The Retreat from Class. Ellen Meiksins Wood
his current political stand, he provides another sign-post: a characterization of the Soviet Union – quite gratuitous in the context of this book – in terms borrowed from Charles Bettelheim (whose work he had already cited approvingly in Political Power and Social Classes). It is also in this work, Poulantzas’s most concrete contribution to political sociology, that he shows a remarkable insensitivity to the differences between the bourgeois-democratic or parliamentary capitalist state, and the capitalist state in its fascist form. On this, his view was to change dramatically over the next few years.
The next important milestone was Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, published in 1974. By now, Poulantzas had abandoned Maoism, and he had also begun to criticize PCF theory directly, though still from the left. The book contains some important applications of his theory of the state to the strategic problems of Communism, and even more important developments in the theory of class, which go a long way toward displacing the relations of production and exploitation as the determinants of class – with, as we shall see, significant political consequences.
A particular target of criticism in the book is the PCF ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ strategy and the theory of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ that underlies it. PCF doctrine, according to Poulantzas, contains several fundamental errors. It treats the relation between the state and monopoly capital as if it were a simple fusion, ignoring the fact that the state represents a ‘power bloc’ of several classes or class fractions and not the ‘hegemonic’ fraction of monopoly capital alone; it treats all non-monopoly interests as belonging equally to the ‘popular masses’, including elements of the bourgeoisie, without acknowledging the class barriers that separate the whole bourgeoisie from the truly ‘popular’ forces; and, in much the same way as the social democrats, it treats the state as in principle a class-neutral instrument, responding primarily to the technical imperatives of economic development, so that there appears to be nothing inherent in the nature of the capitalist state that prevents it from being merely taken over and turned to popular interests.
Poulantzas appears to be undermining the foundations of PCF strategy. And yet, though it is certainly true that his own position is to the left of the PCF mainstream, it nevertheless represents a criticism from within, proceeding from basic principles held in common – notably, the transfer of revolutionary agency to the ‘people’ or ‘popular alliances’, the transition to socialism via ‘transformation’ of the bourgeois state or ‘advanced democracy’, and hence the displacement of class struggle. In the final analysis, Poulantzas’s theory is intended not to undermine Communist strategy but to set it on a sounder foundation. He does not fundamentally reject the notion of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ but rather rescues it. He reformulates the idea to correct its own contradictions, taking account of the incontrovertible fact that the state represents interests other than those of the hegemonic monopoly fraction. This has the added advantage of making it clear why and how the state is vulnerable to penetration by popular struggles. More fundamentally, although Poulantzas questions the unconditional inclusion of non-monopoly capital in the ‘people’, he retains the conception of ‘popular alliance’ and the focus of struggle on the political opposition between ‘power bloc’ and ‘people’ instead of the direct class antagonism between capital and labour. Poulantzas’s ‘left Eurocommunism’ certainly diverges in significant respects from its parent-doctrine, but the shared premises are more fundamental than the divergences and have substantial consequences for Marxist theory.
Here we come to the crux of the matter and Poulantzas’s contribution to the displacement of class struggle. The critical transformation in Marxist theory and practice, the pivot on which Eurocommunist strategy turns, is a displacement of the principal opposition from the class relations between labour and capital to the political relations between the ‘people’ and a dominant force or power bloc organized by the state. This critical shift requires a number of preparatory moves. Both state and class must be relocated in the struggle for socialism, and this requires a redefinition of both state and class. If the opposition between people, or popular alliance, and power bloc cum state is to become the dominant one, it is not enough simply to show how the state reflects, maintains, or reproduces the exploitative relation between capital and labour. It must be shown how the political conflict between two political organizations – the power bloc organized by the state and the popular alliance which organizes the people – can effectively displace the class conflict between capital and labour.
We have seen how Poulantzas, in Political Power and Social Classes, began to displace the relations of production and exploitation from their central position in the theory of the state by establishing the ‘dominance of the political’. As we shall see, a similar displacement is carried out in his theory of class. The immediate effect is to transform class struggle into – or rather, replace it with – a political confrontation between the power bloc organized by the state, and the popular alliance. One might say that class struggle remains only as a ‘structural’ flaw, a ‘contradiction’, rather than an active practice. As Poulantzas points out, the state, together with bourgeois political parties, plays the same organizing and unifying role for the power bloc as a ‘working-class’ party plays for the popular alliance.8 Increasingly, the chief antagonists are no longer classes engaged in class struggle, nor even classes in struggle through political organizations, but political organizations engaged in party-political contests. His new theory of the state in contemporary capitalism goes a long way toward establishing a theoretical foundation for Eurocommunist strategy, but even more important to the doctrine of ‘popular alliances’ is a comparable transformation in the concept of class. If class and class struggle are to be made compatible with a strategy that displaces the opposition between capital and labour from its pivotal role, it is necessary to redefine class itself in such a way that the relations of exploitation cease to be ‘dominant’ in the determination of class. Poulantzas achieves this reformulation, and in the process succeeds by definition in reducing the working class to such minute proportions that any strategy not based on ‘popular alliances’ appears recklessly irresponsible.
The most important element in Poulantzas’s theory of class is his discussion of the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’. The question of the petty bourgeoisie, as Poulantzas points out, stands ‘at the centre of current debates’ on class structure and is of critical strategic importance.9 Considerable debate has surrounded not only the class situation of ‘traditional’ petty-bourgeois traders, shopkeepers, craftsmen, but most particularly the ‘new middle classes’ or ‘intermediate strata’, wage-earning commercial and bank employees, office and service workers, certain professional groups – that is, ‘white-collar’ or ‘tertiary-sector’ workers. These two ‘petty bourgeoisies’ are the main constituents of the popular alliance with the working class, those which together with the working class constitute the ‘people’ or ‘popular masses’. To locate them correctly in the class structure of contemporary capitalism has been a major preoccupation of Eurocommunist strategists and theoreticians. Poulantzas stresses the strategic importance of the theoretical debate, the necessity of accurately identifying the class position of these groups ‘in order to establish a correct basis for the popular alliance …’.10
Poulantzas begins by attacking two general approaches to the question of these ‘new wage-earning groups’, lumping together some very disparate arguments in each of the two categories. The first approach is that which dissolves these groups into either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, or both. The second general ‘tendency’ is what Poulantzas calls ‘the theory of the middle class’, a politically motivated theory according to which both bourgeoisie and proletariat are being mixed together in the ‘stew’ of an increasingly dominant middle group, ‘the region where the class struggle is dissolved’.11 Most of these theories are intended to dilute the concepts of class and class struggle altogether. From the point of view of Marxist theory and socialist strategy, there is only one theory, among the several included in these two categories, which represents a serious challenge to Poulantzas’s own: the theory which assimilates the new wage-earning groups to the working class, arguing that white-collar workers have been increasingly ‘proletarianized’. We shall return in a moment to Poulantzas’s reasons for dismissing this approach.
Poulantzas