxist categories but are in fact systematically linked to the inner logic of the theory itself. Finally, it is important to know how to link that theory to concrete research agendas. The essays in this book are primarily relevant to the second and third of these issues. In order to understand how they attempt to accomplish this, it will be helpful to examine briefly the methodology of theory-construction which underlies them.

Linking Theory to Data in Social Research

One of the central epistemological premises of Marxist theory is the distinction between the “level of appearances” and the underlying social reality which produces those appearances.² This is not to say that “appearances” are purely ephemeral, inconsequential mystifications. On the contrary, the immediately encountered social experience of everyday life is extremely important. People starve “at the level of appearances”, even if that starvation is produced through a social dynamic which is not immediately observable. The point of the distinction between appearances and underlying reality is not to dismiss appearances, but rather to provide a basis for their explanation. The central claim is that the vast array of empirical phenomena immediately observable in social life can only be explained if we analyse the social reality hidden behind those appearances. If we remain entirely at the level of appearances we might be able to describe social phenomena, and even predict those phenomena, but we cannot explain them.³

Marxists, then, have generally stressed the importance of elaborating a theory of the underlying structures of social relations, of the contradictions embedded in those structures, of the ways in which those underlying structures generate the appearances which people encounter in everyday life. The classic example of such an analysis is, of course, Marx’s discussion of surplus value in Capital: the equality of exchange relations (commodity relations) in the capitalist market hides the real relations of exploitation within production. One can very easily predict exchange relations by simply investigating characteristics operating at the level of the market (indeed, this is one of the essential projects of neoclassical economics) but in order to explain them it is necessary to explore the dynamics embedded in production relations themselves.

It is one thing to make the epistemological claim that explanation requires the decoding of hidden contradictions; it is another to develop a strategy for studying the social world which allows one to link systematically such underlying structural processes to empirically observable phenomena. General maxims about moving from the concrete to the abstract and back to the concrete are not very helpful. The problem is how to move from the concrete to the abstract, and how to move back.

In the absence of a coherent strategy for linking systematically the abstractions of Marxist theory to concrete research, two problems are likely to arise. On the one hand, Marxist theory often tends to become very ideological and immutable to transformation from empirical study. The frequent impression in Marxist research that all of the answers are pre-given, are “known” prior to the investigation, is at least partially the result of the methodological distance between the general theory and the “facts” of history. On the other hand, Marxist research often becomes purely descriptive, contributing only marginally to the development of Marxist theory. Historical movements are richly described using Marxist categories, but those descriptions are difficult to translate into transformations of theory. While one should not exaggerate these two tendencies, nevertheless the advancement of Marxist theory is at least in part retarded by the lack of clear strategies for linking theory and research.⁴

In order to facilitate the development of such strategies within Marxism, two general tasks are important. First, it is essential that Marxist theory be formulated in a comprehensible way. This may seem trivial, but the opacity of much Marxist theoretical work is a tremendous obstacle to using such work as a basis for systematic empirical investigation. In particular, it is critical to distinguish within Marxism between assumptions or premises which are not subject to transformation by historical investigation, and propositions which are;⁵ and it is important to distinguish between definitions of concepts and propositions about those concepts. To be sure, theoretical debates over the definitions of concepts and theoretical debates about the actual dynamics of the social world are related. Definitions should not be arbitrary, and a theory of social structures influences the very definitions of those structures. Nevertheless, the two types of theoretical discussion should not be confused, at least if the goal is to develop a conceptual apparatus that can be used in empirical research.

Clarity, however, is not enough. It is also important to develop a more systematic way of understanding the causal relations between the structural categories of Marxist theory and the level of appearances tapped in empirical investigation.⁶ That is, historical investigation gathers data at the level of appearances (by definition): events, personal ties, manifest economic variables, institutional arrangements, demographic distributions, and so on. In some sense these phenomena constitute “effects” of structural relations. The problem is to define more systematically what “effects” means. If empirical investigation is to be directly linked to the logic of the theory itself, then much greater rigour in understanding the logic of causality implicit in the theory is necessary.

