[A-List] RE: a Little Primer on Poulantzas

["Jessop, Robert" <b.jessop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Readers

Apologies for not responding to this invitation for a little primer earlier --
it dropped to the bottom of an overlong e-mail list. For anyone interested, I
attach a short paper drawn from the long book on Poulantzas. Possibly too late
for many, but perhaps useful to some. The paper was published in Studies in
Political Economy, 34, 75-108, in `1991.

Bob Jessop
 <<poulantzas.doc>>
Bob Jessop
Professor of Sociology
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YL
United Kingdom
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> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Keaney Michael [SMTP:Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx]
> Sent:	23 September 2002 12:29
> To:	a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc:	leo panitch; Jessop, Robert
> Subject:	RE: [A-List] Germany: Election results
>
> At 23/09/2002 10:28, Michael K wrote:
>
> >Thus Germany will continue to be transformed in accordance with the
> >predictions of Poulantzas 30 years ago regarding the creation of the
> >conditions of US monopoly capitalism.
>
> You mentioned this before and I still can't get my head round it. Maybe a
> little primer on Poulantzas might help--sorry if you did that already and I
> never noticed.
>
> -----
>
> A little primer on Poulantzas would be brilliant. Bob Jessop devoted a
> weighty tome to Poulantzas, but the result was far from that of a little
> primer, although much more thought-provoking. Jessop himself still says he's
> trying to get his head around much of what NP was saying, as am I (from far
> less solid theoretical foundations than Jessop). Part of the trouble is that
> NP himself was constantly revising and updating his theory of the state,
> leading to Jessop's trouble when writing his exposition, which nonetheless
> remains the definitive study.
>
> However, as I *interpret* or understand NP, the logic is basically this:
> according to NP, the profusion of US FDI that occurred during the 1960s and
> 70s fundamentally altered the class structures of the recipient countries.
> Instead of a dominant national bourgeoisie there was now a three-way split:
> firstly, a section of the national bourgeoisie would become closely entwined
> with US capital whilst retaining an independent, domestic base; secondly,
> another section of the national bourgeoisie would become utterly dependent on
> US capital (i.e., comprador) and have no independent domestic base; thirdly,
> an increasingly rump national bourgeoisie would be left to struggle for
> control over those parts of the state apparatus and policy still accessible.
> This division would be further complicated by the ordinary everyday
> inter-capital rivalries. Re the state, however, hegemony would increasingly
> become the preserve of a power bloc of shifting alliances, rather than the
> property of one dominant class or fraction. That is still theoretically
> possible, but less and less likely. Especially in "State Power Socialism" NP
> began to move towards a treatment of the state as possessing sufficient
> autonomy to advance its own agendas, something which Jessop has since devoted
> much time and energy to developing.
>
> It was Leo Panitch who more recently resurrected NP's work on FDI in his NLR
> article of 2000. Using this as his point of departure he explored how the
> Clinton administration, via Rubin/Summers/IMF was attempting to construct a
> global framework in which every state apparatus would find itself constrained
> (not necessarily involuntarily, as with the WTO) by rules set largely by
> hegemonic US interests, enabling those same US interests to exploit at will
> the global economy at the expense of its imperialist rivals (less an expense,
> more a smaller share of the pie) and especially the South. Panitch also
> linked this analysis to the 1976 intervention by the IMF in Britain, usefully
> highlighting that episode's prototype status with regard to subsequent
> structural adjustment programs foisted upon the South by the IMF/World Bank
> nexus during the 1980s and 90s. In such limited space Panitch is not able to
> expand upon the specifics of US capital's involvement in the struggle for the
> reins of the UK state during the late 70s/early 80s, but the implications are
> sufficient to enable some (like yours truly) to make a stab at joining the
> dots and constructing a reasonably robust narrative charting the history of
> what finally emerged as Thatcherism, only to transmogrify into New Labour, an
> ironic victory for US Cold War liberalism if ever there was.
>
> But I digress: the point re Germany is straightforward, but has major
> implications concerning the EU and its inter-imperialist rivalry with the US.
> Simply, Schröder sits atop a state apparatus aligned with key sectors of
> German capital that wish to break out of the post-1945 straitjacket of
> Deutschland AG and go head-to-head with its main rivals in the US. In order
> to do that, these must enjoy the same (perceived) advantages available to
> their US rivals. Thus the much called for reform of the "labour market" (i.e.
> attack on entitlements won as part of the post-1945 settlement and integral
> to the policies of both main parties), reform of the financial sector (begun,
> however haltingly, with the so-called "Riester pensions" -- i.e.
> part-privatisation of state provision), and access to bigger sources of
> investment capital -- hence the Wall Street listing of Daimler-Benz and the
> aggressive focus on share price by the present management of Deutsche Bank.
> The process of obviously complex, not least because of the retention of
> structures that belong to the post-1945 era and which may even be retained
> owing to perceived advantages these may bring to German capital, which might,
> via the state, promote "capitalism with German characteristics" to paraphrase
> the Chinese. The transition will certainly not be neat and tidy. However, at
> bottom, in order to compete with its US rivals German capital must actually
> become more like its US rivals. NP's point was thus that, far from heralding
> a "colonisation" of Western Europe by the US (cf. Raymond Vernon's
> "Sovereignty at Bay", c. 1974, and numerous worried French left nationalists
> of the time like J-P Chévènement), the creation of the conditions of US
> monopoly capital instigated via US FDI would intensify, rather than calm,
> inter-imperialist rivalries.
>
> Michael Keaney

Attachment: poulantzas.doc
Description: MS-Word document