State theory, regulation, and autopoiesis 83

State theory, regulation, and

autopoiesis: debates and
controversies
Bob Jessop

This contribution briefly reviews the role of various

debates in Capital & Class and its predecessor, the
Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist Economists, in
the development of my own work over the last  years.
These debates concern Marxist state theory; Fordism
and post-Fordism; the regulation approach; the
relevance of autopoiesis to Marxist analysis; and, most
recently, critical realism. Other issues and problems
have also influenced my work, of course, but several
important theoretical turns have been prompted by
challenges raised by CSE members.

 claimed there were three major sources

L of Marxism: German philosophy, English economics,

and French politics. Althusser added that Marx’s
ability to synthesize them derived from his commitment to
proletarian revolution. My work takes Marx’s critique of
political economy as a primary reference point and is
therefore imprinted by its three sources too. But it also has
its own secondary set of sources. These can be described,
only half-jokingly, as German politics, French economics,
and Chilean biology. This is certainly how they have been
(mis)perceived by some critics in Capital & Class. Moreover,
alongside the various intellectual issues that drew me to these
84 Capital & Class #75

particular sources, I also used them to address the

peculiarities of postwar Britain. For much of my work over
 years has been driven by the attempt to understand issues
such as Britain’s flawed Fordism, its Keynesian welfare
national state, Thatcherism, and New Labour (for a first
attempt to address most of these issues, see Jessop ).
The influence of German politics began indirectly in
the mid-s through the Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist
Economists and the  seminars on state theory, in which
John Holloway and Sol Picciotto introduced the German
state debate to anglophone comrades. From , I also
pursued this source more directly through German-language
texts and contacts with German theorists. Their influence is
clear in my work on the changing forms and functions of
the capitalist state but it co-existed with the influence of
Gramsci and Poulantzas (Jessop , ). It was Poulan-
tzas’s influence that prompted some  critics to attack my
work for its ‘politicism’. This allegedly accords primacy to
the state without grounding politics in the capital relation
and/or the unceasing class struggles around that relation.
Politicism is said to derive from the reification of the various
fetishised institutional forms of capitalism and to lead to
voluntarism in theory and practice. Simon Clarke ()
argued that the Poulantzasian interest in the relative power
of different fractions of capital in the power bloc tended
towards instrumentalism and voluntarism and ignored the
underlying objective, contradictory dynamic of capital
accumulation. Werner Bonefeld () and John Holloway
() also criticised treatments of the state as an institutional
ensemble that is (relatively) autonomous. In particular they
claimed theories of relative autonomy neglected the deter-
mining role of the capital relation and failed to see that the
economic and political actually comprise a dialectical
‘separation-in-unity’ rather than two distinct institutional
spheres.
These were important challenges and, whilst not wholly
convinced, I did wonder how to analyse the economy
consistently with my ‘strategic-relational’ approach to the
state. Initially my ideas developed through reading debates
on the value form and re-reading Gramsci’s work on
Americanism and Fordism. This led to my account of
accumulation strategies as means of imposing substantive
unity on different forms of value (Jessop ). At the time I
thought these reflections could offer a neo-Gramscian
State theory, regulation, and autopoiesis 85

