Neo-Marxist Paradigm

Question 1

What did neo-marxism respond to?

Answer 1

It was another response to the societal turmoil of the 1960s and the ways it has been dealt with in philosophy and social sciences

Question 2

What happened in the 1960s?

Answer 2

There was societal turmoil which led to a philosophical and sociological reflection by the Frankfurt School on whether we really had consensus in society. Power differentials were created by pre-political processes and societal inequalities, and by the nature of the political system.

Question 3

What is neo-pluralism?

Answer 3

This is one response to the 1960s turmoil. It recognised that some battle grounds for pluralist politics is uneven and led to a new conception of power.
By this means that the uneven battleground reduced the scope of actors and issues able to penetrate the system without seeking recourse to unconventional politics and forms of resistance
Means there are uneven answers to the questions we can attain sustainability in society

Question 4

What did Smith and Lindblom say about these power differentials?

Answer 4

There are limits to neo-pluralism. Despite power differentials you are filled with knowledge of how important it is to really understand the relations between the state and society
Later investigated the precise relationships between state and society like agenda building theory and rethinking the proper democratic model
About addressing political processes, accessing the political system and the nature of the political system because it is stupid

Question 5

How do neo-marxists differ from neo-pluralists?

Answer 5

That Smith and Lindblom’s recognition of power differentials leads to conceptualising a relations state but the society is still under-theorised. It is not enough. Have to look at the way in which the system and structures are broken and were built that way
This has been translated into new perspectives on who is able to shape decisions and if change from within the system is possible through agenda building theory, descriptive and prescriptive, and different democratic models
Idea that the capitalist state is stupid.
People in society who were thinking it was too simple to just repair the state without paying attention to the way it was related to deeper social structures.

Question 6

What lessons were learnt from the development of capitalism?

Answer 6

Developed in ways which were not only determined by economical laws but co-dependent on social and political struggle which is shaped by will and decisiveness, as well as by political, economic and ideological structuring

It was both the struggle shaped by will and decisiveness alongside the structures in society which bought this development.

Question 7

What was the key puzzle from capitalism?

Answer 7

What, more exactly, is the role of the state?
How does the state contribute to the reproduction of capitalist society?
In the face of the advanced welfare state emerging in the 1960s, how can we understand the precise relationships between the socio-political struggles and the deeper societal structures on the other hand

Question 8

What was the theorising on the relative autonomy of the state in capitalistic society?

Answer 8

Idea that capitalists themselves were a group or class. More attention paid to the idea of capitalist mode of production reproduced independently of the state and therefore keeping things off the agenda, not just capitalism as the class
The most popular theorising approach

Question 9

What is Dunleavy and O’Leary’s definition of neo-marxism?

Answer 9

Neo-marxist approaches ‘analyse the workings of state institutions and policy-making’ in capitalist society

Question 10

What is a more complete definition of neo-marxism?

Answer 10

It is a paradigm, within the broad Marxist tradition which relaxes the assumption of economic determinism to put more emphasis on a broader set of factors that contribute to the reproduction of class relations in terms of ideology, and the production of subjects and subjectivities, political and societal struggle with due attention to the embedment of the state in inherited structures i.e. rejecting historical voluntarism

Question 11

What is economic determinism?

Answer 11

Relations between different classes in society shape the history of our thinking, they relax this assumption to make it less absolute

Question 12

What is historical voluntarism?

Answer 12

That history evolves by people just making free choices, they say it is a more balanced view of structure and agency

Question 13

How does capital Marxism develop during the Industrial Revolution?

Answer 13

Idea that through industrialisation there is a more capitalist intensive mode of production. More capital is needed to fund industry.
At the same time, people working in the factory are no longer owning the products of their labour and labour becomes a rented commodity. There are two glasses, the capitalists and those who work and rent their labour and these interact. This creates new relations of production between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat

Question 14

How do we see classical marxism in political modernisation?

Answer 14

Political modernisation and state formation based on thinking about new relations of production and the way they drive history. However, Marx didn’t really predict this and didn’t talk much about it. He said that the state had not fully developed yet

Question 15

What is historical materialism?

Answer 15

Sees the state as part of superstructure
Says that the institutions of superstructure (including religion, legal system, political system) determined by socio-economic base. This socio economic base is the modes of production, the whole of production forces and relations.
History is the succession of modes of production driven by class struggle

Question 16

What did Early Marx have to say about the state?

