The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology

Part I

Approaches to Power and Politics

Chapter 1

Marxist Approaches to Power

Bob Jessop

Marxist approaches to power focus on its relation to class domination in capitalist societies. Power is linked to class relations in economics, politics and ideology. In capitalist social formations, the state is considered to be particularly important in securing the conditions for economic class domination. Marxists are also interested in why dominated classes seem to accept (or fail to recognize) their oppression; so they address issues of resistance and strategies to bring about radical change. Much recent Marxist analysis also aims to show how class power is dispersed throughout society, in order to avoid economic reductionism. This chapter summarizes the main trends in contemporary Marxism and identifies some significant spatio-temporal aspects of class domination. It also assesses briefly the disadvantages of Marxism as a sociological analysis of power. These include its neglect of forms of social domination that are not directly related to class; a tendency to overemphasize the coherence of class domination; the continuing problem of economic reductionism; and the opposite danger of a voluntaristic account of resistance to capitalism.

Marxists have analyzed power relations in many different ways. But four interrelated themes typify their overall approach. The first of these is a concern with power relations as manifestations of a specific mode or configuration of class domination rather than as a purely interpersonal phenomenon lacking deeper foundations in the social structure. This focus on class domination does not imply that power and resistance are the preserve of social actors with clear class identities and class interests. It means only that Marxists are mainly interested in the causal interconnections between the exercise of social power and the reproduction and/or transformation of class domination. Indeed, Marxists are usually well aware of other types of subject, identity, antagonism and domination. But they consider these phenomena largely in terms of their relevance for, and their overdetermination by, class domination. Second, Marxists are concerned with the links – including discontinuities as well as continuities – among economic, political and ideological class domination. Despite or, perhaps, because of the obvious centrality of this issue to Marxist analysis, it continues to prompt widespread theoretical and empirical disagreements. Different Marxist approaches locate the bases of class power primarily in the social relations of production, in control over the state, or in intellectual hegemony over hearts and minds. I will deal with these options below. Third, Marxists note the limitations inherent in any exercise of power that is rooted in one or another form of class domination and try to explain this in terms of structural contradictions and antagonisms inscribed therein. Thus Marxists tend to assume that all forms of social power linked to class domination are inherently fragile, unstable, provisional and temporary and that continuing struggles are needed to secure class domination, to overcome resistance and to naturalize or mystify class power. It follows, fourth, that Marxists also address questions of strategy and tactics. They provide empirical analyses of actual strategies intended to reproduce, resist or overthrow class domination in specific periods and conjunctures; and they often engage in political debates about the most appropriate identities, interests, strategies and tactics for dominated classes and other oppressed groups to adopt in particular periods and conjunctures to challenge their subordination. An important aspect of strategic analysis and calculation is sensitivity to the spatio-temporal dimensions of strategy and this is reflected in growing theoretical interest in questions of temporality and socio-spatiality.

Power as a Social Relation

Marxists are interested in the first instance in power as capacities rather than power as the actualization of such capacities. They see these capacities as socially structured rather than as socially amorphous (or random). Thus Marxists focus on capacities grounded in structured social relations rather than in the properties of individual agents considered in isolation. Moreover, as these structured social relations entail enduring relations, there are reciprocal, if often asymmetrical, capacities and vulnerabilities. A common paradigm here is Hegel's master–slave dialectic – in which the master depends on the slave and the slave on the master. Marx's equivalent paradigm case is the material interdependence of capital and labour. At stake in both cases are enduring relations of reproduced, reciprocal practices rather than one-off, unilateral impositions of will. This has the interesting implication that power is also involved in securing the continuity of social relations rather than producing radical change. Thus, as Isaac notes, ‘[r]ather than A getting B to do something B would not otherwise do, social relations of power typically involve both A and B doing what they ordinarily do’ (1987: 96). The capitalist wage relation illustrates this well. For, in voluntarily selling their labour-power for a wage, workers transfer its control to the capitalist along with the right to any surplus. A formally free exchange thereby becomes the basis of workplace despotism and economic exploitation. Conversely, working-class resistance in labour markets and the labour process indicate that the successful exercise of power is a conjunctural phenomenon rather than being guaranteed by unequal social relations of production. Thus Marxists regard the actualization of capacities to exercise power and its effects, if any, as always and everywhere contingent on specific actions by specific agents in specific circumstances. It follows that there can be no such thing as power in general or general power – only particular powers and the sum of particular exercises of power.

General Remarks on Class Domination

Marxism differs from other analyses of power because of its primary interest in class domination. In contrast, for example, Weberian analyses give equal analytical weight to other forms of domination (status, party); or, again, radical feminists prioritize patriarchy, its forms and effects. But its distinctive interest in class domination is not limited to economic class domination in the labour process (although this is important) nor even to the economic bases of class domination in the wider economy (such as control over the allocation of capital to alternative productive activities). For Marxists see class powers as dispersed throughout society and therefore also investigate political and ideological class domination. However, whereas some Marxists believe political and/or ideological domination derive more or less directly from economic domination, others emphasize the complexity of relations among these three sites or modes of class domination.

Even Marxists who stress the economic bases of class domination also acknowledge that politics is primary in practice. For it is only through political revolution that existing patterns of class domination will be overthrown. Other Marxists prioritize the political over the economic not just (if at all) in terms of revolutionary struggles but also in terms of its role in the routine reproduction of class domination. This makes the state central to Marxist analyses not only in regard to political power in narrow terms but also to class power more generally. For the state is seen as responsible for maintaining the overall structural integration and social cohesion of a ‘society divided into classes’ – a structural integration and social cohesion without which capitalism's contradictions and antagonisms might cause revolutionary crises or even, in the telling phrase of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, lead to ‘the mutual ruin of the contending classes’.

