Читать книгу The Retreat from Class - Ellen Meiksins Wood - Страница 11

I

All the major themes of the NTS are present in embryo in the work of Nicos Poulantzas; and it is possible that had he lived, he might have followed the logic of his theoretical and political trajectory to the position now occupied by many of his post-Althusserian colleagues. As it is, however, he certainly never went so far; and if he is without doubt a major influence, he cannot really be regarded, theoretically or politically, as a full-blown NTS, either with respect to the theoretical detachment of ideology and politics from any social determinations, or with respect to the political detachment of socialism from the working class.

Poulantzas deserves special attention not only because he is perhaps the most important theorist of the post-Althusserian tradition, the one who has done most to ground that tradition, with its philosophical preoccupations, more firmly in the immediate political problems of contemporary socialism, but also because he has made a major contribution to directing Marxists generally to long neglected theoretical problems. The extent of his influence on the present generation of Marxist political theorists, which is the more impressive for the tragic brevity of his career, would be reason enough for singling him out as an exemplary case. But he is exemplary also in a more general, historical sense. The course of his political and theoretical evolution traces the trajectory of a major trend in the European left, reflecting the political odyssey of a whole generation.

When Poulantzas wrote his first major theoretical work, Political Power and Social Classes, published in 1968, like many others he was seeking a ground for socialist politics that was neither Stalinist nor social democratic. There was then, on the eve of the Eurocommunist era, no obvious alternative in Europe. Poulantzas’s theoretical exploration of the political ground was still abstractly critical, negative, chipping away at the theoretical foundations of the main available options without a clear positive commitment to any party line. Like many of his contemporaries, however, he seems to have leaned towards the ultra-left, more or less Maoist, option. At least, his theoretical apparatus, deeply indebted to Althusser whose own Maoist sympathies were then quite explicit, bears significant traces of that commitment. The attack on ‘economism’, which is the hallmark of Poulantzas’s work and the basis of his stress on the specificity and autonomy of the political, was essential to Maoism and constituted one of its chief attractions for people like Althusser. The concept of ‘cultural revolution’ also held a strong fascination for Poulantzas, as for the many others who claimed it as the operative principle of ‘revolutions’ like that of May 1968. Whatever this concept meant to the Chinese, it was adopted by students and intellectuals in the West to cover revolutionary movements without specific points of concentration or focused political targets, characterized instead by a diffusion of struggle throughout the social ‘system’ and all its instruments of ideological and cultural integration. The theoretical implications of this conception are suggested by Poulantzas himself, for example, in his debate with Ralph Miliband. In this exchange, Poulantzas adopted the Althusserian notion of ‘ideological state apparatuses’, according to which various ideological institutions within civil society which function to maintain the hegemony of the dominant class – such as the Church, schools, even trade unions – are treated as belonging to the system of the state.¹ He went on to suggest a connection between the idea of ‘cultural revolution’ and the strategic necessity of ‘breaking’ these ideological apparatuses. It is not difficult to see why advocates of ‘cultural revolution’ might be attracted to the notion of conceiving these ‘apparatuses’ as part of the state and thus theoretically legitimizing the shift to ‘cultural’ and ideological revolt and the diffusion of struggle. Indeed, the centrality of ideology in post-Althusserian politics and theory, whatever modifications it has since undergone, may be rooted in a conception of social transformation as ‘cultural revolution’ – if not in its original Chinese form, at least in the specifically Western idiom of May 1968. There is also in the earlier Poulantzas, as in many of his contemporaries, much that is reminiscent (as Miliband pointed out in the debate with Poulantzas) of the ‘ultra-left deviation’ according to which there is little difference among various forms of capitalist state, whether fascist or liberal-democratic, and bourgeois-democratic forms are little more than sham and mystification. Strong traces of this view can be found, for example, in Poulantzas’s conception of Bonapartism as an essential characteristic of all capitalist states.

Many of these notions were abandoned or modified by Poulantzas in the course of debate and in his later work. As his earlier political stance, with its ultra-left and Maoist admixtures, gave way to Eurocommunism, he moved away from his earlier views on Bonapartism, ‘ideological state apparatuses’, and so on. Most notably, his theory of the state as well as his explicit political pronouncements shifted from an apparent depreciation of liberal democratic forms toward an albeit cautious acceptance – especially in his last book, State, Power, Socialism – of the Eurocommunist view of the transition to socialism as the extension of existing bourgeois democratic forms.