Answer 16

Initially followed Hegel who made a distinction between the state and society (as a free, formative sphere) Said that the state might be oppressive but civil society is a place for free and formative thinking. People find ways to understand each other, form preferences and understandings.
Said that true democracy is the abolition of capital meaning there are no class differences and no domination

Question 17

What did Later Marx have to say on the state?

Answer 17

Took an instrumental view seeing it as an organisational form in the service of the bourgeoisie.
An occasionally structuralist perspective seeing the state as part of the structures reproducing production relations

Question 18

What did Lenin say about the state?

Answer 18

That it is an oppressive institution with power over civil society controlled by ruling class even under democratic elections.
Wasn’t really a believer in the democratic state but that the revolution would have to smash the bourgeois state, take it over and then a state society would develop and the state would wither away.

Question 19

What did Gramsci say about the state?

Answer 19

Said that the classical distinction between political and civil society is mostly conceptual and in reality there is significant overlap. This means the state can dominate through coercion and violence in political society and the tool of consent in civil society
Reflected in the idea of cultural hegemony that the whole circle of believes and practices in civil society are shaped by the ruling classes. The ruling class’ worldview is reproduced in societal practices as this is the ‘natural order of things’

Question 20

So what does Gramsci say about the state and civil society?

Answer 20

Rejects the identification of political and civil society. That identification, in the form of state-worship, was part of the fascist programme he sought to resist.
The revolutionary party is in the position to develop organic intellectuals. Intellectuals produced ‘organically’ from the oppressed class with the capacity and the duty to articulate the feelings, experiences and wisdom from that class. Intellectuals who may thus help establish a ‘counter hegemony’ through critical pedagogy and popular education and as the necessary competence to ‘manoeuvre warfare’ for revolution
Popular education therefore becomes important

Question 21

What are organic intellectuals of Gramsci?

Answer 21

People who can think independently and critically and mobilise others to do so.

Question 22

Important quotes from Freire on the work of organic intellections?

Answer 22

‘No one educates anyone else nor do we educate ourselves, we educate one another in communion in the context of living in this world’

‘Education does not change the world. Education changes people. People change the world’

Question 23

What does Gramsci say about economic determinism?

Answer 23

Learned from the Russian Revolution that revolution might even come if capitalism has not yet done through its full lifecycle of contradictions eventually leading to revolution
This has disproven the historical materialist causal primacy of the dynamics of social forces as drivers of the succession of modes of production
Also said that this classical doctrine was too fatalistic as it would not help once the working class become active
So rejected economic determinism. History is determined by human action and thus human will. Both economic and cultural changes might be drivers of history

Question 24

What does Gramsci say a passive revolution is?

Answer 24

That it is a gradual but continuous reorganisation of the state and economy in order to preserve the power of the elite by incorporating or neutralising the power of adversarial groups through transforming them into partners, all without overcoming the fundamental social contradictions. It is an instrument of the ruling classes to reinforce a destabilised hegemony ‘in the national interest’
It was a concept inspired by comparing Trasformismo with the French Revolution

Question 25

According to Gramsci, what were the conditions for a passive revolution?

Answer 25

When a social group lacks the strength to establish hegemony. This ‘avoid[s] the popular masses going through a period of political experience like had occurred in France in the years of Jacobinism’ ‘The problem is to see whether the dialectic of revolution/restoration’ it is revolution or restoration which predominates

Question 26

What did Louis Althusser do in the time of de-stalinization?

Answer 26

Thought that the Chinese cultural revolution would be an alternative to both stalinism and human marxism and praised the non-bureaucratic, non-party, mass organisations demonstrating ‘Marxist principles regarding the nature of the ideological’ - they showed precise Marxist thinking and how it differed from hegemonic thinking in society

Question 27

What does Althusser say about classical Marxism?

Answer 27

Says the core notions should be protected from contemporary political events and debate.
Says the superstructure has some autonomy, to some extent, it shapes base and vice versa resulting in reproductive dynamics
But he is against the view that the state is an instrument of the ruling class. Instead the state comprises repressive state apparatuses and ideological state apparatuses

Question 28

What does Althusser say about ideology?

Answer 28

Ideology is not something we deliberately employ, but omnipresent, and we are shaped by it in everything. It has a material basis in in the apparatuses and associate practices like school, family and church

Question 29

What is ideological interpellation?

