Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
The State: Past, Present, Future Bob Jessop Lancaster University Outline • • • • • • • • • • Statehood and problems of definition Approaches to state theory Historical constitution: the origins of the state The formal constitution of the modern state The limits of form analysis The strategic-relational approach Governance and governmentality Trends and counter-trends Authoritarian statism Conclusions Statehood Statehood = territorialized political power The core of the state apparatus comprises a relatively unified ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularized, and strategically selective institutions and organizations whose socially construed and accepted function is to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in a given territorial area in the name of the general will or common interest of a more or less inclusive imagined political community identified with that territory All terms in italics are contested So What is the State? • Four aspects: (a) territory controlled by the state, (b) an apparatus that makes collectively binding decisions, for (c) a resident population subject to state authority, (d) justified by a legitimating state idea or project. • State capacities and state strength vary immensely – there is no general form of state and, in particular, there are important differences in policy regimes • All states are equal: some are more equal than others – some states have more power to shape world market – state strength is linked in part to state’s overall power resources, in part to choice of military vs welfare spending 4 The State as a Social Relation • State is not a thing or a rational subject but an ensemble of institutions and organizations that exercises power, insofar as it does, through an institutionally-mediated condensation of a changing balance of forces that seek to influence forms, functions, and exercise of state power • As well as its articulation to an economic basis and its contingent economic functions, state, as official résumé of society, has key role in socio-political domination • This occurs through selective impact of state form on shaping political opportunities and alliances and through specific state strategies, projects, and policies Six Main Contemporary Approaches • Historical constitution, i.e., genealogy of various elements of state(s) and their articulation • Formal constitution: state as ensemble of ‘forms’ and their ‘formal adequacy’ (‘fit’ with wider social formation) • Institutional analysis and functional/material adequacy, i.e., institutional capacities and policy delivery • Agential analysis of social forces, state projects, and their bases in wider social order • Foucauldian governmentality: oriented to techniques of statecraft (strategic codification of power relations) • Totalizing ‘figurational analysis’ of embedded states in all their complex interdependence with wider orders Plain Marxism and State Theory • A ‘Plain Marxist’ is someone who understands Marx, and many later marxists as well, to be firmly a part of the classic tradition of sociological thinking. • They treat Marx like any great nineteenth century figure, in a scholarly way; they treat each later phase of marxism as historically specific. • They are generally agreed . . . that his general model and his ways of thinking are central to their own intellectual history and remain relevant to their attempts to grasp present-day social worlds. (Mills 1962: 96.) Marx’s Approaches • Critiques of political theory (like those of the economic categories in classical and vulgar political economy); • Historical analyses of the development, changing form, and class character of specific states; • Historical analyses of specific periods and conjunctures; • Analyses of the capitalist type of state - albeit mainly in terms of its fit with the logic of capital accumulation; • Historical analyses of the state (or its equivalents) in precapitalist times and/or outside Europe and USA; • More strategic, political accounts to orient debates in the labour movement Historical Constitution • Territorialization of political power and its genealogy (e.g., Westphalian state) • State formation is not a once-and-for-all process; the state does not originate at one place/time – multiple inventions • There are many types of state: city-states, small states, client states, empires, etc. • There are also forms of political power that are non-statal • No convincing general theory of origins (Marxian, military conquest, priesthood , patriarchy, political imaginaries) • Do not assume unity of state apparatus (institutions, organizations, etc) and include state projects in analysis Origins of the State • Nomadic groups had recognized roaming territories (but with ill-defined outer boundaries) • Simple and complex chiefdoms: – hard to control territory over 12 hours distant by foot – low political division of labour, so delegating authority to distant officials risks creating a potential rival chief • Primary state formation: – First cases of state formation in a given region, without contact with other states (e.g., Mesopotamia) – Involves centralized