This is a quick summary I compiled in April 2019, mostly from the SIPRO booklets. They’re a must-read to get a solid handle on what it means to do a conjunctural analysis.
Steps in the process
- Identify how you’re thinking of things and what potential preconceptions are
- Delimitation – what is and isn’t included in the conjunctural analysis?
- Investigate the correlation of forces
- Conclusions – what are the major things the investigation taught you?
- Based on these conclusions regarding the current moment, where are things headed?
- Evaluation of the process, so we can do it better next time
- Identify how you’re thinking of things and what potential preconceptions are
Before beginning your conjunctural analysis, you need to explicitly shape your approach. We all have preferences when it comes to making sense of the world (theory), ways we differentiate between quality information and junk (epistemology), and ways of collecting information (methodology). Instead of just doing what you’ve always done or everyone doing their own thing, we need to make explicit decisions about this – to form hypotheses – and hold each other accountable to them throughout the process. Otherwise it goes off the rails and you end up with no idea what you learned or what you should change to learn better.
Here are some things to consider. You could potentially debate any one of these questions for years, so remember that you just need quick-and-dirty, provisional agreements/hypotheses for now and you’ll revisit them during the evaluation.
• Who will the actors be in your conjunctural analysis? For example, will you treat “the working class” as a unit or break it up in terms of agricultural, industrial, and service work or be even more detailed than that?
• How do you understand power and how will you measure it? Think about different types of power, including electoral power, broader political power, ideological power, and the power of a sense of belonging.
• How would you define the system you’re analyzing? This doesn’t mean presupposing what should be conclusions of the analysis, but you will need a way to judge what makes groups stronger and weaker within the system.
• What are the origins of this system? As you do the analysis you should be aware of how these origins may persist (for example, “original accumulation” of indigenous land or the police beginning as slave catchers).
• What vantage points can you use to analyze the conjuncture? Wealth, elections and the media are common ones, but what about the perspective of the social fabric, convocational power, or going in and out of the job market? What else?
• What contradictions do you especially want to keep an eye out for when doing the analysis? (See the list towards the end)
• Along with contradictions, you’re looking for conflict and transformation in the conjunctural analysis. Brainstorm and discuss what this may look like. What are different processes to keep an eye out for?
Think about how preconceptions could potentially trip you up. These include
• Going into the analysis confident it will prove what you already think you know. It’s important to be explicit about your theoretical premises, but recognize these can also obscure things.
• Trusting one set of sources and ignoring the others (news, academic articles, statistics, and stuff written by folks in the movement).
• The dangers of your timeframe and geographical focus being too narrow and missing broader developments, or being too broad and impossible to complete.
• Putting too much emphasis on recent events and ignoring things that happened before.
• Falling into a process where you just accumulate information and don’t/can’t analyze it.
• Putting too much faith in the power of elites to shape society (that is, creating conspiracy theories)
- Delimitation – what is and isn’t included in the conjunctural analysis?
Now that you’ve made provisional hypotheses and are aware of potential problems, it’s time to start getting down to business. A conjunctural analysis is a map of what Gramsci calls the “historical bloc” – the alliance of groups who are the leading force in society and arrange things for their direct and indirect benefit. It’s also a map of the groups that are dominated by and opposed to this bloc. The relation between all of them is the “correlation of forces,” and the goal of a conjunctural analysis is to understand the correlation so you can find the most strategic way to support those on the bottom in their struggle against those on top.
So that we’re not left researching everyone who ever lived, you’ve got to make some delimitations
• What is the historical period? A broad period might be all of neoliberalism. A narrower one would be post-Cold War, or post-9/11. And post-Great Recession is probably as short as you’d want to go. “Periods” of history are different from each other because the blocs are different (think of the post-war welfare era versus neoliberalism), and the more narrow our timespan is the less perspective we’ll have on ruptures and reformulations of historical blocs.
• What location will you focus on? Will it be as broad as a world region or as narrow as a city?
You probably started thinking about historical blocs when going over the “things to consider” above. Now it’s time to make some specific hypotheses about these blocs. Without having done any research, what do you think the correlation of forces is? Specifically, who are the different actors, what sort of power do they have, and how do they relate to each other? What are some of the contradictions that are growing during this historical period? How does this location functions within the world system, especially in terms of flows of capital, imperial power, and geography? Think through this to be aware of what your assumptions are as you conduct the conjunctural analysis.
- Investigate the correlation of forces
Now it’s time to get down to business. Based on how you’ve defined “power,” you’ve got to research all the different collective actors in society that might have some of it. The first step (a) is to get the details on them, to figure out what they’re working with. Do they really have all the resources they seem to, or is it just slick PR? Next (b) you’ve got to bring these actors into relation with their allies. Who are their buddies whose backs they scratch, or their comrades whose backs they defend? What evidence supports this connection, beyond common sense or the anecdotal? What are the different groupings of actors, and which ones have the most and least power? Finally (c) it’s time to bring the whole panorama together. What are the broad dividing lines of conflict, who stands on each side of them, and how much power do they have relative to each other? This is the correlation of forces, the conjuncture, the current context.
A. Actors and resources
• Who are the actors?
• For each actor: How much wealth do they have? What sort of assets comprise it? Are these assets locked in place, or can they be flexibly maneuvered?