Answer 29

It works by recruiting subjects to have a particular understanding of the self. It shapes our thinking on what exists and what not, who we are, what nature, society, women and men are… what is right, beautiful, pleasant or wrong, ugly, unpleasant… what is (im)possible
Idea that ‘… ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects’

Question 30

How do Gramsci and Althusser compare?

Answer 30

Gramsci draws attention to the state, dominating so as to maintain production relations, through coercion and cultural hegemony. Emphasises the potential of human action, human will, popular education, counter-hegemonic revolutionary dynamics Belief in a conscious move out of capitalist society

Althusser is more structuralist. State apparatuses are mutually reproductive and really difficult to get through this. Ideological interpellations means that individuals are carriers of these structures, shaped by ideology. We expect too much of individuals

Question 31

therefore, what is the third face of power?

Answer 31

Power, implied in hegemonial discourse, determines how people understand their self, the world and their interests

Question 32

What do Althusser and Gramsci say on this face of power?

Answer 32

Althusser emphasises the constraining effect. However, Gramsci recognises the constraining effect as well as the potential of enabling through promoting counter-hegemonial discourses. It is a way out of capitalist society.

Question 33

what is the context to the Miliband-Poulantzas debate?

Answer 33

After many years of Labour, question why there wasn’t evidence of a real change in society and politics in the UK

Question 34

What was Miliband’s position?

Answer 34

That capital is able to dominate through controlling both economic and political power
State is not an institution but an assemble of institutions each with their own kind of power. This includes executive (legal authorities), civil service (administrative power), representative bodies, police and armed forces (violence), sub-national government
Elite members have leading positions in several of these institutions (like interlocking directorates). These people may use the state as an instrument (like the welfare state) and are recruited and have been socialised into the same class as members of the economic elite
Both claims are carefully empirically substantiated.
Takes both an instrumentalist (Marx) and elitist position

Question 35

How does Poulantzas criticise Miliband?

Answer 35

Says it means you have to return to the instrumentalist view and means there is no conceptualisation of elite power.
Emphasises voluntarism in that merely a bourgeois-pluralist notion of the state as contingent outcome of group struggle… neglecting how class structure shapes both the state and civil society and hence struggle

Question 36

what is Poulantzas theory of the state?

Answer 36

That the state is a structure, an institutional ensemble of rules, relations, actors, resources etc
Its form is oriented towards serving long term political and economic reproduction through organising the capitalist class (through its arbiter task, serving the interest of the capitalist class as a whole, realising favourable conditions for production) and fragmenting labourer’s class through oppression and consent (individualisation, law, nation, division between mind and hand labour)
The state’s form reflects social relations, through its objective function amongst those forces.
Simultaneously, the state shapes the interaction between these forces and (changes in) the balance of power therein. So social forces are structured by the state to reproduce the state capacity to reproduce social relations. More structuralist position

Question 37

What does Offer say about classical marxism?

Answer 37

In the context of the German debate on welfare state around 1980, declining under the influence of emerging neo-liberalism
Rejects classical Marxist points including its derivationalism (determinism), essentialism, smashing of the state by Lenin, ‘the’ capitalist society and the withering away of the state

Question 38

What does Offe say about the state?

Answer 38

Says it is the institutional form which seeks to implement and guarantee the collective interests of all members of a class society organised by capital
Operations of the state are guided by its self-adopted principle that it is excluded from organising the economy/taking investment decisions, constraints due to its independence on capital accumulation and the state’s task to achieve democratic legitimisation.
Therefore the state must manage crises regarding all three demands

Question 39

What did neo-Marxism look like in the 1970s and what did Jessop suggest?

Answer 39

It was instrumentalist. Elitist found little support because it was too voluntaristic and there was too much attention to free will, structural constraints
To avoid voluntarism, the most important ‘arbiter’ adherents switch back and forth between arbiter model and functionalism, with strong structuralist inclination
Jessop brings agency back in to overcome the shortcomings of both models

Question 40

What conclusions does Jessop share with Poulantzas?

Answer 40

That the state is an institutional assemblage… a relationship of forces, the condensation of the relationships among classes and class factions

Boundaries, form and unity of the state not defined ex ante but shapes by social dynamics

Question 41

What does Jessop add to Poulantzas explanation?

Answer 41

Goes beyond economic determinism
Says that capitalist economy is embedded in other domains meaning that as actors in the economy monitor opportunities for profit, the economy responds to change in lifestyles meaning commodification of leisure etc. Simultaneously, there is a dependence on natural resource development.
Thus relations between actors, institutional orders, organisations of other domains develop

Question 42

What is the mode of regulation according to Jessop?

