A Critique of Nicos Poulantzas

7/09/14 11:50 AMInternational Socialism: A critique of Nicos Poulantzas

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A critique of Nicos PoulantzasIssue: Posted: 7 February 07

Colin Barker

This article first appeared in International Socialism issue 4 (Spring1979) under the title: A ‘New’ Reformism?—A Critique of the PoliticalTheory of Nicos Poulantzas. Today, in the context of a radicalisinganticapitalist movement, many old ideas are returning in newcontexts. Poulantzas is once again being cited in arguments overstrategies for the movement and many of the criticisms raised byColin Barker retain their pertinence.

A ‘New’ Reformism?—A Critique of thePolitical Theory of Nicos Poulantzas

‘Here we have the old constitutional folly. The conditionof a “free government” is not the division but the UNITYof power. The machinery of government cannot be toosimple. It is always the craft of knaves to make itcomplicated and mysterious.’ Karl Marx 1

For some years now, there has been a welcome revival in Marxistdiscussion on the State. Two names, above all, have been associated

with that discussion: Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas. 2

Criticism of the work of both authors has been abundant. Among the

more perceptive critics 3 it was noted, separately for each writer, thathis work was open to reformist interpretation. Both produced worksfrom which revolutionary socialists could learn, but the way in whicheach argued his case was such that reformist lessons could not beruled out. This possibility did not arise because of the readiness ofreformists to distort anything they come across, and pervert it.(Though that is a well-known phenomenon.) Rather, the very way inwhich Miliband and Poulantzas constructed their accounts of thestate and of capitalist society was itself ambiguous from thisviewpoint.

Rather schematically, we can see where the heart of the problem lay.Poulantzas in one of his own contributions to the New Left Review,suggested that a key problem with Miliband was his lack of any‘theoretical problematic’. He was, in fact, quite wrong: Miliband’s TheState in Capitalist Society revealed that he had a very distinct‘theoretical problematic’, a ‘theory of society’. That theory was quitedifferent from Marx’s, however. Poulantzas failed to notice this,above all, because he made the same fundamental mistake asMiliband—though on different grounds.

What was the mistake? At root, it was a failure to comprehend Marx’senormous theoretical breakthrough, in particular by comparison with

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the classical political economists to whose critique he devoted a largepart of his theoretical life work. Marx’s achievement in this spherelay, above all, in his ability to get behind the categories of politicaleconomy—value, capital, property, rent, state, class, etc—and to showthat these expressed historically created social relationships. Inparticular, Marx showed that ‘production’ could only be adequatelyunderstood if it were seen as a social process through which humanbeings create and recreate their own world. Far from being simply a‘technical’ relationship between human beings and nature,production was also centrally a social activity through which ‘men’—in the sexist language of the 19th century—made their own history,their own society.

To understand production, it was necessary to grasp its various socialforms. Thus, at the beginning of Capital, Marx analyses thecommodity as the expression of a double production process: it is,simultaneously, a use-value, a thing of use to human beings, and avalue, the expression of a certain kind of social relationship amongproducers. In producing commodities, we produce not only usefulthings, but also a distinct form of society founded on alienated socialrelations.

Similarly, all the other language of political economy has to bereconstrued to reveal this active, social creative process. Workers incapitalist factories make cars, steel, chemicals, toothbrushes, etc: butin this very act of making things, they also produce surplus value.Their work activity takes a form in which they reproduce their bosses,producing the means by which their own exploitation anddomination is continued. The whole social order—relationships offamily, state, science, education, etc—should be understood asperpetually produced and reproduced elements made by real activeindividuals in their social interconnections. It is not that one sectionof society makes society, makes the environment, etc, while anotheris merely the passive, organised section. All human history is therecord of activity of all the individuals who compose it.

Hence, for Marx, revolutionary socialist politics is grounded in anunderstanding of history. The very possibility of socialism—of asociety in which the whole population makes its own societyconsciously and in accordance with a democratically determined plan—rests on the analysis of capitalist and other class societies: for whatmen and women have made and remade they can remake again inline with their own self-developed needs and perceptions. Howeverradical a break with the past a socialist revolution may be, it does notintroduce into history an entirely new principle, the self-activity ofhuman beings. Without that self-activity, the whole of past historycannot be understood.Thus Marx’s more ‘philosophical’ writings are all of a piece with hisrevolutionary politics. His critique of Hegel, and of mechanicalmaterialism, is all of a piece with his critiques of political economyand of various ‘socialisms from above’.

Within this perspective, it is the particular form that socialrelationships take which defines the various ‘modes of production’. Inclass societies, like capitalist society, the key to comprehendingsociety is the form that the active struggle between the classes takes.In particular, the modes of action and the social relationships amongthe oppressed majority are crucial to comprehending how the societyis maintained, and how it may be overthrown through revolutionarypractice.

Now, while the analyses of Miliband and Poulantzas are not the same,it is apparent that in neither of these authors’ work is this centralunderstanding of the class struggle, and in particular of the forms ofactivity of the exploited classes, present as a central and definingelement. Thus there is a measurable distance between their analysesand those of Marx.



In Miliband’s case, The State in Capitalist Society rests on a theory of

society which—as one of his more acute critics, Isaac Balbus 4 pointedout—combines ‘elite’ theory and ‘stratification’ theory. That is, thewhole study is organised around the theme, not of class struggle, butclass domination. In Miliband’s study, only the ruling class appears toact. In the various institutions which he analyses, there is little or nosense of a conflict of classes. (Given that his book was published in1969, for instance, it is remarkable that his account of education inschools and colleges says nothing about student revolt…) Thus hisstudy is very one-dimensional in its emphases. When he discusses thebases of existence of the ruling classes, he emphasises not their rolein production but their benefits from distribution. Thus the rulingclasses are primarily defined in terms of their (passive) possession ofriches rather than their (active) role as capitalists. The working class,similarly, is defined as the class that ‘works hardest and gets least’,not as a class whose struggles and forms of organisation shape theform of society. The working class as an active, creative, strugglingclass does not appear in the body of his analysis: there it merelysuffers. So, when it suddenly pops out on the last page of the book, asthe force which will one day wipe out capitalism, the idea appears as adecorative addition rather than the conclusion of a single argument.

