THE POULANTZAS READER

THE POULANTZAS READER Marxism, Law and the State ^

EDITED BY JAMES MARTIN

First published by Verso 2008 Copyright # Verso 2008 Introduction # James Martin 2008 `Marxist Examination of the Contemporary State and Law and the Question of the ``Alternative'' ' first published as `L'examen marxiste de l'eÂtat et du droit actuels et de question de l'alternative' in Les Temps Modernes, nos 219 and 220, # Les Temps Modernes 1964. `Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and Law' first published as `La Critique de la Raison Dialectique de J-P Sartre et le droit' in Archives de Philosophie du Droit, no. 10, # Archives de Philosophie du Droit 1965. `Preliminaries to the Study of Hegemony in the State' first published as `PreÂliminaires aÁ l'eÂtude de l'heÂgeÂmonie dans l'eÂtat' in Les Temps Modernes nos 234 and 235, # Les Temps Modernes 1965. `Marxist Political Theory in Great Britain' reprinted by permission of the publisher from New Left Review 43 (May±June 1967), # New Left Review 1967. First published as `La theÂorie politique marxiste en Grande Bretagne' in Les Temps Modernes, no. 238, # Les Temps Modernes 1966. `Towards A Marxist Theory' first published as `Vers une theÂorie marxiste' in Les Temps Modernes, no. 240, # Les Temps Modernes 1966. `The Problem of the Capitalist State' first published in New Left Review 58, # New Left Review 1969. `On Social Classes' reprinted by permission of the publisher from New Left Review 78, # New Left Review 1973. First published as `Les classes sociales' in L'Homme et la SocieÂte 24/25, # L'Homme et la SocieÂte 1972. `Internationalization of Capitalist Relations and the Nation State' reprinted by permission of the publisher from Economy and Society, vol. 3, # Economy and Society 1974. First published as `L'Internationalisation des rapports capitalistes et de l'Etat-Nation' in Les Temps Modernes, no. 319 # Les Temps Modernes 1973. `On the Popular Impact of Fascism' first published as `A propos de l'impact populaire du fascisme' in M. Macciochi, ed., Elements pour une analyse du fascisme, Union Generale d'Edition 1976, # Union Generale d'Edition, Paris 1976. `The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau' first published in New Left Review 95, # New Left Review 1976. `The Political Crisis and the Crisis of the State' reprinted by permission of the publisher from J.W. Freiburg, ed., Critical Sociology: European Perspectives, Halstead Press, New York 1979, # Halstead Press 1979. First published as `Les transformations actuelles de l'eÂtat, la crise politique, et la crise de l'eÂtat' in N. Poulantzas, ed., La Crise de L'Etat, PUF, Paris 1976, # PUF 1976. `The New Petty Bourgeoisie' reprinted by permission of the publisher from A. Hunt, ed., Class and Class Struggle, Lawrence & Wishart, London 1977, # Lawrence & Wishart 1977. `The State and the Transition to Socialism' first published as `L'eÂtat et la transition au socialisme' in Critique communiste, no. 16 # Critique communiste 1977. `Towards A Democratic Socialism' reprinted by permission of the publisher from New Left Review 109, # New Left Review 1978. First published as the postscript to L'Etat, le pouvoir, le socialisme, PUF, Paris 1978, # PUF 1978. `Is There a Crisis in Marxism?' reprinted by permission of the publisher from Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, vol. 6, no.3, # Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 1979. `Research Note on the State and Society' first published in International Social Science Journal, vol. 32, no. 4, # International Social Science Journal 1980. All rights reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-200-4 (pbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-199-1 (hbk) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Sabon by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the USA by Maple Vail