Economic Class Domination

Marxism is premised on the existence for much of human history of antagonistic modes of production. Production involves the material appropriation and transformation of nature. A mode of production comprises in turn a specific combination of the forces of production and social relations of production. The productive forces comprise raw materials, means of production, the technical division of labour corresponding to these raw materials and the given means of production, and the relations of interdependence and cooperation among the direct producers in setting the means of production to work. The social relations of production comprise social control over the allocation of resources to different productive activities and over the appropriation of any resulting surplus; the social division of labour (or the allocation of workers to different activities across different units of production); and class relations grounded in property relations, ownership of the means of production, and the form of economic exploitation. Some Marxists highlight the role of productive forces in producing social change but the majority view (and current wisdom) is that the social relations of production are primary. Indeed, it is these social relations that shape the choice among available productive forces and how they get deployed in production.

Given the primacy of the relations of production in economic class domination, some Marxists emphasize the power relations rooted in organization of the labour process. This is considered the primary site of the antagonism between capitalists and workers and is the crucial site for securing the valorization of capital through direct control over power-power. Various forms of control are identified (e.g., bureaucratic, technical, and despotic), each with its own implications for forms of class struggle and the distribution of power between capital and labour. Other Marxists study the overall organization of the production process and its articulation to other aspects of the circuit of capital. Thus emphasis is placed on the relative importance of industrial or financial capital, monopoly capital or small and medium enterprises, multinational or national firms, firms interested in domestic growth or exports. Different modes of economic growth are associated with different patterns of power. Atlantic Fordism, for example, based on a virtuous circle of mass production and mass consumption in relatively closed economies, was compatible for a time with an institutionalized compromise between industrial capital and organized labour. This supported the Keynesian welfare national state with its distinctive forms of economic, social and political redistribution. But increasing globalization (or world market integration) combined with capital's attempts to increase labour market flexibility have undermined these conditions and encouraged an assault on this compromise. This is clearest in those economies that underwent neoliberal regime shifts, such as the United States and United Kingdom, associated respectively with Reaganism (sustained under Clinton's Third Way and the George W. Bush administration) and Thatcherism (sustained by New Labour's ‘modernization’ project). This contributed to a decline in labour's share in income and wealth, to the growing divorce of financial from industrial capital, to the hyper-financialization of everyday life and, in 2007–2009, to the global financial crisis, which has had its own impact on patterns of class domination.

Political Class Domination

Marxist accounts of political class domination typically begin with the state and its direct and indirect roles in securing the conditions for economic class domination. The state is emphasized for various reasons: first, since market forces themselves cannot secure all the conditions needed for capital accumulation and are prone to market failure, there is a need for some mechanism standing outside and above the market to underwrite it and compensate for its failures; second, economic and political competition between capitals necessitates a force able to organize their collective interests and limit any damage that might occur from the one-sided pursuit of one set of capitalist interests; third, the state is needed to manage the many and varied repercussions of economic exploitation within the wider society. Marxists argue that only if the state can secure sufficient institutional integration and social cohesion will the extra-economic conditions for rational economic calculation and, a fortiori, capital accumulation be secured. This requires a sovereign state that is relatively autonomous from particular class interests and can articulate and promote a broader, national-popular interest. Where this project respects the decisive economic nucleus of the society and its capitalist character, then the state helps to secure economic as well as political class domination. This is often held to be more likely in bourgeois democratic political regimes than dictatorial regimes (see Moore 1957; Barrow 1993; Gramsci 1971; Offe 1984; Poulantzas 1978; and Jessop 1990).

There are three main Marxist approaches to the state: instrumentalist, structuralist and ‘strategic-relational’. Instrumentalists see the state mainly as a neutral tool for exercising political power: whichever class controls this tool can use it to advance its own interests. Structuralists argue that who controls the state is irrelevant because it embodies a prior bias towards capital and against the subaltern classes. And strategic-relational theorists argue that state power is a form-determined condensation of the balance of class forces in struggle. I now illustrate these three views for the capitalist state. Different examples would be required for states associated with other modes of production.

Instrumentalists regard the contemporary state as a state in capitalist society. Ralph Miliband expresses this view in writing that ‘the ‘ruling class' of capitalist society is that class which owns and controls the means of production and which is able, by virtue of the economic power thus conferred upon it, to use the state as an instrument for the domination of society' (1969: 22). More generally, theorists of the ‘state in capitalist society' stress the contingency of state–economy relations. For, despite the dominance of capitalist relations of production in such a society, the state itself has no inherently capitalist form and performs no necessarily capitalist functions. Any functions it does perform for capital occur because pro-capitalist forces happen to control the state and/or because securing social order also happens to secure key conditions for rational economic calculation. If the same state apparatus were found in another kind of system, however, it might well be controlled by other forces and perform different functions.

Structuralists regard the state as a capitalist state because it has an inherently capitalist form and therefore functions on behalf of capital. But what makes a state form capitalist and what guarantees its functionality for capital? Structuralists argue that the very structure of the modern state means that it organizes capital and disorganizes the working class. Claus Offe (1984) developed this view as follows. The state's exclusion from direct control over the means of production (which are held in private hands) makes its revenues depend on a healthy private sector; thus, to secure its own reproduction as a state apparatus, it must ensure the profitability of capital. Subordinate classes can secure material concessions only within this constraint – if profitability is threatened, such concessions must be rolled back. Yet capital cannot press its economic advantages too far without undermining the political legitimacy of the state. For, in contrast to earlier forms of political class domination, the economically dominant class enjoys no formal monopoly of political power. Instead the typical form of bourgeois state is a constitutional state and, later, a national-popular democratic state. This requires respect for the rule of law and the views of its citizens.

The strategic-relational approach was initially proposed by a Greek communist theorist, Nicos Poulantzas, and has subsequently been elaborated by the British state theorist, Bob Jessop. Building on Marx's insight that capital is not a thing but a social relation, Poulantzas argued in his later work that the state is also a social relation. Marx showed how continued reproduction of the material and institutional forms of the capital relation shaped the dynamic of capital accumulation and the economic class struggle – but the dominance of these forms could not in and of itself guarantee capital accumulation. This depended on capital's success in maintaining its domination over the working class in production, politics and the wider society. Likewise, Poulantzas saw the modern form of state as having certain inbuilt biases but argued that these were insufficient in themselves to ensure capitalist rule. Indeed they even served to reproduce class conflict and contradictions within the state itself so that the impact of state power depended heavily on the changing balance of forces and the strategies and tactics pursued by class and non-class forces alike (Poulantzas 1978).

