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Marxist Approaches to Power
Bob Jessop
Published as Chapter 1, 'Developments in Marxist theory' in K. Nash and A. Scott, eds,
Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, Oxford: Blackwell, 8-16. It was reprinted in
lightly revised form in the second edition of this book with a new book title and editors:
E. Amenta, K. Nash, A. Scott, eds, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political
Sociology, Oxford: Blackwell, 3-14.
Marxists have analysed power relations in many 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.
The significance thus attached to class domination by no means implies that all forms of
power are always exercised by 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 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 – between economic, political, and ideological class domination.
Despite the obvious centrality of this issue, however, it prompts widespread theoretical
and empirical disagreements. For 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 alternatives 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 reproduce the
conditions for class domination, to overcome resistance, and to naturalize or mystify
class power. It follows, fourthly, 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
order most effectively to challenge their subaltern position.
1. 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, of
course, 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 is a particularly useful example here. For, in voluntarily
selling their labour-power for a wage, workers transfer its control and the right to any
surplus to the capitalist. A formally free exchange thereby becomes the basis of factory
despotism and economic exploitation. Nonetheless, as working class resistance in
labour markets and the labour process indicate, Marxists note that the successful
exercise of power is also a conjunctural phenomenon rather than being guaranteed by
unequal social relations of production. They regard the actualization of capacities to
exercise power and its effects, if any, as always and everywhere contingent on
circumstances. Moreover, as capacities to exercise power are always tied to specific
sets of social relations and depend for their actualization on specific circumstances,
there can be no such thing as power in general or general power – only particular
powers and the sum of particular exercises of power.
2. 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 changing
forms of patriarchy. But Marxists' 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 the routine reproduction of class domination in normal circumstances. This makes the
state central to Marxist analyses not only regarding 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'.
2. Economic Class Domination
Marxism is premised on the existence 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 emphasize the primacy of the forces of
production in producing social change but the majority view (and current wisdom) is that
the social relations of production are primary. Thus most Marxists now regard the social
relations of production rather than the productive forces as the basis for economic class
domination. 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
labour-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 combined with
capital's attempts to increase labour market flexibility have undermined these conditions
and encouraged a neo-liberal assault on the postwar compromise in several countries.
4. Political Class Domination
Marxist accounts of political class domination 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; 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, 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 well 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, those who talk 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. This view implies a correspondence
between form and function such that the state is necessarily capitalist. 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 (1972, 1984) has developed this view as
follows. The state's exclusion from direct control over the means of production (which
are held in private hands) means that its revenues depend on a healthy private sector;
therefore, it must, as a condition of its own reproduction as a state apparatus, ensure
the profitability of capital. Subordinate classes can secure material concessions only
within the limits of the logic of capital – if they breach these limits, such concessions
must be rolled back. But capital in turn is unable to press its economic advantages too
far, however, 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. Poulantzas extended Marx's insight that capital is not a thing but a social
relation to propose 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. In his later work Poulantzas applied this insight to the
capitalist state. He saw the modern form of state as having certain in-built biases but
argued 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 a class-neutral instrumentarium. 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, this results from a strategic coordination enabled by the
selectivity of the state system and the organizational role of parallel power networks that
cross-cut and thereby unify its formal structures. However, as Poulantzas notes, this is
an improbable achievement. For the state system itself 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,
if one accepts this analysis, that there is no end to political class struggle. 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 the
popular masses. And only by disrupting the strategic selectivity of the capitalist state
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.
6. Ideological Class Domination
Marx and Engels first alluded to ideological class domination when they noted in The
German Ideology (1845-6) that 'the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling
class' and related this phenomenon to the latter's control over the means of intellectual
production. Their own work developed several perspectives on ideological class
domination – ranging from the impact of commodity fetishism through the individualism
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
grew even stronger with the rise of democratic government and mass politics in the late
nineteenth century and the increased importance of mass media and national popular
culture in the twentieth century. Various currents in so-called 'Western Marxism' have
been strongly interested in 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 there are many other approaches
that work on similar lines.
A leading figure who has inspired much work in this area is Antonio Gramsci, an Italian
Communist active in the interwar period. Gramsci 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, USA) 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. But his own work 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 coercion and consent (or 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. Conversely, 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. It
should be noted here that 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). But his
overall argument was that the capitalist state should not be seen as a basically coercive
apparatus but as an institutional ensemble marked by a variable mix of coercion, fraud-
corruption, and active consent. Moreover, rather than treating specific institutions and
apparatuses as purely technical instruments of government, Gramsci was concerned
with their social bases and stressed how their functions and effects are shaped by their
links to the economic system and civil society.
One of Gramsci's key arguments is the need in the 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 as meaning 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.
7. 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, and military or parliamentary, presidential, mass
plebiscitary, etc.), particular policy instruments (e.g., Keynesian demand management
vs neo-liberal 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 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 problem 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: 366-7). This implies that the ethico-political not only co-constitutes
economic structures but also gives them their rationale and legitimacy. Where such a
reciprocal relationship exists between base and superstructure, Gramsci spoke of an
'historic bloc'. He also introduced the concepts of power bloc and hegemonic bloc to
analyse 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 analysed in terms of the ruling
classes, supporting classes, mass movements, and intellectuals). A hegemonic bloc is a
durable alliance of class forces organized by a class (or class fraction) which 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', i.e., persons able to develop hegemonic projects that
express the long-term interests of the dominant or subaltern classes in 'national-popular'
terms. Gramsci also emphasized the need for a 'decisive economic nucleus' to provide
the basis for long-term hegemony and criticized efforts to construct an 'arbitrary,
rationalistic, and willed' hegemony which ignored economic realities.
8. Concluding Remarks
To conclude, the Marxist approach to power and its exercise involves the following four
interests: (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; and (4) the role of
strategy and tactics. These interests indicate both the strengths and weaknesses of the
approach. First, in privileging class domination, Marxism tends to ignore other forms of
social domination – patriarchal, ethnic, 'racial', hegemonic masculinities, inter-state,
regional or territorial, etc.. At best these figure as factors that overdetermine the forms
of class domination and/or get modified by changes in class relations. Second, there is
a risk of overemphasizing the structural coherence of class domination at the expense
of 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 concrete analyses reveal
this messiness and complexity but these qualities often go unreflected in more abstract
Marxist theorizing. Third, Marxists risk reducing the limits of economic, political, and
ideological power to the effect of class contradictions. But there are other sources of
failure too. Finally, whilst 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.
References and Further Reading
Altvater, E. and Hoffman, J. (1990) 'The West German state derivation debate', Social
Text, 8 (2), 134-55
Barrow, C.W. (1993) Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Clarke, S., ed., (1990) The State Debate, Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Jessop, B. (1982) The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, Oxford: Martin
Robertson.
Jessop, B. (1990) State Theory: putting capitalist states in their place, Cambridge:
Polity.
Isaac, J.C. (1987) Power and Marxist Theory: A Realist Approach, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Marx, K. (1871) The Civil War in France, in D. Fernbach, ed., Karl Marx: the First
International and After, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1845-6) The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected
Works, vol 5, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848) The Manifesto of the Communist Party.
Miliband, R. (1969) The State in Capitalist Society, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Moore, S.W. (1957) The Critique of Capitalist Democracy, New York: Paine-Whitman.
Offe, C. (1972) Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Offe, C. (1984) Contradictions of the Welfare State, London: Hutchinson.
Poulantzas, N. (1978) State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.