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction by James Martin 1 Marxist Examination of the Contemporary State and Law and the Question of the `Alternative' 2 Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and Law 3 Preliminaries to the Study of Hegemony in the State 4 Marxist Political Theory in Great Britain 5 Towards a Marxist Theory 6 The Political Forms of the Military Coup d'EÂtat 7 The Problem of the Capitalist State 8 On Social Classes 9 Internationalization of Capitalist Relations and the Nation-State 10 On the Popular Impact of Fascism 11 The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau 12 The Political Crisis and the Crisis of the State 13 The New Petty Bourgeoisie 14 The State and the Transition to Socialism 15 Towards a Democratic Socialism 16 Is There a Crisis in Marxism? 17 Interview with Nicos Poulantzas 18 Research Note on the State and Society Notes Index

vii 1 25 47 74 120 139 166 172 186 220 258 270 294 323 334 361 377 387 403 412 431

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people for their assistance in the production of this volume: the Nicos Poulantzas Institute in Athens for financial assistance to procure a number of the translations; Bob Jessop of the University of Lancaster and Stathis Kouvelakis of Kings College, University of London for offering information and advice on the writings and biography of Poulantzas; Bob was also splendidly generous in supplying some vital materials and, along with my colleague at Goldsmiths, Sanjay Seth, kindly passed comment on a draft of the Introduction; at Verso, Sebastian Budgen and, formerly, Jane Hindle kept an improbable project going; and the staff at Goldsmiths Library arranged numerous inter-library loans with typical speed and efficiency. Finally, I'd like to thank Susan for not asking any questions. James Martin Acknowledgement is due to the following publications and publishers for permission to reproduce Poulantzas's work: Archives de Philosophie du Droit, Economy and Society, Halstead Press, International Social Science Journal, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, Lawrence & Wishart, New Left Review, Politis, Les Temps Modernes and Union GeÂneÂrale d'EÂdition.

INTRODUCTION James Martin

Nicos Poulantzas (1936±1979) was one of the leading Marxist theorists of the late twentieth century. From the mid-1960s he developed seminal analyses of the state and social classes and, during the crisis years in post-war capitalism, contributed uniquely to the theoretical extension of radical political analysis. Born and educated in Greece and resident in Paris, initially as a scholar of law, he was closely engaged with the philosophical currents of the age. Influenced first by Sartrean existentialism and, soon after, by Althusser's structuralism, Poulantzas brought a formidable depth and complexity to the Marxist understanding of politics. The articles collected in this volume offer a representative range of Poulantzas's scholarly interests throughout his career. Undoubtedly, however, he remains most well-known for his theory of the capitalist state whose `relative autonomy' from class interests endow it with a distinctive, unifying purpose. This theory, which had important implications for conceptualizing the permutations of bourgeois class domination and for the formulation of revolutionary socialist strategy, brought him into controversy with other Marxists in whom he detected a tendency to `economistic' reduction. His debate on the state with Ralph Miliband in the early 1970s was, for a while, a central reference point for all students of social and political theory. Yet, as the writings gathered here demonstrate, Poulantzas's original approach to the state was a theoretical project under constant development. Indeed, the nature of the state could not, he insisted, be separated from the ongoing conflicts, contradictions and compromises of the struggles that permeate capitalist societies. In this, Poulantzas, much like Gramsci before him, brought to his Marxism an awareness of the strategic variations and reversals that often characterized politics on the capitalist periphery. `A theory of the capitalist State',

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he argued, `must be able to elucidate the metamorphoses of its object'.1 Today, what is taken to be Poulantzas's `theory of the state' might, then, better be understood as a developing reflection on the space of the political opened up by capitalist relations of production. For, builtin to this space is a potential for novelty and change that is often better demonstrated by `exceptional' states, such as fascism, than the classic, parliamentary-democratic model. Poulantzas took it upon himself to acknowledge this potential for variation without losing sight of the principal reference-points found in the Marxist `classics' (Marx, Engels and Lenin). Yet, at times, reconciling the two took him to the limits, perhaps limitations, of Marxist theory itself. By the time of his suicide in 1979, the Althusserian moment had passed decisively, as had the burst of revolutionary enthusiasm and the explosion of interest in Marxism catalyzed by the events in Paris of May 1968. The tragic end to Poulantzas's own life seemed to mirror the wider exhaustion of Marxism's influence on popular struggles. Yet, thirty years on, interest in Poulantzas persists, sustained in part by the efforts of those who fell under his influence in the 1970s but also by a renewed concern for some of the themes on which he wrote. If, reasonably, a good part of Poulantzas's preoccupations seem passe to a contemporary audience, there is nonetheless much in his work that remains instructive: for example, his conceptualization of the state as a material `condensation' of struggles, his focus on the changing forms of state power in contemporary capitalism, or his interest in the authoritarian tendency in late capitalist politics. In the remainder of this Introduction I outline, in broad terms, the arguments contained in the articles that follow and sketch some of their intellectual and political background. My aims here are merely to survey Poulantzas's evolving theoretical concerns and offer a guide to interpretation so as to illuminate his writings and help locate them alongside his other, book-length texts.

