Modes of Determination in Contemporary Capitalism

Figure 3 schematically depicts the articulation of instances characteristic of contemporary capitalism. As in every social formation, the economic function is primary and determinant in the last instance; however, in capitalist modes of production (unlike lineage and feudal modes) the relations and forces of production are formally combined within a distinct complex of economic institutions comprising the eco-

nomic instance. Because the function of economic ownership resides in the economic instance, the latter is the dominant instance of a capitalist mode of production. In figure 3, the dominance of the economic instance is qualitatively expressed as a relation of limitation wherein the economic instance limits the range of possible variations of the political and ideological instances, although it does not directly transform them. Furthermore, because it exercises the ownership function—that is, it controls access to the means of production and the distribution of the social product—the economic instance defines the limits of functional compatibility of the modes of determination exercised by the state on itself—the extent to which the economy can be reproduced or not reproduced (facilitated or inhibited) by the state. Of course, the relations of limitation and the limits of functional compatibility exercised by the economy over the state are not coordinated directly. The absence of direct coordination (reflecting the relative autonomy and uneven development of the social formation) makes it possible, even inevitable, that contradictions between the state and the economy—for example, political practices that are non-reproductive with respect to the economy—will emerge. The economy also exercises an ideological function. By the mode of selection the economic instance determines social subjectivity; it interpellates individuals with respect to their "place" in the forces and relations of production, while the nature and number of available places sets an objective limitation on the practice of interpellated social subjects.

The relative autonomy of the capitalist state is manifested in the formal separation of the political function from the economic instance and from the direct control of the dominant economic class. Although operating within limits imposed by the dominance of the economy (limits that specifically include separate political and economic instances), the capitalist state must have considerable powers not only to reproduce the basic conditions of capitalist accumulation as in the "nightwatchman" state of classical liberalism but also, with the transition to monopoly capitalism, to "regulate" and actively intervene in the economy. Subordinate to the economic instance, the political instance is dominant with respect to the ideological instance. The capitalist state functions as the organizer of the hegemony of the dominant class and class fractions, and by means of its legal code and administrative apparatuses, it limits the practice of human agents to a range of activities compatible with that hegemony. The state determines ideological apparatuses insofar as it declares them legal or illegal, supervises or regulates their

operation, and gives or withholds support (financial and otherwise). By this more specific relation of selection exercised by the state on the various ideological apparatuses, the state indirectly determines the interpellation of social subjects and thus the practice of human agents.

The state directly determines the practice of human agents through the interpellative effects of its own apparatuses, particularly the public school system, where individuals become "good citizens" and patriotic members of the "nation." However, like the economy, the political instance has a polarizing as well as an integrative influence on social subjectivity. While the economy polarizes agents around relations of exploitation and cooperation (ownership of means of production, control over organizational positions and skills, and so forth), politics polarizes social subjects around relations of representation and domination. These bipolar and contradictory interpellations may be specified, following Poulantzas, as "the people" and "the power bloc." Struggles for political power take place in terms of "rights" and "justice" and thus assume a "popular-democratic" rather than an economic-class character.

The ideological instance and the habitus limit the human agent by their objective existence as the social space within which all practice must occur, and select the human agent as a social subject with a unique, often contradictory combination of roles, identities, and capacities. The relations of determination exercised by the economy, the state, and the ideological apparatuses on the human agent are no more directly coordinated with the relations of transformation emanating from the latter than was the case with the relations between the economy and the state. This condition is precisely what makes transformation possible. The human agent—the interpellated effect of the contradictory articulation of instances—is the social subject of all practice, whether antagonistic or non-antagonistic with respect to the dominant mode of production. Thus, the mode of determination of the human agent is always and exclusively transformation.

