State, Power, Socialism

Nicos Poulantzas, Patrick Camiller

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781781681480
• eBook ISBN: 9781781685112
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Developing themes of his earlier works, Poulantzas here advances a vigorous critique of contemporary Marxist theories of the state, arguing against a general theory of the state, and identifying forms of class power crucial to socialist strategy that goes beyond the apparatus of the state.
This new edition includes an introduction by Stuart Hall, which critically appraises Poulantzas's achievement.

Part One

The Institutional Materiality of the State

We can now return to our initial problem: the institutional materiality of the State regarded as a ‘special’ apparatus cannot be reduced to its role in political domination. It must, first of all, be sought in the relationship of the State to the relations of production and to the social division of labour which they entail. But this relationship is not of an order epistemologically different from that of the State’s relationship to social classes and the class struggle. Placing the State in relationship with the relations of production and the social division of labour is but the first, albeit a distinct, moment of a single endeavour: namely that of situating the State vis-à-vis the field of struggle as a whole. I shall now attempt to demonstrate this insofar as it concerns the capitalist State, without however exhaustively taking up analyses made in my previous books. I shall content myself with deepening and rounding off a number of points (and correcting certain others) in the light of analyses that we are now in a position to make.

The question I tried to answer in Political Power and Social Classes was the following: why, in order to assert its political domination, does the bourgeoisie dispose of the quite specific state apparatus that is the capitalist State – the modern representative State, the national-popular class State? From where does this State’s original material framework derive? My analyses already went in the direction of saying that this materiality results from the relative separation of the State and the relations of production under capitalism. This separation constitutes the organizing principle of the peculiar institutions of the capitalist State and of its diverse apparatuses (courts, army, administration, police, and so on), of its centralism, bureaucracy and representative institutions (universal suffrage, parliament, etc.) and of its juridical system; its foundation lies in the specificity of the relations of production and of the social division of labour which they entail: that is to say, in the relationship of possession whereby the direct producer is radically separated from his means and object of labour within the labour process itself.

At the time, I was struck by a characteristic feature of the Marxist theory of the State, one which persists today and which springs from deep ambiguities in Marx’s own thinking on the subject. Of those Marxist authors who did not reduce the capitalist State to political domination (to the ‘dictatorship’ of a subject: the bourgeoisie) and who therefore raised the pertinent question: ‘Why is it this State and no other that corresponds to bourgeois political domination?’ – of these, the overwhelming majority sought to locate the basis of the capitalist State in the domain of the circulation of capital and ‘generalized’ commodity exchange. We know well enough the general components of such analyses: exchange between ‘private’ commodity-owners (private property here being apprehended purely at the juridical level), contractual buying and selling of labour-power, equivalent exchange and abstract exchange-value, and so on. This was supposed to be the ground on which emerged the ‘formal’ and ‘abstract’ equality and freedom of the isolated particles of market society – generic individuals installed as legal-political ‘persons-individuals’ – as well as formal and abstract law and juridical rules serving as the system which binds together the exchangers of commodities. The relative separation of State and economy was understood as separation of the State and the famous ‘civil society’. The site of the needs and exchange-acts of isolated individuals, this civil society was supposed to have represented itself as a contractual association of individualized legal subjects – one in which the separation of civil society and State was reduced to an ideological mechanism lodged at the heart of commodity relations, and to a fetishization or reification of the State derived from the celebrated fetishism of commodities. Although it has numerous variants, this conception always exhibits an identical framework. It was expounded principally by the Italian Marxist school (Galvano della Volpe, Cerroni and others), but it is still extraordinarily full of life. Here I will simply mention Henri Lefebvre’s very recent work on the State, which is closer than others to my positions.¹

I tried to show that this conception is inadequate and partially false, since it seeks to locate the basis of the State in the relations of circulation and commodity-exchange (which is in some ways a pre-Marxist position) rather than in the relations of production which have a determining place in the total cycle of expanded reproduction of capital. To a considerable extent, this conception actually impoverished research on the State. Moreover, while it poses the question of the institutional specificity of the capitalist State, it makes impossible any articulation of this State-civil society with the State-class struggle: social classes themselves are grounded on the relations of production. It is not that this conception does not grasp a number of important institutional mechanisms of the State, for the space of the circulation of capital has its own effect on the State. But it misses what is essential. Nor does it allow us to take into account those characteristics of the State in the East that resemble features of the capitalist State: after all, commodity relations have undergone notable transformations in those countries. As a matter of fact, this family resemblance derives from, among other things, the ‘capitalist aspects’ that mark both the State and the relations of production and social division of labour in the East. The workers exercise neither control and mastery over the labour processes (relation of possession) nor real economic power over the means of labour (economic property relation, as distinct from legal property): what has taken place there is a statization, and not a genuine socialization, of production. At the political level, there is a dictatorship over the proletariat.