Philosophy and Law It has been Poulantzas's fate to be associated closely with the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser which dominated French intellectual life for around a decade from the mid-1960s. Yet this association has done much to obscure Poulantzas's own, independent, development both before and after the high-point of Althusser's influence in the late 1960s. Prior to taking up Althusser's problematic, Poulantzas had been a scholar of law and a devotee of a more `humanistic' philosophical

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3

style, influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, GyoÈrgy LukaÂcs and Lucien Goldmann. Let us begin, then, with this early period in his formation. Poulantzas was born in Athens on 21 September 1936. He grew to adolescence during a turbulent period which encompassed the authoritarian regime of General Ioannis Metaxas in the late 1930s, followed by the Nazi puppet regime during the war, the civil war of 1946±49 and the Western-backed, conservative democracy of the 1950s.2 Graduating in law from the University of Athens in 1957 and, following compulsory military service, he set off in 1960 to undertake doctoral studies in German legal philosophy in Munich. That decision was soon aborted, however, and Poulantzas relocated to Paris, the home of a large Greek diaspora that included figures such as Kostas Axelos, Cornelius Castoriadis and other exiled left-wing intellectuals. Poulantzas enrolled as a teaching assistant at the Universite PantheÂon-Sorbonne and continued his research on law, submitting a meÂmoire de doctorat in 1961 on natural law theory in Germany after the Second World War. By 1964 he had completed his doctoral thesis, published in the following year as his first book, Nature des choses et droit: essai sur la dialectique du fait et de la valeur.3 In Nature des choses, Poulantzas undertook a synthesis of phenomenological approaches to law and existentialist philosophy to produce a theory of natural law grounded in the `dialectical unity' of facts and values. For natural law theorists, obligations to obey legal prescriptions depend upon law's coincidence with moral intuitions, that is, with the `nature of things'. By contrast, followers of legal positivism (such as Kelsen, Hart, and so forth) argue that law must be obeyed regardless of its moral character, simply because it is law. Poulantzas broadly followed the first path, aiming to develop an approach to law that overcame both the ahistorical, `transcendental' enquiry into moral values associated with Kant, and the dualism of fact and value, or `is' and `ought', common to legal positivism. Inspired by Hegel, Marx, Heidegger and Sartre, Poulantzas argued for the `immanent' grounding of legal values in the ontological `fact' of human freedom: A legal universe is `valuable' . . . to the extent that it constitutes, historically, a step in the human struggle against the given facts which alienate and reify man, and towards the creation of a `human' universe where man can create his own dignity and realise his own generic being.4

At first glance, Poulantzas's philosophical approach to law appears at some distance from his later work on the state. Yet, if the explicit