As for the state, Miliband devotes little space to a discussion of thevarious institutional means by which the present state excludes theworking class from power. Rather, he emphasises its class characterby the methods of orthodox sociology: by examining not its forms butthe ‘social class’ origins of its upper members, their possession of

attitudes akin to those of the rich, etc. Thus, as John Lea 5 pointedout, he leaves open the question whether the ‘machinery’ of the statecan be captured and used by working class parties for the benefit ofthe working class and to destroy capitalism. He leaves unexplainedand uncriticised the very forms of the state—its characteristicbureaucracy, the ‘democratic sham’, the nation-state form, etc.

The work of Poulantzas, on the other hand, rests on a system ofthinking developed by the ‘Althusserian’ school, a system which has

already been the subject of a number of important critiques. 6 TheAlthusserian system represented, in one sense, a reaction against aninterpretation of Marxism which it called ‘economism’—the view thatthe historical process is the product of changes in the ‘forces ofproduction’, i.e. a form of determinism. It is characteristic of‘economism’ (or what Colletti termed ‘the Marxism of the Second

International’ 7 ) that production is treated as a technical and notsimultaneously a social process. However, as Simon Clarke suggests(see note 3) the attempt to avoid the trap of ‘economism’ is notnecessarily to fall on the ground of Marxism. There are other possibletraps. Indeed, Althusser leaps into another hole, one in which eventhe works of Marx himself have to undergo a major process ofrewriting and rereading if they are to be purged of their innumerablefailings.

In place of ‘economism’, Althusser proposed the idea that societies beconsidered as complex systems of interdependent levels—theeconomic, the political and the ideological—all of which mutuallyinterpenetrate each other but over which the economic isdeterminant ‘in the last instance’—which ‘last instance’, Althusserassured his readers, never comes. It has been pointed out by endlesscritics that Althusser’s system strongly parallels the system developedby the conservative American sociologist, Talcott Parsons, that it is a‘structural functionalism’. It certainly is a system, as Parsons’ is, inwhich it is difficult to locate principles of historical change. History,as a ‘process without a subject’, consists of a series of modes ofproduction each of which is treated as an ‘eternity’. Nothing withineach mode threatens it: to believe so is to fall into the trap of‘economism’ or ‘historicism’. The system is radically elitist in itsemphases: Althusser makes a distinction between ‘science’ and







‘ideology’ according to which all forms of society require ideology, sothat socialism too will have to be a system which is ultimatelyimpenetrable to all but its few ‘scientific’ members.

Poulantzas took over this system. His central account of the state wascast in functionalist terms: it is ‘the global factor of social cohesion’.The state, as both repressive and ideological apparatuses, holds thewhole system together. Not only this, but the state actually forms andstructures the relations of production, forming isolated individualsand thus the relations of competition which characterise the capitalistform of society. It IS not the case that the state in any sense ‘rises outof’ or ‘expresses’ the social relation’s of capitalist production andexchange: it constitutes these relations. In taking over theAlthusserian system, Poulantzas added something which in Althusseris chiefly decoration: classes. But his classes are formed in the‘relatively autonomous’ “political-juridical level”, not within therelations of production. In the ‘economic level’ there occurs aproduction process—the production of goods, based on technicallyconceived ‘relations of production’ consisting of a combination ofworkers, instruments and objects of production, and non-workers.Nowhere in Poulantzas’s analysis do we find an account of the classstruggle understood as a set of social relations through which peopleproduce capitalist society. Social relations are politically constituted,in the ‘relative autonomy’ of the political-juridical sphere.

Despite the considerable differences between Miliband andPoulantzas (which differences extended to their comprehensibility),they shared a common starting point. Both began with technicallyconceived relations of production, onto which they then constructedsocial (class) relationships of distribution, of ownership andappropriation. As a result, both of them had difficulty in explainingchange within their analytical frameworks. Thus both failed to relatetheir discussion of fascism (a brief section in Miliband, a whole bookby Poulantzas) to the interwar crisis of world capitalism; neitherexamined the forms of the class struggle under Hitler or Mussolini.Both, despite considerable arguments between them, offered similaranalyses of ideology and ‘ideological apparatuses’, which they bothpresented as internally coherent and non-contradictory, and certainlynot as ideas shaped and reshaped in the process of struggle betweenthe classes.

To borrow a term from Althusser, there is a very significant ‘absence’in both of them. Neither gives an account of the class struggle, rootedin the social production relations of capitalism, as the key organisingand disorganising set of social relations in capitalist society. Inneither’s analysis, therefore, does the actual struggle of workers playany significant role. In that crucial sense, the analytical frameworksof both writers were always open to reformist political interpretation.

Until recently, however, final judgement on them had to be held. Butboth writers have now taken the political plunge quite directly,publishing books with explicitly reformist political programmes.Miliband concludes his recent Marxism and Politics with somereflections on the Chilean debacle. The lesson he draws from thedownfall of the Allende regime is, in essence, that the sameexperience must be repeated; only, next time there will have to bepresent a grouping of socialists who will point out to the reformistgovernment the necessity of deepening the process of socialtransformation in its own defence. Thus a social revolution will be

achieved without all the Sturm und Drang of an actual revolution. 8

And now Nicos Poulantzas has published a book, State, Power,

Socialism 9 whose appearance announces that the famous “Miliband-Poulantzas debate” is, in all essential respects, over. For the two ofthem are in basic political agreement with each other. Both haveplaced themselves on the “left wing”—insofar as that is a meaningfulterm—of the present “Eurocommunist” tendency. Both have





announced, unambiguously, their breach with the Marxism thatasserts, with Marx, that ‘the emancipation of the working class mustbe conquered by the working class itself.’

