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ONE
Marxism and the Critique of Bourgeois Social Science
In the Marxist scheme, the “ruling class” of capitalist society is that class which owns and controls the means of production and which is able, by virtue of the economic power thus conferred upon it, to use the state as its instrument for the domination of society.
—Ralph Miliband, 1969
The state has the particular function of constituting the factor of cohesion between the levels of a social formation. This is precisely the meaning of the Marxist conception of the state as a factor of “order” … as the regulating factor of its global equilibrium as a system.
—Nicos Poulantzas, 1968
The publication of Nicos Poulantzas’ Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociales (1968) and Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) initiated a return to the state in political science and sociology after a long hiatus where the concept had been discarded by mainstream social scientists (Almond, 1988; Commninel, 1987; Easton, 1981, 1990; Evans et al., 1985; Pierson, 1996, 78; Therborn, 1987). Similarly, Miliband observes that prior to the publication of his book, Marxists had also “made little notable attempt to confront the question of the state” since Lenin. The one exception to this claim was Poulantzas’ Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociales, which Miliband (1969, 6, 7 fn. 1) described favorably as “a major attempt at a theoretical elaboration of the Marxist ‘model’ of the state.” After the publication of Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society, Poulantzas (1969, 67) also praised Miliband’s book as “extremely substantial” and wrote that “he cannot recommend its reading too highly.” However, Poulantzas’ praise was qualified by “a few critical comments” that set off a series of exchanges between the two theorists in the New Left Review that came to be known as the Poulantzas-Miliband debate (Laclau, 1975; Miliband, 1970, 1973; Poulantzas, 1969, 1976).
When the debate began in 1969, Miliband was already one of the preeminent intellectual figures of the British New Left (Newman, 2002), but by the late-1970s after he moved to the United States his name also appeared on a list of the most prominent political scientists in the United States (Roettger, 1978). Indeed, at the height of his intellectual influence, Miliband was possibly the leading Marxist political scientist in the English-speaking world, primarily due to The State in Capitalist Society (Blackburn, 1994, 15). Nicos Poulantzas’ reputation as a political theorist was also immediately elevated in France by the publication of Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociale, which appeared only a few days before the May Days of 1968 (Jessop, 1985, 9–25).
However, following his review of Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969), Poulantzas’ work soon captured worldwide scholarly attention. The scholarly and political interest in his book on state theory quickly resulted in Spanish (1972) and English (1973) language translations and, by the mid-1970s, Goran Therborn (1987, 1230) observes that “Nicos Poulantzas was arguably the most influential living political theorist in the world.” In a remarkably short period of time, Poulantzas’ book was influencing left-wing academics and political activists throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, and beyond. Bob Jessop (1985, 5–6), who has written the most extensive intellectual biography of Poulantzas argues “it is no exaggeration to claim that Poulantzas remains the single most important and influential Marxist theorist of the state and politics in the post-war period.” For even where Poulantzas’ contributions have been superseded by more recent work, Poulantzas has often “set the terms of debate” (Jessop, 1985, 5–6; 1991).
Consequently, in his recent foreword to the new edition of The State in Capitalist Society, Leo Panitch (2009, xxii) provides a reminder that contemporary state theory continues to build on the framework of the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, while Stuart Hall (2000, viii) insists that the Poulantzas-Miliband debate has become “an obligatory reference point for all subsequent theorizing on the modern capitalist state.” James Martin (2008, 1) echoes the view that the Poulantzas-Miliband debate remains “a central reference point for all students of social and political theory.” The exchange between Poulantzas and Miliband was paradigmatic and enduring partly because it set in motion a broader “state debate” that eventually fractured Marxist political theory into warring schools of thought (Alford and Friedland, 1985; Barrow, 1993; Carnoy, 1984; Clarke, 1991; Jessop, 1982). While the Poulantzas-Miliband debate echoed widely across the 1970s, it was never confined exclusively to Poulantzas and Miliband. Following their initial exchange in 1969–1970, political theorists and political sociologists around the world quickly lined up around the question of whether Miliband’s “instrumentalist” theory of the state or Poulantzas’ “structuralist” theory of the state was the Marxist theory of the state (Gold et al., 1975a, 1975b; Jessop, 1977).
