Mark Neocleous

140 Pages·2013·3.79 MB·English

Mark Neocleous:
All Roads Lead to Class
by
Olena Kobzar
A thesis submitted to
the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Institute of Political Economy
Carleton University,
Ottawa, Ontario
© copyright
September 2005, Olena Kobzar
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
1*1
Library and Bibliotheque et
Archives Canada Archives Canada
Published Heritage Direction du
Branch Patrimoine de I'edition
395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington
Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4
Canada Canada
Your file Votre reference
ISBN: 0-494-10053-2
Our file Notre reference
ISBN: 0-494-10053-2
NOTICE: AVIS:
The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive
exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives
and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver,
publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public
communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter,
telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans
loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres,
worldwide, for commercial or non­ sur support microforme, papier, electronique
commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats.
paper, electronic and/or any other
formats.
The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur
ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these.
this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de
nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement
may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation.
reproduced without the author's
permission.
In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne
Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee,
forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires
from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these.
While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires
in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination,
their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant.
any loss of content from the
thesis.
i*i
Canada
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Abstract
Mark Ncocleous has produced a body of work informed by Bob Jessop’s
admonition that Marxists need to pay more attention to the analytical requirements of a
weak theory of the state. To this end, Neocleous has tried to elaborate a political theory
which proceeds from a more-or-less orthodox Marxist understanding of the relationship
between economy and the state, and supplements it with a politicized rendition of Michel
Foucault’s approach to the study of the connection between power and knowledge. The
point of this conceptual exercise is to demonstrate how the working-class became an
object of administration in the nineteenth century, and how administration itself was
reconceived as the non-political management of social order. This thesis challenges
Neocleous’s functionalist account of the state, arguing that different forms of governance
are better understood as interacting with one another in complex and possibly
contradictory ways.
11
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the assistance of my supervisor Alan Hunt for his
tireless work in reading and commenting on various drafts of this thesis. His numerous
suggestions have been immensely helpful to its final form. His encouragement and sharp
wit made the writing of the thesis a fulfilling exercise. Needless to say whatever faults
that remain in it are wholly attributable to me.
I would also like to thank George Rigakos, Trevor Purvis and Rianne Mahon for
the inspiration and intellectual mentoring I have received while pursuing my MA.
The many conversations I have had with my fellow students at the Institute of
Political Economy have helped me refine my understanding of the political world. I
would like to thank Keith, Dale, Sam, Berrak and especially Lincoln.
A special thanks to Donna Coghill who helped guide me through the year.
iii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Administering Civil Society
1 Introduction 8
2 From Foucault to Marx Through Hegel 17
3 From Gramsci to Foucault Through Althusser 20
4 Rethinking State and Class in Britain 26
5 Class Struggle and Political Power: A First Critique 32
Chapter 2 Fascism
1 Introduction 42
2 Perpetual War and Destruction of Reason 44
3 Nationalism and Racism: A Fascist Equation? 46
4 Fascism and the Working Class 50
5 Fascism as Reactionary Modernism 54
Chapter 3 The Fabrication of Social Order
1 Introduction 62
2 Origins of Police: Preliminary Observations 63
3 Liberalism and the Police Project 69
4 Hegel and Colquhoun: Liberal Realists or Apologists? 75
5 Policing Wage Labour 80
6 The Dirty Criminal Vagrant 83
7 Pigs, Crime and Order 86
8 The Rule of Law versus the Rule of Police 87
9 All Roads Lead to Class 95
Chapter 4 Imagining the State
1 Introduction 102
2 The Body of the State 105
3 The Mind of the State 108
4 The Personality of the State 112
5 The Home of the State 116
Conclusion 120
Bibliography 131
iv
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Introduction
To argue, as I have done, that state power is geared towards the political
administration of civil society, is to argue that bourgeois order is
constituted politically by the state. To make sense of the constitutive
practices of order, one cannot do without the police concept. Just as all
roads lead to property in the bourgeois concept of order, so all roads lead
to the state in the concept of police.1
For Marxist theorists, a recurring question has been the role of the state in
producing and reproducing the order upon which capitalism is structured. There have
been numerous, often conflicting, Marxist accounts of the state’s role in securing
capitalism. For instance, Antonio Gramsci famously argued that the key to understanding
the function of the state is to be found in the dual imperatives of coercion and consent,
and in the contingent nature of the historical bloc of class forces that dominates society at
any given moment.2 Louis Althusser, by contrast, focused on the structuring process
supplied by the repressive and ideological state apparatuses, all the while maintaining
that in the last instance the economic mode of production remains the determining factor
in state policies.3 Ralph Miliband, following an empiricist tradition in Marxism, directed
his attention to the established links between capital and state elites, and the instrumental
value that state policies have for particular classes.4 Miliband’s well-known theoretical
protagonist, Nicos Poulantzas, insisted on viewing the state as a complexly articulated set
of structures that worked to mediate the conflicts engendered by capitalism, while
1 Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: a Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto
Press, 2000), p. 118.
2 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972).
3 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971).
4 Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).
1
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
2
continuously safeguarding the capitalist system as a whole.5 Resisting what they
regarded as a fatal economism in the works of their contemporaries, Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe have argued that an understanding of the discursive constitution of
hegemony is crucial to a theory of the capitalist state.6 Bob Jessop, drawing broadly on
Gramsci via Poulantzas, and, more recently, on writers identified with the “regulation
approach” to the study of capitalism, has tried to develop an institutional analysis of the
state which stresses the varying accumulation strategies which different state projects
n
help underwrite.
