Reading the Conjuncture: State, Austerity, and Social Movements, an Interview with Bob Jessop

Abstract

This interview with Bob Jessop covers diverse issues ranging from the challenge of defining the state to problems of conjunctural analysis and political practice. It first explores the state and state power from a strategic-relational perspective and then addresses the relation between economics and politics in the context of a tendentially unified world market and a continuing plurality of national states. Attention then turns to the North Atlantic financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis and their relation to a variegated global capitalism organized in the shadow of neoliberalism. Financialization and the rise of political capitalism are seen as leading to a loss of temporal sovereignty, problems of crisis management, an assault on democracy, and the rise of the austerity state. Closing remarks address the role of left-wing social movements and parties, such as SYRIZA and Podemos, and the difficulties of periodization, conjunctural analysis, and lesson drawing as well as the prospects for radical democratic transformation.

Key Words:

• Conjunctural Analysis
• Global Financial Crisis
• State Theory
• Temporal Sovereignty
• World Market

Acknowledgments

Mikkel Flohr and Yannick Harrison conducted this interview with Bob Jessop on 4 August 2015 at Roskilde University, Denmark. In-text references and endnotes were added during the transcription process.

Notes

1 “All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined” (Nietzsche 1997, 53).

2 Marx (1996, 751) writes,

Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative. The wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!

3 Gottfried Leibniz (1970, 662) noted that “not all possibles are compossible.” Translated from natural theology to political economy, this implies that, compared with the immense variety of individual elements of a social formation that are possible (or conceivable) when each is viewed in isolation, there is a smaller set of elements that can be articulated as moments of a relatively coherent and reproducible structure in a given time-space envelope. This has major implications for the study of varieties of capitalism in the world market. Relatedly, compossibility can be benign or pathological (witness the relation among varieties of capitalism in the Eurozone) and, in the latter case, reach a breaking point where exit is preferable to staying inside (Jessop 2015).

4 Nicos Poulantzas argued for a dual strategy of simultaneously working within the state to achieve democratic change there and developing alternative institutions outside of it, which could eventually replace it. See Poulantzas (1978, 251–61; 2008).

5 This is a reference to the American journalist John Reed’s (1977) famous book Ten Days That Shook the World, which details his experience of the October Revolution.

6 “Democracy Rising: From Insurrection to Event” was a conference organized by the Global Centre of Advanced Studies, which gathered activists and academics from a range of different countries in Athens. The conference started the day after the SYRIZA government passed the austerity measures dictated by “the institutions” and saw some heated exchanges on this subject.