bureaucratic administration that can overcome these spatio-temporal and administrative limits • Subsequent state formation, including empires. Polymorphic Crystallizations • Study past and present state formations as distinctive polymorphous (changeable) crystallizations of state power. • There are competing axes of societal organization: states (along with rest of a given social formation) vary with dominance of one or another axis • General higher-order crystallizations vs more specific conjunctural crystallizations (e.g., during wars or in periods of economic emergency) • Same power networks can crystallize differently according to dominant issues in given period; but shifting principles can also transform state power and social orders Historical Constitution and Polymorphy • Different axes of societal organization: – – – – – – – – Capitalist state (‘wealth container’) Military-political regime (‘power container’) Nation-state (‘cultural container’) Representative state (democratic or citizenship regimes) Theocratic state (primacy of religion) Security state (primacy of domestic national security) ‘Racialized’ state (primacy of ethnic divisions, e.g., apartheid) …. • There can also be hybrid forms, based on combinations of principles in shadow of one; and some principles may conflict with others (e.g., apartheid vs capital accumulation) Analyzing Formal Constitution • Start with social forms and their impact on co-constitution of capital logic(s), class formation, and class struggle (e.g., constitutional state, tax state, formal citizenship) • Formal correspondence does not guarantee primacy of capital logic or bourgeois domination – form problematizes state’s functionality for accumulation and/or class rule. E.g. – relative autonomy is ‘double-edged sword’ for capital – plurality of territorial states vs integrating world market • Distinguish formal from material adequacy – formal adequacy when optimal for developing content – material adequacy = functionality of given form and its content. ‘Pashukanis Question’ on Form ‘Why does the dominance of a class take the form of official state domination? Or, which is the same thing, why is not the mechanism of state constraint created as the private mechanism of the dominant class? Why is it dissociated from the dominant class -- taking the form of an impersonal mechanism of public authority isolated from society?' (E.B. Pashukanis, Law and Marxism, 1951: 185). Answer to Pashukanis Question • ‘Where exploitation takes the form of exchange, dictatorship may take the form of democracy’ (Moore 1957) • Unique feature of capitalism is generalization of commodity form to labour-power (wage relation) • Hence surplus labour can be appropriated as surplus-value, exploitation can take the form of exchange • Form of political organization corresponds to the form of economic organization (Marx) • So dictatorship may take the form of democracy as long as economic and political class struggles are separated – former subject to logic of market, latter to logic of liberal democracy • This formal possibility depends on balance of forces Liberal Bourgeois Democracy • Bourgeois democratic republic is the formally adequate type of capitalist state but (i) not all capitalist states are democratic; (ii) once democracy emerges, reversals can occur; (iii) specific policies may not be substantively adequate to capital accumulation, overall reproduction of capitalist relations of production, or bourgeois rule. • Marx notes contradiction in capitalist democracies between majority political power of dominated classes and minority economic power of dominant classes – it can be reconciled only if both sides accept the “democratic rules of the game” and thereby reproduce conditions of class domination Economic and Political Struggles • Economic struggle will normally occur within market logic (i.e., over wages, hours, working conditions, prices) • Political struggle will normally occur within logic of a representative state based on rule of law (i.e., over the ‘national interest’, or reconciling particular interests of citizens and property owners in ‘illusory’ general interest) • Class is absent as explicit organizing principle of capitalist type of state – without legal or de facto monopoly of political power, dominant class must compete for political power on formally equal terms with subaltern classes The Limits of Form Analysis • Form analysis is best for capitalist type of state; it is less useful for social formations where some kinds of capitalist relations exist but without a capitalist type of state • Historical constitution may be more suitable than formal constitution for some analytical purposes • Form analysis identities tendencies linked to capitalist type of state to the extent that the latter itself is reproduced • For other types of state and political regimes, may be better to use figurational or strategic relational analysis ... • ... especially where another crystallization of state power prevails together with another Vergesellschaftungsmodus Capitalist Type of State State in Capitalist Society • Formal constitution • Historical constitution • Formal adequacy • Material