The Retreat from Class. Ellen Meiksins Wood
be invoked to explain Eurocommunist doctrine. European Communism has traditions of its own on which to draw – the legacy of the Popular Front with its cross-class alliances, suitably modified versions of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony with its stress on ideological and cultural domination, etc. But for one important segment of the European left, the transition from ‘Maoism’ (in its Western variant) to Eurocommunism had a certain comfortable logic. It is therefore not surprising to find certain continuous themes figuring prominently in the academic theoretical systems that have grown up side by side with Eurocommunism.
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1 André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, Boston 1982, p. 96.
2 Ibid., p. 15.
3 Ibid., p. 68.
4 Ibid., p. 7.
5 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, London 1976, p. 66.
6 Ibid., p. 64–5.
7 Ibid., p. 55.
8 Ralph Miliband, ‘Constitutionalism and Revolution: Notes on Eurocommunism’, Socialist Register 1978, pp. 165–7.
The Forerunner: Nicos Poulantzas
I
All the major themes of the NTS are present in embryo in the work of Nicos Poulantzas; and it is possible that had he lived, he might have followed the logic of his theoretical and political trajectory to the position now occupied by many of his post-Althusserian colleagues. As it is, however, he certainly never went so far; and if he is without doubt a major influence, he cannot really be regarded, theoretically or politically, as a full-blown NTS, either with respect to the theoretical detachment of ideology and politics from any social determinations, or with respect to the political detachment of socialism from the working class.
Poulantzas deserves special attention not only because he is perhaps the most important theorist of the post-Althusserian tradition, the one who has done most to ground that tradition, with its philosophical preoccupations, more firmly in the immediate political problems of contemporary socialism, but also because he has made a major contribution to directing Marxists generally to long neglected theoretical problems. The extent of his influence on the present generation of Marxist political theorists, which is the more impressive for the tragic brevity of his career, would be reason enough for singling him out as an exemplary case. But he is exemplary also in a more general, historical sense. The course of his political and theoretical evolution traces the trajectory of a major trend in the European left, reflecting the political odyssey of a whole generation.
When Poulantzas wrote his first major theoretical work, Political Power and Social Classes, published in 1968, like many others he was seeking a ground for socialist politics that was neither Stalinist nor social democratic. There was then, on the eve of the Eurocommunist era, no obvious alternative in Europe. Poulantzas’s theoretical exploration of the political ground was still abstractly critical, negative, chipping away at the theoretical foundations of the main available options without a clear positive commitment to any party line. Like many of his contemporaries, however, he seems to have leaned towards the ultra-left, more or less Maoist, option. At least, his theoretical apparatus, deeply indebted to Althusser whose own Maoist sympathies were then quite explicit, bears significant traces of that commitment. The attack on ‘economism’, which is the hallmark of Poulantzas’s work and the basis of his stress on the specificity and autonomy of the political, was essential to Maoism and constituted one of its chief attractions for people like Althusser. The concept of ‘cultural revolution’ also held a strong fascination for Poulantzas, as for the many others who claimed it as the operative principle of ‘revolutions’ like that of May 1968. Whatever this concept meant to the Chinese, it was adopted by students and intellectuals in the West to cover revolutionary movements without specific points of concentration or focused political targets, characterized instead by a diffusion of struggle throughout the social ‘system’ and all its instruments of ideological and cultural integration. The theoretical implications of this conception are suggested by Poulantzas himself, for example, in his debate with Ralph Miliband. In this exchange, Poulantzas adopted the Althusserian notion of ‘ideological state apparatuses’, according to which various ideological institutions within civil society which function to maintain the hegemony of the dominant class – such as the Church, schools, even trade unions – are treated as belonging to the system of the state.1 He went on to suggest a connection between the idea of ‘cultural revolution’ and the strategic necessity of ‘breaking’ these ideological apparatuses. It is not difficult to see why advocates of ‘cultural revolution’ might be attracted to the notion of conceiving these ‘apparatuses’ as part of the state and thus theoretically legitimizing the shift to ‘cultural’ and ideological revolt and the diffusion of struggle. Indeed, the centrality of ideology in post-Althusserian politics and theory, whatever modifications it has since undergone, may be rooted in a conception of social transformation as ‘cultural revolution’ – if not in its original Chinese form, at least in the specifically Western idiom of May 1968. There is also in the earlier Poulantzas, as in many of his contemporaries, much that is reminiscent (as Miliband pointed out in the debate with Poulantzas) of the ‘ultra-left deviation’ according to which there is little difference among various forms of capitalist state, whether fascist or liberal-democratic, and bourgeois-democratic forms are little more than sham and mystification. Strong traces of this view can be found, for example, in Poulantzas’s conception of Bonapartism as an essential characteristic of all capitalist states.
Many of these notions were abandoned or modified by Poulantzas in the course of debate and in his later work. As his earlier political stance, with its ultra-left and Maoist admixtures, gave way to Eurocommunism, he moved away from his earlier views on Bonapartism, ‘ideological state apparatuses’, and so on. Most notably, his theory of the state as well as his explicit political pronouncements shifted from an apparent depreciation of liberal democratic forms toward an albeit cautious acceptance – especially in his last book, State, Power, Socialism – of the Eurocommunist view of the transition to socialism as the extension of existing bourgeois democratic forms.
The shifts, both political and theoretical, are substantial; but there is nevertheless a continuity, a unity of underlying premises, that says a great deal not only about Poulantzas himself but about the logic running through the evolution of the European left, or an important segment of it, since the 1960s. There is a characteristic ambiguity in his own conception of democratic socialism and the means by which it is to be achieved, an ambiguity that persists throughout the journey from ‘Maoism’ to Eurocommunism and tends toward the displacement of class struggle and the working class.
II
Poulantzas’s theory of the state, for all its scholasticism, was from the beginning motivated by strategic considerations and the need to provide a theoretical base from which ‘scientifically’ to criticize some political programmes and support others. In Political Power and Social Classes, Poulantzas constructed an elaborate theoretical argument largely to demonstrate and explicate two principal characteristics of the capitalist state: the unitary character of its