The shifts, both political and theoretical, are substantial; but there is nevertheless a continuity, a unity of underlying premises, that says a great deal not only about Poulantzas himself but about the logic running through the evolution of the European left, or an important segment of it, since the 1960s. There is a characteristic ambiguity in his own conception of democratic socialism and the means by which it is to be achieved, an ambiguity that persists throughout the journey from ‘Maoism’ to Eurocommunism and tends toward the displacement of class struggle and the working class.

II

Poulantzas’s theory of the state, for all its scholasticism, was from the beginning motivated by strategic considerations and the need to provide a theoretical base from which ‘scientifically’ to criticize some political programmes and support others. In Political Power and Social Classes, Poulantzas constructed an elaborate theoretical argument largely to demonstrate and explicate two principal characteristics of the capitalist state: the unitary character of its institutionalized power, and its ‘relative autonomy’ vis-à-vis the dominant classes. Paradoxically, argued Poulantzas, the dominant classes in capitalism do not derive their ‘unambiguous and exclusive’ political power from actual participation in or possession of ‘parcels’ of institutionalized state power, but rather from the ‘relative autonomy’ which permits the state to provide them with the political unity they otherwise lack.²

The question underlying these theoretical arguments is fundamentally a strategic one: ‘can the state have such an autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant classes that it can accomplish the passage to socialism without the state apparatus being broken by conquest of a class power?’³ Poulantzas’s answer is aimed at specific targets. He attacks ‘instrumentalist’ arguments which treat the state as a mere tool of the dominant classes. He also rejects the other side of the ‘instrumentalist’ coin, the view that the instrument can easily change hands and that, as an inert and neutral tool, it can be wielded as easily in the interests of socialism as it was formerly wielded in the interests of capital.⁴ In short, Poulantzas is explicitly attacking the theoretical foundations of ‘reformism’ and the political strategy of social democracy. This strategy in effect shares the bourgeois pluralist view that the state can belong to various countervailing interests, and proceeds from there to the conviction that, once representatives of the working class predominate, revolution can be achieved ‘from above’, quietly and gradually with no transformation of the state itself. Indeed, to social democrats, today’s state monopoly capitalism may appear as already a transitional phase between capitalism and socialism. Political and juridical forms, which are in advance of the economy, will simply pull the latter behind them, allowing a piece-meal transition to socialism without class struggle.

At this stage, Poulantzas’s own political prescriptions remain largely implicit, apart from this very general attack on social democracy. Although his theory of the state could be adapted to an assault on Stalinism, as he was later to do explicitly by treating Stalinism as more or less the obverse of social-democratic ‘statism’, in this early work such criticism is muted; and, indeed, there is as yet little that might be construed as ‘anti-statism’. To the extent that the book can be understood as containing implied criticisms of the PCF, they are entirely coded, as they are in Althusser’s work of the time. What can be said about Political Power and Social Classes is that it is generally intended to convey a fidelity to the Leninist tradition, in its Althusserian mediations.

There are, however, important theoretical manoeuvres in this work that have far-reaching political implications. It is here that Poulantzas begins to establish the dominance of the political, going further than his mentor Althusser, and Balibar, in distancing himself from Marxist ‘economism’. He is here perhaps signalling the Maoist leanings which will become more explicit in his next major work, Fascism and Dictatorship’, but he is also fashioning a theoretical instrument that will, as it turns out, continue to be serviceable in his subsequent shift to Eurocommunism.

Poulantzas begins by explaining the circumstances in which the political is ‘dominant’:

… in the global role of the state, the dominance of its economic function indicates that, as a general rule, the dominant role in the articulation of a formation’s instances reverts to the political; and this is so not simply in the strict sense of the state’s direct function in the strictly political class struggle, but rather in the sense indicated here. In this case, the dominance of the state’s economic function over its other functions is coupled with its dominant role, in that its function of being the cohesive factor necessitates its specific intervention in that instance which maintains the determinant role of a formation, namely, the economic. This is clearly the case, for example, in the despotic state in the Asiatic mode of production, where the dominance of the political is reflected in a dominance of the economic function of the state; or again, in capitalist formations, in the case of monopoly state capitalism and of the ‘interventionist’ form of the capitalist state. Whereas in the case of such a form of the capitalist state as the ‘liberal’ state of private capitalism, the dominant role held by the economic is reflected by the dominance of the strictly political function of the state – the state as ‘policeman’ [l’état gendarme] – and by a specific non-intervention of the state in the economic.⁵

In his later work, this same idea was to be stated more succinctly:

… monopoly capitalism is characterized by the displacement of dominance within the CMP from the economic to the political, i.e. to the state, while the competitive stage is marked by the fact that the economic played the dominant role in addition to being determinant.⁶

In other words, despite the separation of the economic and the political which is uniquely characteristic of capitalism and which survives in the monopoly phase, because of the expansion of the domain of state intervention the political sphere acquires a position analogous to the ‘dominance’ of the political sphere in pre-capitalist modes of production. Poulantzas even draws an analogy between state monopoly capitalism and the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in this respect.