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objective of Nature des choses was to defend a species of natural law, its focus was not moral philosophy but, rather, what in the AngloAmerican world is called `social theory'. Having established a broadly Marxian anthropology of legal values ± tracing values to a conscious human interaction with the practical, material dilemmas of collective existence ± Poulantzas devoted the second half of the book to the `sociology of law'. Here he drew upon Sartre's analysis (in the Critique of Dialectical Reason) of relations of `interiority' and `exteriority' to conceptualize the interaction of legal structures with the economic base. Thus Poulantzas produced a global theory of the legal order conceived, following LukaÂcs, as a `reified' social structure generated, at various levels of mediation, through human `praxis' founded in the social struggle for economic subsistence. Feeding existentialist insights into sociology, he developed a comprehensive `meta-theorization' of the place of law in the social development of human existence, one that avoided the crude reduction of law to class interests and cleared space for grasping the complex variation of social orders. If, later, he was to drop his interest in legal philosophy, this comprehensive theoretical approach and anti-economism nevertheless remained. Poulantzas's earliest published articles mirrored the concerns of his legal studies, surveying academic literature on phenomenological and existentialist approaches to law and `juridical ontology'. In Chapter 1, `Marxist Examination of the Contemporary State and Law and the Question of the ``Alternative'' ', published in 1964 in Sartre's Les Temps Modernes (a frequent outlet for Poulantzas in the 1960s and 70s), the sociological concerns of the second part of Nature des choses are set out with an enhanced political accent. Here Poulantzas again elaborates a Marxist approach to the state and law, based on the `internal-external' method and defending the `relative autonomy' of legal superstructures against Marxist economism. Refusing the dismissal of superstructures as `unreal', Poulantzas reconnects juridical norms to the economic infrastructure by emphasizing their mediation by values grounded in material praxis. Thus modern property law is related to economic conditions, not directly as a class instrument, but through values such as liberty and equality, in addition to market values concerning contract and exchange. It is precisely these values that grant legal norms a wider validity, independently of any instrumental advantage to the bourgeoisie and despite their `reified' status and role in sustaining alienated relations throughout civil society. Indeed, for Poulantzas, the significance in noting this crystallization into legal norms of certain values lies precisely in the radical possibilities engendered when the proletariat

INTRODUCTION

5

recognizes the contradiction between its real and ideal existence. Without such recognition, an alternative set of values ± elaborated through the existing values of liberty and equality ± could not come into play. Marxist analysis, claims Poulantzas, cannot rest at merely noting the internal unity of law and the state. Its purpose is to criticize the reification of law by exposing its mediated relationship to the economic base, whilst respecting the specificity of law in its historical genesis. For instance, Poulantzas himself notes the significance of `calculability' and `predictability' in contemporary Western states, values which correspond to a period of monopoly capitalism in which strategic forecasting has become paramount at the level of the state. These values give rise to legal norms based on generality, abstraction, formality and codification, which result in a `systematization of law' and a `formal hierarchy of state bodies'. A critical Marxist analysis, he goes on, must expose the contradictions at work in this legal order by simultaneously grasping the specificity of a normative model of law (an internal analysis of `the state as an organization') and the dialectical relation of the legal superstructure to the base (an external analysis of `the state as body or instrument'), so establishing the various, complex degrees of proximity of legal norms to class exploitation. For the early Poulantzas, this model of analysis provided the basis for a strategic assault on the state by gauging the extent to which a revolutionary advance must adapt and/or relinquish elements of the bourgeois order. His debt to Sartrean existentialism in developing a non-economistic, Marxist sociology of law is illuminated in Chapter 2, `Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and Law'. In a review of the philosopher's lengthy effort to fuse Marxist theory and existentialist philosophy, Poulantzas sets out the relevance of Sartrean Marxism to legal analysis. Sartre's advance over phenomenological approaches, claims Poulantzas, lies in his effort to develop categories that shift ontological analysis from the level of the individual to that of society. The dialectic, in Sartre's hands, entails an ongoing process of `totalization' whereby man as a meaning-creating subject exists in a constitutive, interactive relationship with the material world, encompassed in the experience of labour. This originary `praxis-totalization' ± whereby man makes himself as he labours on the world ± is the basis to an `existentialist ontology of law' that, in Poulantzas's view, surpasses the ahistorical and de-contextualized approaches of established legal phenomenology.

