Stuff often happens more or less by chance. I haven’t thought seriously about Poulantzas since my undergraduate days in the late 1960s (when he was on a few reading lists). At the back of my mind, however, has been Bob Jessop’s admiration for Poulantzas’ analyses of the state. Then the other day, serendipitously, I came across a long-buried edited collection on Poulantzas in my study, which doubles as an invaluable if spatially compromised and haphazard library. Jessop himself was a contributor. The publication date was 2011, though it was first published in German in 2006.
On the train today I read through Jessop’s chapter. As frequently occurs, I judged my own version of post-1970s financial capitalism’s class/command dynamic might benefit from refinement. I have repeatedly alluded to the need to disassemble and clarify the command relations represented in the apparatus of the state. Poulantzas is a neglected resource.
As I am on the move I must be brief (anyway, I prefer short, pithy blogs). So what’s to learn from Poulantzas? His analysis of the state, Jessop rightly insists, is relational (i.e. his concept of the state ‘holds for the capitalist type of state, diverse states in capitalist social formations, and statehood more generally’). The state is not an entity: it is ‘a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship, such as is expressed within the State in a necessarily specific form.’ In Jessop’s words, the state ‘is not a subject but a social relation between subjects mediated though their relation to things’. State power might be seen as a form-determined condensation of the changing balance of forces in political and politically-relevant struggle.’
Following Althusser, Poulantzas argues that the institutional separation of economy and state in capitalist formations requires an autonomous theory of the state. Two approaches run concurrently through his work: an abstract-simple analysis of the formal adequacy of a given type of state in a pure capitalist social formation; and a concrete-complex analysis of actually existing states in capitalist societies. The former identifies the historical specificity of the capitalist type of state, the latter delivers analyses of particular states.
All of the state apparatuses – including the economic and repressive apparatuses and not just the ideological apparatuses – are according to Poulantzas the product of the separation of mental from manual labour. This is salient with regard to political struggle. Drawing on Gramsci, he notes that the modern democratic state, grounded in individual citizenship and a national sovereign state, encourages ‘normal politics’ to take the form of a struggle for national—popular hegemony. The state serves to organize the dominant classes and disorganize the dominated classes.
Responding to the need for concrete-complex analyses, Poulantzas focused on the changing relationship between the economic and extra-economic conditions of capital accumulation (in the early says of financial capitalism). He concluded that: (a) the state’s economic functions were growing in importance; (b) the boundaries between the economic and extra-economic were shifting; (c) the economic interventions of the state were increasingly focused on the social relations of production (with what were previously seen as extra-economic elements increasingly being re-interpreted as ‘directly relevant to valorization’); and (d) even those policies most directly focused on economic reproduction have taken on a political character and have to be pursued with regard to social cohesion in a class-divided society. This extension of state intervention enhances tensions between different fractions of capital and also accentuates inequalities and disparities between dominant and dominated classes. The state in financial capitalism, in short, acquires a new ‘democratic’ form.
Class struggles not only contribute to the genesis of political crises but also determine whether these are resolved by restoring democracy or lead to an ‘exceptional state’ (eg fascism). While consent predominates over constitutionalised violence in ‘normal states’, exceptional states intensify physical repression and conduct an open war against dominated classes. Jessop offers the following summary at this point:
- Whereas the normal state has representative democratic institutions with universal suffrage and competing political parties, exceptional states suspend the electoral principle (apart from plebiscites and/or referenda closely controlled from above).
- The transfer of power in normal states follows constitutional and legal rules and occurs in stable and predictable ways. Exceptional states suspend the rule of law, however, to facilitate constitutional and administrative changes allegedly required to help solve the hegemonic crisis.
- Ideological state apparatuses (ISA) in normal states typically have ‘private’ legal status and enjoy significant autonomy from official government control. In contrast, ISA in exceptional states are generally subordinated to the repressive state apparatus and lack real independence. This subordination serves to legitimate the increased resort to coercion and helps overcome the ideological crisis that accompanies a crisis of hegemony.
- The formal separation of powers within the repressive state apparatus (RSA) is also reduced through the infiltration of subordinate branches and power centres by the dominant branch and/or through the expansion of parallel power networks and transmission belts cutting across and linking different branches and centres. This produces greater centralisation of political control and multiplies its points of application in the state. This serves to reorganise hegemony, to counteract internal divisions and short-circuit internal resistances, and to secure flexibility in the face of bureaucratic inertia.
When democratic institutions are abolished and an exceptional state established, the balance of forces tends to congeal, rendering it harder to resolve new crises and contradictions. Exceptional states can as a consequence collapse swiftly and decisively.
Poulantzas refers to the ‘new’ normal form of the (post-1970s financial) capitalist state as authoritarian statism. It is most characterised by ‘intensified state control’ over every sphere of socio-economic life, combined with a radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and a curtailment of ‘formal liberties’.
As Habermas recognised in his Legitimation Crisis, the state’s resolution of one type of crisis can generate other types, which can ultimately call into question the very legitimacy of the state.
The contemporary authoritarian state brings a centralisation of administrative power. The rule of law is weakened and pre-emptive policing grows at the expense of judicial punishment. In politics a ‘charismatic frontman’ is sought to give strategic direction, even as political parties lose their traditional functions in representative policy-making in favour of a direct lobbying of the administration.
Jessop judges Poulantzas’ account of authoritarian statism remarkably prescient:
The various trends that he identified … have become even clearer. They are reactions to the growing political crisis in the power bloc, the representational crisis in the political system, the legitimacy and state crises associated with the twin failures of the postwar interventionist state and the neoliberal turn, and the growing challenge to the primacy of the national territorial state in the face of globalisation. We should particularly note the continued decline of parliament and the rule of law, the growing autonomy of the executive, the increased importance of presidential or prime ministerial powers, the consolidation of authoritarian, plebiscitary parties that largely represent the state to the popular masses, and, something neglected by Poulantzas, the mediatisation of politics as the mass media play an increasing role in shaping political imaginaries, programmes and debates. An increased emphasis on issues of national security and pre-emptive policing associated with the so-called war on terror at home and abroad has also reinforced the attack on human rights and civil liberties.’
Prescient of Jessop too. He attributes Poulantzas’ shrewdness to his commitment to combine theoretical and historical analyses (which allowed him to theorise ‘transformed form’).
Jessop is not altogether satisfied. Naturally, Poulantzas’ analyses raise questions even as they (provisionally at least) answer others. Jessop particularly stresses lacunae around the transition from Atlantic Fordism to a globalising knowledge-based economy; a major ‘re-scaling’ of nation states and state apparatuses and powers in ‘contemporary imperialism’; and a considerable weakening too of nation states’ capacity to secure social cohesion. But he remains very impressed.
As far as I’m concerned: (a) I had forgotten just how penetrating and durable Poulantzas is, and (b) I am reminded of the importance of not neglecting past inputs (see my blog on ‘the compression of the past’).
Reference
Jessop,B (2011) Poulantzas’ State, Power, Socialism as a modern classic. In Eds Gallas,A et al: Reading Poulantzas. Pontypool; Merlin Press.