This analogy and Poulantzas’s conception of the ‘dominance’ of the political in state monopoly capitalism reveals a great deal about his point of view. His argument is based on the Althusserian principle that, while the economic always ‘determines in the last instance’, other ‘instances’ of the social structure may occupy a ‘determinant’ or ‘dominant’ place. In fact, the economic ‘determines’ simply by determining which instance will be determinant or dominant. This is at best an awkward and problematic idea; but it makes some kind of sense insofar as it is intended to convey that in some modes of production – indeed typically, in precapitalist societies – the relations of production and exploitation may themselves be organized in ‘extra-economic’ ways. So, for example, in feudalism surplus-extraction occurs by extra-economic means since the exploitative powers of the lord are inextricably bound up with his political powers, his possession of a ‘parcel’ of the state. Similarly, in the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ the ‘political’ may be said to be dominant, not in the sense that political relations take precedence over relations of exploitation, but rather in the sense that exploitative relations themselves assume a political form to the extent that the state itself is the principal direct appropriator of surplus labour. It is precisely this fusion of ‘political’ and ‘economic’ that distinguishes these cases from capitalism where exploitation, based on the complete expropriation of direct producers and not on their juridical or political dependence or subjection, takes a purely ‘economic’ form. This is more or less the sense in which Althusser and Balibar elaborate the principle of ‘determination in the last instance’. In Poulantzas’s hands, however, the idea undergoes a subtle but highly significant transformation.⁷

In the original formula, the relations of exploitation are always central, though they may take ‘extra-economic’ forms. In Poulantzas’s formulation, relations of exploitation cease to be decisive. For him, relations of exploitation belong to the economic sphere; and the ‘economic’ in pre-capitalist societies, and apparently also in monopoly capitalism, may be subordinated to a separate political sphere, with its own distinct structure of domination. It would, of course, be perfectly reasonable for Poulantzas to point out that the role and the centrality of the ‘political’ vary according to whether it plays a direct or indirect role in surplus extraction and whether it is differentiated from the ‘economic’. It would also be reasonable to suggest that the expansion of the state’s role in contemporary capitalism is likely to make it increasingly a target of class struggle. But Poulantzas goes considerably beyond these propositions. He suggests not only that the nature of exploitative relations can vary in different modes of production according to whether they assume ‘economic’ or ‘extra-economic’ forms, but also that modes of production – or even phases of modes of production – may vary according to whether the relations of exploitation are themselves ‘dominant’ at all. When he argues, therefore, that the ‘political’ and not the ‘economic’ is ‘dominant’ in monopoly capitalism, he is in effect arguing that the relations of exploitation (though no doubt ‘determinant in the last instance’) no longer ‘reign supreme’.

III

In 1970, Poulantzas published Fascism and Dictatorship, which represents his most overtly Maoist work. Written in the wake of May 1968, when the largest youth current on the French left was Maoism in the form of La Gauche Prolétarienne, the book is punctuated with references to Mao; and, as if these markers were not enough to identify his current political stand, he provides another sign-post: a characterization of the Soviet Union – quite gratuitous in the context of this book – in terms borrowed from Charles Bettelheim (whose work he had already cited approvingly in Political Power and Social Classes). It is also in this work, Poulantzas’s most concrete contribution to political sociology, that he shows a remarkable insensitivity to the differences between the bourgeois-democratic or parliamentary capitalist state, and the capitalist state in its fascist form. On this, his view was to change dramatically over the next few years.

The next important milestone was Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, published in 1974. By now, Poulantzas had abandoned Maoism, and he had also begun to criticize PCF theory directly, though still from the left. The book contains some important applications of his theory of the state to the strategic problems of Communism, and even more important developments in the theory of class, which go a long way toward displacing the relations of production and exploitation as the determinants of class – with, as we shall see, significant political consequences.