Economic and political structures define positions or places within social space, and they interpellate human agents on the basis of the positions and places they occupy. However, economic and political relations do not completely define the social space, nor do they exclusively define concrete human individuals who are the agents of all political and economic practice. This tension means, on the one hand, that the effectivity of the ideological instance with respect to the individual agent cannot be reduced to economic or political forms. Although subordinate to both the economic and political instances, the ideological

instance not only mediates relations among itself, the economy, and the state—it is only through the values, meanings, and strategies formed within the habitus that the economy and the state can function at all—but it also interpellates social subjects who are more than simply citizens or workers. On the other hand, the ideological field is limited and selected by the dominance of economic and political structures. As a result, the capacity of a social subject to act within the fields of economic, political, or ideological relations is always already structured insofar as its condition of existence is the intransitive articulation of the instances and their distinct and unequal effectivities. Given the primacy of the economic instance within the social formation, the practice of social subjects is always already a class-structured practice.

To prevent a serious misunderstanding, I should point out that each of the instances depicted in figure 3 (and thus their various modes of determination) is assigned its place and function by the historical matrix of the structure as a whole. In other words, the intransitive effectivity of the articulation of the instances, what Althusser calls the "matrix effect of a mode of production," determines the transitive effectivities, the distinct and unequal modes of determination of the economic, political, and ideological structures. Similarly, the articulation of the instances, as internalized by social subjects and manifested as social space (the field of practice), defines all possible practices and gives to them a determinate class-based character. It is Poulantzas's original achievement to have identified this indirect, intransitive, and overdetermined class relationship and to have given it a name: social class. Poulantzas has also clarified an important distinction between economic and social class relations about which we must be absolutely clear. Economic class relations, defined by the forces and relations of production, exert direct or transitive determinations on the political and ideological instances (as depicted by the arrows in figure 3); social class relations, defined by the historical matrix, exert an indirect or intransitive effectivity that is always already there with respect to economic (as well as political and ideological) relations as their assigned place and function within the complex whole (depicted in figure 3 as the relative dominance of the instances and the qualitative character of their modes of determination). Thus economic class relations are always already social class relations, but it is as economic (social) class relations that they exert their dominance over political and ideological (social class) relations in capitalist modes of production.

Similarly, by means of the matrix effect of the articulation of in-

stances, the capitalist state is always already a class state insofar as it has been assigned a place and a function by an articulation dominated by the capitalist mode of production. It acts as a class state because its apparatuses are limited by the primacy of the economy. It remains a class state to the extent that social class relationships, actualized within the social space and the habitus by social class subjects, remain polarized around the objective economic class interests of the dominant class(es) and not the exploited class(es)—the extent, in other words, to which the ideological discourse of the ruling class is hegemonic within the field of ideological interpellations, thereby producing agents whose practice reproduces the existing relations of production and the existing structure of the state. The state's ability to fulfill its structural function of reproducing the "rule" of the ruling classes depends on its ability to minimize the contradictions between domination and execution within the state itself and mask their interpellative effects, that is, the distinction between the power bloc and the people. Although the capitalist state is not the source of the power it wields (power has its ultimate source in the forces and relations of production), it has acquired, by means of its separation from the economy and the resulting ideological consequences of this separation, the exclusive right to power. The power of the state is particularly difficult to undermine not simply because it has acquired its own coercive apparatuses and monopolized the means of violence but also because its relative autonomy effectively conceals the economic taproot of political power behind a mask of popular-democratic forms.

The modes of determination depicted in figure 3 are provisional. While the economic, political, and ideological instances—combined within a single institutional framework (a lineage) or taking separate institutional forms (a state, an enterprise)—and their hierarchy are constant social facts, their modalities are presented here as hypotheses, not axioms. I do not seek to limit dogmatically the modes of determination to just the six forms described by Wright, nor to imply that these forms might not be revised considerably in light of substantive variations of the economic, political, and ideological instances in different modes of production and social formations. Here I have sought only to demonstrate how political practice and the capitalist state might be explained in terms of economic determination without being reduced thereby to reflections of the economy.