Page 43 - Communication Commerce and Power The Political Economy of America and the Direct Broadcast Satellite

US Foreign Communication Policy 31

According to Robert Cox, 'The nature of the state is ... [in part]
defined by the class structure on which the state rests.' 32 Rather than
portraying a crude dominance of a ruling class, in which dominant
agents use the state instrumentally, Cox agrees with Skocpol in under-
standing that the actions of state actors are directly influenced by
historically based structural capacities. According to Cox,

state actions are constrained by knowledge on the part of the
state's agents of what the class structure makes possible and what
it precludes. . . . The structure defining these tasks and limits,
which becomes part and parcel of the state itself, is . . . called the
historic bloc. 33

Cox explains a historic bloc to be a 'complex of social class
relations ... [which] sets the practical limits for feasible goals and
methods of exerc1smg power.' Significant social-economic
movements and related power shifts will generate disruptions within
a bloc. In such disruptive periods, 'classes and ideologies and the
political parties that shape and guide them form rival historic
blocs contending over the very nature of the state. If one bloc,' says
Cox, 'displaces another, a new state is born and with a new raison
d'etat.'
In sum, a historic bloc is a complex alliance of interests which both
reflect and direct the character of dominant political-economic activ-
ities at a given period of capitalist history. Directly linked to such
34
historic blocs and their capacities are more general complexes of
national and international production relations and classes, and
these both influence and are influenced by a particular world order.
Cox and other Gramscian international political economists (such as
Stephen Gill) deem such a world order to be hegemonic if 'the
dominant state creates an order based ideologically on a broad meas-
ure of consent.' Cox continues that in such an order,

production in particular countries becomes connected through the
mechanisms of a world economy and linked into world systems of
production. The social classes of the dominant country find allies
in classes within other countries. The historic blocs underpinning
particular states become connected through the mutual interests
and ideological perspectives of social classes in different countries,
and global classes begin to form. An incipient world society grows
up around the interstate system, and states themselves become