Poulantzas: Power, Class Struggle, and the State

Whatever their faults, Foucault's historical analyses of various ideological apparatuses are of great significance, and they have always been taken seriously by the Structural Marxists. Pierre Macherey has gone so far as to refer to Foucault as "our Hegel," an apt if ironic characterization that reflects both the felt need to absorb Foucault's insights into the problematic of historical materialism as well as an equally pressing need to divest his work of its irrationalist and voluntarist character. The most significant questions in this regard are, of course, those pertaining

to power. What is power? Where does it come from? How does it function? The problems we have pointed out with respect to Foucault's answers to these questions are called into being by his attempt, at least until his final works, where power simply disappears, to make power the primordial constituent of social formations and then try to figure out some way of subverting it. Because Foucault links his otherwise compelling historical analyses of ideological apparatuses to a Deleuzean ontology of Power, he can conceive of power only as a vitalist essence prior to its concrete social forms. Foucault cannot distinguish the necessary existence of ideological apparatuses from their historically determinate place and function because he situates Power somehow beyond any structured whole within which its mechanisms and effects might be causally explained.

A Structural Marxist problematic must therefore be able to differentiate and contextualize power within social structures without, as Foucault's very limited view of Marxism suggests it must, eliminating the internal and relational character of power or reducing all power to class power centered in the state. Conversely, a Structural Marxist account of power, in asserting the relational nature of power and criticizing the identification of all domination with state power, may not have recourse to a conception of power that extends beyond the pale of social determination, nor may it go so far as to discount the central significance of the state as a condensation of power determined in the last instance by the mode of production and class struggle. In the end, Foucault's final devaluation of power and his valorization of an individualistic dialectic of adaptation and transcendence must be rejected as simplistic and ultimately conformist. Within the Structural Marxist camp, the works of Nicos Poulantzas, published between 1968 and 1978, constitute the most sustained analysis of the source and circulation of power, analyses that anticipate, from a Marxist perspective, many of Foucault's criticisms of orthodox Marxist interpretations. Although a full discussion of Poulantzas must be reserved for later, this is the place to discuss his specific objections to Foucault's notion of Power and the alternative view that Poulantzas would substitute for it.

In State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas acknowledges a similarity between his own relational view of power and attempt to differentiate political and economic power and certain of Foucault's formulations. Nevertheless, Poulantzas rejects any move to separate power from the forces and relations of production or to mystify the nature and functioning of power, traits that Poulantzas sees as the common

ground uniting Foucault's concept of bio-power and the New Philosophers' one-dimensional view of state power. For Poulantzas, power always has a precise material basis in social struggles, and its materiality is not exhausted in any specific apparatus of power or in any "essence" defined as Power. As against the New Philosophers on the one hand and Foucault on the other, Poulantzas insists that neither the state nor Power is the first cause of struggle. Struggle always emerges out of social contradictions—economic contradictions between the forces and relations of production, political contradictions between domination and execution, and ideological contradictions between subjection and qualification. As a result, Poulantzas views state power as neither ahistorical nor unlimited. "Power is a relation between struggles and practices . . . and the state is above all a condensation of a relationship of forces defined precisely by struggle," Poulantzas explains. "No more than other power mechanisms does the state encounter limits in an original outside: it is not that the State is an omnipotent entity beyond which lies emptiness; but already inscribed in its materiality are internal limits imposed by the struggles of the dominated. Such struggles are always present in the State (and, more generally, in power mechanisms); for even though the State is already there, neither the state nor power is the First Cause of struggle" (Poulantzas 1978, 151).

Poulantzas also maintains that the mode of production and class power structure all power relationships, even those that originate elsewhere:

The relational field of class-specific power therefore refers to a material system of place-allocation throughout the social division of labor: it is fundamentally, though not exclusively determined by exploitation. This explains the existence of class division and thus of class struggles. We may even conclude that in a society in which the State utilizes all power (e.g., phallocracy or the family) for purposes of relaying class power, every struggle, be it heterogeneous to class struggles properly so-called (e.g., the struggle between men and women) acquires its characteristic meaning only to the extent that class struggles exist and allow other struggles to unfold. (Poulantzas 1978, 148)

Poulantzas is making three important points here: first, power relationships are always social relationships; second, social relationships, even those of a manifestly non-economic nature, have a "class-specific" element attached to them; and third, the state, while not the source or foundation of power, is nonetheless grounded in power and functions as the central apparatus through which power is deployed. As against

both Foucault and the New Philosophers, Poulantzas posits the following propositions regarding the state and power:

(a) Class power is the cornerstone of power in class-divided social formations, whose motive force is class struggle;

(b) Although grounded in economic power and the relations of production, political power is primordial in that it changes in its character condition every essential transformation in other fields of power; . . .

(c) In the capitalist mode of production political power occupies a field and a place that are distinct from other fields or power, however much they may intersect on another;

(d) This power is pre-eminently concentrated and materialized by the State [which, while not a source of power] is the central site of the exercise of power. (Poulantzas 1978, 44)

Leaving aside for the moment the important question of precisely how economic relations overdetermine political and ideological relations and how the state apparatus actually works, it is clear that Poulantzas's approach to power avoids the problems that plague Foucault's account. Power, for Poulantzas, has a pattern and a limit in social struggles; power is not simply a particular expression of a pre-existing, inexplicable essence (as in Foucault's works of the seventies), nor is it reducible to the nullity of a "problematization" (as in Foucault's last works). In contrast to Foucault, Poulantzas is able to differentiate power theoretically, to posit links from economic relations to the state and to the production of knowledge without reducing political and ideological apparatuses to simple reflections of economic power or collapsing them into an undifferentiated, tendentially monolithic, network of power relations. Poulantzas's assertion of concrete relations between power, social struggles, and the state opens up these areas to further research and refinement. By contrast, Foucault's refusal to link knowledge/power and bio-power to the social formation as a complex whole (and thus to the mode of production and the state) stuffs these relations into the black box of "pluralism" and preempts further investigation into the materiality of power.

Finally, Foucault's scattering of micro-powers, his homogenizing of the mechanisms of power, and his stubborn insistence that the state is simply one form of power among others (albeit an inexplicably dangerous one) has profound and pessimistic political implications. Contrary to Foucault's own belief, power cannot be effectively resisted if it cannot be identified in relation to a structured totality and a hierarchy of relations of dominance and subordination. When power is diluted and scat-

tered resistance is localized. When resistance is localized, it will be either co-opted or repressed. When power is conceptualized as homogeneous, resistance is effectively de-politicized. The anti-state rhetoric of the New Philosophers, for example, opposes the state not for any particular political purpose, most certainly not as a result of any understanding of its central role in the class struggle, but simply because the state is the quintessential form of Power. What is missing from the New Philosophers, as from Deleuze and Foucault, is a reason for political activity, a theoretical explanation as to how anything might possibly be different. Foucault's final retreat from the entire question of power testifies most eloquently to the theoretical bankruptcy of postmodern dissidence.