adequacy • Historically specific type tied to • primacy of capitalist production Structure results from pathdependency and path-shaping • Main principle of societal organization is accumulation • Other organizational principles are possible (polymorphy) • Class power is structural and tends to be obscure or else is seen as legitimate • Class power is contingent: openly instrumental or mediated via other relations Normal States Exceptional Regimes • Liberal democracy with universal suffrage • Suspend elections (except for plebiscites, referenda) • Power transferred in stable way in line with rule of law • No legal regulation of power transfer (‘might is right’) • Pluralistic ISAS, relatively independent of state • ISAs integrated into state to legitimate power • Separation of powers • Concentration of powers • Power circulates organically, facilitating flexible reorganization of power • Congeals balances of forces at time that exceptional regime is introduced Exceptional Regimes Brittle Military Dictatorships No specialized politico-ideological apparatuses to channel and control mass support. Apportions power rigidly among political ‘clans’ tied to each apparatus. Lacks ideology to secure state’s institutional unity and establish national cohesion. Muddles through via mechanical compromises, tactical alliances, narrow bargaining among interests. Intensifies contradictions inside state apparatus and reduces its flexibility in face of crises. Flexible Fascist Regime Most flexible because it displays a limited pluralism, has elaborate politico-ideological apparatuses, including party and union organizations, corporate bodies, etc.. Also has strong nationalist ideology and mechanisms to reorganize power. Beyond Form Analysis • ‘a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions, such as this is expressed in the State in a necessarily specific form' (Poulantzas, 1978) • State apparatus and state capacities can be seen as ‘material causes’, changing class forces as ‘efficient causes’, class strategies as ‘final cause’, and state power as ‘formal cause’ • Therefore need to examine struggles over form of state as institutional ensemble, over state policy, and struggles at a distance from the state Strategic Selectivity "Particular forms of economic and political system privilege some strategies over others, access by some forces over others, some interests over others, some spatial scales of action over others, some time horizons over others, some coalition possibilities over others … structural constraints always operate selectively: they are not absolute and unconditional but always operate temporally, spatially, agency, and strategy specifically' (Jessop, 1997b: 63) Four Selectivities Structural Structurally-inscribed strategic selectivities plus structurally-oriented strategic calculation Form analysis and critical institutionalism; focus on uneven distribution of constraints/opportunities Agential Attribution of interpretive and causal powers to agents to make a difference in specific conjuncture by virtue of specific capacities unique to them Conjunctural analysis oriented to individual and social agents in a changing balance of forces Discursive Orders of discourse (sense- and meaning-making) limit what can be thought and said; strategic use of language can also make a difference Critical semiotic analysis of text, intertext, and context to see how semiosis construes, guides action, and constructs Technological Technologies for appropriating and transforming nature and/or for the conduct of conduct (Foucault et al.) Material, social, and spatiotemporal biases inscribed in technological capacities for action and their effects Gramsci on State Power • Gramsci focused on modalities of state power rather than its specific institutional mediations – hence looks beyond state in its juridico-political sense to power as relation • Lo stato integrale = “political society + civil society” and state power in West = “hegemony armoured by coercion” – Force (use of a coercive apparatus to bring popular masses into conformity with requirements of a specific mode of production) – Hegemony (ruling class mobilizes ‘active consent’ of dominated groups via intellectual, moral, and political leadership) • Focus on relative weight in different societies of coercion, fraud-corruption, passive revolution, and active consent Foucault on the State • “if the state is what it is today, it is precisely thanks to this governmentality that is at the same time both external and internal to the state • it is the tactics of government that allow the continual definition of what should or should not fall within the state’s domain, what is public and what private, what is and what is not within the state’s competence, etc. • So, if you like, the survival and limits of the state should be understood on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality” (Foucault 2008: 109). Governance and Governmentality • Governmentality covers discourses and practices of state formation, statecraft, state’s role in strategic codification of micro-powers, and overall projection of state power • Governmentality covers problem of macro-intelligibilities