A particular target of criticism in the book is the PCF ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ strategy and the theory of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ that underlies it. PCF doctrine, according to Poulantzas, contains several fundamental errors. It treats the relation between the state and monopoly capital as if it were a simple fusion, ignoring the fact that the state represents a ‘power bloc’ of several classes or class fractions and not the ‘hegemonic’ fraction of monopoly capital alone; it treats all non-monopoly interests as belonging equally to the ‘popular masses’, including elements of the bourgeoisie, without acknowledging the class barriers that separate the whole bourgeoisie from the truly ‘popular’ forces; and, in much the same way as the social democrats, it treats the state as in principle a class-neutral instrument, responding primarily to the technical imperatives of economic development, so that there appears to be nothing inherent in the nature of the capitalist state that prevents it from being merely taken over and turned to popular interests.

Poulantzas appears to be undermining the foundations of PCF strategy. And yet, though it is certainly true that his own position is to the left of the PCF mainstream, it nevertheless represents a criticism from within, proceeding from basic principles held in common – notably, the transfer of revolutionary agency to the ‘people’ or ‘popular alliances’, the transition to socialism via ‘transformation’ of the bourgeois state or ‘advanced democracy’, and hence the displacement of class struggle. In the final analysis, Poulantzas’s theory is intended not to undermine Communist strategy but to set it on a sounder foundation. He does not fundamentally reject the notion of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ but rather rescues it. He reformulates the idea to correct its own contradictions, taking account of the incontrovertible fact that the state represents interests other than those of the hegemonic monopoly fraction. This has the added advantage of making it clear why and how the state is vulnerable to penetration by popular struggles. More fundamentally, although Poulantzas questions the unconditional inclusion of non-monopoly capital in the ‘people’, he retains the conception of ‘popular alliance’ and the focus of struggle on the political opposition between ‘power bloc’ and ‘people’ instead of the direct class antagonism between capital and labour. Poulantzas’s ‘left Eurocommunism’ certainly diverges in significant respects from its parent-doctrine, but the shared premises are more fundamental than the divergences and have substantial consequences for Marxist theory.

Here we come to the crux of the matter and Poulantzas’s contribution to the displacement of class struggle. The critical transformation in Marxist theory and practice, the pivot on which Eurocommunist strategy turns, is a displacement of the principal opposition from the class relations between labour and capital to the political relations between the ‘people’ and a dominant force or power bloc organized by the state. This critical shift requires a number of preparatory moves. Both state and class must be relocated in the struggle for socialism, and this requires a redefinition of both state and class. If the opposition between people, or popular alliance, and power bloc cum state is to become the dominant one, it is not enough simply to show how the state reflects, maintains, or reproduces the exploitative relation between capital and labour. It must be shown how the political conflict between two political organizations – the power bloc organized by the state and the popular alliance which organizes the people – can effectively displace the class conflict between capital and labour.

We have seen how Poulantzas, in Political Power and Social Classes, began to displace the relations of production and exploitation from their central position in the theory of the state by establishing the ‘dominance of the political’. As we shall see, a similar displacement is carried out in his theory of class. The immediate effect is to transform class struggle into – or rather, replace it with – a political confrontation between the power bloc organized by the state, and the popular alliance. One might say that class struggle remains only as a ‘structural’ flaw, a ‘contradiction’, rather than an active practice. As Poulantzas points out, the state, together with bourgeois political parties, plays the same organizing and unifying role for the power bloc as a ‘working-class’ party plays for the popular alliance.⁸ Increasingly, the chief antagonists are no longer classes engaged in class struggle, nor even classes in struggle through political organizations, but political organizations engaged in party-political contests. His new theory of the state in contemporary capitalism goes a long way toward establishing a theoretical foundation for Eurocommunist strategy, but even more important to the doctrine of ‘popular alliances’ is a comparable transformation in the concept of class. If class and class struggle are to be made compatible with a strategy that displaces the opposition between capital and labour from its pivotal role, it is necessary to redefine class itself in such a way that the relations of exploitation cease to be ‘dominant’ in the determination of class. Poulantzas achieves this reformulation, and in the process succeeds by definition in reducing the working class to such minute proportions that any strategy not based on ‘popular alliances’ appears recklessly irresponsible.