While differing on such things as the internal unity of the capitalist state, its
precise relationship to civil society, its efficacy in producing the conditions for capitalist
profitability, the role of the class struggle within state institutions, etc, what these Marxist
theorists have in common is a tendency to regard the state as an entity or an ensemble of
forces that is relatively independent of the economic classes and mode of production that
comprise capitalism, and that works in one way or another to condition or structure class
relations. This inclination to treat the state not as an epiphenomenon of, but rather a
crucial formative institution for, capitalism is shared by another contemporary Marxist
theorist, Mark Neocleous. While his writings have not yet earned him a wide audience8
Neocleous’s reflections on state and administration promise to be marked as a significant
contribution to a debate that has become so central to the Marxist legacy.9 In this thesis 1
5 Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973); “The Problem of
the Capitalist State," New Left Review ,58, (1969), pp. 67-78.
6 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics (London: Verso Press. 1985).
7 Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1990); The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
8 Only a handful of reviews of Neocleous’s work have appeared to date.
9 Neocleous has authored four books which explicitly deal with the topic of the capitalist state:
Administering Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power (Houndmills, U.K.: Macmillan Press,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
3
propose to examine critically the theoretical and political nature of this contribution with
an eye to determining whether Neocleous succeeds in his self-appointed task of
assembling a Marxist theory of state power that retains a separate notion of civil society,
and that is grounded in an analysis of the role of administration in fashioning modern
capitalism. The thesis will consist of an immanent critique of Neocleous’s assorted
writings on the capitalist state, the theoretical motivation for which is a shared affinity for
Marxist theory that systematically aims at historicizing its subject matter
A Lecturer at Brunei University in West London since 1994, and a member of the
editorial collective of the journal, Radical Philosophy, Mark Neocleous is, if anything, a
prolific writer. In the last decade Neocleous has written five books and scores of articles
on subjects ranging from state theory, modem European philosophy, fascism, policing,
security, and political imagery. Dense with references and frequently filled with highly
allusive language, these writings reveal a thinker who can at once infuriate with hastily
drawn epithets and entice with carefully crafted arguments. It must be noted in advance
that Neocleous’s style of writing does not easily lend itself to summary. His expositions
are not exactly linear; rather, he frequently circles back on previous arguments in order to
expand and refine points. He also frequently indulges in digressions either to make
polemical points or to distinguish his arguments from those of other writers. He
occasionally resorts to undocumented claims using such academically unacceptable
assertions as: “research shows...” He is fond of employing conceptual symmetries that
1996); Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); The Fabrication of Social Order: A
Critical Theory of Police Power (London: Pluto Press, 2000); and Imagining the State (Maidenhead, U.K.:
Open University Press, 2003). It must be noted that a fifth book which tangentially touches on the same
subject was in press when this thesis was being written and was therefore not considered: The Monstrous
and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
4
are alleged to be preconditions of each other though never demonstrably shown to be
such.
Despite these several problems of exposition, it is nonetheless the case that
Neocleous’s overall academic purpose is easy to detect. The theoretical project that runs
through Neocleous’s varied writings was initially enunciated in Administering Civil
Society. Observing the renewed interest amongst academics of all political persuasions in
the idea of civil society in the years both immediately preceding and those succeeding
the fall of communism in the former Soviet Bloc countries, Neocleous proposes to
revitalize this concept for Marxism by reconsidering the Hegelian distinction between
state and civil society. In the process of reassessing this Hegelian theoretical heritage in
Marxism, Neocleous also proposes to incorporate insights from Michel Foucault’s
treatment of power as a disciplining mechanism that constitutes subjects according to
norms of various administrative discourses. From Foucault Neocleous takes over the idea
that administration is central to the construction of subjectivity, but he resolutely links
this process to the state, thereby stressing the political character of administration,
particularly its role in mediating class conflict. This latter point, that political
administration is intimately and inextricably involved in managing class struggle, is a
theme to which Neocleous returns time and again. It is for all intents and purposes the
guiding motif of his political theory, and, as will be argued in the course of this thesis,
this class-centric view of administration tends to vitiate the very distinction between state
and civil society that Neocleous takes such pains in defending.
The thesis consists of five chapters, the first four of which offer critical
commentary on Neocleous book-length studies of the state and political administration in
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
5
the order that they have appeared in print. The decision to present the trajectory of
Neocleous’s arguments in this chronological fashion rather than according to thematic
distinctions, has been taken because there is a palpable sense in which each of his
succeeding books can be profitably read as an extended elaboration of points first raised
in Administering Civil Society.10 Chapter One of this thesis will reprise the central
arguments of this inaugural work and establish the academic and political context against
which these arguments gain their sense. Included in the chapter will be brief accounts of
the history of the state/civil society couplet, some of the conventional views on the rise of
the modem administrative state, recent Marxist and non-Marxist attempts to theorize the
capitalist state, and the Foucauldian representation of state power as part of the
generalized social ordering process. Politically—why has class struggle not succeeded in
subverting capitalism?
Chapter Two looks at Neocleous’s interpretation of the phenomenon of fascism.
Frequently regarded by Marxist writers as an exceptional form of the capitalist state,
fascism is taken by Neocleous to symbolize in the starkest manner the internal logic of
the state form within capitalism. Focusing on the symbols and ideological expressions of
fascist regimes, Neocleous contends that the political purpose of this form of state is to
present a set of discursive practices that serve to integrate the working class into existing
capitalist relations by deliberately exaggerated appeals to national as opposed to class
identities. In detailing this argument it will be shown that Neocleous’s own understanding
of the state/civil society distinction contains unresolved tensions, largely because he tends
10 And as often is the case with academic writers, the theoretical problematic that informs Neocleous’s
publishing career derives from preoccupations acquired in graduate school. Thus Administering Civil
Society, and the further refinements to arguments enunciated in that book, originate in his PhD dissertation,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.