The suggestion that the state is a social relation is important theoretically and politically. Seen as an institutional ensemble or repository of political capacities and resources, the state is by no means class-neutral. It is inevitably class-biased by virtue of the structural selectivity that makes state institutions, capacities and resources more accessible to some political forces and more tractable for some purposes than others. This bias is rooted in the generic form of the capitalist state but varies with its particular institutional matrix. Likewise, since it is not a subject, the capitalist state does not and, indeed, cannot, exercise power. Instead its powers (in the plural) are activated through changing sets of politicians and state officials located in specific parts of the state apparatus in specific conjunctures. If an overall strategic line is ever discernible in the exercise of these powers, it results from strategic coordination enabled by the selectivity of the state system and the organizational role of parallel power networks that cross-cut and unify its formal structures. This is, however, an improbable achievement. For the state system is necessarily shot through with contradictions and class struggles and the political agents operating within it always meet resistances from specific forces beyond the state, which are engaged in struggles to transform it, to determine its policies, or simply to influence it at a distance. It follows that political class struggle never ends. Only through its continual renewal can a capitalist power bloc keep its relative unity in the face of rivalry and fractionalism and maintain its hegemony (or, at least, its dominance) over subaltern groups. And only by disrupting the state's strategic selectivity through mass struggle at a distance from the state, within the state, and to transform the state could a democratic transition to democratic socialism be achieved.

Ideological Class Domination

Ideology (1845–1846) stated that ‘the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class' and related this to the latter's control over the means of intellectual production. Their own work developed a number of perspectives on ideological class domination – ranging from the mystifying impact of commodity fetishism, through the individualist attitudes generated by political forms such as citizenship, to the struggles for hearts and minds in civil society. Marxist interest in the forms and modalities of ideological class domination intensified with the rise of democratic government and mass politics in the late nineteenth century and the increased importance of mass media and popular culture in the twentieth century. Various currents in so-called ‘Western Marxism' have addressed the mechanisms and effects of ideological class domination – especially whenever a radical socialist or communist revolution has failed to occur despite severe economic crisis or, indeed, during more general periods of working-class passivity. Successive generations of the Frankfurt School have been important here but many other approaches work on similar lines.

An inspirational figure in this area is Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist politically active in the interwar period until his incarceration by the fascist regime, when he wrote his celebrated prison notebooks. He developed a very distinctive approach to the analysis of class power. His chief concern was to develop an autonomous Marxist science of politics in capitalist societies, to distinguish different types of state and politics, and thereby to establish the most likely conditions under which revolutionary forces might eventually replace capitalism. He was particularly concerned with the specificities of the political situation and revolutionary prospects in the ‘West' (Western Europe, United States) as opposed to the ‘East' (i.e. Tsarist Russia) – believing that a Leninist vanguard party and a revolutionary coup d'état were inappropriate to the ‘West'.

Gramsci identified the state in its narrow sense with the politico-juridical apparatus, the constitutional and institutional features of government, its formal decision-making procedures and its general policies. In contrast, his studies focused more on the ways and means through which political, intellectual and moral leadership was mediated through a complex ensemble of institutions, organizations and forces operating within, oriented towards, or located at a distance from the state in its narrow sense. This approach is reflected in his controversial definition of the state as ‘political society + civil society' and his related claims that state power in Western capitalist societies rests on ‘hegemony armoured by coercion'. Gramsci also defined the state as: ‘the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules' (1971: 244). He argued that states were always based on variable combinations of force and hegemony. For Gramsci, force involves the use of a coercive apparatus to bring the mass of the people into conformity and compliance with the requirements of a specific mode of production. In contrast, hegemony involves the successful mobilization and reproduction of the ‘active consent' of dominated groups by the ruling class through the exercise of political, intellectual and moral leadership. Gramsci did not identify force exclusively with the state (e.g., he referred to private fascist terror squads) nor did he locate hegemony exclusively within civil society (since the state also has important ethico-political functions). Overall, he argued that the capitalist state should not be seen as a basically coercive apparatus but as an institutional ensemble based on a variable mix of coercion, consent, fraud and corruption. Moreover, rather than treating specific institutions and apparatuses as purely technical instruments of government, Gramsci examined their social bases and stressed how state power is shaped by its links to the economic system and civil society.

One of Gramsci's key arguments is the need in advanced capitalist democracies to engage in a long-term war of position in which subordinate class forces would develop a hegemonic ‘collective will' that creatively synthesizes a revolutionary project based on the everyday experiences and ‘common sense' of popular forces. Although some commentators interpret this stress on politico-ideological struggle to imply that a parliamentary road to socialism would be possible, Gramsci typically stressed the likelihood of an eventual war of manoeuvre with a military-political resolution. But this would be shorter, sharper, and less bloody if hegemony had first been won.

The Articulation of Economic, Political, and Ideological Domination

The relations among economic, political, and ideological domination can be considered in terms of the structurally inscribed selectivity of particular forms of domination and the strategies that help to consolidate (or undermine) these selectivities. The bias inscribed on the terrain of the state as a site of strategic action can only be understood as a bias relative to specific strategies pursued by specific forces to advance specific interests over a given time horizon in terms of a specific set of other forces each advancing their own interests through specific strategies. Particular forms of state privilege some strategies over others, privilege the access of some forces over others, some interests over others, some time horizons over others, some coalition possibilities over others. A given type of state, a given state form, a given form of regime, will be more accessible to some forces than others according to the strategies they adopt to gain state power. And it will be more suited to the pursuit of some types of economic or political strategy than others because of the modes of intervention and resources that characterize that system. All of this indicates the need to examine the differences among types of state (e.g., feudal vs. capitalist), state forms (e.g., absolutist, liberal, interventionist), modes of political representation (e.g., democratic vs. despotic), specific political regimes (e.g., bureaucratic authoritarian, fascist, military or parliamentary, presidential, mass plebiscitary, etc.), particular policy instruments (e.g., Keynesian demand management vs. neoliberal supply-side policies), and so on (see Jessop 1982, 1990).

