Abstract
The focus of this article is on Nicos Poulantzas’s thinking from a strategic point of view: His theoretical analyses cannot be dissociated from the concrete political perspective of the conquest of the state and the transition to socialism in the European context of the 1970s. Rejecting any instrumental conception of the state, Poulantzas studies its transformations, within the framework of a theorization that bears the mark of structuralism and the strategies of union of the left specific to this period. In this context, it attaches decisive importance to ideological struggle and intellectual activities, with a view to achieving the ‘transformation of the State’ and the ‘deployment of direct democracy’. At a time of a new transformation of the state into an instrument of neoliberal policies, and as its de-democratization accelerates, it is necessary to question the merits and limits of the original approach that Nicos Poulantzas took. But we must also and above all pursue such strategic thinking, so largely deserted today.
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Notes
- 1.
Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso, 1980, p. 132.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 257.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 18.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 191.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 148.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 163.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 261.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 263.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 72.
- 14.
Friedrich Engels to Conrad Schmidt, 20 October 1890, text from Marxists Internet Archive.
- 15.
Capital, Vol. I: Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 93.
- 16.
Friedrich Engels, ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State’, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 269.
- 17.
Lenin, State and Revolution, Chapter One, text from the Marxists Internet Archive.
- 18.
Antoine Artous, Marx, l’État et la Politique, Paris: Syllepse, 1989.
- 19.
Antoine Artous, ‘À propos du livre de Nicos Poulantzas l’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme’, online at the ‘Marxismes au xxie siècle’ site www.marxau21.fr.
- 20.
Hai Hac Tran, Relire le “Capital”, 2 vols., Lausanne: Page Deux, 2003; Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘La forme politique de l’émancipation’, in Jean-Numa Ducange and Isabelle Garo (eds.), Marx politique, Paris: La Dispute, 2015; André Tosel, ‘La critique de l’économie politique ou les catégories marxiennes de l’émancipation’, in L’Esprit de scission. Études sur Marx, Gramsci, Lukács, Besançon: Annales littéraires de l’université de Besançon, 1991; and Lucien Sève, Structuralisme et dialectique, Paris: Messidor-Éditions sociales, 1984.
- 21.
Alain Supiot, Critique du droit du travail, Paris: PUF, 2002, p. xviii.
- 22.
Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 222.
- 23.
Alain Supiot, op. cit., p. 244.
- 24.
Stathis Kouvelakis, op. cit.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 41.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 27.
State, Power, Socialism, p. 86.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 148.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 132.
- 30.
Political Power and Social Classes, op. cit., p. 208.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 210–11.
- 33.
State, Power, Socialism, op. cit., p. 237, translation altered.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 264.
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Garo, I. (2019). Nicos Poulantzas’s Strategic Reflection Between Economics and Politics. In: Ducange, JN., Keucheyan, R. (eds) The End of the Democratic State. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90890-8_2
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