نيكوس بولانتزاس

الأعمال

• 1968السلطة السياسية والطبقات الاجتماعية (Pouvoir politique et classes sociales)

  نظرية بنيوية في الدولة الرأسمالية واستقلالها النسبي عن الطبقات المهيمنة ودورها في تنظيم «كتلة السلطة» تحت الهيمنة.

• 1978الدولة والسلطة والاشتراكية (L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme)

  يصف الدولة بأنها التكثّف المادي لعلاقة قوى، ويدافع عن طريق ديمقراطي إلى الاشتراكية يجمع بين الديمقراطية التمثيلية والمباشرة.

الموقف

Poulantzas is on the map for a Marxist theory of the capitalist state. In “Political Power and Social Classes” (1968) he combined Althusser’s structural Marxism with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony: the state is relatively autonomous from the dominant classes and organises their divided fractions into a “power bloc” under the hegemony of one of them, while it isolates the dominated classes by addressing them as individual citizens. Against Ralph Miliband, who examined the social ties between state personnel and capitalists, he argued that the class character of the state lies in its structure, not in the persons who run it. He applied this to exceptional regimes in “Fascism and Dictatorship” (1970) and “The Crisis of the Dictatorships” (1975). “State, Power, Socialism” revised his position: the state is the material condensation of a relation of forces between classes; against Michel Foucault he insisted that power is rooted in relations of production and has a centre in the state. He warned of an “authoritarian statism” in Western democracies and argued for a democratic road to socialism that combines representative democracy with forms of direct democracy. Stuart Hall discussed the book in 1980 as a step beyond the structuralism of the early work, and Bob Jessop and later state theorists built on it. Ernesto Laclau and others criticised the early work as formalist and functionalist.

الحياة والسياق

Nicos Poulantzas was born on 21 September 1936 in Athens. He studied law at the University of Athens and was active in the student movement of the Greek left. After a short stay in West Germany he moved to Paris in 1960, where he took his doctorate in the philosophy of law, published in 1965 as “Nature des choses et droit”, and wrote for Sartre’s journal “Les Temps modernes”. Close to Sartre at first, he turned in the mid-1960s to the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser. From the late 1960s he taught sociology at the new University of Paris VIII in Vincennes. His exchange with the British political scientist Ralph Miliband in the “New Left Review”, begun in 1969, became a classic of Marxist state theory. He was close to the Communist Party of Greece and, after its split in 1968, belonged to the Eurocommunist Communist Party of Greece (Interior); in 1975 he analysed the fall of the dictatorships in Portugal, Greece and Spain. His last book, “State, Power, Socialism”, appeared in 1978. He took his own life in Paris on 3 October 1979.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Fascism and Dictatorship (Fascisme et dictature, 1970)
• Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (Les classes sociales dans le capitalisme aujourd’hui, 1974)
• The Crisis of the Dictatorships (La crise des dictatures, 1975)