请将“Finally, Poulantzas and Miliband had a significant disagreement over the concept of power, but as I discuss in Chapter 3, it is C. Wright Mills who actually provides a solution to this problem. Poulantzas (1978a, 115, fn. 24) defines an institution as “a system of norms or rules which is socially sanctioned. … On the other hand, the concept of structure covers the organizing matrix of institutions.” In other words, whereas Miliband conceptualized power as the ability to authoritatively mobilize the key resources organized through institutions (i.e., decision making), Poulantzas conceptualized power as a structured relationship between classes, rather than merely an attribute of institutions or organizations. This problem is resolved by recognizing that the relationship among classes and the state, as organized by institutions, is asymmetrical as in the case of investment strikes. The structural power of capital is its ability to make decisions about capital investment and disinvestment and they would not have that power if they did not occupy the command posts of financial and industrial corporations and if bourgeois legality did not maintain a separation of the political and the economic. Structural mechanisms such as disinvestment and capital strikes are not automatic and impersonal market forces, but decisions made by economic elites occupying the top command posts of financial and nonfinancial corporations. When “the market” responds to an unfavorable business climate, it is signaling a series of decisions made by those in positions of economic power. This is the “organizing matrix” of capitalism.





Why Return to the State Theory?


However, with state theory in decline for the last twenty years, why now return to state theory? The answer is simple. We have recently lived through a financial crisis that originated in the United States. It began with a rise in mortgage delinquencies in early 2007 and was followed by the collapse of major financial institutions in 2008, the collapse of major industrial corporations in 2009, and these events precipitated a global financial crisis and the Great Recession—the worst recession in U.S. history since the Great Depression of the 1930s (Kotz, 2009). Despite the platitudes of an anti-statist free-market neo-liberal ideology, nation-states were deeply involved in managing this crisis.

The world’s central banks began coordinated injections of liquidity into national financial systems by the summer of 2007 in response to growing mortgage delinquencies and the emerging crisis in mortgage backed obligations. Despite these injections, Bear Stearns, a leading global investment bank based in New York City imploded, but being “too big to fail,” the U.S. Federal Reserve orchestrated its forced acquisition by JP Morgan Chase. This maneuver was soon followed in the summer of 2008 by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) takeover of Indymac Bank, which was a major underwriter and holder of subprime mortgages. As the financial crisis accelerated, the U.S. Government took control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the early fall of 2008, forced the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, watched the failure of Lehman Brothers, and then rescued the American International Group (AIG) by nationalizing it. The U.S. Government effectively nationalized General Motors and Chrysler the following year (2009) with an $80 billion bailout (Crotty, 2008).

By April 30, 2011, the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and other federal agencies had made commitments of $12.2 trillion to assist the struggling financial and industrial system. These commitments included the expenditure of $1.6 trillion in direct investments in financial institutions, as well as the purchase of high-grade corporate debt and the purchase of mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. The U.S. Government had spent $330 billion to insure debt issued by financial institutions and to guarantee poorly performing assets owned by private banks and by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The U.S. Government became the lender of last resort for private banks and other financial institutions in the amount of $528 billion. As a consequence of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the U.S. Treasury acquired stock in hundreds of banks, including two of the largest banks in the United States—Bank of America and Citibank—as well as in General Motors, Chrysler, and AIG. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were put into conservatorship by the U.S. Treasury (“Adding Up the Government’s Total Bailout Tab,” 2011). Moreover, similar scenarios were played out across Europe and many other countries around the world. At the same time, approximately 5 million homes in the United States had been lost to foreclosure by mid-2013 and millions of additional foreclosures were to follow (Global Research, 2013).