Whereas Jessop, building on Poulantzas, tends to emphasize the structural moment of ‘strategic selectivity', Gramsci focused on its strategic moment. In particular, against the then prevailing orthodox Marxist view that the economic base unilaterally determined the juridico-political superstructure and prevailing forms of social consciousness, Gramsci argued that there was a reciprocal relationship between the economic ‘base' and its politico-ideological ‘superstructure'. He studied this in terms of how ‘the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure' is secured through specific intellectual, moral and political practices that translate narrow sectoral, professional or local interests into broader ‘ethico-political' ones. Only thus, he wrote, does the economic structure cease to be an external, constraining force and become a source of initiative and subjective freedom (1971: 366–367). This implies that ethico-political practices not only co-constitute economic structures (even where, as he noted, the state assumes a laissez-faire role, which is, itself, a form of state intervention) but also give them their overall rationale and legitimacy (e.g., through bourgeois notions of property rights, freedom of exchange and economic justice). Where such a reciprocal relationship exists between base and superstructure, Gramsci spoke of an ‘historical bloc'. He also introduced the concepts of power bloc and hegemonic bloc to analyze respectively the alliances among dominant classes and the broader ensemble of national-popular forces that were mobilized behind a specific hegemonic project. The concept of hegemonic bloc refers to the historical unity not of structures (as in the case of the historical bloc) but of social forces (which Gramsci analyzed in terms of the ruling classes, supporting classes, mass movements and intellectuals). Thus a hegemonic bloc is a durable alliance of class forces organized by a class (or class fraction) that has proved itself capable of exercising political, intellectual and moral leadership over the dominant classes and the popular masses alike. Gramsci notes a key organizational role here for ‘organic intellectuals', that is, persons or organizations that can develop hegemonic projects that give a ‘national-popular' expression to the long-term interests of the dominant or, alternatively, the subaltern classes. He also noted how relatively durable hegemony depended on a ‘decisive economic nucleus' and criticized efforts to build an ‘arbitrary, rationalistic, and willed' hegemony that ignored economic realities.

Spatio-Temporal Moments of Domination

Time and space are closely related and have both structural aspects (the differential temporalities and spatialities of particular institutional and organizational orders and their interrelations) and strategic aspects (such as specific temporal and spatial horizons of action, wars of position and manoeuvre, and efforts to compress and/or extend social relations in time and space). Thus a sound account of specific forms and patterns of domination must include their distinctive spatio-temporal features. This was already evident in Marx's analysis of capital accumulation: this rests on a distinctive political economy of time and also has inherent tendencies to spatial expansion. The inner determinations of capital accumulation entail specific ways of organizing time – reflected in the aphorism that ‘time is money'. Accordingly Marx developed an array of concepts to reveal the dialectical interplay of concrete and abstract aspects of time during capital accumulation. They include labour time, absolute surplus value, socially necessary labour time, relative surplus value, machine time, circulation time, turnover time, turnover cycle, socially necessary turnover time, interest-bearing capital and expanded reproduction (cf. Grossman 2007). He deploys them to show how the concrete temporalities of particular processes are connected to the constant rebasing of abstract labour time as the driving force behind the never-ending treadmill of competition from which neither capital nor workers can escape (Postone 1993). This driving force becomes ever more powerful as the world market becomes more closely integrated in real time through what is often called globalization but, from a Marxist viewpoint, is better described as changing forms of international economic and political domination. More generally, differential accumulation involves competition to reduce the socially necessary labour time embodied in commodities, the socially necessary turnover time of capital and, increasingly, the [naturally] necessary reproduction time of nature. These pressures exist alongside other forms of competition based on developing new products, new markets, new sources of supply, new organizational forms, new forms of dispossession and so on. Such pressures generate uneven geographical development, affect the spatial and scalar division of labour, and reorder the spatial aspects of economic domination. There is also a spatial dynamic to capital accumulation. This is reflected in its inherent tendencies to expand, culminating potentially in the formation of a world market but also prompting counter-movements against unbridled market forces. In short, the temporalities of accumulation are crucial aspects of the organization of economic domination and fundamentally affect political and socio-cultural relations, penetrating deeply into everyday life.

These spatio-temporal dynamics also influence forms of political domination. While the development of the world market and its associated space of flows challenge the state's territorial sovereignty, its temporal sovereignty is challenged by the acceleration of time. States increasingly face temporal pressures in their policy-making and implementation due to new forms of time-space distantiation, compression and differentiation. For example, as the temporal rhythms of the economy accelerate relative to those of the state, it has less time to determine and coordinate political responses to economic events, shocks and crises. This reinforces conflicts between the time(s) of the market and the time(s) of the state. One solution to the state's loss of time sovereignty is a laissez-faire response that frees up the movement of superfast and/or hypermobile capital – increasing, as we have recently seen, the chances of global crises generated by their unregulated activities.

There are two other options: states can try to compress their own decision-making cycles so that they can make more timely and appropriate interventions; and/or they can attempt to decelerate the activities of ‘fast capitalism' to match existing political routines.

A strategy of temporal compression increases pressures to make decisions on the basis of unreliable information, insufficient consultation, lack of participation etc., even as state managers continue to believe that policy is taking too long to negotiate, formulate, enact, adjudicate, determine, and implement. Indeed, the rhetoric of crisis can be invoked, whether justified or not, to create a climate for emergency measures and exceptional rule. This resort to ‘fast policy' is reflected in the shortening of policy development cycles, fast-tracking decision making, rapid programme rollout, continuing policy experimentation and the relentless revision of guidelines and benchmarks. This privileges those who can operate within compressed time scales, narrows the range of participants in the policy process, and limits the scope for deliberation, consultation and negotiation. A scholar inspired by the Frankfurt School, Bill Scheuerman, has summarized some of these trends in terms of a general shift to ‘economic states of emergency' characterized by executive dominance and constant legal change and dynamism (Scheuerman 2004).

