Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony by Jonathan S. Davies

Author:Jonathan S. Davies [Davies, Jonathan S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781847426147
Google: 0ELA90py7BAC
Goodreads: 11494833
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2011-01-15T06:59:35+00:00

Capitalism and the capitalist state

The preceding paragraphs argue that capital accumulation still relies on the exercise of state power domestically and internationally and that any account of governance must take the power embodied in nation states within a conflictual international system seriously. But, how and why are capitals able to depend on states? This is another area where there is a very rich and diverse Marxist literature. Space precludes an in-depth discussion but the following paragraphs briefly summarise key positions within Marxism and the approach informing the Gramscian account in Chapter Five.

The now largely discredited theory of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ (StaMoKap) asserted that state and monopoly capital are increasingly fused into a single power bloc, where policy is governed by the demands of monopoly capitalists at the expense of both other fractions of capital and other social interests. This notion of fusion between the economic and extra-economic spheres influenced ‘instrumentalist’ approaches, such as Ralph Miliband’s (2009) theory of the state as the instrument of class rule, where capital is able to monopolise control of the state apparatus through shared sociocultural norms with political and civil service elites, cultivated through institutions such as schools, universities and clubs.

Insightful as it was about the web of interdependencies between state and capitalist elites, graphically highlighted in the UK’s phone-hacking scandal, Miliband’s instrumentalist approach did not satisfy theorists seeking a structural account of the relationship, or those arguing that monopoly capital is not a unitary interest. Contributors to the ‘state derivation debate’ argued that the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘capital’ introduces a spurious dualism. They posed questions such as: What is the political form of capitalism? What is specific about states in capitalist societies? And why does class domination under capitalism take the form of a public power such as the democratic state (Gerstenberger, 2010, p 63)? The ‘derivation’ debate was so-called because the position was ‘derived’ from rereading Marx as theorist not only of the capitalist economy, but also of the totality of capitalist social relations. One conclusion, closely associated with the Open Marxism tradition (Bonefeld and Holloway, 1995), was that the categories of economy, politics and ideology combine in different ways across all dimensions of capitalist social relations. The category ‘state’ could be interpreted as a form of the capital relation, or as a ‘concentration of bourgeois society’ (Tsolakis, 2010, p 402). The derivationists therefore inferred the existence of the capitalist state from their conception of capitalist societies as the contradictory totality of economic and non-economic relations. Derivationist scholarship was much criticised for its excessive abstraction and a-historicity – for inferring that which needs demonstrating empirically (Gerstenberger, 2010, p 65). It was also criticised for functionalism, the assertion that the state fulfilled certain duties because these were the prerequisites of capital accumulation.

One of the most influential offshoots of the derivation debate was Poulantzas’s (2000) theory of the state as the condensate of the outcome of class struggles. Poulantzas began with the functionalist assumption that the state fulfils the needs of the society of which it is part.

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