Lisa Watanabe

Legacies of Miliband and Poulantzas

Aronowitz, S. and Bratsis, P. (eds.), Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered, London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2002, ISBN 0-8166-3294-4, $24.95 (pbk); ISBN 0-8166-3293-6, $68.95 (cloth).

At a time when globalisation has moved to centre stage and the role of states in the mediation of class conflict appears to be in a period of flux, the decline and early burial of Marxist state theory can only be lamented. Paradoxically, while globalisation progresses apace under their auspices, states are more often than not perceived as increasingly circumvented and weakened by the dictates of global capital, indicating the inadequacy of our understanding of the state and its relationship to the globalizing political economy. Yet, as noted in the book, “it will not do to simply assert the continued importance of states amid globalisation, while failing to explore the determining patterns of state action in our era.” To properly make sense of the place of the modern state within the context of globalisation, Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis argue that we need to bring state theory back from the dead. They aim to do just that with Paradigm Lost.

The volume comprises twelve essays: one introductory essay written by the editors and eleven essays that taken together are designed to provide a background and introduction to the central features of Marxist state theory, to evaluate its relevance in relation to the present political juncture, and to identify its limits and how its insights might be built upon to construct an more adequate and strategically useful theory of the state. All essays take as their focal point the so-called Miliband-Poulantzas debate, around which the development of state theory has to a large extent been framed (i.e., around Miliband’s ‘instrumentalist’ claim that the state had been captured by the capitalist class as a result of its political organisation versus Poulantzas’s ‘structuralist’ claim that the state is capitalist because of its functions and acts to disorganise the working class).

Part One reviews the contributions of Miliband and Poulantzas. Clyde W. Barrow usefully outlines the contours of Miliband and Poulantzas’s respective theories of the state and helpfully reconstructs the debate around which the “institutionalist”/“structural-functionalist” divide within Marxist state theory came to crystallize. Barrow crucially points out that while the debate had the detriment of fracturing Marxism, it did successfully challenge assumptions of pluralism and system equilibrium that were dominant within social science when the debate took off in the early 1970s. Andriano Nervo Codato and Renato Monseff Perissinotto make the case for a Poulantzasian theory of the state as opposed to competing, ‘institutionalist’ perspectives, arguing that Poulantzas’s conception of the state remains truer to the indicates of Marx than those of ‘institutionalists,’ taking into account the linkage between political structure and relations of production in a particular society, and, thus, offering a theory of the state that is both general and historical. The third and final essay in the section by Paul Thomas highlights how prescient Poulantzas’s thinking was; being able to “speak the language of ‘globalisation’ even before the term globalisation enjoyed much currency,” in many respects, Poulantzas, according to Thomas, correctly identified where we were tending (p. 82).  

In the second part of the book, which addresses the contemporary relevance of Miliband and Poulantzas, a number of contributions stand out. In the opening chapter of the section, Leo Panitch stresses the importance of going beyond the polemic between Miliband and Poulantzas over ‘instrumentalism’ versus ‘structuralism,’ since a theory of today’s capitalist state, in Pantich’s view, needs to be able to both trace the specific linkages between state institutions and class actors and to delineate the more structural determinants of state action. Andreas Kalyvas points out that an updated theory of the state should also take into account the constitutive role of the law in the organizational terrain of the modern capitalist state; something that something Poulantzas recognized early on, but failed to anticipate its growing significance. Rhonda F. Levine reminds that whilst Miliband and Poulantzas provided powerful tools with which to understand the role of the state in general terms, their particular focus was on European states. In the case of Poulantzas, who was concerned with the effect of American capital on European states and social formations, this led him to neglect what was going on in the US itself to precipitate changes that were central to the collapse of the Bretton Woods/Keynesian welfare state consensus and the ascendance of neoliberalism. Bob Jessop points out that the relationship between ‘internationalisation’ and the state has changed in several key respects since Poulantzas wrote: the functions of the state have been dispersed among several institutional levels of territorial organisation and are now shared with an extended range of actors, leading to a shift from government to governance, though the general political function of maintaining social cohesion is still performed at the level of the national state. Indeed, the most pressing ideological task of the state, Constantine Tsoukalas highlights, is to legitimate the increasing ‘structural power asymmetry’ between capital and labour resulting from these developments (p. 235).

In the third and final part of the book, the editors attempt to go beyond Miliband and Poulantzas. Bratsis contends that state theory has so far failed to adequately explain the state per se, as a result of its failure to sufficiently account for the causes of meaning producing practices that make the state a material reality ‘internally,’ in relation to ‘society,’ and ‘externally,’ in relation to other states. While Bratsis would appear correct in arguing for the need for a better understanding of the constitution of the material reality of the state, he provides little guidance as to how to achieve this without displacing the importance of class practices and diminishing the strategic value of state theory. Referring to the contingency of a particular state form, rather than the state itself, Aronowitz questions the extent to which the tension between the decline in the mediating role of the state and the growing importance of the rule of law and military force in the constitution of the global political economy can be sustained, hinting at the ongoing possibility of undoing some capital’s most recent gains.

Overall, Paradigm Lost is a valuable contribution to the debate on globalisation and the state, containing a wealth of highly interesting hypotheses and questions. Not only will it help to counter the commonly held belief that globalisation implies diminished state capacity, but also the assumption that underpins this idea that globalisation and the state, or ‘the market and the state,’ represent two discrete realms. In so doing, it will help forge an understanding of globalisation and the transformation of the state as part of the same process. In terms of identifying the characteristics of the dominant state form associated with globalisation, the contributing authors make a persuasive case for the importance the conceptual legacy of Miliband and Poulantzas, whilst importantly highlighting the need to take stock of the changes that have taken place since the 1970s. Efforts on the part of the editors to go beyond Miliband and Poulantzas are, however, somewhat less compelling. The reader is left with the feeling that they might have better developed a research agenda for understanding the linkages between various dimensions of state transformation and emergent global order. 

Lisa Watanabe is a doctoral student at York University, Toronto, Canada. watanl@freesurf.ch