Class Struggles Within the Democratic State

The most noteworthy development in Poulantzas's thinking in the ten years separating Political Power and Social Classes from State, Power, Socialism is his increasing attention to the political scene and to the existence and importance of class struggles within it. In the former work, Poulantzas emphasizes the externality of the power bloc and the realm of political practices with respect to the state apparatuses and the political scene. Poulantzas implies that the state apparatuses are not affected internally by class contradictions: "This [capitalist] state possesses institutions within which the economic existence of classes and the political class struggle are absent" (Poulantzas 1973, 276). In Polit-

ical Power and Social Classes , Poulantzas defines the state bureaucracy in terms of social categories, not social classes, implying that bureaucracies qua bureaucracies are free of class distinctions and class antagonisms. Bureaucracies, he maintains, reflect the pertinent effects of class power, but they lack real power of their own: "so-called 'bureaucratic power' is in fact the mere exercise of the state's functions. . . . [T]he bureaucracy has no class power of its own, nor does it directly exercise the power of the classes to which it belongs" (Poulantzas 1973, 336). Finally, the forms of the political regime are clearly of secondary importance in Poulantzas's initial framework. Shifting power relations between the legislative (parties) and the executive (bureaucracy) reflect shifts within the power bloc, but the predominance of either does not affect the nature of state power.

Poulantzas continues to defend the essence of his initial position in State, Power, Socialism , and there is no basis for claiming that he abandons his earlier problematic in his last work. However, he does come to realize that his initial framework was inadequate insofar as it ignored the impact of the dominated classes on and within the state, failed to recognize the presence of class struggles within the political scene, and emptied the state of any real significance. Poulantzas corrects these deficiencies not by repudiating his previous view but by expanding his concept of the pertinent effects of class relations on the political scene in such a way as to insert class struggle into the very heart of the state's apparatuses:

The state is the condensation of a relationship of forces between classes and class fractions such as these express themselves in a necessarily specific form, within the state itself . In other words, the state is through and through con-stituted-divided by class contradictions. . . . The executive and parliament, the army, the judiciary, the various ministries, regional, municipal and central apparatuses, the ideological apparatuses—all of these, which are themselves divided into distinct circuits, networks and vantage points, are often the pre-eminent representatives of the diverging interests of one or several fractions of the power bloc. (Poulantzas 1978, 132-33)

The excessively monolithic character of hegemony that predominates in Political Power and Social Classes is qualified significantly in State, Power, Socialism . First, within the realm of the power bloc, the leadership of the hegemonic class or fraction is no longer viewed as having the capacity to exclude the pertinent effects of other classes and fractions from the political scene. Class contradictions within the power bloc, Poulantzas now maintains, are also active within the state.

Indeed, they are active to such an extent that the autonomy of the state is "concretely manifested in the diverse contradictory measures that each of these classes and fractions, through its specific presence in the state and the resulting play of contradictions, manages to have integrated into state policy" (Poulantzas 1978, 135). Contradictions within the power bloc "take the form of internal contradictions between, and at the heart of, [the state's] various branches and apparatuses" (Poulantzas 1978, 132-33). Second, the structure and practice of the state no longer correspond as directly and precisely to the hegemony of the power bloc as is the case in Political Power and Social Classes . In a direct reversal of his earlier position, Poulantzas specifically includes popular struggles within the domain of the state and insists that such struggles no longer be viewed as strictly external and oppositional with respect to the state apparatuses: "in reality . . . popular struggles traverse the state from top to bottom and in a mode quite other than penetration of an intrinsic entity from outside" (Poulantzas 1978, 141).

In recognizing the presence of contradictions and popular struggles within the state apparatuses, Poulantzas by no means abandons the thrust of his original position: that state power is unified, that it represents the interest of a power bloc organized under the hegemony of the dominant class fraction, and that it has a specific autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant class.

The state does not constitute a mere assembly of detachable parts: it exhibits an apparatus unity which is . . . related to the fissiparous unity of state power . This finds expression in the fact that its global polity is massively oriented in favour of the hegemonic class or fraction—today in favor of monopoly capital. But the unity of state power is not established through the cohesive will of the bearers of monopoly capital or through their physical hold over the state. Unity-centralization is written into the capitalist state's hierarchic-bureaucratized framework as the effect of the reproduction of the social division of labor within the state. . . . It also arises from the state's structure as the condensation of a relationship of forces, and from the predominance over other classes or fractions of the power bloc that is commanded within the state by the hegemonic class or fraction. (Poulantzas 1978, 136)

Poulantzas continues to insist that the ruling class rules indirectly and structurally by reproducing existing relations of exploitation and domination through state power. It is the structured effectivity of the state—that is, the functions and modes of determination assigned by the ensemble of structures—and not the direct control of the power

bloc over it that "destines" the state to organize and reproduce the hegemony of the dominant class or fraction. The essential condition of this process is the separation of workers from the struggle over the means of production, and Poulantzas continues to maintain that the predominance of the popular-democratic form of the state within capitalist social formations stems from the fact that this form and no other reproduces this separation most successfully. For Poulantzas, as Martin Carnoy acutely observes, "the state is neither just political nor just juridical in the sense that it reproduces or enforces the legal bases of capitalist exchange. Rather it is fundamental to the conditions under which the bourgeoisie can accumulate and control capital, displacing struggle and conflict to the political from the economic sphere" (Carnoy 1984, 112).

For all these reasons the presence of the dominated classes within the state does not imply that they share or participate in political power or that the existing state apparatus may be reformed from within rather than destroyed from without. Indeed, Poulantzas rejects both of these positions in State, Power, Socialism :

The dominated classes exist in the state not by means of apparatuses concentrating a power of their own , but essentially in the forms of opposition to the power of the dominant classes. [They can never] lastingly hold power without a radical transformation of the state [for their subordination is inscribed in] the very material structure of the state, comprising as it does internal mechanisms of reproduction of the domination-subordination relationship: this structure does indeed retain the dominated classes within itself, but it retains them precisely as dominated classes. . . . The action of the popular masses within the state is a necessary condition of its transformation, but is not itself a sufficient condition. (Poulantzas 1978, 142-43)

In State, Power, Socialism , the dominant classes continue to predominate within the field of political power, and the repressive apparatuses of the state remain the ultimate expression of this power. Poulantzas points out that the repressive apparatuses of the capitalist state (the army, the police, and so forth) are relatively unaffected by the democratic or dictatorial nature of the regime; in both cases they perform precisely the same function—undergirding by force the mechanisms of separation by which the capitalist state reproduces the existing forces and relations of production. In all capitalist social formations "state monopolized physical violence permanently underlies the techniques of power and mechanisms of consent: it is inscribed in the web of disci-

plinary and ideological devices; and even when not directly exercised, it shapes the materiality of the social body upon which domination is brought to bear" (Poulantzas 1978, 81).