The Retreat from Class. Ellen Meiksins Wood

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.