Poulantzas’s proposalsPoulantzas suggests that the transition to socialism must proceed ontwo levels. On one hand, the parliamentary system must be both usedby the Left, and maintained as an integral part of socialist politics. Onthe other hand, and in parallel, there must be a development ofworkers’ councils or ‘self-management’ bodies, organised on theprinciple of direct democracy. The problem is to find ‘a democraticroad to socialism, a democratic socialism’,posed as follows:

how is it possible radically to transform the State in sucha manner that the extension and deepening of politicalfreedoms and the institutions of representativedemocracy (which were also a conquest of the popularmasses) are combined with the unfurling of forms ofdirect democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies 10

The ‘fundamental problem’ is that of ‘combining a transformed

representative democracy with direct, rank-and-file democracy’. 11

‘Democratic socialism is the only kind possible.’ 12 At the nationallevel, central government is to be organised on a parliamentary basis.This, he makes clear in the Interview with Henri Weber, involves agovernment elected by universal suffrage, on a secret ballot, with no

‘imperative mandate’ over MPs, no right of recall over MPs, 13 rights

for bourgeois parties. 14 In addition to this national system, there areto be local bodies based on the principles of ‘direct democracy’, i.e.with recall of delegates, mandation of delegates, etc. Parliamentary,representative democracy nationally, plus workers’ councils based onfactories, etc: these two forms are to co-exist, and be articulated

together, in ways Poulantzas admits 15 he can’t at this stage specifyvery precisely:

the answer to such questions does not yet exist—noteven as a model theoretically guaranteed in some holytext or other.

As he explains, this idea involves quite definitely abandoning the ideaof smashing the existing state and replacing it with a state of the kindcelebrated by Marx in the Paris Commune:

...the expression ‘sweeping transformation of the stateapparatus in the democratic road to socialism’ suggeststhat there is no longer a place for what has traditionallybeen called smashing or destroying that apparatus. Thefact remains, however, that the term smashing, whichMarx too used for indicative purposes, came in the endto designate a very precise historical phenomenon:namely, the eradication of any kind of representativedemocracy or ‘formal’ liberties in favour purely of direct,rank-and-file democracy and so-called real liberties. It isnecessary to take sides… talk of smashing or destroyingthe state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbaltrick. What is involved, through all the varioustransformations, is a real permanence and continuity ofthe institutions of representative democracy—not asunfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long asnecessary, but as an essential condition of democraticsocialism. 16

No more talk, either, of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’: Marx,who used the term, used it










as a notion of applied strategy, serving at most as asignpost. It referred to the class nature of the State andto the necessity of its transformation in the transition tosocialism and the process of the withering away of theState. 17

Continued use of the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would onlyobscure Poulantzas’s programme: he therefore supports the PCF’s[the French Communist Party] decision to drop the idea.

Therefore, Poulantzas criticises those in the PCF who want to retainthe phrase in the party programme (e.g. Etienne Balibar). Suchpeople, he suggests, are given to uttering ‘dogmaticbanalities’ of the following kind: ’...every State is a class State; allpolitical domination is a species of class dictatorship; the capitalist

State is a State of the bourgeoisie.’ 18 No doubt it is true that these‘dogmatic banalities’ have, on occasion, been uttered withoutexamination, with criticism, without deepening of their meaning. Butdoes this make them incorrect? (The better part ofPoulantzas’s own work has been devoted to elucidating their truth,after all.) Poulantzas continues his discussion of these ‘banalities’ bysuggesting that ‘such an analysis is incapable of advancing researchby a single inch’, and that it can’t help us understand ‘concretesituations, since it cannot account for the differential forms and

historical transformations of the capitalist State.’ 19 This kind ofsimplification led to the disasters of Stalinism in the face of facism, hesuggests.

It has to be noted that Poulantzas refers to only one kind of‘disaster…in the face of fascism’: the ‘social fascism’ analysiswhich underpinned the German Communist Party’s appalling tacticsin the face of Hitler. But can the ‘social fascism’ doctrine be attributedto the ‘banalities’ outlined above? Not without political mediations, itcan’t. Trotsky, for one, never doubted the truth of these ‘dogmaticbanalities’, yet his analysis of the rise of Hitler, and his proposals fora united front to defeat the Nazis, have yet to be bettered,Furthermore, it was the ‘forgetting’ of these,‘dogmatic banalities’ which led the Comintern in the PopularFront period (on which Poulantzas is quite silent) to grovel before theBlum government in France and to follow a strategy in Spainfrom which all the gains were made by General Franco. Poulantzas,however, can hardly criticise the Popular Front: his proposals are fora re-run of that experience.

Poulantzas’s proposals, I want to suggest, would if pursuedproduce disaster. They would involve the working class repeating awhole series of defeats already experienced this century. Hisprogrammatic utterances announce his own, unambiguous, breachwith Marxism. And his argumentation for them is very weak.

Does workers’ power necessitate Stalinism?Poulantzas suggests that the classical Marxist conception of socialistrevolution—destruction of the existing state apparatus and itsreplacement by direct workers’ democracy—leads directly to ‘statism’,i.e. to Stalinism. All the horrors of Stalinism, to which the communistparties are now becoming sensitive, were rooted in the way theRussian Revolution was conducted. This, of course, is a propositionthat finds ready assent from a chorus of liberals and other anti-socialists, so Poulantzas evokes the seemingly impressive authority ofRosa Luxemburg. In 1918, this great German revolutionary socialistwrote a pamphlet strongly criticising the Bolsheviks for, among otherthings, their dissolution of the Constituent Assembly.

Poulantzas, however, does not offer much in the way ofconcrete data on the question. And a few matters have to be faceddirectly. Was Luxemburg’s criticism of the Bolsheviks correct? Whydid the Bolsheviks, who’d been the most active campaigners






for the Constituent Assembly, then dissolveit by force? Were theywrong to do so?

