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Miliband–Poulantzas Debate
The Miliband–Poulantzas debate was a debate between Marxist theorists Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas concerning the nature of the state in capitalist societies. Their exchange was published in ''New Left Review'', beginning with Poulantzas's review of Miliband's 1969 work on bourgeois democracies, ''The State in Capitalist Society''. The exchange is typically characterized as a debate between Miliband's instrumentalist model of the capitalist state and Poulantzas' structural position; however, Bob Jessop argues that this account is misleading. Debate In ''The State in Capitalist Society'', Miliband presents his theory of how the state functions to serve capitalist interests. It does so, he claims, because of (1) the social origins of members of the government and (2) the personal ties and influence between members of the government and ruling-class elites. Poulantzas disagrees with Miliband's approach, adopting a structural position. He claims the state is objectively a c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ralph Miliband
Ralph Miliband (born Adolphe Miliband; 7 January 1924 – 21 May 1994) was a British sociologist. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson. Miliband was born in Belgium to working-class Polish Jewish immigrants. He fled to Britain in 1940 with his father, to avoid persecution when Nazi Germany invaded Belgium. Learning to speak English and enrolling at the London School of Economics, he became involved in left-wing politics and made a personal commitment to the cause of socialism at the grave of Karl Marx. After serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he settled in London in 1946 and naturalised as a British subject in 1948. By the 1960s, he was a prominent member of the New Left movement in Britain, which was critical of established socialist governments in the Soviet Union and Central Europe (the Eastern Bloc). He published several ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Capitalist Mode Of Production (Marxist Theory)
In Karl Marx's critique of political economy and subsequent Marxian analyses, the capitalist mode of production (German: ''Produktionsweise'') refers to the systems of organizing production and distribution within capitalist societies. Private money-making in various forms (renting, banking, merchant trade, production for profit and so on) preceded the development of the capitalist mode of production as such. The capitalist mode of production proper, based on wage-labour and private ownership of the means of production and on industrial technology, began to grow rapidly in Western Europe from the Industrial Revolution, later extending to most of the world. The capitalist mode of production is characterized by private ownership of the means of production, extraction of surplus value by the owning class for the purpose of capital accumulation, wage-based labour and—at least as far as commodities are concerned—being market-based. Synopsis A "mode of production" (German: ''Pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marxist Theory
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, theoretical psychology and philosophy of science, as well as its obvious influence on political philosophy and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
State Derivation
State derivation has been understood since the 1970s as an attempt within Marxism and neo-Marxism to explain the emergence and extent of the state and its law within the bourgeois, modern economic system and therewith to derive the relationship between economics and politics from the structure of capitalist production. In the 1920s, the legal scholar Paschukanis foreshadowed the debate with his explanation of the legal form of commodities. In the 1970s Western Marxism resumed the state derivation debate dominated by the works of Gramsci, Althusser and Poulantzas. In West Germany, however, as a result of the student movement’s political expectations of the first post-war social democratic-led government of Willy Brandt, an exclusive debate occurred, the ''Staatsableitungsdebatte''.Matthias Dapprich, The historical development of West Germany’s new left from a politico-theoretical perspective with particular emphasis on the Marxistische Gruppe and Maoist K-Gruppen. PhD thesis, Uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Structure And Agency
In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. ''Structure'' is the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. '' Agency'' is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. The structure versus agency debate may be understood as an issue of socialization against autonomy in determining whether an individual acts as a free agent or in a manner dictated by social structure. Structure, socialization and autonomy The debate over the primacy of structure or of agency relates to an issue at the heart of both classical and contemporary sociological theory: the question of social ontology: "What is the social world made of?" "What is a cause of the social world, and what is an effect?" "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" Structural functionalists such as Émile Durkheim see stru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marx's Theory Of The State
Karl Marx's idea that the state can be divided into three subject areas: pre-capitalist states, states in the capitalist (i.e. present) era and the state (or absence of one) in post-capitalist society. Overlaying this is the fact that his own ideas about the state changed as he grew older, differing in his early pre- communist phase, the young Marx phase which predates the unsuccessful 1848 uprisings in Europe and in his later work. Bourgeois state In Marx's 1843 ''Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right'', his basic conception is that the state and civil society are separate. However, he already saw some limitations to that model, arguing: By the time he wrote ''The German Ideology'' (1846), Marx viewed the state as a creature of the bourgeois economic interest. Two years later, that idea was expounded in ''The Communist Manifesto'': This represents the high point of conformance of the state theory to an economic interpretation of history in which the forces of produc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agency (sociology)
