Politics of power: Engaging with the structure-agency debate from a class-based perspective

Abstract

This article provides a historical materialist critique and response to Bob Jessop’s Strategic-Relational-Approach (SRA) to the structure-agency debate. The critique is developed in four steps and four class-based solutions are given. First, the SRA provides no ontological entry-point to account for historically specific relations of power, while the researcher inescapably finds herself within them (e.g. class relations). Second, the SRA provides no ‘method of articulation’ to understand and explain why particular disruptive agencies exist within the structure-agency dialectic. Instead, Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’ locates the researcher as a potential ‘organic intellectual’ in the confrontation and transcendence of class relations. Third, for the SRA, power is meaningless because agency can always be ‘redefined’ so that it is explained through structural determinations. In politicising power through historical materialism, this article provides a concrete emancipatory operationalisation of Jessop’s dialectical ontology. Fourth, when studying uneven historical change, adopting a partisan approach may well suggest focusing on contingent action instead of structural necessities. Therefore, acknowledging the ‘politics of power’ may well be social scientists’ first step when contrasting historical change with their own political views.

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