Nicos Poulantzasâs intellectual work is characterized by what we could call a tragic paradox. He was a Marxist who theorized his epoch from a revolutionary perspective, in a time when the revolutionary processes were closing or had deviated into the aberrant restoration of a statified capitalism. Without doubt, Poulantzas was a heterodox Marxist. His contributions regarding the path to socialism were both brilliant and courageous, indeed at a time when the socialist horizon was falling apart as a symbol and as a perspective with the capacity to mobilize people.
I would like to study two key concepts of Poulantzasâs Marxism. These concepts are each interconnected, and allow us to think and to act in the present. They are the state as a social relation, and the democratic path to socialism.
The State and Gödelâs Incompleteness Principle
There is no doubt that this first concept (the state as a social relation) is one of the Greek-French Marxist sociologistâs main contributions: i.e. the idea that we should study the state as âa material condensation of the relationship of forces between classes and class fractionsâ. But is it not in fact the case that the executive and parliaments are chosen by the majority popular vote, from both dominant and dominated classes? And even if the popular classes vote for representatives that belong to the dominant elites, are these representatives not in some way committed to their voters? Is it not true that there are moral restrictions, imposed by voters, that limit the sphere of government action, which, if transgressed, will prompt a switch in voter preferences towards other candidates, or indeed produce social mobilization?
Some varieties of Marxism, confined in the universities, have argued that the popular classes live in a permanent state of delusion, under the effect of an âideological illusionâ organized by the dominant classes, or that the weight of the tradition of domination bears down so heavily on the popular classes that they can only reproduce their domination, whether voluntarily or unconsciously. This is absolutely not the case. The first idea amounts to considering domination as a biological fact, closing the door to any possibility of emancipation. Nor is tradition all-powerful. If that were true, new generations could only repeat what older generations had done before, and therefore history would be the perpetual repetition of the beginning of history. In this case, how could we understand that, for instance, we today live in cities whereas our ancestors lived in caves? It is wrong to overestimate the weight of tradition. It is true that tradition permeates and guides our attitudes and possibilities, but it never closes off the new paths and alternatives that could also appear. We can well understand the role of tradition in history by using Gödelâs incompleteness theorem.1 Gödel proves that in the formal systems of arithmetic, assuming the existence of a set of noncontradictory axioms, there are statements that cannot be proven or refuted by those axioms.
In the infinite diversity of possible human actions which result from peopleâs prior conditions (tradition), there are many choices and historic possibilities that do not depend or derive directly from this tradition. That is what explains the fact that societies transform themselves permanently despite the historic burden of relations of domination. The tradition of relations of domination that affect the behavior of new generations, those who rule and those who obey, in order to reproduce relentlessly those relations of domination has spaces (statements) that cannot be inferred from this domination and that do not reproduce this domination. There are spaces of uncertainty or interstitial fissures that escape from this logic of reproduction of domination. We could call it a principle of historic incompleteness which allows the possibility of innovation or breachesâin other words, of revolutions.
It is clear then that popular classes are not dumb, that reality is not a simple illusion and nor is tradition ubiquitous. Surrounded by deceptions, impostures, and the legacy of domination, peoples can also choose, learn, know, and decide. That is how they can elect some representatives instead of others, reaffirm their confidence in them or reject their promises. So, through the articulation of this legacy of domination with their own decisive action, the popular classes contribute to the formation of the public authorities and participate in the historical patterning of the relations of force within these same authorities. When they feel that they have been misled, they are outraged, and associate with other outraged people. If they see some opportunity, they mobilize. Moreover, if their actions condense in a collective hope for a different future, they transform their conditions of existence.
Those mobilizations usually break apart when they confront their first adversity or success. Sometimes they grow, win over new supporters, and extend their influence over media and public opinion. In some cases, they create a new common sense. When their demands materialize in accords, laws, budgets, investments, and rules, they become a state matter. And this is precisely what the state is: an everyday pattern of social relations between the governing and the governed, in which everyone participates in defining such concepts as the public, the commons, the collective and universal, albeit with different levels of influence, effectiveness, and determination.
The state is a permanent process of monopolization of a diversity of concepts: coercion, use of taxes, the common resources, dominant universals, and the writing and implementation of the laws that will apply to all. It is also an institution of rights (to education, health, security, work, and identity). The state thus encompasses all these determinations, albeit in a process. It is a flow, a fluid frame of relationships, struggles, achievements, sieges, seductions, symbols, and discourses that fight for goods, symbols, resources, and monopoly control over their management. The state definitely is a process, a cluster of social relations which enter into an institutional framework, become regular and stabilize (and indeed, this is why the words state and stability have a common root). But with the particularity that here we are faced with relations and social processes that institutionalize relationships of political-economic-cultural-symbolic domination, with a view to the reproduction and ânaturalizationâ of this same domination. In certain cases, the state is an institution, a procedural machine, but this machine and this materiality are also relationships, reified flows of struggles that objectivate the quality of the relationship of forces between those flows and social struggles.
The society, the state, and its institutions are like the tranquil geography of a rural landscape. They seem static, fixed, and immovable. But that is only on the surface. Underneath this geography we can find intense, burning lava flows that shift the landscape above as they circulate down below. When we look at geology at the scale of millions of years of history, we see that the surface is the result of lava flows that rose up and destroyed the old landscape, through their movement creating new mountains, valleys, and precipices that solidified and gave rise to todayâs geography.