as well as of micro-powers: so how do we understand strategic codification of different disciplinary techniques and other forms of governmentality? • State power as key emergent field of strategic action that Foucault links to capitalist political economy and interests of rising bourgeoisie A Governmental Reinterpretation • State = government + governance in shadow of hierarchy • Government is more than the state considered as territory, apparatus, population – it exercises power in ways that go well beyond imperative coordination • Government as a social relation (hegemony armoured by coercion or statecraft) involves practices of collibration, i.e., rebalancing forms of governance in shadow of hierarchy and, as such, is linked to issues of domination • Collibration is more than technical, problem-solving fix: tied to wider “unstable equilibrium of compromise” and specific objects, techniques, and subjects of governance Policy Fields, Spatiality, Temporality • Go beyond generic analysis of state or class power to consider specificities of substantive policy fields (noting how they are socially and technically constituted) and their associated forms of government and governance • Go beyond naturalization of national territorial state to include complex inter-state relations, scalar division of political labour, political networks, and place • Question the temporal sovereignty of states and political regimes to consider how time affects state capacities Three trends by way of response to challenges of internationalization • The hollowing out of the national state – transfer of powers upward, downward, sideward • From Government to Governance – from hierarchical command to networks & partnerships • From sovereign states to the internationalization of policy regimes as sources of domestic policy Three Countertrends • Interscalar articulation – national states seek to shape what goes up, down, sideways • From government to metagovernance – states seek to organize (control) framework conditions for self-organization • Interstate struggles to shape international regimes and global governance and local implementation Multi-Level Government • Levels of political organization in nested territorial hierarchy • Vertical interdependence, communication, joint decisionmaking • Specific policy and issue areas rather than coordination problems across different areas • More concerned with government than with governance, neglects meta-governance Multi-Scalar Meta-Governance • Marked plurality of levels, scales, areas and sites involved in, affected by, mobilized in multi-scalar meta-governance • Complex, tangled, interwoven political link-ages -horizontal, transversal, and vertical • Meta-governance as art of ‘collibration’ to secure requisite variety, flexibility, adaptability • Plurality and heterogeneity of actors in and beyond a given multi-scalar economic, political, … and social space Authoritarian Statism - I ‘Intensified state control over every sphere of socioeconomic life combined with radical decline of institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘formal’ liberties’ (Staatstheorie: 203-4). Authoritarian Statism - II • Transfer of power from legislature to executive and concentration of power within the latter • Accelerated fusion between three branches of state legislature, executive, judiciary – decline in rule of law • Functional decline of political parties as leading channels for political dialogue with administration and as major forces in organizing hegemony • Rise of parallel power networks crosscutting formal organization of state, with major share in its activities The Role of States Today • Effects of neo-liberalism on world scale now evident in different forms in different states • Restructuring and shifts in strategy of national states and regional and global governance regimes to manage crisis on behalf of [monopoly] [financial] capital • Concentration of state power, strengthening of ties to financial capital, fast policy at cost of normal democratic processes, even more authoritarian statism, etc. • Short-term crisis management for capital will undermine longer-term prospects for solving other – and more fundamental – crises noted above. Grounds for Critique I • Statehood Anarchist critique • Type of State Historical critique • State form Formal adequacy • Normal/Exceptional Differential critique • Political Regime Material adequacy • Political Scene Strategic critique • Political struggle Conjunctural critique Grounds for Critique II • Paradoxes Form analysis • Political imaginaries Ideologiekritik • Problems of failure: 1 Form analysis • Problems of failure: 2 Coping capacities • Rogue or Failed States Ideologiekritik • Consequential Normative Critique Some Conclusions • Six main approaches – start with one well-suited to your theoretical object, add others to produce more complexity • Recognize limits of form analysis – there are 172 states in UN and few are ‘capitalist types of state’ • There are many other types of government and governance in addition to the territorial national state • No one-to-one match among economic class interests, forms of political representation, organization