On the first issue, that of Luxemburg’s criticisms, Poulantzas fails tomention a couple of germane points. The first is that,

according to some historians 20 she later retracted this specificcriticism of the Bolsheviks. But it should also be noted that within ayear of the Russian Revolution she was to be faced with exactly thesame issue in Germany. There Kautsky’s USPD made proposals ofexactly the same kind Poulantzas now advocates: for a NationalAssembly plus soviets. Rosa Luxemburg was utterly uncompromisingin her opposition to the idea. Poulantzas does not quote her opinionon the matter—not surprisingly.

Whoever pleads for a National Assembly is consciouslyor unconsciously depressing the revolution to thehistorical level of a bourgeois revolution: he is acamouflaged agent of the bourgeoisie or an unconsciousagent of the petty bourgeoisie. 21

and again:

The path of the revolution follows clearly from its ends.Its methods follow from its tasks. All power in the handsof the working masses, in the hands of the workers’ andsoldiers’ councils. This is the guiding principle… Everyact, every step must like a compass point in thisdirection. 22

The National Assembly, rather than a guarantee of ‘democraticsocialism’, was that ‘counter-revolutionary stronghold erected against

the working class.’ 23

Thus, in her own practice, Rosa Luxemburg did not believe in themaintenance of parliamentary forces. Had she suddenly lost her(1917) commitment to democracy? Far from it: her position arosedirectly from her profound commitment to democracy, from herbelief that nothing should stand between the working class and directpower. Clearly, if we are to play the game of citing ‘authorities’,Luxemburg is a poor one for Poulantzas to quote. Why did theBolsheviks dissolve the Constituent Assembly? They certainly hadbeen campaigning for a Constituent Assembly to be convened during1917. Indeed, their argument had been that only a powerful sovietsystem could guarantee a Constituent Assembly. It does not seem tohave occurred to them, prior to October, that there might be a conflictbetween soviets and Assembly. In itself that isn’t very surprising: theBolsheviks were in the process of recasting Marxist theory in action.After all, they entered the revolution believing it would be a bourgeoisrevolution: before February, only the isolated non-Bolshevik, Trotsky,with his theory of permanent revolution, thought otherwise.

The October uprising completely altered the picture. Lenin wasamong the first to grasp this, urging a delay in the ConstituentAssembly elections and extension of the vote to 18 year olds. As sooften, he failed to win a majority for his proposal, and the electionswent ahead. Overall, the Socialist Revolutionaries won a clearmajority, though the strength of their vote was directly proportionalto the voters’ distance from the centres of the revolution. The SRvictory was, at best, ambiguously democratic: in the uprising, the SRshad split, with the Left SRs supporting the uprising and the Rightopposed, yet the elections lists were presented by a ‘united’ party.Thus it wasn’t clear what the electorate had actually voted for.

On the Assembly’s first day, the Bolsheviks pronounced ratification ofthe soviet seizure of power, the decree on land, the decree on peace,workers’ control of production, etc. By 237 to 136 votes, the Assemblyrejected the motion. The same day it was dispersed. It had become







the rallying centre for counter-revolution, as it continued to be in theCivil War that broke out within months. Not to have dispersed theConstituent Assembly would have been a crime against therevolution: it would have permitted the re-emergence of a situation of‘dual power’, with two rival national political centres, each withopposed aims and methods.

To suggest, as does Poulantzas (who also repeats the old canard about

Lenin’s What Is To Be Done prefiguring Stalinism 25 ) that it was thisevent which led to Stalinism is a most fantastichistorical judgement and a piece of utter formalism. The tragedy ofthe degeneration of the Russian Revolution arose, above all, from theworking class’s loss of its ability to govern directly, under the impactof the isolation of the Revolution and the terrible rigours of the CivilWar, the de-urbanisation, famine, collapse of production, etc. TheSoviets, the living heart of the revolution, ceased to beat with the lifeof the Russian workers. Not, let it be emphasised, initially throughthe bureaucratic manipulations of any anti-democratic party or

leadership, but under the terrifying pressure of circumstances. 26

‘Representative Democracy’Poulantzas’s second line of argument is his insistence that‘representative democracy’, i.e. parliamentarism, is the key guaranteeof the preservation of political freedoms. Thus it is the strategic lineof defence against state authoritarianism. In his interview, he citesthe opinion of the Italian social democrat Nobert Bobbio:

[Bobbio] did highlight one point. He said: ‘If we want tomaintain liberties, the plurality of expression, etc., thenall I know is that throughout history these liberties havebeen coupled with a form of parliament.’ Certainly heexpressed it in a social-democratic form. But yet, Iwonder if there isn’t a core of truth in that, if themaintenance of formal political liberties doesn’t requirethe maintenance of the institutional forms of power ofrepresentative democracy. Obviously they would betransformed: it’s not a matter of keeping the bourgeoisparliament as it is, etc. 27

Poulantzas doesn’t offer very much by way of arguments for‘representative democracy’ beyond the observation that both thisform of government and other political freedoms were ‘conquests ofthe masses’. Historically, though we might cavil at this simplificationof the path by which workers won civil and political rights undercapitalism, we needn’t object in principle. Marxists continue todefend those rights against attacks from the right. On the other hand,we also do not glamourise the extent or nature of these rights andfreedoms. In particular, we have to recognise the very ambiguous andlimited character of the ‘conquest’ involved in representativedemocracy. (Indeed, both in his earlier work, Political Power andSocial Classes, and indeed in his latest offering, Poulantzas is notuninteresting on the whole issue: he provides plenty of materials fordenouncing parliamentary government as sham democracy.) Let’srecall a few of the major limitations on what is properly called‘bourgeois democracy’.