Institutions are like geography in this regard: over time, the temporary solidification of past struggles, the relations of force between different social groups, and a particular moment of this relationship of forces, cools down and petrifies as norms, institutions, and procedures. Ultimately, institutions are the result of ancient struggles, forgotten and petrified. They are objectivated struggles but, at the same time, they also serve these struggles; they express what was the dominant relationship of forces during these ancient struggles which are now forgotten. They now work as structures of domination, without appearing as such. Hence, the double effectiveness of domination: The institutions are the result of domination, working for domination, but they have become dominant without appearing as structures of domination.
The State as a Paradoxical Process: Matter and Idea, Monopolization, and Universalization
The state is a cluster of paradoxical institutions. In the first place, it represents material and ideal relations. Second, it is a process of monopolization and universalization. It is in this paradoxical relation that we can find the secret and the real mystery of relations of domination.
We say that the state is matter because it daily presents itself to citizens as a set of institutions where people do paperwork or obtain certificates, or as laws that must be respected unless they want to risk punishment, or as procedures to follow in order to secure certification in the educational, labor, or territorial fields. The state also materially presents itself as courts of law, prisons that remind us of the consequences of breaking the law, and ministries where people can present demands or insist on their rights, etc. At the same time, the state is an idea and a symbol. In fact, it is more an idea and a symbol than it is matter, and it is the only place in the world where the idea precedes matter, because the key idea, the social proposal, the government program, the triumphant discursive articulation between the frame of discourses that define the social field transform into matters of state, laws, decrees, budgets, management, execution, etc.
The state is formed by a set of learned knowledge concerning history, culture, the natural sciences, and literature. But it also represents the certifications that validate the different hierarchies (be they military, educational, or social) that allow us to organize our lives (even without clearly knowing the origin of these hierarchies). It represents fears, prohibitions, and scrupulous respect for what is socially correct and socially punishable; acceptance of police or civil authority; submission before the learned, accepted, and respected standards that regulate paperwork, rights, certifications, legal, financial or proprietary procedures; norms about what is or is not appropriate; the mental organization necessary to function successfully within all these routine social norms; and the culture inculcated by the school, civic rituals, or institutionalized recognition, accepted as such. The state represents all this. In this sense, it is possible to say that the state implies a way of knowing the existing world as it has been constructed, and functioning with it; a way of knowing how to translate into action the symbols of the institutionally established dominant order; and a way of being able to act, whether individually or collectively, as workers, peasants, students, or businessmen, according to the maps for navigating society that are pinned up in offices, schools, universities, parliaments, courts, banks, etc.
The state is a permanent process that consolidates the existing relations (relations of domination) in each personâs body and in the frameworks through which they perceive and practically organize their own world. It is the permanent formation of the mental structures that people use to understand the existing world and to interact in this perceived world. The state is, then, the set of mental structures, symbolic frameworks, and systems for interpreting the world adopted by individuals who operate and function in the world. Clearly, this world is hierarchically organized, but it has also become internalized as a schema for interpretation and possible action. So it is no longer seen as something external; instead, it is ânaturalizedâ through the organization of the world at the level of ideas, alive in the mind and the body of every individual. Consequently, the state is also a set of ideas, knowledges, procedures, and perception frameworks that facilitate the tolerance of the established structures of authority. To some extent, it could be said that the state is the way in which the dominant reality chooses to write its grammar of domination on the body and mind of every individual, and on the collective body of every social class. It also represents the procedures of symbolic, discursive, and moral production through which every person and collective body sees themselves and interacts as a body in the world. In that sense, it can be said that the state is both matter and idea: 50% matter, 50% idea.
Similarly, in the other dimension of its paradoxical definition, the state is a permanent process of the concentration and monopolization of decisions. At the same time, it is a process of universalization of functions, knowledges, rights, and possibilities.
The state has the monopoly of coercion (according to Weberâs studies),2 but it is also a process of monopolizing taxes (as Norbert Elias has shown),3 of educational qualifications, national narratives, and dominant ideasâin other words, frameworks of perception and mental action with which people understand and interact in the world. It is the process of monopolization of common sense and the symbolic order,4 or, following Durkheim,5 of moral and logical principles that made people what they are in the world. This permanent monopolization of the knowledges and procedures that organize the social order is the main visible quality of the state. This is a monopolization of the principles that organize material and symbolic life in society.
However, there cannot be a legitimate monopoly (a primary quality of the state) if there is not a socialization or universalization of procedures, knowledges, achievements, rights, and identities. Social alchemy works in such a way that the appropriation of resources (coercion, taxes, knowledge, etc.) can only work if those resources are shared.
To some extent, the state is a form of community: a territorial, linguistic, educational, historical, mental, spiritual, and economic community. However, this community cannot be constructed without it simultaneously being usurped and monopolized by the few. The state is a historical process of the construction of the common. As soon as it has become common, something universal, it is simultaneously monopolized by a minority (the authorities). The result is precisely a monopoly of the common. The state does not represent a monopoly of private resources, but rather the monopoly of common resources, of common goods. We find in this contradiction the key to understanding the state or, in other terms, social domination.
The state can on...