The most important element in Poulantzas’s theory of class is his discussion of the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’. The question of the petty bourgeoisie, as Poulantzas points out, stands ‘at the centre of current debates’ on class structure and is of critical strategic importance.⁹ Considerable debate has surrounded not only the class situation of ‘traditional’ petty-bourgeois traders, shopkeepers, craftsmen, but most particularly the ‘new middle classes’ or ‘intermediate strata’, wage-earning commercial and bank employees, office and service workers, certain professional groups – that is, ‘white-collar’ or ‘tertiary-sector’ workers. These two ‘petty bourgeoisies’ are the main constituents of the popular alliance with the working class, those which together with the working class constitute the ‘people’ or ‘popular masses’. To locate them correctly in the class structure of contemporary capitalism has been a major preoccupation of Eurocommunist strategists and theoreticians. Poulantzas stresses the strategic importance of the theoretical debate, the necessity of accurately identifying the class position of these groups ‘in order to establish a correct basis for the popular alliance …’.¹⁰

Poulantzas begins by attacking two general approaches to the question of these ‘new wage-earning groups’, lumping together some very disparate arguments in each of the two categories. The first approach is that which dissolves these groups into either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, or both. The second general ‘tendency’ is what Poulantzas calls ‘the theory of the middle class’, a politically motivated theory according to which both bourgeoisie and proletariat are being mixed together in the ‘stew’ of an increasingly dominant middle group, ‘the region where the class struggle is dissolved’.¹¹ Most of these theories are intended to dilute the concepts of class and class struggle altogether. From the point of view of Marxist theory and socialist strategy, there is only one theory, among the several included in these two categories, which represents a serious challenge to Poulantzas’s own: the theory which assimilates the new wage-earning groups to the working class, arguing that white-collar workers have been increasingly ‘proletarianized’. We shall return in a moment to Poulantzas’s reasons for dismissing this approach.

Poulantzas then turns to the solution proposed by the PCF in its political strategy of the ‘anti-monopoly’ alliance. Like Poulantzas himself, the PCF line rejects the ‘dissolution of the wage-earning groupings into the working class’,¹² but it denies their class-specificity altogether and allows them to remain in a classless grey area as ‘intermediate strata’. Poulantzas attacks this refusal to identify the class situation of the new wage-earning ‘strata’. It is, he suggests, an abdication to bourgeois stratification theory and is inconsistent with the fundamental Marxist proposition that ‘the division into class forms [is] the frame of reference for every social stratification’. The principle that ‘classes are the basic groups in the “historic process”’is incompatible with ‘the possibility that other groups exist parallel and external to classes …’.¹³

It should be noted immediately that Poulantzas’s criticism of the PCF line on the ‘new wage-earning groups’ does not strike at its roots either theoretically or practically. In fact, his argument proceeds not as a rejection of PCF principles but, again, as an attempt to supply them with a sounder theoretical foundation, albeit somewhat to the left of the main party line. A truly Marxist theorization of popular alliances must, he argues, be based on a definition of class which grants these ‘strata’ their own class position instead of allowing them to stand outside class. The significant point, however, is that this class position is not to be found within the working class. In other words, Poulantzas is seeking a more clearly Marxist theoretical support for the Eurocommunist conception of an alliance between a narrowly defined working class and non-working-class popular forces.

Why, then, does Poulantzas, in common with the PCF, refuse to accept the theory which ‘dissolves’ these ‘strata’ into the working class? This theory, which he attributes primarily to C. Wright Mills, has been developed more recently in unambiguously Marxist ways by Harry Braverman and others. Poulantzas, however, apparently regards it as a departure from Marxism – for example, on the grounds that it makes the wage the relevant criterion of the working class, thereby making the mode of distribution the central determinant of class.¹⁴ (It is perhaps significant that Poulantzas focuses on the wage as a mode of distribution and not as a mode of exploitation – as we shall see in a moment.) He argues further that by assimilating these groups to the working class, this view promotes reformist and social-democratic tendencies. To identify the interests of ‘intermediate strata’ with those of the working class is to distort working-class interests, accommodating them to more backward, less revolutionary elements.¹⁵ A political strategy based on the hegemony of the working class and its revolutionary interests, he maintains, demands the exclusion of these backward elements from the ranks of the working class.

On the face of it, then, Poulantzas’s refusal to accept the proletarianization of white-collar workers appears to be directed in favour of a revolutionary stance and the hegemony of the working class which alone is ‘revolutionary to the end’.¹⁶ He even criticizes the PCF analysis on the grounds that, despite its refusal to accept this dissolution, it courts the same danger by neglecting to identify the specific class interests of the new wage-earning strata and hence their divergences from working-class interests. It is true that he fails to explain how these dangers will be averted by a ‘working-class’ party whose object is precisely to dilute its working-class character by directly representing other class interests, but let us leave aside this question for the moment. Let us pursue the implications of his own theory of the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ to see whether it does, in fact, represent an attempt to keep exploitative class relations, class struggle, and the interests of the working class at the centre of Marxist class analysis and socialist practice.

