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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 irtation 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 states role in regularizing the conditions for accumulation through providing an
improbable, provisional, and unstable spatio-temporal x
for specic accumulation regimes; (b) the many dierent
contradictions in the capital relation that are reproduced
and inected in specic ways and with specic weights through
class struggle and institutionalized in specic 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 Moues post-Marxist discourse
analysis). They also depend on several other theoretical
turnsincluding 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 dierently from my
critics, an often subterranean inuence 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 selforganising 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
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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.
References
Bonefeld,W. (1987) Reformulation of State Theory, Capital & Class,
33, pp.96-127.
_______ (1993a) Some Notes on the Theory of the Capitalist State,
Capital & Class, 49, pp.113-21.
_______ (1993b) Crisis of Theory: Bob Jessops Theory of Capitalist
Reproduction, Capital & Class, 50, pp.25-48.
_______ (1994) Aglietta in England: Bob Jessops Contribution to
the Regulation Approach, Futur antrieur, special issue, pp.299330.
Clarke, S. (1977) Marxism, Sociology, and Poulantzass Theory of the
State, Capital & Class, 2, pp.1-31.
_______ (1988) Overaccumulation, Class Struggle and the
Regulation Approach, Capital & Class, 36, pp.59-92.
_______ (1991) New Utopias for Old: Fordist Dreams and PostFordist Fantasies, Capital & Class, 42, pp.131-53
Hay, C.S. (1995) Werner in Wunderland, Futur antrieur, special issue,
pp.331-359.
Holloway, J. (1988) The Great Bear, Post-Fordism and Class Struggle:
a Comment on Bonefeld and Jessop, Capital & Class, 36, 93-104
_______ (1994) Global Capital and the National State, Capital &
Class, 52, pp.25-30.
_______ (1993a) Open Marxism, history and class struggle. Some
comments on Heide Gerstenbergers book Die subjektlose Gewalt:
Theorie der Entstehung brgerliche Staatsgewalt, Common Sense, 13,
pp.76-86.
Jessop, B. (1977) Recent Theories of the Capitalist State, Cambridge
Journal of Economics, 1 (4), pp.353-373.
_______ (1980) TheTransformation of the State in Postwar Britain,
in R. Scase, ed., The State inWestern Europe, London: Croom Helm,
pp.23-94.
_______ (1982) The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods,
Oxford: Martin Robertson.
_______ (1983) Accumulation Strategies, State Forms, and
Hegemonic Projects, Kapitalistate, 10, pp.89-111.
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