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DOI: 10.1177/0309816801075001072001 25: 83Capital & Class

Bob JessopState theory, regulation, and autopoiesis: debates and controversies

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83State theory, regulation, and autopoiesis

This contribution briefly reviews the role of various

debates in Capital & Class and its predecessor, the

Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists, in

the development of my own work over the last years.

These debates concern Marxist state theory; Fordism

and post-Fordism; the regulation approach; the

relevance of autopoiesis to Marxist analysis; and, most

recently, critical realism. Other issues and problems

have also influenced my work, of course, but several

important theoretical turns have been prompted by

challenges raised by CSE members.

L claimed there were three major sources

of Marxism: German philosophy, English economics,

and French politics. Althusser added that Marxs

ability to synthesize them derived from his commitment to

proletarian revolution. My work takes Marxs critique of

political economy as a primary reference point and is

therefore imprinted by its three sources too. But it also has

its own secondary set of sources. These can be described,

only half-jokingly, as German politics, French economics,

and Chilean biology. This is certainly how they have been

(mis)perceived by some critics in Capital & Class. Moreover,

alongside the various intellectual issues that drew me to these

State theory, regulation, andautopoiesis: debates andcontroversies

Bob Jessop


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Capital & Class #7584

particular sources, I also used them to address the

peculiarities of postwar Britain. For much of my work over

years has been driven by the attempt to understand issues

such as Britains flawed Fordism, its Keynesian welfare

national state, Thatcherism, and New Labour (for a first

attempt to address most of these issues, see Jessop ).

The influence of German politics began indirectly in

the mid-s through the Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist

Economists and the seminars on state theory, in which

John Holloway and Sol Picciotto introduced the German

state debate to anglophone comrades. From , I also

pursued this source more directly through German-language

texts and contacts with German theorists. Their influence is

clear in my work on the changing forms and functions of

the capitalist state but it co-existed with the influence of

Gramsci and Poulantzas (Jessop , ). It was Poulan-

tzass influence that prompted some critics to attack my

work for its politicism. This allegedly accords primacy to

the state without grounding politics in the capital relation

and/or the unceasing class struggles around that relation.

Politicism is said to derive from the reification of the various

fetishised institutional forms of capitalism and to lead to

voluntarism in theory and practice. Simon Clarke ()

argued that the Poulantzasian interest in the relative power

of different fractions of capital in the power bloc tended

towards instrumentalism and voluntarism and ignored the

underlying objective, contradictory dynamic of capital

accumulation. Werner Bonefeld () and John Holloway

() also criticised treatments of the state as an institutional

ensemble that is (relatively) autonomous. In particular they

claimed theories of relative autonomy neglected the deter-

mining role of the capital relation and failed to see that the

economic and political actually comprise a dialectical

separation-in-unity rather than two distinct institutional

spheres.

These were important challenges and, whilst not wholly

convinced, I did wonder how to analyse the economy

consistently with my strategic-relational approach to the

state. Initially my ideas developed through reading debates

on the value form and re-reading Gramscis work on

Americanism and Fordism. This led to my account of

accumulation strategies as means of imposing substantive

unity on different forms of value (Jessop ). At the time I

thought these reflections could offer a neo-Gramscian


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analysis of the economy corresponding to the insight that

the state is a social relation. With hindsight, these reflections

were also politicist, however, because they focused on the

national states role in formulating accumulation strategies

and ignored other political scales as well as the role of firms,

fractions of capital, and other economic, political, and social

forces. These problems have been addressed in more recent

work (see below).

I first formulated these ideas by developing analogies

between Gramscis account of lo stato integrale (the integral

state) and leconomia integrale(the integral economy). Thus,

if Gramsci defined the state in its inclusive sense as political

society + civil society and saw state power in western

societies as based on hegemony armoured by coercion, a

regulationist account might interpret the economy in its

inclusive sense as comprising an accumulation regime +

social mode of economic regulation and capital

accumulation as involving the self-valorization of capital

in and through regulation. Shortly after formulating these

neo-Gramscian ideas, I became interested in French

economics in the guise of the Parisian regulation school.