• What’s their place in the economic structure? What economic, political, cultural, judicial or coercive resources do they have? What’s their capacity to use each of them?
• How many people are there in their corporation/army/party/organization?
• How many people can they mobilize? How many sympathize with them?
• What’s the actor’s general level of organization, preparation, and the level of consciousness of their members?
• Who is the actor allied with? To what extent can they depend on these allies?
B. Blocs
• Looking for groupings of actors.
• What is the leading bloc? Whose material interests are directly served? Who can enlist the state and legality to serve these interests?
• Whose symbolic interests are served while their material interests are indirectly served? These are subordinate allies within the leading bloc.
• Who is subjugated? Whose participation is managed through coercion and consent?
• How do these blocs compare to the class make-up of society? How does class conflict manifest through conflict between different blocs?
• What are the contradictions each bloc is wrestling with? How are they looking to conserve or alter the economic basis of these contradictions?
C. Correlation of forces
• How are domination, consent, and resistance playing out between these groupings?
• Where does power lie and who have the upper hand regarding different aspects of power?
• What is each blocs’ strategy? How is the dominant bloc trying to reproduce the conditions of its power? What are its weaknesses? What are the struggles over the state, over moral leadership, and over the accumulation of wealth?
• How is the correlation changing as new resources, new strategies and tactics, and new strengths and weaknesses come about?
- Conclusions – what are the major things the investigation taught you?
Now that you’ve done all this work, it’s time to draw some lessons from it. Whereas before you had common sense assumptions about the best strategies and tactics to use, the most important groups to target, and communities to organize with, now you’ve looked at the evidence.
• Are there aspects of the leading bloc that seem weak, actors at risk of breaking off, contradictions that are primed to create a crisis?
• What aspects of the correlation of forces are favorable to our side?
• Which assumptions were born out and which ones were misguided?
• What surprised you and what inspired you?
• Most importantly, what are your fundamental take-aways?
- Based on these conclusions regarding the current moment, where are things headed?
This is where the process moves to strategic planning. As always, it’s important to begin by identifying your intuitions, desires, hopes and fears as you move into considering ‘What is to be done?’ One way to consider different courses of action is to make a table: the columns are the different primary actors and the rows are different tactical and strategic developments (for example, “a militant rank and file in our unions,” “a robust mutual aid network,” “socialists elected to city council,” “occupations of vacant housing”). How feasible is each of developments and how would each of them affect the different actors? This can help in determining what course of action would be most impactful (beyond just sounding cool) and also what’s within your means. If you key in on a few potential strategies you can further consider feasibility by listing out the organizing steps you’ll need to carry out to get there and what are the potential pitfalls.
- Evaluation of the process, so we can do it better next time
As always, remember to evaluate. What was helpful and what was problematic? Were you able to do an empirical analysis or did your assumptions steer the process? How can we change this conjunctural analysis method so that it works better for others in the future?
Sources
SIPRO – Metodologia de Analisis de Coyuntura notebooks (English translations available here)
Anne Showstack Sassoon- Gramsci’s Politics
Bertell Ollman- Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method
David Harvey- Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
Appendix – Seventeen Contradictions
Contradictions aren’t just problems or when people have opposing opinions. In the philosophy of dialectics they’re social forces that a) are both mutually supportive and mutually undermining, b) can range from being at a low simmer on the backburner to a rolling boil up front, c) can “metamorphosize” to include new social forces, and d) produce crises that sometimes lead to a total resolution (aka revolution) or more frequently partial reform. It’s important to develop a keen idea for contradictions, since they’re the grinding fault lines of the correlation of forces.
Harvey lists out seventeen primary contradictions. Read the book for examples of how each of them play out in real life.
The Foundational Contradictions
1: Exchange is necessary to obtain use value, but also it impedes our ability to access use values.
2: Social value must be represented physically, but money-holders also benefit from misrepresenting value.
3: Private property (money, commodities, capital) is guaranteed by the State, but the State/finance and individuals/private property can be mutually antagonistic.
4: Capital demands the dispossession and privatization of social wealth, but in doing so it destroys society’s capacity for reproduction.
5: Capital and labor both need each other and destroy each other.
6: Capital needs both fixity (long term physical investment) and circulation.
7: The value of production is only realized through consumption, but the producers aren’t paid enough to be adequate consumers.
The Moving Contradictions
8: Capital needs technology (hardware, software, organization) to increase profits, but this reduces labor and consumer demand while increasing unrest.
9: Capital needs an internally competitive, segmented, fragmented labor force, but this causes alienation.
10: Contradiction between the tendencies for monopoly/centralization and competition/decentralization.
11: Contradiction between a) fixed capital, hubs of investment, the state and b) mobile finance, creative destruction, capital
12: Capital needs poverty, but this creates crises of realization and revolt.
13: Capital colonizes and destroys the social reproduction necessary for its own reproduction.
14: Contradictory unity between freedom and domination (as in ‘workers are both free to work for whoever and free to starve’).
The Dangerous Contradictions
15: Capital demands compound growth but has less ability to feed its exponential rise.
16: Capital internalizes nature (reshapes nature for its benefit) but compound growth destroys it, rentiers enclose and leech off it, and the entire process is alienating.
17: Capital expands through increasing alienation, but alienated people revolt.
Stuart Schussler 