For Poulantzas, the primary structural criterion for distinguishing between the working class and the new petty bourgeoisie at first seems to be the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. The ‘unproductive’ character of white-collar work separates these groups from the ‘productive’ working class. Poulantzas proceeds on the assumption that Marx himself applied this criterion and marked off the ‘essential boundaries’ of the working class by confining it to productive labour. Now it can be shown convincingly that Marx never intended the distinction to be used in this way.¹⁷ In any case, Marx never said that he did so intend it, and Poulantzas never demonstrates that this is what he meant. He bases his argument on a misreading of Marx. He quotes Marx as saying ‘Every productive worker is a wage-earner, but it does not follow that every wage-earner is a productive worker.’¹⁸ Poulantzas takes this to mean something rather different: ‘as Marx puts it,’ he says, putting words into Marx’s mouth, ‘if every agent belonging to the working class is a wage-earner, this does not necessarily mean that every wage-earner belongs to the working class.’ The two propositions are, of course, not at all the same, nor does Poulantzas argue that the one entails the other. He simply assumes it – i.e. he assumes precisely what needs to be proved, that ‘agent belonging to the working class’ is synonymous with ‘productive worker’. He can then go on to demonstrate that various groups do not belong to the working class simply by demonstrating that they are not, according to Marx’s definition (at least as he interprets that definition), productive workers.

Why this distinction – as important as it may be for other reasons – should be regarded as the basis of a class division is never made clear. It is not clear why this distinction should override the fact that, like the ‘blue-collar’ working class, these groups are completely separated from the means of production; that they are exploited (which he concedes), that they perform surplus labour whose nature is determined by capitalist relations of production – the wage-relationship in which expropriated workers are compelled to sell their labour-power; or even that the same compulsions of capital accumulation that operate in the organization of labour for the working class – its ‘rationalization’, fragmentation, discipline, etc. – operate in these cases too. Indeed, the same conditions – the compulsory sale of labour-power and an organization of work derived from the exploitative logic of capital accumulation – apply even to workers not directly exploited by capital but employed, say, by the state or by ‘nonprofit’ institutions. Whatever the complexities of class in contemporary capitalism – and they are many, as new formations arise and old ones change – it is difficult to see why exploitative social relations of production should now be regarded as secondary in the determination of class. Poulantzas’s use of the distinction between productive and unproductive labour to separate white-collar workers from the working class seems to be largely arbitrary and circular, with no clear implications for our understanding of how classes and class interests are actually constituted in the real world.

In fact, it soon turns out that this ‘specifically economic’ determination is not sufficient – or even necessary – to define the new petty bourgeoisie. It cannot account for all the groups that Poulantzas wants to include in this class. Not only, he suggests, can it not account for certain groups which are involved in the process of material production (e.g. engineers, technicians, and supervisory staff), it cannot explain the overriding unity which binds these heterogeneous elements into a single class set off from the working class. Now, political and ideological factors must be regarded as decisive. These factors are decisive even for those groups who are already marked off by the productive/unproductive labour distinction,¹⁹ and in some cases even override that division. In the final analysis, once these groups have been separated out from the bourgeoisie by the fact that they are exploited, the decisive unifying factor that separates them from the working class is ideological, in particular the distinction between mental and manual labour. This distinction cannot be defined in ‘technicist’ or ‘empiricist’ terms, argues Poulantzas – for example, by empirically distinguishing ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ jobs, or those who work with their hands and those who work with their brains, or those who are in direct contact with machines and those who are not. It is essentially a ‘politico-ideological’ division. Although this division cannot be entirely clear-cut and contains complexities which create fractions within the new petty bourgeoisie itself, it is, according to Poulantzas, the one determinant that both distinguishes these groups from the working class and overrides the various differences within the class, including the division between productive and unproductive labour with which it does not coincide. In other words, this ideological division is the decisive factor in constituting the new petty bourgeoisie as a class at all.