This is reflected in my work on the crisis of Atlantic Fordism

and the transition to post-Fordism and the possibilities of

delineating a post-Fordist form of state analogous to the

Keynesian welfare national state. Michel de Vroey, who

provided the first extended overview of this school in Capital

& Class(),1 reinforced this interest in French economics

when he invited me to join the organizing committee of the

International Conference on Regulation (). More

generally my work on regulation has evolved in dialogue

not only with French economics but also with some West

German state theorists whose work on the changing forms

and functions of the state has also been informed by the

regulation approach. This engagement with the German

debate once again provoked the wrath of Holloway and

Bonefeld, this time for its alleged reformist reformulation

of Marxist state theory and for naturalizing rather than

resisting the transition to post-Fordism (Bonefeld a;

Holloway ).

Whilst working on regulation I continued to reflect on

the relative autonomy of the state and the question of

politicism and began to consider the apparently autonomous

logic of market forces. This posed interesting issues about

how the economic and political orders come to be


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structurally coupled to produce an historic bloc (Gramscis

term for the mutually reinforcing correspondence of

economic base and politico-ideological superstructure) as

well as about the conditions, if any, under which they can be

coordinated strategically by a power bloc. As I was attempting

to combine German politics and French economics I came

across Chilean biology, if not directly, at least by way of

German social theorists, especially Niklas Luhmann,

Gunther Teubner, and Helmut Willke. From them I took

the concept of autopoiesis or self-production. Transposed

(some would say illegitimately) from cell biology to

sociology, autopoietic theory suggests that major societal

sub-systems (such as law, politics, the economy, and science)

can be studied as self-referential, self-reproducing, and self-

regulating. Such systems constitute their own boundaries,

re-create the conditions for their internal operations, and

develop according to their own operational logic rather than

obeying an external logic. Drawing on these ideas suggests

that historic blocs could be understood in terms of the path-

dependent structural coupling of two operationallyautonomous

but substantivelyinterdependentsubsystems, the path-shaping

efforts of economic and political forces to influence (or

govern) the nature and direction of this co-evolution, and

the ecological dominance of the market-mediated, self-

valorising capitalist economy.2 Needless to say, this flirtation

with Luhmannian theory incurred the ire of open marxists,

most notably in Werner Bonefelds critique of the eclecticism

and conservatism involved in critical realism, Luhmannian

theory, and work on Fordism and post-Fordism (b,

). As my colleague, Colin Hay () wrote an effective

counter-critique, I decided not to reply directly. Instead I

chose to respond indirectly in my later work.

Thus, during the last years, my theoretical work has

developed in three main directions. First, further rounds of

theoretical and empirical work have led me back to the value

form to reground regulationism in Marxs critique of

political economy. This is my latest attempt to develop state

theory in response to the problem of politicism and, in

particular, to reintegrate the analysis of economics and

politics without conflating them or subsuming them under

a generic logic of accumulation (see below). Second, I have

become more interested in problems of scale in analyzing

the changing economic and political dynamic of capitalism

especially in the dialectic of globalization-regionalization


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and the future of the national state in an era of globalizing

capitalism. This is reflected in work on cross-border regions,

urban politics, the entrepreneurial city, globalization, and

the post-national state (see Jessop , a, b, a,

b). This attempts to redress the national focus of my

previous work on accumulation strategies and to address

the rescaling of economics and politics. Third, I have explored

the changing forms and modalities of state intervention in

reproducing the economic and extra-economic conditions

for accumulationespecially the shift from imperative

coordination to public-private partnership, networking, and

other forms of self-organization and self-regulation. This is

reflected in work on the emerging significance and limitations

of governance (self-organization) and the enhanced role of

states (on different scales) in meta-governance, i.e.,

organizing the conditions for self-organization. This work

is a further development of concerns with autopoiesis applied

on an institutional level to the complexities of the globalizing

economy (Jessop b, b, c,b).