Answer 42

It is a set of ‘rules and procedures, of norms, institutions, procedures, and modes of calculation through which the accumulation regime is secured. It comprises all of the institutional forms and norms which secure the compatibility of typical modes of economic conduct’
It comprises economic institutions like monetary arrangements, aspects of the state, culture, and mechanisms for initial socialisation (sex and gender relations, family forms etc)

Question 43

How do Jessop and Poulantzas compare in their ideas of the state, power relations, mode of regulation etc?

Answer 43

Both say the state does not merely passively reflect social power relations, but shapes their development selectivities

But Poulantzas emphasises structural selectivity which directly reflects the balance of forces which determine how capital is being secured, shaping the balance of forces to the interest of capital. Whereas Jessop emphasises strategic selectivities

Question 44

What are strategic selectivities?

Answer 44

Jessop says state officials respond by adapting their mode of regulation to changes in balance of forces in different spheres (commodification of lifestyles, superior economic globalisation overrules cultural diversity etc). an they do so strategically. Relations are thus shaped, over time, as strategically rather than structurally selective

Question 45

What was the situation of natural gas extra in Bolivia?

Answer 45

Natural gas extraction is an important activity because it is a pillar of the national economy and because it might yield socio-ecological damage. Given the places where it is being extracted, damage especially felt by indigenous populations. Concerns are taken up by Evo Morales and MAS party since 2006 however, extraction still increased

Question 46

What are the questions to ask here?

Answer 46

How come ambitious programme has such a disappointing outcome?
How were changes in governance in Bolivia related to broader shifts in the state and changes in society? [NB: inquires into ‘social forces’ / structure]
Why and how were progressive changes in governance limited, despite the potentially radical character of the political project that accompanied the election of Evo Morales? [passive revolution

Question 47

So, how were changes in governance in Bolivia related to broader shifts in the state and changes in society?

Answer 47

(1) Shifts in the balance of power among competing social actors and political forces
Initially: neoliberal hegemony, i.e. market co-ordination also prevailed in other domains than market
Indigenous population better organized, territorial say and autonomy key issues =>
Indigenous groups reframed gas extraction into an issue of indigenous social and environmental rights => successful counter-hegemony, leading to shift in power between social forces with more attention to for social and ecological consequences [Gramsci]
May 2005: Inclusion of indigenous rights in hydrocarbon Law > symbol of counterhegemony
December 2005: Morales elected
Symbol of counterhegemonic victory

Question 48

So, Why and how were progressive changes in governance limited, despite the potentially radical character of the political project that accompanied the election of Evo Morales?

Answer 48

Hydrocarbon Law: limited implementation and reversal of laws that sought to improve outcomes of extraction:
Consultation and Participation’ bylaw
not carried out in good faith
Corruption by state and firm reps
Focused on monetary compensation, detached from self-determination
Socio-Environmental Monitoring’ bylaw
Not implemented: firms did not pay, govt did not empower indigenous people
Indigenous Development Fund’ bylaw
Money went to rural unions, close to ruling party, and part of indigenous leadership

See changes in social relations:
gov’t policies did not promote self-determination; more collaboration gov’t with campesino bloc; indigenous (counterhegemonial) forces marginalized
Co-optation of campesinos
Major victory Morales, 2016

Question 49

What were the eventual outcomes?

Answer 49

‘neo-liberal nationalization’, i.e. nationalisation without expropriation
Renegotiated exploitation contracts => more state revenues for its policies
Yet: more export => more profits
Re-constitution the state-owned company limited success
In sum:
dominance of transnational companies remained unchallenged
Expansion of extraction => pressures on indigenous territories

State got more revenue for the policies, more capital went out of the country still
Expansion of extraction continued with pressures as well

Question 50

So in the case of Bolivia, how did a passive revolution occur?

Answer 50

Initial changes in legislation, intended to improve outcome of extraction, were followed by reversals
Due to shifting power relations between gov’t, social movements and hydrocarbon industry

This reflects how changes in governance (i.c. after first election) are shaped by
ingrained strategic selectivities: more relations with firms and unions than with indigenous people
Cp Jessop
struggle between social forces: co-optation of indigenous leadership plus unions; dependence of state on revenues
Cp Gramsci