The question of state power is one of the most complex issues for emancipatory politics. Even when popular parties with redistributive agendas have won electoral majorities and gained, in principle, access to the governmental levers of power, they face a host of obstacles in implementing their campaign promises. They do not enter into full possession of the state, as if it were a new home: the rooms may be booby-trapped, the stairs barricaded; there may be snipers in the kitchen—shooters who are unseen because they are taken for granted, and all the more effective because unseen. As Lenin reminded Kautsky, even if they have been ejected from office, ‘the exploiters’ still retained many practical advantages: money, property, superior education, knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of rule, norms of organization, close connections with higher officialdom and so forth.footnote¹ In liberal democracies, enormous pressures can be brought to bear upon radical administrations, whether at municipal, state or federal level. The mainstream media, the judiciary, the intelligence services, opposition parties may all come into play, with scandals whipped up out of trifles, judicial harassment, dirty tricks or political manoeuvres—and this even before market pressures are taken into account. If we are not to become trapped in a permanent state of melancholy, we need a careful analysis of the state’s enormous capacity for reaction in defence of capital’s interests.

These questions are central for an assessment of the cycle of left governments in Latin America that opened with Chávez’s victory in Venezuela in 1998—followed by the advent of Lula in Brazil, Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. The end of the cycle might be dated to the 2015 victory of Mauricio Macri in Argentina, followed by the victories of Sebastián Piñera in Chile and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. But at the time of writing this political landscape remains fiercely contested, with new rebellions against neoliberal orthodoxy in Chile and Colombia, counter-revolution in Bolivia, successive attempts to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela and new victories of the centre-left in Mexico and Argentina.

A rich literature has analysed the roots of this experience in the crises of the neoliberal model that erupted across the continent in the late 1990s—foreshadowing those that would strike the advanced-capitalist heartlands from 2008—and its coincidence with the China-led commodity super-cycle. In one of the landmark texts of the upswing, the Brazilian strategist Emir Sader set Latin America’s markedly leftist political response to this conjuncture in the context of the continent’s long tradition of popular revolt.footnote² Since then, further work has focused chiefly on subjective issues: studies of social movements, protests and trade unions, both continent-wide and at country level. Of these, one of the most original contributions—from the Chilean scholar, René Rojas—set out to explain the limits of the ‘pink tide’ governments in terms of the structural weakness of the popular classes in Latin America, after decades of imf programmes, in contrast to the militant workers’ organizations of the 1960s, crushed by the full weight of the 1970s military dictatorships.footnote³ So far, however, there has been little cross-country comparative analysis of the recent left governments’ experience with state power.

What conceptual underpinnings would such a study require? Theorizations of state and inter-state orders have been a staple of political thought, often enough—in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel, Weber, Lenin, Gramsci, Mann, Tilly, Fukuyama—responding to the crises, wars and revolutions that have marked the emergence and life-span of the modern state. Collating half-a-dozen or more contemporary perspectives, Bob Jessop’s work offers a conceptual tool-box to help address the task. An English writer in the broader new-left tradition, Jessop’s early contributions focused on Marxian and Poulantzasian theories of the state; he has taught in the sociology department of the University of Lancaster since 1990, following a 15-year stint teaching government at Essex. His most recent book, The State: Past, Present, Future, summarizes nearly forty years of study.footnote⁴

The approach Jessop proposes does not set out a general theory of ‘the state’—that is, an explanation that would comprehend its origins, laws of motion and course of development, without reference to other kinds of inquiry. He argues that the polymorphism of this mechanism of rule—instantiated in Mesopotamian palaces, scholar-bureaucracies, complex chiefdoms, city-states, early modern absolutist monarchies, colonial and post-colonial transplants, party-states, capitalist liberal-democracies—and its multiple, changing contexts suggest, rather, the need for a combined method of comparative-historical case studies and conjunctural analysis. The object, then, is not ‘the state’ but modern ‘states’, of which the primary determinants are, as Weber said, territory, population and apparatus of rule—to which Jessop would add the ‘state idea’. But these cannot be understood without reference to the broader system of competitive political forms—multi-national empires, militarized theocracies, feudal baronies, tribal confederations, lawless zones—within which modern states fought their way to dominance; to the discursive and coercive strategies through which they secure the population’s consent; and to the successive inter-state hierarchies in which they have combined.footnote⁵ International structures of wealth and power have acquired a new salience for nation states in the age of globalization, Jessop notes, introducing non-accountable forms of control—multinational companies and banks, supra-national bodies—capable of penetrating their social structures. At the same time, economic might is more than ever linked to media power, with its capacity to promote and inform specific cultural values, and to surveillance technologies. There is no doubt that states are capable of exercising a greater degree of social control today than could have been imagined twenty years ago.

Following Nicos Poulantzas in State, Power, Socialism (1978), Jessop argues that a state is not a neutral instrument or passive tool, offering equal constraints and opportunities to all social actors; nor should it be conceived, as in much mainstream political science, as disembodied from the broader society over which it rules. Instead, as the Greek political scientist suggested, the formal-institutional constitution of a state—its apparatus, modes of representation, governing ideas—reflects a historical crystallization of the balance of social forces in its home territory and beyond. For Jessop, adopting Gramsci’s terms, this material condensation represents the interests of the dominant bloc, the victors of past social struggles—of capital over labour, men over women, whites over blacks and indigenous peoples, the centre over the periphery. But the state compact is also marked by the compromises struck with broader class and regional forces, and the discursive forms or ‘hegemonic visions’ with which it wins the consent of the governed and projects its own goals as the national interest. It is in this sense that Poulantzas’s ‘admittedly enigmatic’ formulation, ‘the state is a social relation’, should be understood. Its mode of operation has built-in biases—Jessop calls this ‘strategic selectivity’—reflecting the interests of the dominant bloc; the liberal-democratic state is thus both representative and hierarchical. Yet the underlying balance of forces is subject to change, through shifts in the economy, social developments or the impact of external forces, potentially throwing the state into crisis and challenging its operatives to respond and adapt.footnote⁶

In this view, it is not ‘the state’ that acts; rather, the powers of a state are activated by changing sets of leaders, officials and politicians located within different state institutions, often acting in response to external pressures, reflecting the domestic or international balance of forces. At the same time, the institutional matrix of the state apparatus itself—the core legal-political-coercive complex: executive, legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, intelligence services, armed forces and so forth—is a heterogeneous assortment, the distribution of powers varying within it. The relative weight of executive and legislative branches, the superordinate role of powerful ministries (Finance, Interior), the accountability (or corruption) of the bureaucracy, rivalries between intelligence services or security forces, are likely to reflect relations outside the state as well as narrow institutional outlooks and jealousies. To act coherently, the state apparatus as an ensemble needs to be unified by a guiding set of ideas—a state project, in Jessop’s terms—which provides it with an overall orientation and shapes the forms its ‘strategic selectivity’ will take. This project is distinct from, and narrower than, the hegemonic visions by which the dominant bloc aims to unify the broader social formation behind its rule and which serve to legitimate state power. Modes of representation—electoral systems and political parties, but also the ‘ideological apparatus’ of the media, education systems and established religions—are the crucial transmission belts for the reproduction and contestation of its rule.footnote⁷