It is far from clear to what reality Poulantzas’s ideological division corresponds, or why it should override the structural similarities among workers. What is true is that the organization of production in industrial capitalism establishes various divisions among workers within the labour process which are determined not by the technical demands of the labour-process itself but by its capitalist character. These divisions often constitute obstacles to the formation of a unified class – even in the case of workers who belong to the same class by virtue of their relation to capital and exploitation. But it is not clear why the divisions cited by Poulantzas should be more decisive than any others that divide workers in the labour-process or disunite them in the process of class organization. It is not clear why such divisions should be regarded not simply as obstacles to unity or roadblocks in the difficult process of class-organization – a process riddled with obstacles even for blue-collar workers – but rather as definitive class barriers dividing members from non-members of the working class.²⁰ In fact, Poulantzas’s theory seems unable to accommodate any process in the development of classes at all. There seems to be only a string of static, sometimes overlapping, class situations (locations? boxes?). This is a view which in itself would seem to have significant political implications.

If the ideological division between mental and manual workers within the exploited wage-earning groups does not correspond to any objective barrier directly determined by the relations of production between capital and labour, neither does it correspond to a real and insurmountable division of interest between these workers. The class interests of both groups are determined by the fact that they are directly exploited through the sale of their labour-power; these interests have to do in the first instance with the terms and conditions of that sale, and in the last with the elimination of capitalist relations of production altogether, both the ‘formal’ and the ‘real’ subjection of labour to capital. The different functions of these workers in the labour-process may create divisions among them, based in some cases on differences in their responsibilities, education, income, and so on;²¹ but these differences cannot be regarded as class divisions by any standard having to do with relations of production and exploitation. The ideological divisions between them are constituted less from the point of view of their own class interests than from the point of view of capital, which has an interest in keeping them apart. The imposition of capitalist ideology can certainly operate to discourage unity within the working class and interfere with the processes of class organization, but it can hardly be accepted as an absolute class barrier between different kinds of workers.

Poulantzas has thus presented a class analysis in which relations of exploitation are no longer decisive. This is in keeping with the fundamental principles of his theory. The relations of production and exploitation, according to him, belong to the ‘economic’ sphere which, as we have seen, though it ‘determines in the last instance’ may not be dominant in any given mode of production or social formation. This notion is carried over into the analysis of class.²² It now becomes clear that there are cases in which political or ideological factors ‘reign supreme’ in determining class. Poulantzas is saying more than simply that the formation of classes is always a political, ideological, and cultural process as well as an economic one, or that relations between classes are not only economic but also political and ideological. Nor, again, is he simply pointing to the special role of the ‘political’ where relations of production are themselves ‘politically’ organized. He is suggesting that ideological and political relations may actually take precedence over the relations of exploitation in the ‘objective’ constitution of classes, and that political or ideological divisions may represent essential class barriers. Again the relations of exploitation have been displaced.²³

What, then, are the practical consequences of Poulantzas’s views on class? Why is it a matter of such critical importance whether or not white-collar workers are theoretically included in the working class? Poulantzas himself, as we have seen, maintains that it is strategically important to separate out the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ in order to protect the revolutionary integrity and hegemony of the working class. There is, however, another way of looking at it. We have seen that for Poulantzas the relations of production are not decisive in determining the class situation of white-collar workers. The ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ is distinguished as a class on the basis of ideological divisions defined from the point of view of capital. In other words, they constitute a class insofar as they are absorbed into the hegemonic ideology of capitalism; and that absorption seems to be definitive: the new petty bourgeoisie can be made to adopt certain working-class positions – that is, their political attitudes can ‘polarize toward’ the proletariat; but they cannot be made part of the working class. These propositions are very different from the observation that the inclinations of white-collar workers to accept capitalist ideology may be stronger than those of blue-collar workers; that these inclinations constitute a problem for class organization, for the development of class consciousness, and for the building of class unity; and that they must be taken into account by any socialist strategy. For Poulantzas, it would appear that these inclinations represent a decisive class boundary; and this has significant strategic implications.

Despite Poulantzas’s criticism of PCF theory and strategy, his theory of class belongs to the ‘attempt of the theoreticians of Eurocommunism to reduce the weight of the Western proletariat to that of a minority within society…’.²⁴ At a stroke of the pen, the proletariat is reduced from a comfortable majority in advanced capitalist countries to a rump group which must inevitably place class alliances at the top of its agenda. Poulantzas’s very definition of class in general and the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ in particular displaces the focus of socialist strategy from creating a united working class to constructing ‘popular alliances’ based on class differences, even based on divisions imposed by capital. Any appeal to the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’, for example, must be directed not to its working-class interests but to its specific interests as a petty bourgeoisie.