It is no longer possible to pretend that the state is in retreat as the global financial and economic crisis resulted in massive state interventions and, once again, despite the myth of neo-liberalism, the state visibly reemerged as the main structural and institutional mechanism for restabilizing and reproducing the capitalist mode of production on a global scale, and primarily through the actions of nations-states, albeit led by and coordinated with the United States. Thus, as Martijn Konings (2010, 174) observes, “the period since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 has seen unprecedented public interventions into economic life. As a result, the role and presence of states has taken on a new degree of visibility. … If the state’s presence and active role were impossible to miss, so was the fact that the benefits of its interventions were distributed in a highly unequal manner.”

If the state is significant, then so must (or should) be state theory. Konings (2010, 174) reminds us that “the deployment of public authority in ways that systematically benefit some interests more than others suggests the need for a more profound appreciation of the ways in which socio-economic sources of power make themselves felt in the political arena. The insights of Marxist state theory therefore remain indispensable.” For example, Spyros Sakellaropoulos and Panagiotis Sotiris (2015, 99) have analyzed the Greek debt crisis as another reminder that “the formation of the current international financial architecture was not a spontaneous process, and the same goes for the lowering of barriers to the free flow of products and capital and for the political decision to expose capitalist social formations to the competitive pressure of world markets and capitalist movements.” Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris (2015, 98) reveal how the Greek debt crisis exemplifies the new “non-territorial imperialism” and demonstrate how “the tendency of capital to transcend national borders is not an unmediated, purely economic process,” because “political power and bourgeois hegemony are necessary conditions for the reproduction of capitalist social relations” and “the same goes for the internationalization of capital: some form of political intervention (and ideological legitimization) is necessary for it.” However, as David A. Kotz (2009, 307) has also recently observed: “when a particular form of capitalism enters its crisis phase, this eventually gives rise either to a new form of capitalism or to a transition beyond capitalism. This suggests we can expect to see more changes ahead than just a bailout of the financial system and a big government stimulus program. If a restructuring of capitalism rather than its replacement lies ahead, history suggests that we will see the emergence of a more state-regulated form of capitalism in the United States” and elsewhere.





State Theory Beyond the Poulantzas-Miliband Debate


However, even if we must return to state theory to understand the post-2007 world, what is to be gained by a return to Miliband and Poulantzas, particularly when they both published their major works on state theory well before globalization became a major topic in the social sciences. Miliband (1989, 167) did not specifically articulate a concept of globalization, even in his later works, but by the end of his life, he did increasingly recognize that “the international dimension of class struggle has assumed extraordinary, unprecedented importance.”4 Miliband (1989, 171) suggested that international class relations in the post–World War II era had been shaped by a consensus among national power elites that they collectively had “to ensure by all possible means that the radicalism produced or enhanced by the war should be strictly contained, and prevented from bringing about revolutionary change anywhere in the world.” In the post–World War II era before globalization, this meant that the Soviet Union and China had to be contained within their existing boundaries and that “third world” revolutions had to be prevented or suppressed through inducements (e.g., development aid and government loans) and coercion (e.g., support for authoritarian governments or direct military intervention). Moreover, this class-political strategy required the acceptance of American leadership by the power elites of other major capitalist nations, despite occasional disputes among them, because only the United States’ immense military and economic power could underwrite and guarantee the dominance of capitalist classes throughout most of the world.5 This claim remains a basic thesis of the new “non-territorial” concept of imperialism being advanced in state theory today.

Poulantzas also did not use the term globalization, but he was acutely aware of the “internationalization of capital” and he viewed this change in the geography of capitalism as one requiring a new state form. Poulantzas argued that nation-states were not “retreating,” but restructuring their state apparatuses and realigning those apparatuses with the newly dominant fractions of internationalized capital. However, as Michel Aglietta observed at the time, it is necessary to undertake new “Milibandian analyses” to understand this process of state reconstruction in the various nation-states and to identify the contours of the new state form. Indeed, much of the best work being undertaken at the present time on the new state form is explicitly and directly indebted to the works of Miliband (e.g., Panitch and Gindin, 2012) and Poulantzas (e.g., Jessop, 2002a).”翻译为中文