analysis of the economy corresponding to the insight that

the state is a social relation. With hindsight, these reflections
were also politicist, however, because they focused on the
national state’s role in formulating accumulation strategies
and ignored other political scales as well as the role of firms,
fractions of capital, and other economic, political, and social
forces. These problems have been addressed in more recent
work (see below).
I first formulated these ideas by developing analogies
between Gramsci’s account of lo stato integrale (the integral
state) and l’economia integrale (the integral economy). Thus,
if Gramsci defined the state in its inclusive sense as ‘political
society + civil society’ and saw state power in western
societies as based on ‘hegemony armoured by coercion’, a
regulationist account might interpret the economy in its
inclusive sense as comprising ‘an accumulation regime +
social mode of economic regulation’ and capital
accumulation as involving ‘the self-valorization of capital
in and through regulation’. Shortly after formulating these
neo-Gramscian ideas, I became interested in French
economics in the guise of the Parisian regulation school.
This is reflected in my work on the crisis of Atlantic Fordism
and the transition to post-Fordism and the possibilities of
delineating a post-Fordist form of state analogous to the
Keynesian welfare national state. Michel de Vroey, who
provided the first extended overview of this school in Capital
& Class (),1 reinforced this interest in French economics
when he invited me to join the organizing committee of the
International Conference on Regulation (). More
generally my work on regulation has evolved in dialogue
not only with French economics but also with some West
German state theorists whose work on the changing forms
and functions of the state has also been informed by the
regulation approach. This engagement with the German
debate once again provoked the wrath of Holloway and
Bonefeld, this time for its alleged reformist reformulation
of Marxist state theory and for naturalizing rather than
resisting the transition to post-Fordism (Bonefeld a;
Holloway ).
Whilst working on regulation I continued to reflect on
the relative autonomy of the state and the question of
‘politicism’ and began to consider the apparently autonomous
logic of market forces. This posed interesting issues about
how the economic and political orders come to be
86 Capital & Class #75

structurally coupled to produce an ‘historic bloc’ (Gramsci’s

term for the mutually reinforcing correspondence of
economic base and politico-ideological superstructure) as
well as about the conditions, if any, under which they can be
coordinated strategically by a power bloc. As I was attempting
to combine German politics and French economics I came
across Chilean biology, if not directly, at least by way of
German social theorists, especially Niklas Luhmann,
Gunther Teubner, and Helmut Willke. From them I took
the concept of ‘autopoiesis’ or ‘self-production’. Transposed
(some would say illegitimately) from cell biology to
sociology, autopoietic theory suggests that major societal
sub-systems (such as law, politics, the economy, and science)
can be studied as self-referential, self-reproducing, and self-
regulating. Such systems constitute their own boundaries,
re-create the conditions for their internal operations, and
develop according to their own operational logic rather than
obeying an external logic. Drawing on these ideas suggests
that historic blocs could be understood in terms of the path-
dependent ‘structural coupling’ of two operationally autonomous
but substantively interdependent subsystems, the path-shaping
efforts of economic and political forces to influence (or
govern) the nature and direction of this co-evolution, and
the ecological dominance of the market-mediated, self-
valorising capitalist economy.2 Needless to say, this flirtation
with Luhmannian theory incurred the ire of open marxists,
most notably in Werner Bonefeld’s critique of the eclecticism
and conservatism involved in critical realism, Luhmannian
theory, and work on Fordism and post-Fordism (b,
). As my colleague, Colin Hay () wrote an effective
counter-critique, I decided not to reply directly. Instead I
chose to respond indirectly in my later work.
Thus, during the last  years, my theoretical work has
developed in three main directions. First, further rounds of
theoretical and empirical work have led me back to the value
form to reground regulationism in Marx’s critique of
political economy. This is my latest attempt to develop state
theory in response to the problem of politicism and, in
particular, to reintegrate the analysis of economics and
politics without conflating them or subsuming them under
a generic logic of accumulation (see below). Second, I have
become more interested in problems of scale in analyzing
the changing economic and political dynamic of capitalism—
especially in the dialectic of globalization-regionalization
State theory, regulation, and autopoiesis 87

