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From International Socialism, No. 63, Mid-October 1973, p. 32.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Political Power and Social Classes
Nicos Poulantzas
New Left Books and Sheed and Ward, £5.75.
THIS BOOK is described by the publishers as a ‘translation’ of a major work by a follower of the French philosopher Louis Althusser. But a good deal more translation would be necessary before the theoretical language Poulantzas employs could be understood, not just by politically conscious workers, for whom its ostensible subject matter is of great importance, but even (were he alive) by Marx himself.
Not that there is anything wrong with a scientific terminology which helps to make important ideas clear. Marx himself, in Capital, expresses himself in a way which is often difficult for the new reader – but this way of expressing himself was important for his purpose. But the difference between Marx’s terminology and that of Althusser and Poulantzas is that while the one is designed for the science of proletarian revolution, the other is designed for a pseudo-scientific ‘Marxism’ conceived as a ‘theoretical practice’, independent from the practice of the workers’ revolution.
The treatment of the state and politics in this book is heavily overlaid with a theoretical argument to separate Marxist theory from working-class consciousness. Despite the fact that Poulantzas follows Marx in distinguishing between ideology and Marxist theory, he follows bourgeois relativism in terming all practical political consciousness as ideological, and talks about working-class ideology’. Any suggestion of a dialectic between theory and practice he terms ‘historicist’, an abusive word in Poulantzas’s vocabulary, which is never properly explained but represents the mortal sins committed by Marxists such as Lukacs and Gramsci. I do not know what Poulantzas would make of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: ‘the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question’; ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the word, the point is to change it.’ But the idea that Marxist theory might in any way be subservient to the revolutionary practice of the working class is very much anathema to our author.
As I have said, the ostensible subject-matter of this book – the Marxist conception of politics and the state – is of extreme importance and badly in need of a systematic treatment. (The only other recent offering, Ralph Milibands’s The State in Capitalist Society, is certainly very weak on the theoretical level.) Unlike anarchists, Marxists certainly do operate with a concept of ‘the political’ which, while fundamentally dependent on the economic or social, is not simply reducible to it. It is a peculiarity of the capitalist mode of production that the state becomes separated off from production, becoming in the end the monstrous apparatus of war, repression and domination which we know today and which spreads its tentacles back into every crevice of social life. Workers’ revolution, while always directly a social and economic revolution, centrally involves a challenge to the state and the construction of a new state power. For these reasons the state presents very important special problems to Marxists; and some of them find their way into Poulantzas’s book.
What is most unsatisfactory about it, on this level, can be summed up in two main points. It does not do justice to the development of Marx’s own theory of the state – there is an almost philistine attitude to Marx’s early writings which are very important for this – or to the positions of other Marxists such as Gramsci and Lukacs. And secondly it does not really deal with the development of the state in the 20th century, the host of theoretical problems thrown up by the experience in the West, and in Russia and Eastern Europe.
It is clear that these weaknesses are not accidental: Despite Poulantzas’s belief in a separation of science and ideology, his own ideology is operating very blantantly throughout this highly ‘scientific’ work. This is not to say that it is all directly the result of a political motive – but a highly scholarly dismissal in the section on bureaucracy, of the ‘ideological rubbish churned out by Trotsky’s successors’, suggests that the links between Althusserian theory and Stalinist politics are not as slender as some people think.
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