Since that time, discussion and research on the State and power have advanced so much in France and abroad that the ideological-theoretical conjuncture has partially changed. A number of recent analyses, however, seem to be reproducing the drawbacks and deficiencies of the ones I attacked in my earlier work. My own analyses have often been criticized for their politicism: in seeking to map out, ‘purely’ on the basis of the relations of production, that political space which is peculiar to the capitalist State and capitalist power, I am supposed to have paid insufficient attention to the relations between State and economy.

According to this line of argument, the problem is one of placing the State in relation to what some call the logic of capital – that is, to its accumulation and expanded reproduction. (This problematic has been developed particularly in West Germany under the name of Ableitung, and in Great Britain and the United States under that of Derivation.) Involved here is an attempt to ‘derive’, or let us say deduce, the particular institutions of the capitalist State from the ‘economic categories’ of capital accumulation. Now, this problematic relapses into a fairly traditional conception of capital as an abstract entity with an intrinsic logic – the economic categories – thereby issuing in two lines of research that are equally incapable of accounting for the material specificity of this State. Either, as Hirsch has shown, it falls right back into the space of exchange and circulation of capital (equivalent exchange, abstract value, money, etc.) and deduces the specificity of the capitalist State from these ‘categories’;² or else it tries to deduce the specificity and historical transformations of this State from its economic functions in promoting the expanded reproduction of capital. This latter tendency may also be found in France, where it takes the form, especially in relation to the present-day State, of deducing the totality of institutional changes from the State’s new role in the overaccumulation-devalorization of capital.

Here too, this line of research misses the essential point. No doubt in concentrating my attack against economism, I did bend the stick in the other direction. Economic functions favouring the accumulation of capital affect the structuring of the State in a number of important ways that vary according to whether it is a question of primitive accumulation, competitive capitalism, or present-day monopoly capitalism. I shall explain the character of these functions more precisely in Part Three, where I show that they are essential to an explanation of the current form of State: authoritarian statism. For the time being, I will simply say that they are not the primary functions, and that they do not allow us to give an exhaustive explanation of political institutions. They do not answer the basic question: why are these functions fulfilled precisely by the quite peculiar apparatus that is the modern, national-popular, representative State? Why, for example, has this State not reproduced itself in the form of Absolutist monarchy?

Just as we cannot answer this question merely by referring to political domination (to the nature of the bourgeoisie or to the political struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class), so we cannot answer by referring to the State’s economic functions or to a combination of the two (economic functions+political struggle). More precisely, these economic functions are articulated and grounded in the specifically capitalist relations of production. In fact, these relations constitute the initial scaffolding of the State’s institutional materiality and of the relative separation from the economy that stamps its framework as an apparatus; they are the only possible starting-point for analysis of the State’s relationship with classes and the class struggle. Changes in the State themselves refer above all to the struggles of social classes. These constitute the framework of modifications in the role and economic activities of the State, each of which has particular effects upon the State.

I was already following this line of research in Political Power and Social Classes; but I must now point out the limitations of that text, which I wrote before May 1968. (It was actually published during the May events.) While it stressed the role of the social (capitalist) division of labour insofar as it started from the relations of production, it did not grasp the full extent of that division. It was May itself and the resulting peculiarities of the workers movement that blew away a whole series of obstacles. In Social Classes in Contemporary Capitalism³ I drew the lessons concerning the importance of the social division of labour in the constitution of classes. Here I shall try to do the same for the State, bringing in certain typical cases as examples. In this way, we shall be led on to an examination of fundamental theoretical questions. Locating the perspective and axis of research in the division of labour will clearly pose fresh problems, since it is not as easy as many have thought to establish the relation between this division and the State.

¹ E. Pashukanis, Law and Marxism: a General Theory, London 1978; Galvano Della Volpe, Rousseau e Marx, Rome 1964; U. Cerroni, Marx e il diritto moderno, 1963; Henri Lefebvre, De l’Etat, Paris 1976 and subsequent years. Of course, I do not wish to underestimate the value of Lefebvre’s work: his last book, in particular, contains some remarkable analyses. This line of research is also adopted in the works of J. Baudrillard.

² See J. Hirsch, Staatsapparat und Reproduktion des Kapitals, 1974, and his contribution to the collective work, La crise de l’Etat (ed. Poulantzas) Paris 1976. The Ableitung problematic has been popular for quite a long time in West Germany, and some of its exponents may be found in the collective work L’Etat contemporain et le marxisme (ed. J.-M. Vincent), Paris 1975. It has appeared more recently in Great Britain and the United States: see a number of articles in the journals Kapitalistate, Insurgent Sociologist (USA), Capital and Class (Great Britain), and the recent work of Holloway, Piccioto, Hindess, Hirst and others. Lastly, I should mention that my work has been criticized for its ‘politicism’ above all by the writers grouped around the journal Economie politique.

