SoLiXG:The State

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The State

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The state and state power are notoriously difficult to define. Within the social sciences, definitions vary radically in relation to disciplinary belonging, theoretical outlook, and historical scope. Should the state apparatus be emphasized, with its complex ensemble of institutions and organizations, which may exert repressive force on the state’s citizens, but also facilitate democratic co-determination, through representative or other arrangements? Should the state’s territorial aspects be prioritized, highlighting questions of the determination and legitimacy of frontiers, of state sovereignty and inside-outside demarcations, and of inter- or supra-state relations and dependencies? Or should the population of the state be seen as its deciding element, foregrounding questions of citizenship and rights, of “general will” and biopolitical governance, of imagined communities and the nature of nationhood? [1]

All of the above, answers renowned sociologist and state theorist Bob Jessop, and adds a fourth dimension: the state idea, a discursive and performative construct that confers an imagined unity onto “the state” as a heterogeneous ensemble, and that can itself be an object of competing “state projects”, vying for hegemony. “The core apparatus of the state”, Jessop writes,

“comprises a relatively unified ensemble of socially embedded, socially regularized, and strategically selective institutions and organizations whose socially 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 common interest or general will of an imagined political community identified with that territory.“ [2]

Jessop’s definition, in other words, emphasizes the polyvalent, polymorphic, relational, and porous nature of the state, as a dynamic complex of forces and institutions. It is a model for understanding the state developed in response to a dominant tendency in modern, political thinking, toward essentializing, reifying, and instrumental conceptions of the state. To this day, much political discourse, on the left as well as on the right, remains caught in the contradictions generated by such notions.

Within liberal and libertarian traditions, the state has generally been thought as a substantial thing that exerts a limiting force upon freedom, conceived negatively as the complete and abstract absence of dominance. [3] According to various versions of contract theory, from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls, citizens enter into a mutual agreement about the establishment of the state, to which some freedoms are relinquished and some responsibilities are conferred, in exhange for guarantees of security and stability. [4] Politics should aim to minimize the limiting force of the state – reducing it to a “night watchman”, or even, ultimately, according to anarcho-libertarian theorists, suppressing it altogether – in favor of the possibility for private individuals of pursuing freedom and happiness, through economic relations. [5]

At the same time, as many social theorists and historians have shown, liberal and neoliberal policies have in no way always sought to minimize the state. [6] Instead, they have tended toward functionalizing the state, redefining it and restructuring it as a vehicle for stimulating private enterprise or for “encasing” markets (to use Quinn Slobodian’s term), so as to defend them from the “external” threats of labor organization or redistributive or egalitarian policies. [7] Here, the state is a condition of, not a limit to, a functioning, “free” market economy. Such processes are intensified today, through efforts to integrate the institutional infrastructure of state administrations with techniques of algorithmic governance developed, provided, and controlled by major digital platform corporations. [8]

Within the socialist tradition, in a broad sense of the term, the contradiction is even more blatant. On the one hand, in Marxist theories from the nineteenth century onwards, the modern state has generally been conceived of as an instrument of class domination in the hands of the bourgeoisie. [9] The aim of a socialist politics should therefore, as Marx phrased it in a late text, be “a revolution not against this or that legitimate, constitutional, republican or imperialist form of state power [but] against the state itself”. [10] That revolutionary process could take the form of a violent upheaval or of a more long-term “withering away of the state” (Lenin), in favor of some other mode of social organization, unrecognizable as the state form. [11]

On the other hand, the histories of both “really existing socialism” and of social democratic regimes in the west, have evidently not been histories of the state’s abolishment, however slow. Instead, they have been histories of the development of “strong states”, of highly complex state apparatuses with large administrations and/or sprawling security apparatuses, some of which have functioned better than others – from “golden age” welfare states to eastern bloc bureaucratic colossi. [12] This is a living contradiction: whether it should be anti-state or in favor of a strong state remains an unsettled question in much radical left politics to this day.

In the 1970s, the Greek philosopher and sociologist Nicos Poulantzas developed a “relational” theory of the state, that sought to break with reifying and instrumental conceptions, emerging either from the right or from the left. The state, he argued, should not be understood as a monolithic bloc without internal contradictions, that could exert power as an instrument for or a direct expression of a determined political will. Instead, he held, the state should be seen as a “material condensation” of the “relationship of forces” that characterized social relations in society as a whole, at the same time as it maintained a “relative autonomy” from those relations. [13] Poulantzas’ model therefore rejected notions of the state as a closed, self-sufficient, coherent entity, that could be controlled, seized, or overthrown from the outside. Political struggles were instead always already “inscribed in the institutional materiality of the state”, where they maintained different degrees of stability, influence, and reach. [14]

With his polymorphic and dynamic concept of the state, Jessop builds on Poulantzas’ analysis. What he proposes is a “strategic-relational” approach that aims to “capture not just the state apparatus but the exercise and effects of state power as a contingent expression of a changing balance of forces that seek to advance their respective interests inside, through, and against the state system”. [15] At a general level, such political work of “advancing interests”, he means, takes the form of multi-dimensional efforts to establish “state projects” that can command the “state idea” and provide a “substantive internal operational unity” to the state apparatus. [16] In order for such state projects to be effective, he continues, with a reference to Gramsci, they must be connected to wider “hegemonic visions”, that elaborate the nature and the purposes of the state in relation to the complex social order of which it is a part, setting up general guidelines for conducting state policy.

What could a radically democratic project, encompassing these different levels of social and political organization, be today, in a “post-digital” condition? The terms of mounting such “state projects” and “hegemonic visions” are of course radically shifted in a situation where the administrative infrastructure of state apparatuses, and “civil society” institutions and social relations, are to an increasing degree integrated with governance techniques and protocols of social interaction fostered by monopolistic digital platform corporations, operating at a global scale. Perhaps, as Cédric Durand has recently suggested, any meaningful “digital sovereignty” – however progressive – would today presuppose the establishment of some sort of “non-aligned digital policies”, creating “an economic space outside the grip of the monopolists in which alternative technologies could be developed”. [17]

Notes

[1] Max Weber’s famous definition of the state as the “human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory” combines elements of all of these three dimensions of the state. Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics”, in Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 310f.

[2] Bob Jessop, The State: Past, Present, Future (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), p. 49.

[3] See Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty: An Inaugural Lecture, Delivered before the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). For another classical discussion, see Herbert Marcuse, A Study on Authority (London: Verso, 2008).

[4] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1968); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).

[5] See e.g. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).

[6] This is for example a central point in Michel Foucault’s discussion about ordoliberalism and the emergence of neoliberalism, in The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

[7] Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

[8] See e.g. Cédric Durand, How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-Feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy (London: Verso, 2024).

[9] See e.g. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (London: Penguin, 1985 [1884]).

[10] Karl Marx, “First Draft of The Civil War in France” [1871], in Political Writings, vol. 3: The First International and After (London: Verso, 2010), p. 249.

[11] Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution (London: Penguin, 1992 [1917]).

[12] See e.g. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: New Left Books, 1978).

[13] Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 1980), p. 127ff.

[14] Ibid., p. 144.

[15] Jessop, The State, p. 54.

[16] Ibid., p. 84.

[17] Cédric Durand, ”Fragile Leviathan?”, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fragile-leviathan (last visited 25.02.21). See also Cédric Durand and Razmig Keucheyan, Comment bifurquer: Les principes de la planification écologique (Paris: La Découverte, 2024).