In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential. For instance, structure consists of those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit agents and their decisions. The influences from structure and agency are debated—it is unclear to what extent a person's actions are constrained by social systems. One's agency is one's independent capability or ability to act on one's will. This ability is affected by the cognitive belief structure which one has formed through one's experiences, and the perceptions held by the society and the individual, of the structures and circumstances of the environment one is in and the position one is born into. Disagreement on the extent of one's agency often causes conflict between parties, e.g. parents and children. History The overall concept of agency has existed since the Enlightenment where there was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ruling Class
In sociology, the ruling class of a society is the social class who set and decide the political and economic agenda of society. In Marxist philosophy, the ruling class are the capitalist social class who own the means of production and by extension determine and establish the dominant ideology (culture, mores, norms, traditions) of society by way of cultural hegemony. In the 21st century, the worldwide political economy established by globalization has created a transnational capitalist class that is not native to any one country. Background In previous modes of production, such as feudalism (inheritable property and rights), the feudal lords of the manor were the ruling class; in an economy based upon chattel slavery, the slave owners were the ruling class. The political economy of the feudal system gave socio-economic and legal power to the feudal lord over the life, labour, and property of the vassal, including military service. The political economy of a slave state gave ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bob Jessop
Bob Jessop (born 3 March 1946) is a British academic who has published extensively on state theory and political economy. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster. Work Jessop's major contribution to state theory is in treating the state not as an entity but as a social relation with differential strategic effects. This means that the state is not something with an essential, fixed property, such as a neutral coordinator of different social interests, an autonomous corporate actor with its own bureaucratic goals and interests, or the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie", as often described by pluralists, elitists/ statists, and conventional Marxists, respectively. Rather, what the state is essentially determined by is the nature of the wider social relations in which it is situated, especially the balance of social forces. The state can thus be understood as follows: First, the state has varied natures, apparatuses, and boundaries ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicos Poulantzas
Nicos Poulantzas ( el, Νίκος Πουλαντζάς ; 21 September 1936 – 3 October 1979) was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and philosopher. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading structural Marxist; while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of democratic socialism Democratic socialism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing political philosophy that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self- .... He is best known for his theoretical work on the state, but he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s (such as Francisco Franco's rule in Spain, António de Oliveira Salazar's in Portugal, and Georgios Papadopoulos' in Greece). Life Poulantzas studied law in Greece a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Structural Marxism
Structural Marxism is an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and sociologists outside France during the 1970s. Other proponents of structural Marxism were the sociologist Nicos Poulantzas and the anthropologist Maurice Godelier. Many of Althusser's students broke with structural Marxism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Overview Structural Marxism arose in opposition to the instrumental Marxism that dominated many western universities during the 1970s. In contrast to other forms of Marxism, Althusser stressed that Marxism was a science that examined objective structures, and he believed that historistic and phenomenological Marxism, which was based on Marx's early works, was caught in a "pre-scientific ideology". Toward the middle of the 1970s and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Instrumental Marxism
Instrumental Marxism, or elite model, is a theory which reasons that policy makers in government and positions of power tend to "share a common business or class background, and that their decisions will reflect their business or class interests". It perceives the role of the state as more personal than impersonal, where actions such as nepotism and favoritism are common among those in power, and as a result of this, the shared backgrounds between the economic elite and the state elite are discernible. The theory argues that due to the high concentration of wealth within the State that the actions of State actors seek to secure and increase their wealth by passing policies that benefit the economically superior class. It is also noted that businessmen-become-politicians who have a say in policy making “are not very likely, all the same, to find much merit in policies which appear to run counter to what they conceive to be in the interests of business.” Instrumental Marxism tends ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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