³ NLB 1975.

1

Intellectual Labour and Manual Labour: Knowledge and Power

Let us begin by considering the creation and functioning of the bourgeois State from the point of view of its materiality as an apparatus. It is, in fact, a specialized and centralized apparatus of a peculiarly political nature, comprising an assemblage of impersonal, anonymous functions whose form is distinct from that of economic power; their ordering rests on the axiomatic force of laws-rules distributing the spheres of activity or competence, and on a legitimacy derived from the people-nation. In the modern State, all these elements are incorporated in the organization of its apparatuses. By contrast, feudal state apparatuses are based on personal ties; on the modelling of all power after economic power (the lord here playing the roles of judge, administrator and army commander in his capacity as landowner); and on a hierarchy of watertight powers (the aristocratic pyramid) whose legitimacy derives from the sovereignty of the person of its head (the lord-king) inscribed in the body of society. The specificity of the modern State therefore refers precisely to the relative separation of the political from the economic, and to the entire reorganization of its respective spaces and fields implied by the total dispossession of the direct producer in capitalist relations of production.

These relations are the ground of a prodigious reorganization of the social division of labour: indeed, they are themselves consubstantial with this reorganization, which puts its stamp on the production of relative surplus-value and on the expanded reproduction of capital in the stage of ‘machine production’ and ‘large-scale industry’. Once it is understood that the specifically capitalist division of labour represents, through all its forms, the precondition of the modern State, then the latter appears in all its historical originality as an effective break with pre-capitalist types of State (Asiatic, slave and feudal). This point cannot be fully grasped by conceptions which ground the modern State on commodity relations, since these have always existed.

Here I shall examine but one case: the division between manual and intellectual labour. In reality, this should not at all be conceived as an empirical or natural split between those who work with their hands and those who work with their head: instead, it directly refers to the political-ideological relations prevailing within particular relations of production. Now, as Marx clearly showed, this division assumes a specific form under capitalism, where the direct producer is totally dispossessed of his means of labour. This results in the following:⁴ (a) the characteristic separation of intellectual elements from the labour performed by the direct producer, which, through differentiation from intellectual labour (knowledge), becomes the capitalist form of manual labour; (b) the separation of science from manual labour at a time when the former enters ‘the service of capital’ and tends to become a directly productive force; (c) the development of specific relations between science-knowledge and the dominant ideology – not in the sense that knowledge is more highly ‘ideologized’ than before, nor simply that the existing power utilizes knowledge for political-ideological ends (that has always been the case), but in the sense that power is ideologically legitimized in the modality of scientific technique, as if it flowed automatically from a rational scientific practice; and (d) the establishment of organic relations between, on the one hand, intellectual labour thus dissected from manual labour and, on the other hand, the political relations of domination: in short, between capitalist knowledge and capitalist power. Of course, Marx was already familiar with this phenomenon. When discussing factory despotism and the role of science in the capitalist production process, he analysed the organic relations between knowledge and power, between intellectual labour (or knowledge-science invested in ideology) and the political relations of domination such as they exist and are reproduced in the very process of extraction of surplus-value.

Although this quite typically capitalist separation of manual and intellectual labour is only one aspect of a more general social division of labour, it is nevertheless of decisive importance in the case of the State. One of the fundamental insights of the Marxist classics is the understanding that, as regards the State’s emergence as a ‘special’ apparatus, unquestionably the most important aspect of the social division of labour is the division between manual and intellectual labour. In all its apparatuses (that is, not only in its ideological apparatuses but also in the repressive and economic ones) the State incarnates intellectual labour as separated from manual labour: this becomes evident provided that the two are not conceived according to a naturalist-positivist distinction. And it is within the capitalist State that the organic relationship between intellectual labour and political domination, knowledge and power, is realized in the most consummate manner. Separated from the relations of production, the State takes up position alongside an intellectual labour that has itself been divorced from manual labour: it is the corollary and the product of this division, and at the same time plays a specific role in its constitution and reproduction.

This finds expression in the very materiality of the State – and, above all, in that specialization-separation of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Verso Classics edition by Stuart Hall
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: The Institutional Materiality of the State
• Part Two: Political Struggles: The State as the Condensation of a Relationship of Forces
• Part Three: State and Economy Today
• Part Four: The Decline of Democracy: Authoritarian Statism
• Part Five: Towards a Democratic Socialism