Background to the Poulantzas-Miliband Debate
The Poulantzas-Miliband debate erupted within a paradoxical historical context defined on the one hand by the political rebellions of 1968–1969 and, on the other hand, by the ideological dominance of a social science preoccupied with the concepts of “pluralism” and “system equilibrium.” The two sides of this contradiction were mediated by a student, intellectual, and cultural revolt that revived the study of Marxism in universities throughout the advanced capitalist societies (Ollman, 1982). Not coincidentally, Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband were public intellectuals who were already engaged in this ideological struggle and both were theoretically committed to “the Marxist tradition,” which they considered the main alternative to the dominance of “bourgeois social science.” In fact, the two books that precipitated the initial debate appeared within a year of each other and were published at the global apogee (1968–1969) of the domestic and colonial insurrections in and against advanced capitalism.
Biographical Background: The 1960s
Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas were both expatriates and refugees who fled repressive regimes early in their lives. Miliband, who came from a Polish-Jewish background was actually born in Belgium in 1924. He joined his first socialist youth organization at age 15 and fled to England with his father in 1940 literally on the last boat to leave Belgium before Nazi troops captured Ostend. The following year, Miliband (1993) entered the London School of Economics (LSE) specifically to study with Harold Laski. Laski (1935, 87–88) was a well-established state theorist by this time and had long claimed that “Since the Industrial Revolution the state has been biased in favour of the owners of the instruments of production as against those who have nothing but their labour power to sell.” After completing his studies, Miliband began teaching at LSE in the early 1950s and he remained there until 1969 when he moved to Brandeis University to accept the Morris Hillquit Professorship. Miliband eventually left Boston to become a member of the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and he had just retired from CUNY shortly before his death in 1994.
For most of his life, Miliband did not belong to any political party, but he was closely associated with the “left socialists” in the British Labour Party, who sought to steer a path between Leninism and social democracy. Miliband’s first book, Parliamentary Socialism (1961) was a critique of the British Labour Party and a critique of the electoral and bureaucratic mechanisms that diverted the party from pursuing more radical objectives (Burnham, 2008; Coates and Panitch, 2002). During this time, Miliband was a founding editor of the New Left Review and a co-founder of the Socialist Register. He was also active in the British peace movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and numerous other campaigns against social and political oppression. In the 1980s, Miliband was a founder of the Socialist Society, which helped convene several conferences to provide a new voice for socialists in the British Labour Party. However, by the final decade of his life, Miliband (1995) was calling for a new socialist party capable of forging an alliance between organized labor and the new social movements (Allender, 1996).
Nicos Poulantzas was born in Athens in 1936 where he lived through the Nazi occupation and the Greek Civil War. Poulantzas received his baccalaureate from the Institute Francais in 1953 and then entered the University of Athens School of Law. Although active in various political movements as a youth, it was not until the early 1960s, after Poulantzas had moved to Paris that he became a card-carrying member of the Greek Communist Party (Jessop, 1985, Chap. 1). Poulantzas was a professor of legal philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1961 to 1964 and he continued teaching at French universities until his death in 1979. By the time Poulantzas published Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociale in 1968, he was already well known in French intellectual circles, primarily through his association with the “existential Marxists” at Les Tempes Modernes (Hirsch, 1981; Poster, 1975). However, shortly after joining the editorial board of Les Tempes Modernes in 1964, Poulantzas was increasingly influenced by the British Marxists gathering around the New Left Review and the works of Antonio Gramsci, but most especially by the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser (Benton, 1984; Elliott, 2009; Lewis, 2005; Montag, 2013).
Intellectual Background: Bourgeois Social Science
Miliband had conceived of writing The State in Capitalist Society as early as 1962 (Newman, 2002, 185), but it was not published until 1969 on the cusp of a rising wave of global political upheaval. Miliband acknowledges at a number of points that his own work was building on a subterranean intellectual movement that had been gaining momentum in the United States after the publication of C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite (1956). Miliband’s book effectively linked a vast array of disparate economic, political, and ideological left-wing currents into a theory that explained why a nominally democratic state was responding more to the economic and political preferences of capitalist elites than to popular mass movements expressing their vehement opposition to existing state policies at home and abroad.