Thus fast policy is antagonistic to corporatism, stakeholding, the rule of law, formal bureaucracy and, indeed, to the routines and cycles of democratic politics more generally. It privileges the executive over the legislature and the judiciary, finance over industrial capital, consumption over long-term investment. In general, resort to fast policy undermines the power of decision-makers who have long decision-taking cycles – because they lose the capacity to make decisions in terms of their own routines and procedures, having to adapt to the speed of fast thinkers and fast policy-makers. This can significantly affect the choice of policies, the initial targets of policy, the sites where policy is implemented and the criteria adopted to demonstrate success. This is especially evident in the recent global financial crisis, where pressure to act forced states to rescue banks that were deemed ‘too big to fail' and led to the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a small financial elite who had played a key role in creating the crisis in the first instance.

An alternative strategy is not to compress absolute political time but to create relative political time by slowing the circuits of capital. A well-known recommendation here is a modest tax on financial transactions (the so-called Tobin tax), which would decelerate the flow of superfast and hypermobile financial capital and limit its distorting impact on the real economy. Another important field of struggle is climate change. Here we see continuing conflicts between national states about the speed and nature of the response along with well-funded and vocal opposition from firms and sectors with vested interests in continued economic expansion that could cost the earth. In this sense, rather than being a purely general problem that affects all equally, there is a strong class aspect to the creation of the environmental crisis and to struggles over appropriate responses and the distribution of costs of adjustment (Burkett 1999).

Another issue raised by changing spatio-temporalities is the increasing complexity of economic, political and ideological relations as they develop in the context of a world market that lacks either a world state or effective global governance. This undermines state capacities to steer the economy, cope with its crisis tendencies and address its effects on inequalities in economic power and resources; but it also generates instability as enterprises exploit global market opportunities without regard to their environmental, political and social consequences. This is reflected in a shift from government to governance, the increased role of networks and partnerships, and resort to multi-level or, better, multi-spatial governance oriented to different spatio-temporal horizons and interactions. These are far from purely technical solutions to new challenges but have their own selectivities on the configuration of class power (Jessop 2002, 2007).

Conclusions

Marxist approaches to power and its exercise address the following themes: (1) power and class domination; (2) the mediations among economic, political and ideological class domination; (3) the limitations and contradictions of power that are grounded in the nature of capitalism as a system of social relations, including their spatio-temporal aspects; and (4) the role of strategy and tactics. These themes indicate the strengths and weaknesses of Marxism. First, in privileging class domination, it marginalizes other forms of social domination – patriarchal, ethnic, ‘racial', hegemonic masculinities, interstate, regional or territorial etc. At best these figure as factors that overdetermine the forms of class domination and/or change in response to changes in class relations. Second, Marxist analyses may exaggerate the structural coherence of class domination, neglecting its disjunctures, contradictions, countervailing tendencies etc. Notions of a unified ruling class belie the messiness of actual configurations of class power – the frictions within and across its economic, political and ideological dimensions, the disjunctions between different scales of social organization, the contradictory nature and effects of strategies, tactics and policies, the probability of state as well as market failures and the capacity of subaltern forces to engage in resistance. Many empirical analyses reveal this messiness and complexity but this often goes unremarked in abstract Marxist theorizing. Third, Marxists risk reducing the limits of economic, political and ideological power to the effect of class contradictions and thereby missing other sources of failure. Finally, while an emphasis on strategy and tactics is important to avoid the structuralist fallacy that capital reproduces itself quasi-automatically and without need of human action, there is a risk of voluntarism if strategy and tactics are examined without reference to specific conjunctures and broader structural contexts.

Further Reading

Barrow, C.W. 1993: Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Jessop, B. 2002: The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jessop, B. 2007: State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Marx, K. 1871: The Civil War in France. In D. Fernbach (ed.) Karl Marx: the First International and After. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Miliband, R. 1969: The State in Capitalist Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Poulantzas, N. 1978: State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso.

Chapter 2

Weber and Political Sociology

Peter Breiner

This chapter shows that Weber provides an existential account of political action that is then folded into his political sociology. This existential account does not merely rotate around the rationalization of all social action into routine forms of domination, as so many commentators have claimed, but constitutes a dialectical movement between competition, struggle and selection on the one hand and routine predictability on the other, the former leading to the latter and the latter creating new conditions for the former. This dialectic is operative in Weber's famous definition of power, his typology of legitimate of legitimate domination-rulership (legitime Herrschaft) and his application of these concepts to understanding the dynamics of modern politics as business and vocation. An unexpected outcome of reading Weber's political sociology in this way is that his view of direct democracy converges, though quite unintentionally, with those democratic theorists and political sociologists who argue that genuine democracy always appears in resistance to domination.

Though he often claimed this was his intention, Max Weber did not develop a systematic political sociology. But partially because of that, political sociology appears throughout his work. Indeed, from his earliest ‘Freiburg Inaugural Lecture’ through the many iterations of his sociology of rulership-domination to his last lectures on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ and ‘The General Theory of the State’, he relentlessly argued for the primacy of politics over economic and social considerations. Moreover, though modernity was characterized by multiple life spheres, it was in politics, he insisted, where the value commitments in every other sphere were fought out. But, for Weber, only sociology could reveal to us the various forms this political struggle might take, the social forces impinging on these struggles, the institutional structures though which they would occur and the cost of these struggles to deeply held partisan commitments. And so Weber understood politics and political sociology to be integrally interconnected.