of political forces. • Use conjunctural analysis oriented to horizons of action of various political forces, their class relevance, if any, and their impact over different time periods on economic, political, and ideological class domination THE END …. ARTICULATION OF ECONOMY AND STATE IN CAPITALISM IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ECONOMY AND CLASS RELATIONS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STATE AND POLITICS Institutional separation of market economy, sovereign state, and a public sphere (civil society) that is located beyond market and state The economy is dominated by capitalist law of value as mediated via competition between capitals and economic class struggle. Raison d'État (a specialized political rationality) distinct from profit-andloss market logic and from religious, moral, or ethical principles. Legitimate claim to monopoly of organized force in state territory. Coercion excluded from immediate organization of labour process. Specialized military-police organs are subject to constitutional control. Role of legality in legitimation of the state and its activities. The value form and market forces shape differential accumulation. Subject to law, state may counter market failure in national interest. Specialized administrative staff with its own channels of recruitment, training, and ésprit de corps. State has specific place in division between manual and mental labour. Official discourse has key role in state power. Political class and officials specialize in mental labour and their power is linked to specialist knowledge intellectuals formulate state and hegemonic projects This staff is subject to authority of political executive. It forms a social category internally divided by market and status position. ‘Supervisionsstaat’ State legitimacy based on national or 'national-popular' interest. ARTICULATION OF ECONOMY AND STATE IN CAPITALISM IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ECONOMY AND CLASS RELATIONS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STATE AND POLITICS ‘Tax State': its revenues derive mainly from taxes on economic actors and their activities PLUS loans advanced by market actors Taxes may be used to produce public goods deemed essential to market economy and/or for social cohesion Subjects in state territory have a general duty to pay taxes to state, whether or not they approve of specific state activities State does not own property with which to produce goods and services for its own use and/or for sale to generate revenue to reproduce state and finance its activities Bourgeois tax form linked to the constitutionalization of the state: State fiat money is means of payment for state taxes and so circulates more widely in state space (and, perhaps, beyond) Tax capacity depends on legal authority and coercive power: involves Steuermonopol and Gewaltmonopol Private agents must earn money: state can tax or borrow Taxes are • a general contribution to state revenue, • levied on continuing basis • state can apply them freely to any legitimate tasks They should not be extraordinary, ad hoc, irregular, short-term, levied for specific tasks , and/or secured through negotiation Taxation capacity acts as security for sovereign debt. Tax as early form of class struggle ARTICULATION OF ECONOMY AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STATE IN CAPITALISM ECONOMY AND CLASS RELATIONS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STATE AND POLITICS The state is based on the rule of law. This involves division between private law, administrative law, and public law. Economic agents are formally free and equal owners of ‘commodities’, including labour-power. No formal monopoly of political power in hands of dominant economic class(es) but 'equality before the law'. Private law evolved on the basis of property rights and contract law. Formal subjects of state are individuals with citizenship rights, not feudal estates or collectively organized producer groups or classes. Struggles to extend these rights play a key role in the expansion of state activities. International law governs relations between states. State has key role in securing external conditions for economic exchange and the realization of private profit. Public law is organized around individual-state, public-private, and national-international distinctions. Formally sovereign state with a distinct and exclusive territorial domain in which it is formally free to act without interference from other states. Tension between economy as abstract 'space of flows' in world market and as sum of localized activities, with politically-overdetermined character. Ideally, the state is recognized as sovereign in this territory by other states but it may need to defend its territorial integrity by force. Substantively, states are constrained in exercise of sovereignty by balance of international forces. Particular capitals may seek support in world competition from their respective states Political and military rivalry is conditioned by strength of national economy. Can there be a Marxist theory? • Marx’s “missing book” on the state • State as “chaotic conception” or “rational abstraction” • State as a “complex synthesis of many determinations • Form analysis for given mode of production • An autonomous science of politics in overall context of capitalist mode of production? • “The present state” or “actually existing states” • The state as a social relation • States and the world market Materialist State Theory in 1970s Renewed Marxist interest prompted by: • State's role in averting post-war economic crisis – Keynesian Welfare [National] States • Critiques of pluralism, behavioralism, and elitism in political science – develop radical alternative in terms of laws of capital and/or how capitalists rule • Discovery of Gramsci and the power of ideas – ruling class rules via hegemonic common sense • Search for 'true' Marxian theory of state based on the ‘correct’ starting point in critical political economy • Analysis of specific forms of state and political crisis Key Marxist Insights from the 1970s • Turning from functionality to form, state theorists found that form threatens function (form analysis) • Abandoning views of state as simple thing or unitary class subject, they began to analyse state power as a complex social relation (relational analysis) • Noting complexity of state as institutional ensemble, they began to study problems of relatively unified state action across various policy fields (critical policy analysis) • Rejecting base-superstructure, they explored specificity and effectivity of semiosis, discourse, language (and mass media) (studies of hegemony and mediatization) ‘Logical-Historical’ Dilemmas • Start from most abstract-simple concepts to unfold step-bystep concrete-complex concepts for conjunctural analysis – Either, one-sided explanation based on aspects for which rich conceptual vocabulary exists, enabling more sophisticated description-explanation than can be provided through other, less elaborate sets of categories – Or, rich account just shows mediations of the ‘ultimate’ mini-set of causes • Start from events to identify actual social forces in specific strategic contexts and retroduce their deeper significance – Either, descriptivism based on mere chronicling of events rather than a differential, periodization with spatio-temporal depth and breadth – Or, empiricism that mistakes self-representation for real social forces and mistakes surface forms for underlying tendencies and counter-tendencies The Decline of Liberal Democracy • Liberal democracy stronger in periods when national was the primary scale of economic and political organization • Keynesian welfare national state: – National economy managed by national state on behalf of national citizens to create conditions for growing welfare state – Class compromise between industrial capital and working class • Internationalization undermines conditions for KWNS and its democratic shell • Neo-liberalism undermines these conditions further because it promotes financialization, political capitalisms • Together these trends undermine temporal as well as territorial sovereignty of national states Foucault’s Guidelines • study power where it is exercised over individuals rather than where it is legitimated at the centre; • study actual practice of subjugation - not intentions or strategies that guide attempts at domination; • recognize that power is relational and circulates through networks in which individuals are relays - not just points of application of power; • start from multiplicity of power relations and explore how they are colonized, articulated into ever more general mechanisms and forms of global domination maintained by the entire state system; • explore connections between micro-power and means of producing knowledge - for surveillance and constitution of specific types of subject Governmentality • Early work rejected the importance of the state (because it was seen in juridico-political terms or as a subject), • Foucault later began to see state as crucial site for strategic codification of power relations • He also emphasized various strategies (state projects, governmentalizing projects) that identified nature and purposes of government • Especially clear in later lectures, which move beyond disciplinary power to biopolitics and security Governmentality as Statecraft • Immanent multiplicity of relations and techniques of power are ‘colonised, used, inflected, trans-formed, displaced, extended, and so on by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination … and, above all, how they are invested or annexed by global phenomena and how more general powers or economic benefits can slip into the play of these technologies of power’ (Foucault 2003: 30-1). • Selection and, even more, retention are tied to economic and political class powers Variation, Selection, Retention • Resolve some ambiguities and confusions in the analytics of power by distinguishing three moments in development of power relations. – variation in objects, subjects, purposes, and technologies of power; – selection of some technologies and practices rather than others; – retention of some of these as they are integrated into broader, more stable strategies of state &/or class (or national or racial) power