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

capitalism. This is reflected in work on cross-border regions,
urban politics, the entrepreneurial city, globalization, and
the post-national state (see Jessop , a, b, a,
b). This attempts to redress the national focus of my
previous work on accumulation strategies and to address
the rescaling of economics and politics.Third, I have explored
the changing forms and modalities of state intervention in
reproducing the economic and extra-economic conditions
for accumulation—especially the shift from imperative
coordination to public-private partnership, networking, and
other forms of self-organization and self-regulation. This is
reflected in work on the emerging significance and limitations
of governance (self-organization) and the enhanced role of
states (on different scales) in meta-gover nance, i.e.,
organizing the conditions for self-organization. This work
is a further development of concerns with autopoiesis applied
on an institutional level to the complexities of the globalizing
economy (Jessop b, b, c, b).
Given the limited space available here, I concentrate on
the first set of developments. Marx identified a fundamental
contradiction in the commodity form between exchange-
and use-value. On this basis he unfolded the complex nature
of the capitalist mode of production and its dynamic; and
showed both the necessity of periodic crises and their role
in re-integrating the circuit of capital as a basis for renewed
expansion. In turn I have suggested that all forms of the
capital relation embody different but interconnected versions
of this contradiction and that they impact differentially on
(different fractions of) capital and (different strata of) labour
at different times and places. These contradictions are
reproduced along with capitalism but do not keep the same
weight or significance. In addition, ‘the reproduction of these
contradictions with their contradictory effects and their
impact on the historical tendency of capitalist development
depends on the class struggle’ (Poulantzas , -, italics
in original). This is the vector that realizes contradictions
and dilemmas in specific conjunctures. Indeed, as Holloway
argues, ‘there is no distinction to be made between contradiction
and struggle: all social contradictions are relations of struggle,
and therefore undetermined, uncertain, wide open’ (a:
).
Drawing on these arguments, I have argued that
capitalism needs regulating because of the indeterminate
88 Capital & Class #75

but antagonistic nature of the capital relation. This has three

key aspects: (a) the constitutive incompleteness of the capital
relation such that its reproduction depends, in an unstable
and contradictor y way, on changing extra-economic
conditions; (b) the various structural contradictions and
strategic dilemmas inherent in the capital relation and their
forms of appearance in different accumulation regimes,
modes of regulation, and conjunctures; and (c) conflicts over
the regularization and/or governance of these contradictions
and dilemmas as they are expressed both in the circuit of
capital and the wider social formation. The first point refers
to the inherent incapacity of capitalism to reproduce itself
wholly through the value form. For accumulation depends
on an unstable balance between three moments: the extension
of commodity relations, the reproduction-regulation of
fictitious commodities (notably land, labour power, money,
and knowledge), and the maintenance of capital’s key extra-
economic supports. This rules out the eventual com-
modification of everything and poses major problems of the
regularization of the capital relation. This is reflected in
cycles of commodification, de-commodification, and re-com-
modification as the struggle to extend the exchange-value
moments of the capital relation encounters real structural
limits and/or increasing resistance and seeks new ways to
overcome them. It is also reflected in less frequent but more
radical crises of specific accumulation regimes and their
spatio-temporal fixes emerge in and through social struggles
over the basic forms of the capital relation.
Second, the various structural contradictions and strategic
dilemmas inherent in the capital relation all express the basic
contradiction between exchange- and use-value. For example,
productive capital is both abstract value in motion (notably
in the form of realized profits available for re-investment)
and a concrete stock of time- and place-specific assets in the
course of being valorized; the worker is both an abstract
unit of labour-power substitutable by other such units (or,
indeed, other factors of production) and a concrete individual
with specific skills, knowledge, and creativity; the wage is
both a cost of production and a source of demand; money
functions both as an international currency exchangeable
against other currencies (ideally in stateless space) and as
national 3 money circulating within national societies and
subject to state control; land functions both as a form of
property (based on the private appropriation of nature)
State theory, regulation, and autopoiesis 89