Given the limited space available here, I concentrate on

the first set of developments. Marx identified a fundamental

contradiction in the commodity form between exchange-

and use-value. On this basis he unfolded the complex nature

of the capitalist mode of production and its dynamic; and

showed both the necessity of periodic crises and their role

in re-integrating the circuit of capital as a basis for renewed

expansion. In turn I have suggested that all forms of the

capital relation embody different but interconnected versions

of this contradiction and that they impact differentially on

(different fractions of) capital and (different strata of) labour

at different times and places. These contradictions are

reproduced along with capitalism but do not keep the same

weight or significance. In addition, the reproduction of these

contradictions with their contradictory effects and their

impact on the historical tendency of capitalist development

depends on the class struggle (Poulantzas , -, italics

in original). This is the vector that realizes contradictions

and dilemmas in specific conjunctures. Indeed, as Holloway

argues, there is no distinction to be made between contradiction

and struggle: all social contradictions are relations of struggle,

and therefore undetermined, uncertain, wide open (a:

).

Drawing on these arguments, I have argued that

capitalism needs regulating because of the indeterminate


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but antagonistic nature of the capital relation. This has three

key aspects: (a) the constitutive incompleteness of the capital

relation such that its reproduction depends, in an unstable

and contradictory way, on changing extra-economic

conditions; (b) the various structural contradictions and

strategic dilemmas inherent in the capital relation and their

forms of appearance in different accumulation regimes,

modes of regulation, and conjunctures; and (c) conflicts over

the regularization and/or governance of these contradictions

and dilemmas as they are expressed both in the circuit of

capital and the wider social formation. The first point refers

to the inherent incapacity of capitalism to reproduce itself

wholly through the value form. For accumulation depends

on an unstable balance between three moments: the extension

of commodity relations, the reproduction-regulation of

fictitious commodities (notably land, labour power, money,

and knowledge), and the maintenance of capitals key extra-

economic supports. This rules out the eventual com-

modification of everything and poses major problems of the

regularization of the capital relation. This is reflected in

cycles of commodification, de-commodification, and re-com-

modification as the struggle to extend the exchange-value

moments of the capital relation encounters real structural

limits and/or increasing resistance and seeks new ways to

overcome them. It is also reflected in less frequent but more

radical crises of specific accumulation regimes and their

spatio-temporal fixes emerge in and through social struggles

over the basic forms of the capital relation.

Second, the various structural contradictions and strategic

dilemmas inherent in the capital relation all express the basic

contradiction between exchange- and use-value. For example,

productive capital is both abstract value in motion (notably

in the form of realized profits available for re-investment)

and a concrete stock of time- and place-specific assets in the

course of being valorized; the worker is both an abstract

unit of labour-power substitutable by other such units (or,

indeed, other factors of production) and a concrete individual

with specific skills, knowledge, and creativity; the wage is

both a cost of production and a source of demand; money

functions both as an international currency exchangeable

against other currencies (ideally in stateless space) and as

national3 money circulating within national societies and

subject to state control; land functions both as a form of

property (based on the private appropriation of nature)


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deployed in terms of expected rents and as a natural resource

(modified by past actions) that is more or less renewable

and recyclable; knowledge is both a source of profit in the

form of intellectual property rights and a collectively

produced intellectual commons. Likewise, the state is responsible

for certain key conditions for the valorization of capital and

the social reproduction of labour power and also has overall

political responsibility for maintaining social cohesion in a

class-divided social formation.

Such contradictions and dilemmas can assume different

forms and primacies. They often find expression in different

agents, institutions, and systems as the prime bearers of one

or other of their aspects. They can also prove more or less

manageable depending on the specific spatio-temporal fixes

and institutionalized class compromises with which they

may be linked. However, insofar as these compromises

marginalize forces that act as bearers of functions or

operations essential to long-run accumulation, the emergence

of significant imbalances, disproportionalities, or disunity

in the circuit of capital will tend to strengthen these

marginalized forces and enable them to disrupt the

institutionalized compromises associated with a particular

accumulation regime, mode of regulation, state form, and

spatio-temporal fix (Clarke ). Such crises typically act

as a steering mechanism for the always provisional, partial,

and unstable re-equilibration of capital accumulation.

