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This article explores challenges to the state and state power originating in the world market and the world of states. It proposes an approach useful for this and other purposes and identifies reference points for discussing recent challenges. This cannot be the 'state in general' but must comprise well-specified, actually existing state forms. It then explores crises as an objectively overdetermined, subjectively indeterminate condensation of challenges that pose problems of crisis-management and may also lead to crises of crisis-management. It examines the interaction of economic and political crises and their possible role in the alleged decline of liberal democracy.

AbstractThis article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky's work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. The article ends with brief reflections on the role of easy credit and hard cash in the surprising survival of neo-liberal economic and political regimes since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis became evident.

This article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky's work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. The article ends with brief reflections on the role of easy credit and hard cash in the surprising survival of neo-liberal economic and political regimes since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis became evident.

This article critiques the institutionalist literature on varieties of capitalism and the more regulationist comparative capitalisms approach. It elaborates the alternative concept of variegated capitalism and suggests that this can be studied fruitfully through a synthesis of materialist form analysis and historical institutionalism within a world-market perspective. It highlights the role of institutional and spatiotemporal fixes that produce temporary, partial, and unstable zones of stability (and corresponding zones of instability) within the limits of the crisis-prone capital relation, and illustrates this from the crisis of crisis-management in the Eurozone crisis.

Politicisation, depoliticisation, and repoliticisation are basic and interrelated concepts in political analysis. They may also describe specific political strategies in relatively stable, turbulent or crisisprone periods or concrete conjunctures. This article aims to clarify the chameleon-like concept of depoliticisation by distinguishing its different levels and forms. It also applies these distinctions to two cases of 'depoliticisation' in the fiscal politics of the North Atlantic Financial Crisis (NAFC). The magnitude, duration, and depth of this crisis have prompted an intriguing mix of de- and repoliticisation strategies. These are evident in the manufactured hysteria about the 'fiscal cliff' in the USA and the attempts to impose technocratic government and a new economic constitution in the Eurozone. The conclusion offers some general reflections.

This article offers some critical realist, strategic-relational comments on Colin Hay's proposal to treat the state as an 'as-if-real' concept. The critique first develops an alternative account of ontology, which is more suited to analyses of the state and state power; it then distinguishes the 'intransitive' properties of the real world as an object of investigation from the 'transitive' features of its scientific investigation and thereby provides a clearer understanding of what is at stake in 'as-if-realism'; and it ends with the suggestion that a concern with the modalities of state power rather than with the state per se offers a more fruitful approach to the genuine issues raised in Hay's article and in his earlier strategic-relational contributions to political analysis.