Workers in the capitalist democracies have the right to vote inparliamentary and local elections. This right they exercise through

the secret ballot 28 . Thus each voter exercises his ‘power’ in isolationfrom any community, as an individual in an atomised relation to thestate. This atomistic relation between ‘citizen’ and state was a majortheme in Marx’s critique of the capitalist state, from the early 1840s,

and is indeed continued in Poulantzas’s own writings 29 . Individualvoting is not a matter for public discussion, or for meetings. It isutterly individualised. Revolutionaries have always argued that massmeetings are more democratic than secret ballots, since they permit








the exercise of wider kinds of political reasoning than can be appliedby the isolated voter. In a mass meeting, issues can be discussed,arguments refuted. In a mass meeting, estimates can be made of thegeneral level of support for some proposals for action, and thus of thelikelihood of that action being successful. This is not possible with thesecret ballot.

Secondly, and notoriously, voters have no real control over theirelected ‘representatives’. There is no effective right of recall, noeffective mandate which voters can exercise over MPs, etc. The voterselect the MP as isolated voters, and as such have no control over himor her. The MP is protected from control by constituents by a wholegamut of ‘privileges’ once he or she is elected. The MP ceases torepresent anyone once elected. In the late 18th century, theconservative Edmund Burke expressed the relation between MP andconstituents very well when he told the electorate of Bristol that ifthey voted him into Parliament he would not represent them “to thenation”, he would represent the nation to them. More recently,Harold Wilson reportedly expressed the same idea with a definitionof democracy as ‘government of the people, for the people, by thepeople—with the emphasis on government’. Thus, in theparliamentary system, the exercise of political freedom and powerconsists in the few seconds, every few years, it takes the voter toexpress a choice between parliamentary misrepresentatives—markinghis ballot paper with a cross, like an illiterate.

Thirdly, it is in any case only the legislature which is elected by theanonymous and powerless parliamentary constituencies. We exerciseno control over the remaining part of the state machinery: if we gainsome influence there, it is not by legal-constitutional means, but bymeans varying from riot to bribery. We do not elect our army,judiciary, police or humorously named ‘civil servants’. Nor have weeffective means of control over them. If complaints against them aremade, most often they have their own internal mechanisms forproviding their own judges and juries in their own cases. It is evenexceptional for the legislature itself, i.e. Parliament, to exercise realcontrol over the state bureaucracies. The non-elected part of the state—that vast machinery which we support with taxes and otherexactions, and which maintains a multiplicity of controls over ourdaily lives—is protected from popular control by a whole variety ofinstitutional means, including rules of ‘contempt’ (note that there isno charge of ‘contempt of people’ that can be brought against ourjudges), official secrecy (extending even to the rules for SocialSecurity benefits), bureaucratic appointment, etc. Even the MPs areexcluded from scrutiny of large parts of the bureaucracy’s personneland actions.

Fourthly, the legislature deals chiefly with the framing of laws, withgeneral rules rather than particular cases. (Otherwise, as radiolisteners have now discovered in Britain, it chiefly generates noiselike a school debating society on an off afternoon.) But the business ofmodern states is more and more concerned, not with generalities andwidely applicable laws, but with specifics, with the detail of bargainsbetween ministries and corporations, with particular administrativecases and so forth. Parliaments are neither empowered norcompetant to deal with these issues. The whole framework of the‘legal state’ is thus being progressively undermined by tendencies to

concentrate capital and power. 30 Orthodox political science hasregistered this development with a growing literature on ‘pressuregroup theory’, the ‘decline of parliament’, etc. Parliament, whichnever very precisely represented anyone, comes less and less to.represent real powers in society and to involve itself in real decisions.

In short, the ‘conquest’, of the vote has proved rather insubstantial. Itcannot be said that the defence of the existing right to vote is a majordefence of the democratic principle.Now Poulantzas, of course, wants to preserve a ‘transformed’




representative democracy, though lie is generally vague on how it isto be ‘transformed’. What is not to be transformed, however, heinsists, is the secret ballot, the lack of a power of recall over MPs, the

lack of a mandate over MPs, etc. 31 So, wherever we are to look for a‘transformation’, it is not in the direction of democratisation.

But then he claims he has an altogether grander aim in view. The taskis ‘to open up a global perspective of the withering away of

the state’ 32 The idea of the ‘withering away of the state’ is a nobleidea first developed by Marx and Engels, along with their other ideasabout smashing the existing state, the dictatorship of the proletariat,and the other things Poulantzas wants to junk. It refers in Marx andEngels to the process whereby the overwhelming majority, theworking class, having formed a new state power under their directcontrol, is then and only then capable of developing a new pattern ofsocial relations and control over the conditions of life such that theystand in less and less need of organised violence to manage theirsocial affairs. With the withering away of the state, conviction ratherthan coercion becomes society’s key organising principle. But themaintenance of a parliamentary body, which is not even directlysubordinated to society, does not even begin to meet the conditionsfor the realisation of this aspiration. It stands in the way, as animpediment to democratic life, as a governmental form out of thecontrol of the people. In reality Poulantzas is not proposing a route tothe ‘withering away of the state’: to suggest that he is, is, in his words,a ‘verbal trick’.

In short, Poulantzas’s ‘democratic road to socialism’ depends on the

maintenance of an undemocratic form of government. 33

Attack on workers’ self-governmentPoulantzas’s argument also embodies an attack on direct democracy,on workers’ councils as a form of government. Here too hisarguments are very weak.

His first point is simply a non-argument: namely, that up to now allsuch movements of the working class, aiming at the dictatorship ofthe proletariat, have failed. It is of course true: there is no socialismanywhere in the world. By various means, every revolutionarymovement of the working class has so far been beaten back. That isno more of an argument against learning from the historicalexperience of these defeats in order to succeed next time thandrownings are an argument against learning to swim.

Secondly, he suggests that the existing state is too strong to permitthe emergence of a rival centre in a ‘dual power’ situation, as aprelude to socialist revolution:

...if you consider the essence of the state apparatus asit is in France, and then the forms of centralisation ofpopular power… Well it’s obvious that it will be crushedbefore it’s taken more than three jumps of a flea. Yousurely don’t think that in the present situation they willlet you centralise parallel powers to the state aiming tocreate a counter-power. Things would be settled beforethere were even a shadow of a suspicion of such anorganisation. 34

Here Poulantzas introduces a whole new dimension into the dialectic:the method of self-contradiction, or having your cake and eating it. In

support of his own argument, the state appears as essentially weak 35

, too weak to be certain of barring the ‘democratic road’. For hissocialist opponents, however, the state is too strong!