My aim here is to reconstruct Weber's own political sociology based on an unnoticed existential dialectic embedded within it. I would then like to make a brief comment on how contemporary political sociologists have responded to these arguments and concerns. And at the very end I would like to give an ever so brief indication of a vital but undeveloped strand of Weber's political sociology: the testing of political commitments against the sociological and existential conditions of their realization.

Weber's Political Sociology

The dialectic of conflict and selection vs. methodical routine

Typically those who argue for a distinctive Weberian political sociology focus on his definition of power, his typology of legitimate forms of domination (Herrschaft) and his definition of the state. And indeed Weber himself saw these ideal-typical concepts as the foundation for his political sociology (Breuer 1991: 25; Hübinger: 2009: 19–20). However, while many commentators root his political sociology in his ideal types of political rule/domination/authority into the routine forms of traditional or rational-legal authority, they neglect a crucial existential assumption behind his dynamic account of political power and domination. Specifically, all social life for Weber oscillates between two modes of social action: between actions that are purposively rational and lead to methodical fitting of means to ends in routine institutions, what he famously calls ‘purposive reason’ (Zweckrationalität) (Weber 1978 [1922]: 24), and actions subject to the process of competition (Wettbewerb), conflict (Kampf) and eventually selection (Auslese) (Weber 1978 [1922]: 38–40). Indeed conflict leading to selection cannot for Weber be extirpated from social life even in the most routine of social relations (Weber 1949a: 26–27; Weber 1978 [1922]: 38).

Once we give Weber's concepts of conflict (Kampf) and selection (Auslese) equal weight to his more well-known notion of rationalization of social life through the methodical choice of means to given ends, we discover an existential dialectic deeply embedded in his political sociology. Viewed through this existential dialectic, Weber's political sociology will be governed by the constant alternation between conflict leading to selection on the one hand and routinization into forms of methodical domination and obedience on the other. Even routine social relations that methodically seek predictability in the achievement of their goals, such as economic organizations, political parties, states and bureaucracies, select for certain character types at the expense of other types, and this in turn spawns new conflicts from the excluded. This means that for Weber political will and the logic of power struggle are in constant tension with the routine forms of command and obedience in which and by means of which political will is fought for and realized. We might want to call this a dialectic of selection and institutional routinization.

This dialectic, I would argue, shapes Weber's political sociology on several levels: his more general ideal-typical concepts of power and legitimate domination, and political action as found in a wide variety of cultural and historical settings; his particular ideal-typical account of the historical developmental tendencies leading to the modern state, the modern political party, the modern parliament and the modern vocational politician as professional and as charismatic actor with a calling; and his assessment of the possibilities for democracy given the crucible of power struggle and routinization of domination suggested both by his general typology of legitimate domination and by his specific sociology of the business of politics. But despite focusing on the rationalizing side of this dialectic, Weber insists, there is no single logic governing the outcomes of political conflicts and their dissipation into routine forms. On the contrary this process takes on many different forms, and it is the job of the political sociologist to map them out.

This dialectic of conflict selection and institutional routinization in Weber's political sociology can be seen first and foremost in the way he maps the political world through his general ideal-type concepts of power (Macht), rulership or domination (Herrschaft), politics, institution (Anstalt) and the state. Famously he defines power as the ‘probability’ or chance that an actor will be in a position to achieve or impose his or her will over the resistance of others, and it is irrelevant for his definition what kind of situation or resources allow an agent to exercise this capacity (Weber 1978 [1922]: 53). But when power is successfully exercised in a predictable manner and without resistance such that ‘a command with a specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons’ (Weber 1978 [1922]: 53), we have a particular routinization of power, namely ‘Herrschaft’, which, depending on context, can be translated as rule or rulership in the sense that one rules over subjects, as domination with its emphasis on command and obedience, or as authority in the sense that an agent claims to be obeyed unconditionally due to the validity of his/her rule or entitlement to give commands. Sometimes, Weber emphasizes only one of these meanings, other times all three at once.

Not surprisingly, Weber transfers these two concepts – the first embedded in conflict, the second embedded in day-to-day commands – to his sociological definition of politics. Thus politics becomes the striving ‘for a share of power or to influence the distribution of power, whether between states or between the groups of people contained within a state’. And we pursue power either for the prestige of having power or to realize goals separate from it, but in politics we never escape the striving for power (Weber 1919: 33; also 1978 [1922]: 16). But politics is also defined by the achievement of rule or domination in the state, and so rule or domination may serve as the object of politics if we view politics as the striving to impose one's will over resistance and as its consequence when power is successfully achieved, that is, as ‘relationship in which people rule over other people’ (Weber 1919: 34).

Not surprisingly, then, Weber will place politics as the pursuit of power and rule-domination in the kind of institution that exercises coercion or compulsion on its members (ein Anstalt) rather than in the kind of association that rests on voluntary submission based on consent of its participants (ein Verein) (1978 [1922]: 52). Thus both political power and political rule or domination are pursued, for Weber, both by means of and within a particular kind of compulsory institution (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb), the state, which Weber famously defines as ‘that human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory . . .’ (Weber 1978 [1922]: 54). What is crucial in this definition is not that the state rules over a territory through violence, but that only the administration of the state may use violence as a last resort to impose its commands and to compel obedience to its laws while no other political organization seeking power or the resources of the state may do so.

What might all of these definitions mean for mapping the terrain of politics from a sociological point of view? First off, given Weber's precise though relentlessly instrumental definition of power, politics will always involve a striving to attain the means of imposing one's will on others. But if this is the case, politics will always involve struggle, not just over the means to impose oneself on others, but also against others seeking similar means to impose their will. These means include money, organization, reliable staffs and above all the means of rule or domination possessed by the state such as its revenue, its administration and its coercive power. Most of these means may be possessed by other agents in society, but only the state has the legitimate claim to use force to impose its commands whatever its administrative apparatus (see Mann 1986). So politics – defined as struggle for power – also means seeking domination as obedience to commands both in organizing groups and parties by transforming voluntary into compulsory organizations to mobilize a following in the struggle for power and in gaining control over the state as the ultimate form of ‘Herrschaft’ – rule over others and obedience to commands – over a territory. This will be true, Weber claims, whatever ends we may pursue through politics – whether nationalism, liberalism, or socialism – for the means of politics, power and domination (rule), are invariant (Weber 1919: 313).