deployed in terms of expected rents and as a natural resource

(modified by past actions) that is more or less renewable
and recyclable; knowledge is both a source of profit in the
form of intellectual property rights and a collectively
produced intellectual commons. Likewise, the state is responsible
for certain key conditions for the valorization of capital and
the social reproduction of labour power and also has overall
political responsibility for maintaining social cohesion in a
class-divided social formation.
Such contradictions and dilemmas can assume different
forms and primacies. They often find expression in different
agents, institutions, and systems as the prime bearers of one
or other of their aspects. They can also prove more or less
manageable depending on the specific ‘spatio-temporal fixes’
and institutionalized class compromises with which they
may be linked. However, insofar as these compromises
marginalize forces that act as bearers of functions or
operations essential to long-run accumulation, the emergence
of significant imbalances, disproportionalities, or disunity
in the circuit of capital will tend to strengthen these
marginalized forces and enable them to disrupt the
institutionalized compromises associated with a particular
accumulation regime, mode of regulation, state form, and
spatio-temporal fix (Clarke ). Such crises typically act
as a steering mechanism for the always provisional, partial,
and unstable re-equilibration of capital accumulation.
Third, modes of regulation and governance vary widely.
This follows from the constitutive incompleteness of the
capital relation and the variety of accumulation regimes and
modes of regulation. There are different ways to seek to
close the circuit of capital and compensate for its lack of
closure. Which of these comes to dominate depends on the
specific social and spatio-temporal frameworks within which
these attempts occur. Indeed, notwithstanding the tendency
for capital accumulation to produce a single world market,
there are important counter-tendencies and other limits to
globalization. Specific accumulation regimes and modes of
regulation are typically constructed in specific social spaces
and spatio-temporal matrices. This justifies work on
comparative capitalisms and their embedding in specific
institutional and spatio-temporal complexes; it also justifies
exploration of the path-dependent linkages between
di fferent economic trajectories and broader social
developments.
90 Capital & Class #75

Conclusions

Early debates in Capital & Class have continued to shape my

work for almost  years in four main ways: they introduced
me to state theory, they posed the issue of politicism, they
challenged me to justify my flirtation with theories of
autopoiesis, and they have prompted me to justify the critical
realist approach that informs my analyses (on the last of
these issues, see Jessop c). The biggest challenge has
been to respond to the charge of politicism and, in this regard,
my Capital & Class critics have been constant critical
members of my ‘imagined intellectual community’ as I have
developed my work. I have obviously continued to disagree
with many of their criticisms but I have not ignored them.
Without such criticisms I doubt that I would have arrived at
my current interpretations of: (a) the state’s role in regulari-
zing the conditions for accumulation through providing an
improbable, provisional, and unstable ‘spatio-temporal fix’
for specific accumulation regimes; (b) the many different
contradictions in the capital relation that are reproduced
and inflected in specific ways and with specific weights through
class struggle and institutionalized in specific accumulation
regimes and modes of regulation; or (c) the ecological
dominance of the capital relation as a way to rethink the
problem of economic determination in the last instance.
These current interpretations have also involved debates and
discussions in other contexts too (most notably with Stuart
Hall on the nature of Thatcherism in New Left Review and,
indirectly, with Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist discourse
analysis). They also depend on several other theoretical
turns—including an institutional turn, a narrative turn, a
governance turn, and a scalar turn. But, in the spirit of an
open Marxism that I understood rather differently from my
critics, an often subterranean influence has continued.

Notes

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

institutional economist.
2. Ecological dominance refers to the capacity of a given system in a self-
organising ecology of self-organising systems to imprint its
developmental logic on other systems’ operations through structural
coupling, strategic co-ordination, and blind co-evolution to a greater
State theory, regulation, and autopoiesis 91

extent than the latter can impose their respective logics on that system.
I argue that the self-valorization of capital makes the capitalist economy
ecologically dominant in contemporary societies and that neo-liberal
globalization reinforces this tendency (Jessop 2000a).
3. Plurinational monetary blocs organized by states could also be
included here.

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_______ (1993a) ‘Some Notes on the Theory of the Capitalist State’,
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_______ (1993b) ‘Crisis of Theory: Bob Jessop’s Theory of Capitalist
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_______ (1994) ‘Aglietta in England: Bob Jessop’s Contribution to
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_______ (1988) ‘Overaccumulation, Class Struggle and the
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