The argument is anyway ridiculous. Who, after all, thinks that ‘in thepresent situation’ in France (or anywhere else) workers are going totry to centralise the power of their workers’ councils? The very








precondition of such a development is that the ‘present situation’ haschanged. The idea of revolution in a non-revolutionary situation isabsurd. Every revolutionary situation has involved a split within theexisting state apparatus and the existing ruling class. A revolutionarysituation involves a crisis for the state, a loss of effectiveness. Withoutsuch a crisis there can be no revolution: that is part of the ABC ofMarxism. It is precisely the crisis in the state which permits theemergence of a situation of ‘dual power’ and the possibility of a newform of state power conquering.

In practice, Poulantzas—like all reformists—seeks to construe atransition to socialism from the ‘present situation’. He suggests thattoday’s capitalist state is best understood as a state in crisis, a state ofcrisis:

This state crisis offers the Left new objective possibilitiesof a democratic transition to socialism. There are severalkinds of political crisis: the present one defines for theLeft a precise field related to the possibility of ademocratic transition. What is involved is neither a dual-power crisis nor a crisis stemming from a tendencytowards fascism. 36

There are two elements here: first, a correct (if ‘banal’) observationthat general tendencies to crisis are not in themselves revolutionarycrises; second the absurd idea that there can be a transition tosocialism without a revolutionary crisis. By revolutionary crisis Imean not some economic slump, but a crisis in class relations of thetype Lenin referred to in ‘Left-Wing Communism’: a boiling situationwhere the ruling class cannot keep ruling in the old way and theoppressed refuse to continue being ruled in the old way. Poulantzassometimes recognises this. He suggests the election of a ‘Left’government can only amount to a ‘social democratic experience’unless there is simultaneously a mobilisation of the ‘popular masses’.That this would fundamentally alter the ‘present situation’ for theworking class, for the state, for all forms of political life, however,seems to escape him.

Thirdly, Poulantzas suggests—in line with his argument about Russia—that direct workers’ democracy leads to Stalinism, the suppressionof political liberties and the crushing of dissent:

Direct democracy, by which I mean direct democracy inthe soviet sense only, has always and everywhere beenaccompanied by the suppression of the plurality ofparties, and then the suppression of political and formalliberties. 37

This theme is repeated in the book. If we ‘base everything on direct,rank-and-file democracy’ we take a path that ‘sooner or later,

inevitably leads to statist despotism or the dictatorship of experts’ 38 ;if workers’ councils form their own state power, ‘it is not thewithering of the State or the triumph of direct democracy that

eventually emerges, but a new type of authoritarian dictatorship’ 39 .It must be said that Poulantzas offers no arguments in support of thiselitist proposition that working class self-government is impossible,only flat assertions. But we can note two things.

First, Poulantzas is wrong. There has not been an associationbetween workers’ councils and the disappearance of a ‘plurality ofparties’ (China, Cuba, Cambodia, etc, are nothing to do with the case,for there never were workers’ councils there). The Paris Communehad a plurality of parties; so did the Spanish workers’ councils in1936-7; a key demand of the Hungarian workers’ councils in 1956 wasa plurality of parties.

Second, what Poulantzas is actually arguing for is a plurality of







bourgeois parties. These, for him, are the guarantee of ‘politicalliberties’. It is true there has not tended to be much room forbourgeois parties in workers’ councils—though, not so much becauseworkers’ councils have banned them as because in revolutionarysituations bourgeois parties do not seek democratic rights withinworkers’ councils, but seek to destroy them! The ConstituentAssembly, after all, refused to recognise the soviet power, and MrsThatcher’s chief interest, faced with a congress of workers’ councils inBritain, will hardly be one of winning a delegation from the Finchleyworking class…

It should also, perhaps, be noticed that Poulantzas doesn’t even seemto understand the idea of a socialist revolution. At several points heemploys a ‘fortress’ analogy which he attributes to the revolutionaryleft: e.g. ‘It is first of all necessary to take state power, and then, afterthe fortress has been captured, to raze to the ground of the entire

state apparatus, replacing it by the second power (soviets)...’ 40 ;’...first of all the existing state power is taken, and then another is put

in its place. This view can no longer be accepted’. 41 Whoever did‘accept’ this notion? It is a reformist fantasy. The idea that a socialistrevolution first puts itself in charge of the bourgeois state apparatus,then abolishes it is nonsensical. The existing state power is a targetonly for destruction, not for ‘taking’.

But, does Poulantzas want socialism anyway?It is by no means clear that Nicos Poulantzas, judging by his ownarguments, doesn’t want to avoid socialism altogether. In theInterview, he successively makes two points: first, andunexceptionably,

I agree with you: the whole of the present state and allits apparatuses—social security, health, education,administration, etc—correspond by their very structureto the power of the bourgeoisie. I do not believe that themasses can hold positions of autonomous power—evensubordinate ones—within the capitalist state. They actas means ,of resistance, elements of corrosion,accentuating the internal contradictions of the state.

and then the remarkable statement:

[It is necessary to struggle within the state] not simplyin the sense of a struggle enclosed within the physicalconfines of the state, but a struggle situated all thesame on the strategic terrain of the state. A struggle, inother words, whose aim is not to substitute the workers’state for the bourgeois state through a series of reformsdesigned to take over one bourgeois state apparatusafter another, and thus conquer power, but a strugglewhich is, if you like, a struggle of resistance, a struggledesigned to sharpen the internal contradictions of thestate, to carry out a deep-seated transformation of thestate. 42

In short, no taking of power!