However, if politics defined as the struggle for political power to impose one's will also relies on successfully achieving rule or domination outside of and within the state, then the latter, Weber argues, will not last very long if it happens to be the fortuitous result of an agent finding him/herself to be in the position of coercing another to submit to his/her will out of self-interest. Domination depends on predicable rulership and durable rule, and this in turn depends on the subject of the ruler accepting commands as if they were valid, that is in the belief that they are valid and hence legitimate (Weber 1978 [1922]: 213–214, 942–943, 946–947). It is on the differing grounds for individuals and for staffs to accept an agent's commands as valid or legitimate that Weber develops his famous three-part typology of legitimate forms of Herrschaft (rulership, domination and authority) – though it should be pointed out here that in doing so, he explicitly refuses to draw a distinction between obeying out of legitimate reasons and mere acquiescence to domination because one sees no alternative, claiming instead that from a sociological viewpoint such distinctions are irrelevant (1978 [1922]: 947). In defining legitimacy, Weber claims, only belief in the validity of the commands counts. As we will see, Weber's conflation of this distinction will lead to some surprisingly radical, though unintended, consequences for his theory of democracy.

While it may seem that Weber's typology of legitimate rule and domination describes the routine non-conflictual side of politics, in fact the dialectic between conflict leading to selection and success leading to methodical routine is firmly embedded in his sociology of the three types of Herrschaft. Famously, ‘charismatic rule or domination’ involves obedience-based belief in the unique and extraordinary personality or character of an individual and so for Weber it is the most unstable form of Herrschaft. In this sense, in Weber's pithy phrase, it exists ‘only in the moment of its inception’ (Weber 1978 [1922]: 264), and therefore at the very point it becomes effective as power, it immediately routinizes into one of the two everyday forms of rule and dominance: traditional and rational-legal forms of rule or domination. As is well known, traditional domination is based on belief in the sanctity of time-bound custom and the subject's submission to the commands of ‘the chief’ whose position requires personal loyalty and the habituation to day-to-day custom based on personal relationships (Weber 1978 [1922]: 228, 1006–1010). Rational-legal rule or domination both imitates and is the opposite of traditional domination as it is based on the validity of formal rules and a hierarchically organized division of labour in which each specialized task is adhered to out of a belief that it is based on procedural correctness. Above all, this form of command and obedience depends on a thoroughgoing separation of administrator from the means of administration (Weber 1978 [1922]: 214,216, 218–219). Interestingly, all three forms of submission ‘select’ for a particular character type of ruler at the expense of the other: ‘the charismatically qualified leader’, the patriarchal or patrimonial ruler and the impersonal but order-loving administrator or political office seeker. In turn each type selects a certain claim to obedience and command against the other: personal devotion to the charismatic leader; customary obedience to a chief, though in the patrimonial form of rule this is rendered in exchange for sinecures, tax farming, or personal protection; and subservience to procedural rules rather than persons in the case of rational-legal authority or domination.

But this said, the object of each of these kinds of rule is twofold. They require the obedience to commands by both an organized staff beneath the ruler and the subjects of rule who provide the resources, submit to policies and obey the laws or statutes of the ruler. Hence, charismatic domination depends on disciples emotionally attached to the charismatic leader, traditional domination on the court or clients of the patrimonial ruler and rational-legal authority on the impersonal administrator or office holder. Indeed, if the question arises, which of the two elements within each type of domination are most significant in the constant struggle to stabilize the authority of one's commands and direct them towards a goal, it is the belief of the staff in the legitimacy of the ruler that Weber finds to be most significant: ‘For all types of domination the fact of the existence of an administrative staff is vital for the habit of obedience cannot be maintained without organized activity directed to the application and enforcement of order’ (Weber 1978 [1922]: 264). For the staff can enforce consistent obedience of the subjects, preventing the form of rule-domination from becoming a mere transitory phenomenon; and yet the following is the source of resources and support for the ruler both in its day-to-day functioning and in its conflicts with other political entities. Hence for the ruler there is a constant tension internal to the three kinds of legitimate rule-domination between retaining the loyalty of the staff and the loyalty of the following. Once applied to politics, this internal problem within each type of rule or domination will become the fundamental external problem of political leadership in organizing to acquire political power within and against the state.

Typically, the conceptual narrative derived from the tension within and between these three types takes on several forms in Weber that are relevant for understanding his sociology of politics. Charismatic authority is portrayed as the rebellion against routine domination and rule either in its traditional form or in the form of impersonal rule. Similarly, charisma represents a revolutionary force mobilizing disciples and a following to recover a lost set of values or reorienting ordinary normative patterns of order from within through the voice of the charismatic leader or prophet who claims that his words trump the accepted or written laws. Or these types describe the process by which charismatic authority routinizes through the staff or disciples into a set of traditional rules, customs and habits, or in turn furthers the process whereby administration imposes formal procedure and rules within a hierarchy of functions and a division of labour based on specialization – for example when Weber claims that charismatic leaders of both revolutionary and parliamentary parties, if successful, will either have to hand out the political spoils to a new set of clients or increase bureaucratic domination over social life or a combination of both (Weber 1919: 350–351, 364–365; see Mommsen 1974: 3–21). Or where charisma plays no role, traditional rule or obedience may contain a dispersion of political and military resources to feudal lords that under rational-legal rule are centralized in the hands of the impersonal state. Or alternatively, Weber's types may be used to describe combinations of all three forms. For example, a charismatic leader may gain leadership over a political association such as a political party or a state but attains obedience to a following through a formal party apparatus and when that leader is successful he or she hands out patronage to clients on the basis of traditional (patrimonial) authority. Or most dramatically, and for Weber most ominously, the typology is used to describe the process whereby bureaucracy under rational-legal rule swallows up all other kinds of rule, leading to subservience to formal rules in all areas of social life and the complete disappearance of politics either as stable political rule or as the struggle for power. But for all these various uses, charisma always ends up on the conflictual side of Weber's dialectic of political power struggle and routinization while the other two forms can end up an either side.

