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