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Poulantzas goes on to sketch Sartre's account of the different modes of social being ± `series', `collectives', `fused', `statutory' and `institutionalized' groups ± as moments in the `structuration of the social'. These represent different stages of dialectical praxis in which group members relate to each other through a shared experience of being. Juridical relations fundamentally express, therefore, a form of collective identity grounded in social `needs' and `labour': Law is thus the specific `ontological' dimension of the cohesion of a social group . . . organized for its permanency through the pledge, demanding a predictability on the part of its members, and necessitating a differentiation of tasks in order to achieve a common objective.5

If Poulantzas adds a critical note of caution concerning Sartre's own philosophical starting point ± not in socio-economic structures but in an `ahistorical' and solitary individual praxis ± which significantly distances his enterprise from classical Marxist analysis, the tenor of his article is nevertheless supportive. Sartre offers a non-reductionist approach to juridical relations, underlining the autonomy of law and the state from economic interests, one that is broadly compatible with Marxism, as Poulantzas sees it. At this stage, the young student of law looked forward to a further and deeper engagement with Sartre on these issues.

Althusser and the Revival of Marxism Just as Nature des choses was published and its various offshoots found themselves in print, Poulantzas began to switch intellectual allegiances from Sartre to Althusser, moving from a paradigm based on existentialism and phenomenology to one based on structuralism. This was not an overnight conversion, by any means. Althusser's presence had first taken form as a brief footnote in Nature des choses and developed into more substantial but still unelaborated references in the journal articles. Between 1964 and 1966, Poulantzas gradually abandoned both his direct interest in law and his existentialist Marxism, adopting, instead, a focus on the state as a distinctly political, rather than strictly juridical, object of Marxist analysis. This phase of transition also saw Poulantzas shifting attention to debates within contemporary European Marxism, whilst at the same time reassessing the Marxist classics. Whilst still concerned with the autonomy of the political realm from simple or direct class influence, Poulantzas began

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to incorporate into his own analysis the more refined and philosophically rigorous language of Althusser. Althusser's impact on French Marxism had been underway since his seminars in the early 1960s. The theoretical work undertaken there was published in 1965 in the collection of essays, For Marx, and the jointly-authored Reading `Capital'.6 The promise of these works was no less than a wholesale revival of Marxism as a `scientific' enterprise, founded on a structuralist-inspired reading of Marx's `epistemological break' with the `humanism' of his early years, and directed towards returning Marxist theory to a deeper, more radical political engagement than Soviet orthodoxy permitted. There is no room here to discuss the details of Althusser's enterprise, so I shall sketch only some of its key claims as they relate directly to Poulantzas.7 Althusser's reading of Marx offered a route between what he saw as the mechanistic economism of Stalinist orthodoxy ± which construed history as the linear development of modes of production based on the inexorable expansion of productive forces ± and its `mirror-image', the Hegelian Marxism of LukaÂcs, Korsch and Gramsci, which made history the journey of a subject overcoming its alienated essence.8 The first was viewed as a crude, dogmatic assimilation of Marxism to the model of the natural sciences, whilst the second lapsed into `historicism', that is, the reduction of knowledge to its own conditions of existence, thus abandoning altogether Marxism's claim to genuine, scientific status. Building on the structuralist orientation underway since the mid-1950s in the work of figures such as Roland Barthes and Claude LeÂvi-Strauss, Althusser proposed to reconstruct Marx's `problematic' as an autonomous scientific practice whose object was the complex `mode of production', consisting of several autonomous structural levels whose overall interdependence was determined by economic relations only `in the last instance'. Economism, historicism and humanism were castigated as unscientific enterprises that either reduced history to a single cause (economism) or the expression of a subject (historicism and humanism). Althusser's fundamental challenge had been to draw a line between a rigorous, scientific historical materialism and the unscientific, `ideological' forms it had taken in previous interpretations. If he concentrated on the philosophical grounds for this enterprise in his reconstruction of the later Marx, it remained to be seen how a more concrete socio-political analysis could be drawn from it. It was precisely that wider extrapolation that Poulantzas undertook to explore. His first, elaborate engagement with Althusserian categories ± although not with Althusser himself ± arrived in a mammoth