The Retreat from Class. Ellen Meiksins Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ the focus of socialist strategy from creating a united working class to constructing ‘popular alliances’ based on class differences, even based on divisions imposed by capital. Any appeal to the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’, for example, must be directed not to its working-class interests but to its specific interests as a petty bourgeoisie.

      The strategic implications become even clearer when this view of alliances is embodied in a particular conception of ‘working-class’ parties as organizations which do not simply form alliances with other groups and parties but directly represent other class interests. Poulantzas insists that ‘the polarization of the petty bourgeoisie towards proletarian class positions depends on the petty bourgeoisie being represented by the class-struggle organizations of the working class themselves … This means, firstly, that popular unity under the hegemony of the working class can only be based on the class difference between the classes and fractions that form part of the alliance …’²⁵ This notion turns out to be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it suggests that the popular forces should themselves be transformed in the process of struggle. That is why, argues Poulantzas, the alliance should be established ‘not by way of concessions, in the strict sense, by the working class to its allies taken as they are, but rather by the establishment of objectives which can transform these allies in the course of the uninterrupted struggle and its stages, account being taken of their specific class determination and the specific polarization that affects them’.²⁶ On the other hand, the very idea that alliances must not be based merely on ‘concessions’ to allies ‘taken as they are’ also entails that working-class organizations must cease to be organizations of the working class. It now appears that it is not just the integrity of working-class interests that these organizations must protect, but also that of the petty bourgeoisie. Poulantzas now seems to be criticizing the PCF for taking the ‘popular masses’ too much for granted, instead of acknowledging the specificity of their various class interests. A ‘working-class’ party cannot simply make ‘concessions’ to elements outside itself from a vantage point consistently determined by working-class interests; it must actually represent other class interests – and this means establishing objectives addressed to these other class interests. This inevitably raises the question of the degree to which the ultimate objectives of socialism itself must be tailored to the measurements of cross-class alliances.

       IV

      The groundwork for a theorization of Eurocommunism was, then, already firmly laid in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism; but its logic and strategic implications were not fully worked out until Poulantzas wrote his last two major works: The Crisis of the Dictatorships (1975–76) – which may mark the critical turning point to the right – and State, Power, Socialism, published in 1978. The composition of the first of these books coincides with the official emergence of Eurocommunism and may be related to his involvement with the Greek Communist Party of the Interior. In his final book – written before the defeat of the Union de la Gauche but after the rise of the Nouvelle Philosophie, and other related anti-Marxist currents 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.

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