In his book, he proposes that the state’s economic apparatusesshould not be smashed:

At no point should changes lead to the actualdismantling of the economic apparatus: such adevelopment would paralyse it and accordingly increasethe chances of boycott on the part of the bourgeoisie. 43

How awful, we might paralyse the Department of Trade andIndustry, or the Treasury! Poulantzas feels able to argue this, despitethe fact that on the previous page he has stated that the ‘economic







apparatus’ (yes, the same one) ‘remains, in its unity, an essentialfactor for the reproduction of capital’. Note, too, that the bourgeoisieis presumed still to have the power of boycott. Might not this riskhave been reduced by the local workers’ councils taking control of thefactories, banks, etc? No, this too is ruled out:

...the democratic road to socialism refers to a longprocess. the first phase of which involves a challenge tothe hegemony of monopoly capital. but not headlongsubversion of the core of the relations of production. 44

The reader who dares to ask the naive question, Why on earth not?gets an answer:

change cannot go beyond certain limits without runningthe risk of economic collapse. 45

Thus, the transition to socialism is to occur from the ‘presentsituation’ and without ‘economic collapse’. And Poulantzas thinksrevolutionaries are utopians! Against Poulantzas, we must be clear: atransition to socialism, to the complete reorganisation of society bythe working class, cannot occur without ‘economic collapse’. Asocialist revolution involves ‘economic collapse’: the problem is tocarry it through, decisively, so that economic recovery on a new basis

can be started immediately. 46 But not for Poulantzas:

Over and above the breaks involved in the anti-monopoly phase, the State will still have to ensure theworkings of the economy-an economy which will remainto a certain degree capitalist for a long time to come. 47

Lessons of historyParliamentary democracy and workers’ councils, I suggested, areincompatible institutions. Poulantzas suggests they must be yokedtogether, though he doesn’t know how. But, he remarks that‘History… has provided—and that is not insignificant—some negative

examples to avoid and some mistakes upon which to reflect.’ 48 Let’sreflect, then—on a classic ‘negative example’ and the ‘mistakes’involved in a ‘combination’ of parliamentary democracy and workers’councils: Spain in 1936 and 1937.

In July 1936 Franco’s revolt against the Spanish republic began.Initially, the revolt was defeated over large parts of Spain, largely bypopular forces who demanded (and often seized) arms from theRepublican government. The background to the generals’ revolt hadbeen a development, all across Spain, of convulsive mass struggles.The signal for these had been provided by the election, in February1936, of a Popular Front government. There had been a wave ofgeneral strikes and land expropriations, workers’ and peasants’councils were formed, etc.

After July, this movement developed tenfold. In large parts of Spain,especially Catalonia, Aragon and Castile, workers’ and peasants’councils organised production and distribution, ran the towns andvillages, set up their own militia forces, etc. At the centre ofrepublican Spain was an enormously weakened bourgeoisparliamentary government. Spain, after July, represented a classicsituation of ‘dual power’.

The republic’s chief source of military aid against Franco was Stalin.He wanted a diplomatic and military alliance with the ruling classesof France and Britain against Hitler, and was implacably opposed tothe development of socialist revolution in Spain—out of fear, amongother things, that this would alienate the French and Britishgovernments. In backing the Republic, therefore—and at a high price—he insisted that the revolution be contained within bourgeoisdemocratic limits.








The period up to mid-1937 was one of permanent struggle betweenthe central republican government, chiefly armed and organisedthrough Moscow, and the local workers’ councils, workers’ militia,etc. The bourgeois democratic Republic was clearly incompatible withthe workers’ and peasants’ struggles and organisations, and with thedemands they embodied (socialised property, land expropriation,workers’ control of production, etc). The outcome of the struggle wasthat first the forces at the base of Spanish society were limited andcontained, and then the workers’ councils were destroyed in pitchedbattles, police actions, etc: in Barcelona in early May 1937, in Aragona little later on.

What the whole tragedy demonstrated was the clear incompatibilitybetween the maintenance of the bourgeois parliamentary governmentand even local workers’ councils, even local independent workingclass action that went beyond the narrow prescribed limits set by thecentral government. The key to the tragedy of Spain was that thosewho led the workers’ councils—above all the anarchists—opposed thecentralisation of the workers’ councils, thereby leaving a void at thecentre of Spanish life which the counter-revolutionary liberals andCommunist Party filled, organised and used against the workingclass. From that struggle the only victor was General Franco.

Wherever the issue has appeared, parliamentary democracy hasproven incompatible with forms of workers’ councils. If one form is tobe maintained, the other has to be destroyed. In France, in 1936, tosave the Popular Front government, the Communist Party called off amass strike movement. At the end of the war, in France and Italy, theCommunist Parties saved the parliamentary system by disarming theResistance. In Chile, the maintenance of the Allende Popular Unitygovernment was achieved through attacks on the workers’ movement,both directly and through the method of bureaucratising and limitingit. The results, over and over again, are famous disasters.

Poulantzas is not putting forward a ‘new’ strategy, but an old, triedand tested, fully guaranteed formula—for working-class defeat. It isthe job of Marxists to insist that a mass workers’ movement that doesnot complete the process of socialist revolution by centralising itsown power in new institutions, and by smashing all obstacles to thatcentralisation of its power in workers’ councils, prepares its owndownfall. It is vital that the ideas of those like Poulantzas, whopropose limitations on workers’ power, becombatted as strongly as possible.

It may not, however, be Poulantzas himself we have to combat.He-ends his book with a gloomy reverie on the ‘risks’ of the‘democratic road’:

...at worst, we could be heading for camps andmassacres as appointed victim. But to that I reply: if weweigh up the risks, that is in any case preferable tomassacring other people only to end up ourselvesbeneath the blade of a Committee of Public Safety orsome Dictator of the Proletariat… There is only one sureway of avoiding the risks of democratic socialism, andthat is to keep quiet and march ahead under thetutelage and the rod of advanced liberal democracy. Butthat is another story.

The ambiguity is characteristic. Is this to be the topic of Poulantzas’snext offering, we wonder? It would not be inappropriate: for he hasshown, decisively, that he is already under the theoretical tutelage ofliberal democracy—whether we call it advanced or not.