More significantly, if one looks closely at the typology as a whole, one notices that each of the three kinds of rule/domination mirror one another so that each contains features of an opposed type – what Weber in his famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism called ‘elective affinities’; and this mirroring becomes the basis for Weber's explanations for why one ‘Herrschaftsform’ can turn into or give way to one another. For example, both charismatic authority or rulership and traditional authority or rulership represent different kinds of personal relations, charisma based on submission of the staff and following to the unique qualities of a person and traditional authority on submission to a person or chief based on custom or habit. Or for example on the other side of the ledger, once administrators follow the formal rules of office regularly and their clients submit to administrative decisions without questioning them, rational-legal rules can become habitual and customary, similar to traditional forms of authority, and both administrative officials and their clients come to view bureaucratic rules in a traditional manner, that is as inevitable, existing from time immemorial. Likewise, Weber points out that, similar to the holders of sinecures from a patrimonial ruler, the civil servants may form a status group with its own rules of entry and its own concept of honour using its status to protect intrusion from the political arm of the state as well as from its clients. And even the radically opposed types of rational-legal and charismatic rule may turn into one another through the common logic that they both depend for their sustenance on their organized staffs: in the first case the disciples form a division of labour to continue the cause and solve the problem of succession; in the second case the bureaucratic staff becomes the instrument of the charismatic political leader.

Finally, I would like to point to one last political sociological use of this typology in Weber: namely all three forms both by themselves and in combination at once enable and constrain the process of struggling for power. Specifically, they enable politics by becoming means by which political actors, whether parties, leaders, or movements, engage in competition and struggle to prevent themselves from being selected against. But they also constrain the politics by forming the barriers to that struggle, as every vertical process of conflict between, say status groups or classes, is absorbed at once into a horizontal conflict among types of legitimate domination and a horizontal process by which types settle into routine forms of legitimate rule. And in this way, charismatic, traditional and rational-legal authority/domination – the core of Weber's political sociology – provide a frame within which he draws out his specific sociological account of the dynamics and emergence of modern politics into ‘business’ and ‘vocation’.

Politics as a ‘business’ and a ‘vocation’

In his specific sociology of modern politics, Weber lays out a series of interlocking developmental tendencies and contingent political conflicts leading to the emergence of politics into an autonomous ‘enterprise’ or ‘business’ (Betrieb) with its own professional requirements, division of labour and organizations. Once fully formed, this ‘organization’ of politics selects only for certain types of political actors capable of engaging in the unceasing struggle for power in the modern rational-legal state (Weber 1919: 325). In understanding the origin of politics as business, Weber, I would argue, focuses on the development of five different political entities and their convergence in modernity: the political association as the victory over kinship and clan networks, the modern political party as response to democracy, the modern parliament as an outgrowth of collegial rule, the modern state as the ultimate expropriator of political means and above all, the leading or vocational politician who operates within and against these developments.

First off, a precondition for the development of modern politics for Weber is the process whereby the political community takes over from the warrior communities and clans the task of punishing internal violators of persons and property and defending against external enemies. Simultaneously, a subjective sentiment of ‘solidarity against outsiders’ develops as membership comes to mean identification with the community's control of force against enemies (Weber 1978 [1922]: 907–908). Viewed this way, the legitimacy of the political community's rule over all other associations follows from its claim to provide protection against internal injury and outside threats. Thus emerges a kind of legitimacy flowing from the political community's definition of the friend–enemy relation through its claim to provide the legitimate monopoly of violence.

But the modern impersonal administrative state based on rational-legal authority and domination emerges from a second development, namely what Weber, transferring Marx's concept of capitalist expropriation of the independent producers to the political realm, calls ‘the political expropriation process’ (Weber 1919: 316, 1918b: 281). One should note that it is in traditional forms of rulership and domination – in particular patrimonial forms – that this separation has its origin. Under patrimonial rule the administrative staff, in particular one based on estates, appropriates particular political resources from the ruler in exchange for support (Weber 1978 [1922]: 232–234). The first professional politician, the prince, initiates the expropriation of these political means from the private possessors of financial and military power and centralizes them under his own authority. But he succeeds only to be displaced by his staff which has now become technically specialized in deploying these means; the staff in turn has these means expropriated from it by the central administration that it creates to execute its orders. However, the central administration, though forming a status of its own, is no longer subject to any one individual but to the one institution that can back up its Herrschaft (rule or domination) with force, the state (Weber 1919: 315).

The modern political party also develops as part of this political expropriation process in direct response to the struggle for political power in the state. However, it takes its form as response to universal suffrage within mass democracy rather than to the centralization of political means in the state. For with the introduction of mass suffrage, the modern political party has to become an efficient machine to bring in the votes over a vast territory (Weber 1919: 338, 341). To adapt to these conditions, parties must jettison their reliance on traditional notables for whom politics was a part-time job and instead employ officials who permanently live off the party, specializing in organizing local units of the party and deploying the party's finances. In turn the party becomes increasingly bureaucratic in its structure, relying on a division of labour and strict chain of command to organize its following to succeed in the peaceful ‘battlefield of elections’ (Weber 1919: 331, 341). Any party that fails to submit to this version of rational-legal domination internally will be driven out of the struggle for power to capture the rational-legal state externally.

The expropriation of the means of political struggle by political parties has its parallel in the historical sociology of parliaments for Weber. But the pull is in the opposite direction in that where the monarch or prince, having centralized his domination, developed a collegial form of rule against his dependence on specialists in military force and administration, the collegial body would under certain circumstances separate itself from the executive and declare its own supremacy, as happened in England (Weber: 1919: 323–324 but see Collins 1998: 24–25).