Third, modes of regulation and governance vary widely.

This follows from the constitutive incompleteness of the

capital relation and the variety of accumulation regimes and

modes of regulation. There are different ways to seek to

close the circuit of capital and compensate for its lack of

closure. Which of these comes to dominate depends on the

specific social and spatio-temporal frameworks within which

these attempts occur. Indeed, notwithstanding the tendency

for capital accumulation to produce a single world market,

there are important counter-tendencies and other limits to

globalization. Specific accumulation regimes and modes of

regulation are typically constructed in specific social spaces

and spatio-temporal matrices. This justifies work on

comparative capitalisms and their embedding in specific

institutional and spatio-temporal complexes; it also justifies

exploration of the path-dependent linkages between

different economic trajectories and broader social

developments.


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Conclusions

Early debatesin Capital & Classhave continued to shape my

work for almost years in four main ways: they introduced

me to state theory, they posed the issue of politicism, they

challenged me to justify my flirtation with theories of

autopoiesis, and they have prompted me to justify the critical

realist approach that informs my analyses (on the last of

these issues, see Jessop c). The biggest challenge has

been to respond to the charge of politicism and, in this regard,

my Capital & Class critics have been constant critical

members of my imagined intellectual community as I have

developed my work. I have obviously continued to disagree

with many of their criticisms but I have not ignored them.

Without such criticisms I doubt that I would have arrived at

my current interpretations of: (a) the states role in regulari-

zing the conditions for accumulation through providing an

improbable, provisional, and unstable spatio-temporal fix

for specific accumulation regimes; (b) the many different

contradictions in the capital relation that are reproduced

and inflected in specific ways and with specific weights through

class struggle and institutionalized in specific accumulation

regimes and modes of regulation; or (c) the ecological

dominance of the capital relation as a way to rethink the

problem of economic determination in the last instance.

These current interpretations have also involved debates and

discussions in other contexts too (most notably with Stuart

Hall on the nature of Thatcherism in New Left Review and,

indirectly, with Laclau and Mouffes post-Marxist discourse

analysis). They also depend on several other theoretical

turnsincluding an institutional turn, a narrative turn, a

governance turn, and a scalar turn. But, in the spirit of an

open Marxism that I understood rather differently from my

critics, an often subterranean influence has continued.

Notes

1. De Vroey is not himself a Parisian regulationist but a Flemish

institutional economist.

2. Ecological dominance refers to the capacity of a given system in a self-

organising ecology of self-organising systems to imprint its

developmental logic on other systems operations through structural

coupling, strategic co-ordination, and blind co-evolution to a greater


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extent than the latter can impose their respective logics on that system.

I argue that the self-valorization of capital makes the capitalist economy

ecologically dominant in contemporary societies and that neo-liberal

globalization reinforces this tendency (Jessop 2000a).

3. Plurinational monetary blocs organized by states could also be

included here.

References

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33, pp.96-127.

_______ (1993a) Some Notes on the Theory of the Capitalist State,

Capital & Class, 49, pp.113-21.

_______ (1993b) Crisis of Theory: Bob Jessops Theory of Capitalist

Reproduction, Capital & Class, 50, pp.25-48.

_______ (1994) Aglietta in England: Bob Jessops Contribution to

the Regulation Approach,Futur antrieur, special issue, pp.299-

330.

Clarke, S. (1977) Marxism, Sociology, and Poulantzass Theory of the

State, Capital & Class, 2, pp.1-31.

_______ (1988) Overaccumulation, Class Struggle and the

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Documents

Capital & Class 2001 Jessop 83 92