Some steps in this direction have been made by Louis Althusser and other so-called structuralist Marxists. The concepts of over-determination and, more broadly, structural causality, have provided at least a preliminary formulation of the relationship between structures and their manifest effects.⁷ This concept of causality, however, has been very difficult to use explicitly in empirical studies. While this may be due partially to the high level of abstraction at which Althusser and others have discussed these concepts, it is also due to certain problems in the conceptualization of structural causality itself. In particular, the global notion of structural causality contains within itself several distinct forms of causality. In order to make the concept of structural causality accessible for empirical research, therefore, it needs to be broken down into this plurality of types of causation.

Modes of Determination and Models of Determination

What follows is a provisional attempt at elaborating a more differentiated schema of structural causality compatible with Marxist theory. The discussion will revolve around what I shall label “modes of determination”, that is, a series of distinct relationships of determination among the structural categories of Marxist theory and between those categories and the appearances of empirical investigation. These diverse modes of determination will then be organized into what can be called “models of determination”, that is, schematic representations of the complex interconnections of the various modes of determination involved in a given structural process. Such models of determination can be considered symbolic maps of what Althusserians have generally referred to as “structured totalities”.

Before discussing these diverse modes of determination, it must be emphasized that the schematic diagrams representing the models of determination are largely heuristic devices. They are designed to make explicit those linkages among categories which are either vague or implicit in theoretical statements. The diagrams themselves may appear to be highly mechanistic and rigid, not allowing for the dynamic movements which lie at the heart of a dialectical view of history. The intention, however, is to develop a way of representing the structural constraints and contradictions present in a given society which make that dynamic movement a non-random process.

At least six basic modes of determination can be distinguished within the global concept of structural causality: structural limitation, selection, reproduction/nonreproduction, limits of functional compatibility, transformation and mediation. While these modes of determination are highly interdependent, and thus a full understanding of any one of them presupposes an understanding of all, nevertheless it will be helpful to define each of them.

1. Structural Limitation: This constitutes a pattern of determination in which some social structure establishes limits within which some other structure or process can vary, and establishes probabilities for the specific structures or processes that are possible within those limits. That is, structural limitation implies that certain forms of the determined structure have been excluded entirely and some possible forms are more likely than others. This pattern of determination is especially important for understanding the sense in which economic structures “ultimately” determine political and ideological structures: economic structures set limits on the possible forms of political and ideological structures, and make some of those possible forms more likely than others, but they do not rigidly determine in a mechanistic manner any given form of political and ideological relations.

A good example of such structural limitation determination is the relationship between the economic structure and the forms of the state in feudal society. Given the nature of economic relations in classical feudalism—the control of the immediate means of production by the peasantry, the appropriation of the surplus product through coercion, the limited amount of surplus available, etc.—a representative democracy with universal suffrage was structurally impossible as a form of the state, i.e. it fell outside the structural limits established by economic structures. Within those limits, however, a fairly wide variety of state forms could occur, ranging from highly decentralized manorial systems of political rule, to relatively centralized Absolutist states. While the given structure of feudal economic relations may have shaped the likelihood of different specific forms of the feudal state, it did not determine uniquely which form occurred.

Structural limitation does not imply that every structurally possible form of the state (or other structure determined by a relation of structural limitation) is necessarily functional for the reproduction of the determining structure. We shall deal with this question in some detail below in the discussion of “limits of functional compatibility” as a mode of determination. For the moment it is simply important to note that the range of structurally limited possibilities and the range of functional possibilities do not necessarily coincide. In fact, part of our understanding of the concept of “contradiction” will hinge on the various ways in which a non-co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Methodological Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Class Structure of Advanced Capitalist Societies
• Chapter 3: Historical Transformations of Capitalist Crisis Tendencies
• Chapter 4: Bureaucracy and the State
• Chapter 5: Conclusion: Socialist Strategies and the State in Advanced Capitalist Societies
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index