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Robert Solo
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830 Robert Solo
Ralph Miliband:
The State in Capitalist Society
Miliband, a favorite student and former disciple of Harold Laski, was
evidently displaced from his senior lectureship at the London School of
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Nico Poulantzas:
Political Power and Social Classes
the state in capitalism has been controlled by a class (or faction) other
than the bourgeoisie. The absolutist states under whose regime the capi-
talist mode of production came into being were under the domination of
nobles, both in the polity and the economy. In Great Britain, a landed
gentry through the appropriation of land rents eliminated an independent
peasantry and became the nucleus of an industrial bourgeoisie, while the
aristocracy retained dominance in affairs of state. The political structure
did not change its feudal character, while at the level of economic rela-
tionships the incremental accumulation of juridical decisions evolved a
basis for capitalism in the common law. In Prussia, industrial capitalism
was installed directly by a state constituted of and controlled entirely by
an aristocracy. Only in France did an already formed bourgeoisie expro-
priate the aristocracy and replace it as the politically dominant class, yet
France was precisely the most laggard in establishing the capitalist mode
of production, hampered by the continued existence of a massive small-
holding peasantry and a petty bourgeoisie whose power was required as
a counterweight to an already important and politically aggressive pro-
letariat.
But while capitalism evolved spontaneously, and the preeminence of
the bourgeoisie developed within the frame of feudal structures and under
political regimes ruled by aristocracies, Poulantzas maintains that nothing
of the sort could happen for the establishment of socialism. It cannot
develop as a mode of production within the frame of a political regime
dominated by the bourgeoisie. Socialism requires "the taking over of the
means of production by the producers themselves, a process which can
in no way be introduced inside the capitalist mode of production."^*
Poulantzas is here concerned to refute a notion that there exists in Jaco-
binism qua ideology of the bourgeoisie a seed that, as Jean Juares be-
lieved and as young Marx thought, would ripen into socialism. This
supposed "seed" of social democracy, he holds, is the ideology proper
to the petty bourgeoisie that projects as its ideal a society made up of
small-scale independent producers, farmers, and artisans, each owning
his own field, workplace, shop, or stall, and each able to support his
family without recourse to wage labor and without being exploited by
"the very rich."i»
This petty bourgeois ideal has a counterpart in American Populism.
It was expressed by Justice Louis Brandeis in Curse oj Bigness, and it is
reflected in those antitrust laws (such as the Robinson-Patman Act) that
would protect the competitor rather than preserve the intensity of com-
petition. Poulantzas is certainly correct that capitalism will never be
transformed into socialism via the path of Populism. Anything but! The
838 Robert Solo
if they were "scientifically" enlightened, they would not support the state
that upholds a capitalist system but would opt for the socialist alternative.
It is not, however, on the basis of scientific truth but according to the
stars of ideology that social classes behave. It is the pervasive power and
illusional force of ideology (understood as a rationalization operating
on the plane of the imaginary) that finds its expression in, and provides
perpetuation of, the capitalist state. Hegemony in the capitalist state
belongs to that social faction committed to and able to articulate the
ideological imperatives of nationhood and unity through "institutions
[wherein] everything takes place as if the class struggle did not exist."^*
This is possible because the juridic-political structure isolates individ-
uals, individuates roles and values, producing a condition of competition
that masks class interests and conceals the realities of the class struggle.
What surfaces to consciousness is the image of a community of individ-
uals, each in isolation, competing within market parameters, hence
operating within and requiring the uninterrupted functioning of the
capitalist system.
James O'Connor:
The Fiscal Crisis of the State
O'Connor, a leading light among current American neo-Marxists,
stands in curious opposition to Poulantzas.^* He is the brash American
priest pounding pavements, joining a dozen betterment and liberation
bandwagons, having no truck with the mysteries of dialectic, out to do
a job, in sharp contrast with the subtle Latin monsignor who takes as his
task to guide and redirect an unbroken stream of thought unfolding in a
world discourse whose coherence and continuity depend above all else on
faith and commitment to the invisible church that underlies it. For
O'Connor's uncertain Marxism, the symbolic garb—cassock and cross—
the familiar pejoratives, and an interest in the relationships of power
suffice. There is no proof by scripture for him. Only once in his book do
the words of Marx appear, and then as a quotation from an American
textbook on public finance. Nor is mention made of Lenin or of the other
great Marxist disciples and interpreters. It is his former mentors in the
American academic establishment, Keynesian and neoclassical econo-
mists, that O'Connor is out to impress, to defy, to teach a lesson.
He divides the economy into three parts. The monopoly-capitalist sec-
tor consists of large corporations and trade unions. The state sector is
composed of public employees, including those engaged in education.
The competitive sector consists of small enterprise, including agriculture.
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Conclusion
We have not attempted to review the literature on the Marxist concept
of the state, nor has this article been a review of the three books given
particular attention.^^ Sampling work from the spectrum of neo-Marxist
thought, we have tried to deduce and to articulate an emerging concep-
tualization of the state. This concept is one very important component
Theory of the State 841
Notes
1. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld
andNicolson, 1969).
2. This is true, alas, for revolutionary parties as well.
3. Miliband, The State, p, 263.
4. Ibid,, p. 277.
5. Nico Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Sheed
and Ward, 1973). The original French version was published in Paris in
1968.
6. Ibid,, p. 69.
7. Ibid., p. 63.
8. Ibid,, pp, 67-68.
9. Ibid., p. 79.
10. Ibid,, p. 115,
11. Ibid,, pp. 44-45.
12. Ibid,, p. 45.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 160.
15. Ibid,, p, 179.
16. Ibid., p. 144.
17. Ibid,, p, 188.
18. Ibid., p. 183.
19. James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1973).
20. Anything more than an attempt to deduce historical change in the con-
ception of the state, from an examination of Adam Smith's Wealth of
Nations, Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics, and J. M. Clark's
Social Control of Business, would have been either a review of "the lit-
erature" in general or of the whole content of those three books in par-
ticular.