State as an Institutional Form in the Postgrowth Context
Discussion
The state as an institutional form in the postgrowth context
Max Koch & Hubert Buch-Hansen:
"At a more concrete level of abstraction, degrowthers and ecosocialists aspiring to formulate a political economy of the postgrowth era could build on the regulation theoretical notion of ‘institutional forms’ (see above). Critical issues to be studied include the conjunctural features of the wage-labour nexus (including patterns of marginalization, precarization and devaluation of certain work functions), enterprise forms, the kinds and functions of money and of the international political regime in a (transition to a) postgrowth economy as well as an operational division of labour of scales in a corresponding mode of regulation. And it would need to be discussed how the single institutional forms could evolve in parallel and at roughly the same speed, so that experiences of exclusion and anomie are avoided during the downscaling process of matter and energy throughputs in production and consumption. An early example for a reinterpretation of institutional forms in this light is the role of the state. There is a recent rereading of some classics of state theory from a degrowth and transformational change perspective (D’Alisa & Kallis, 2020; Koch, 2020b).
Materialist state theory – especially Gramsci (1971), Poulantzas (1978) and Bourdieu (2015) – constructs the state as a relatively autonomous sphere, where dominating and dominated groups represent and struggle for their interests. State policies cannot be reduced to the strategic interests of single actors, but rather develop as a result of the heterogeneity, compromises and changing dynamic of social forces within and beyond the state apparatus. The more socially coherent the coalition of forces that influences the state, the lesser the contradictions across its policies. Hence, according to the mentioned state theorists – and provided the necessary civil society mobilization (Buch-Hansen, 2018) – the existing state apparatus could be used to challenge the growth imperative. This would, however, presuppose a simultaneous change of the internal structure of the state, as Poulantzas already highlighted. Similarly, Max-Neef (1991, p. 62) argued that, in an ecological and social transition, the state apparatus would need to open up for state-civil society relations, in which the ‘political autonomy that arises from civil society’ serves as counterbalance to the ‘state’s logic of power’. The main challenge for activists continues to be the avoidance of ‘cooptation strategies of the state’ as a result of which ‘micro-organizations’ may ‘lose control … ’ (Guillén-Royo, 2015, p. 112; Max-Neef, 1991, p. 75)." (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807837?)