Notes1. K. Marx ‘The Constitution of the French Republic AdoptedNovember 4 1848’ Notes to the People, London, no 7, (June 1851);

http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=294#extrabarker1



cited in Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol I (1977),Monthly Review Press, p.316. Available online

2. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, Weidenfeld &Nicolson, (1969), (now in Quartet paperback); Nicos Poulantzas,Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, (1973); Fascism andDictatorship, (1974); Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, (1975);Crisis of the Dictatorships, (1976). Miliband and Poulantzas debatedin various issues of the New Left Review

3. John Lea, ‘The State of Society’ International Socialism, old seriesno 41, Dec-Jan 1969; Simon Clarke, ‘Marxism, Sociology andPoulantzas’s Theory of the State’, Capital and Class, 2, summer 1977.

4. Isaac Balbus, ‘Modem capitalism and the state’, Monthly Review,May 1971.

5. John Lea, op.cit.

6. For instance, Simon Clarke, ‘Althusser’s Marxism’ (scandalouslystillunpublished mimeo, but available from him at Dept. of Sociology,University of Warwick; E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory andother essays, Merlin, 1978.

7. Lucio Coletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, NLB, (1972).

8. See Colin Barker, ‘Muscular Reformism’ (review of Marxism andPolitics) International Socialism, old series 102, (October 1977).

9. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (hereafter SPS), NewLeft Books, (1978), £7.50. Poulantzas also gave a very interestinginterview to Henri Weber of the French section of the FourthInternational; this first appeared in Critique Communiste 16, (June1977), then appeared in translation in International and wasreprinted in the US journal Socialist Review no 38 (March-April1978), the source from which I quote (hereafter Interview).

10. SPS p.256.

11. ibid.

12. ibid, p.257.

13. Interview, p.20.

14. Well, almost. There is the following small interchange betweenPoulantzas and Weber, in which neither is very illuminating:Poulantzas: Do you believe in pluralism?Weber: Of course. We believe in it and we practice it.Poulantzas: But for your opponents as well?Weber: Certainly. Even for the bourgeois parties, it’s there in writing. Poulantzas: Aha. Even for the bourgeois parties. Now, not to be toonaive, there are things one has to say, because we fear for ourselves aswellWeber: Of course.Poulantzas: It’s all very well to say so, but I want to know what formsof institutional guarantee there would be—they are always secondary,of course, but they matter… (Interview, p.23).We leave to some other occasion discussion of the FI’s writtenguarantees to bourgeois parties!

15. SPS, p.264-5.

16. ibid, p.260.

17. ibid, p.256. Note that Poulantzas, eager to claim the restless spiritof Karl Marx for his ideas, is very cavalier with the old revolutionary,as he is with Engels, who actually suggested that if people wanted to

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/06/14.htm


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understand ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ they should look at theParis Commune. It seems that if there was a ‘signpost’ in Marx andEngels, it did not exactly point in Poulantzas’s direction, but directlyagainst him.

18. SPS, p.124.

19. ibid, p.125.

20. e.g. Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, NLB, 1976,p.187.Others of her criticisms of the Bolsheviks in her pamphlets were, inany case, quite misplaced: cf. Tony Cliff, Rosa Luxemburg, IS, 1969,ch.7. Available online

21. cf. Tony Cliff, op.cit., p.70.

22. Norman Geras, op.cit., p.I44.

23. ibid., p.126.

24. I draw here on Tony Cliff, Lenin, Vol 3, Pluto, (1978).

25. SPS, p.253; Interview, p.21.

26. In the Interview, Henri Weber offers this argument, but letsPoulantzas get away with murder in reply. Poulantzas refuses toaccept the historical explanation of the inward defeat of the RussianRevolution, citing as additional examples of lack of democracy therevolutions in China, Cuba, Cambodia. Weber does not mention—how could he?—that the working class played no independent role inthese revolutions, that they never were any kind of socialistrevolution. Has the FI come to this pass, that it cannot defend thesoviet idea against reformism?


28. Poulantzas defends the secret ballot, as surprisingly does HenriWeber (Interview, p.25).

29. e.g. SPS, p.l04, on the ‘individualisation of the body-politic-as anensemble of identical monads separated from the State.’

30. cf. e.g. Franz Neumann, ‘The change in the function of law inmodem society’, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State, FreePress, (1957); Poulantzas himself also notes this, e.g. SPS, p.l72.


32. SPS, p.262, emphasis in original.

33. Poulantzas’s argument involves overthrowing Marx’s opinion,from the Paris Commune onwards, that the working class cannotsimply lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the state and wield itfor its own purposes. He treats ‘representative democracy’ as if itwere a class-neutral form of eternal relevance. Yet he also contradictshimself: e.g. ’...political domination is itself inscribed in theinstitutional materiality of the State… state power (that of thebourgeoisie in the capitalist state) is written into this materiality’(SPS, p.14); he notes that the capitalist state embodies the separationof manual and intellectual labour, but fudges the issue in relation toParliament—’It is equally clear that a number of institutions of so-called indirect democracy (political parties, parliament, etc) in whichthe relationship between State and masses is expressed, themselvesdepend on the same mechanism’ (SPS p.56)—leaving open thepossibility that ‘some’ institutions are somehow different, but withoutspecifying which, or how.





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35. e.g. his chapter on ‘The Weakening of the State’, SPS, p.241ff.

36. ibid, pp.206-7

37. Interview, p.20

38. SPS, p.255. Cf also ibid, p.261

39. ibid, p.264

40. ibid, p.255

41. ibid, p.260

42. Interview, p.13-4

43. SPS, p.198

44. ibid, p.197

45. ibid, p.197

46. Inter alia, cf. Nicolai Bukharin, The Economics of theTransformation Period, Bergman, (1971).

47. SPS, p.197

48. ibid, p.265

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A Critique of Nicos Poulantzas