The strategic implications become even clearer when this view of alliances is embodied in a particular conception of ‘working-class’ parties as organizations which do not simply form alliances with other groups and parties but directly represent other class interests. Poulantzas insists that ‘the polarization of the petty bourgeoisie towards proletarian class positions depends on the petty bourgeoisie being represented by the class-struggle organizations of the working class themselves … This means, firstly, that popular unity under the hegemony of the working class can only be based on the class difference between the classes and fractions that form part of the alliance …’²⁵ This notion turns out to be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it suggests that the popular forces should themselves be transformed in the process of struggle. That is why, argues Poulantzas, the alliance should be established ‘not by way of concessions, in the strict sense, by the working class to its allies taken as they are, but rather by the establishment of objectives which can transform these allies in the course of the uninterrupted struggle and its stages, account being taken of their specific class determination and the specific polarization that affects them’.²⁶ On the other hand, the very idea that alliances must not be based merely on ‘concessions’ to allies ‘taken as they are’ also entails that working-class organizations must cease to be organizations of the working class. It now appears that it is not just the integrity of working-class interests that these organizations must protect, but also that of the petty bourgeoisie. Poulantzas now seems to be criticizing the PCF for taking the ‘popular masses’ too much for granted, instead of acknowledging the specificity of their various class interests. A ‘working-class’ party cannot simply make ‘concessions’ to elements outside itself from a vantage point consistently determined by working-class interests; it must actually represent other class interests – and this means establishing objectives addressed to these other class interests. This inevitably raises the question of the degree to which the ultimate objectives of socialism itself must be tailored to the measurements of cross-class alliances.

IV

The groundwork for a theorization of Eurocommunism was, then, already firmly laid in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism; but its logic and strategic implications were not fully worked out until Poulantzas wrote his last two major works: The Crisis of the Dictatorships (1975–76) – which may mark the critical turning point to the right – and State, Power, Socialism, published in 1978. The composition of the first of these books coincides with the official emergence of Eurocommunism and may be related to his involvement with the Greek Communist Party of the Interior. In his final book – written before the defeat of the Union de la Gauche but after the rise of the Nouvelle Philosophie, and other related anti-Marxist currents in France – Poulantzas felt obliged to confront contemporary attacks on Marxism at the same time as meeting some of the new intellectual trends – notably Foucault – at least half way. The critical development in these two books is a perception of the state and of the transition to socialism that endorses the Eurocommunist vision of that transition as a smooth process of ‘democratization’. In The Crisis of the Dictatorships, for example in his analysis of the Portuguese Revolution, he reveals how far his thought has developed in this direction by rejecting any attack on the integrity of the state, any ‘dismantling, splitting or disarticulating’ of the state apparatus, as a threat to ‘democratization’.

At this point, Poulantzas begins to converge in significant ways with the social-democratic theory of the state which he launched his career by attacking. He continues to criticize social democracy however, this time as a kind of ‘statism’. For the first time he explicitly attacks Stalinism also. Like the social democrats, he insists that the state is open to penetration by popular forces and that there is no need for strategies – such as those implied by the concept of ‘dual power’ – based on the assumption that the state is a ‘monolithic bloc without cracks of any kind’.²⁷ Indeed, such strategies are actively pernicious, leading to ‘statism’ and other such authoritarian deformations. The state need not be attacked and destroyed from without. Since it is ‘traversed’ by internal contradictions – the contradictions inherent in intra- and inter-class conflicts – the state itself can be the major terrain of struggle, as popular struggles are brought to bear on the state’s internal contradictions. There is much here that is reminiscent of the inverted instrumentalism which he had earlier rejected, the social-democratic notion that the state, or pieces of it, can pass, like an ‘object coveted by the various classes’, from the hands of the dominant class to those of the dominated, thereby effecting the transition from capitalism to socialism. Like the social-democratic strategy, this one too seems confident that the state can lead the transition to socialism without encountering insurmountable class barriers along the way. The difference between the two strategies is that for Poulantzas, the state cannot be simply occupied: it might be transformed. There must be a ‘decisive shift in the relationship of forces’ within the state – not simply within representative institutions through electoral victory, but within the administrative and repressive organs of the state, the civil service, the judiciary, the police and the military. The complete vagueness of these prescriptions, coupled with the injunction that the unity of the state must be preserved, makes one wonder how substantial these departures from social democracy really are; but even if we accept that there is a significant difference, this project is arguably even more optimistic than the social-democratic programme about the possibilities of transforming the capitalist state into an agent of socialism with a minimal degree of class struggle.