In the late 1960s, the terms of debate in social science and political theory were defined by theories that could not account for the existence, much less the magnitude, of rebellion within the advanced capitalist societies (Gitlin, 1987; Young, 1977). The concept of the state and state power had been replaced in academic sociology and political science by a concept of “the political system” identified with the works of Talcott Parsons and David Easton. Parsons’ sociology identified the political system with individual and collective behaviors that provide “a center of integration for all aspects” of the social system. David Easton (1953, 106), who played a major role in consolidating the behavioral revolution in political science, declared that “neither the state nor power is a concept that serves to bring together political research.” In urging political scientists to abandon the analysis of the state and power, Easton proposed that scholars examine instead “those interactions through which values are authoritatively allocated for a society.” Furthermore, Easton (1953, 21–23) emphasized that to account for the persistence of political systems, one had to assume that they successfully generate two “system outputs”: (1) the political system must be able to allocate values for a society (i.e., decision making) and (2) the political system must induce most members of society to accept these allocations as binding, at least most of the time (i.e., legitimacy). The bulk of Easton’s theoretical and empirical work during the 1950s and 1960s was on the “support inputs” that stabilize and equilibrate political systems.
However, as Miliband (1969, 3) observes, the systems analytic concept of decision making was wedded to the democratic-pluralist view of society that also came to dominate political science and political sociology at the same time. Pluralist theory views decision making as the outcome of bargaining and conflict between interest groups in society (Dahl, 1958, 1959, 1961; Truman, 1951). Importantly, pluralists argue that key sources of power, such as wealth, force, status, and knowledge are, if not equally distributed, at least widely diffused among a plurality of competing groups in society. This purported pattern of “dispersed inequalities” means that no one group controls a disproportionate share of all key resources, while all groups in society possess some key resources. This pattern of dispersed inequalities insures that no one group dominates the political process all the time (i.e., authoritative decision making), while no group is completely powerless within that process or involuntarily excluded from it. The significance of pluralist theory is that it seemed to explain how the authoritative allocation of values in the political system induces most citizens to accept those decisions as legitimate and binding most of the time.
Robert A. Dahl (1965, 137–138), who was possibly the single most important proponent of pluralist theory among the icons of the behavioral revolution, (1965, 137–138) emphasized that pluralist theory assumes:
… that there are a number of loci for arriving at political decisions … business men, trade unions, politicians, consumers, farmers, voters and many other aggregates all have an impact on policy outcomes; that none of these aggregates is homogeneous for all purposes; that each of them is highly influential over some scopes but weak over many others; and that the power to reject undesired alternatives is more common than the power to dominate over outcomes directly.
In the view of most mainstream scholars and public officials, the Western consensus on pluralist democracy and managed capitalism—namely, the Keynesian welfare state—was so complete by the early 1960s that politics had seemingly reached “the end of ideology” (Bell, 1960). However, the worldwide political upheavals of 1968–1969 called into question the dominant assumptions of academic social science at precisely the moment when systems theorists, behavioralists, and pluralists were celebrating their triumph at meetings of the social science disciplinary associations. The idea that Western economic and political systems had achieved system equilibrium through pluralist democracy and managed capitalism literally went up in smoke on university campuses and in the streets of those very countries (Singer, 1970; Touraine, 1971; Young, 1977).
In the United States, the long hot summers of the mid-1960s signaled an end to the system equilibrium of a so-called pluralist society. There were urban riots in the African-American sections of many major cities, including Los Angeles (1965), Chicago (1966), and Newark (1967). Only July 28, 1967, while new rioting was underway in Detroit, Michigan, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate these riots convinced that the underlying cause was external Communist or Soviet subversion designed to distract the United States from its involvement in the Vietnam War. However, when the so-called Kerner Commission presented its findings in 1968, it concluded that urban riots and other forms of violence in major cities were caused by the profound frustration of inner-city African-Americans and a deeply embedded r...
