Life in an older America Book

This is perhaps one of the best abstract theoretical accounts of what the state is from a Marxist perspective I have read. At the same time, Poulantzas suffers from a few key issues.

1. Like most male Marxists, he really doesn’t do more than pay lip service to feminism and the role of gender. It would have been better if he could more systematically theorizes his isolated comments on the role of gender relations in political power/the state, but he doesn’t. What he does say, how ever, is more promising for a feminist uptake and development of his work than are the misogynist and victim blaming comments made by the likes of Michel Foucault.

2. Speaking of Foucault, Poulantzas has some great critiques of Foucault and offers a real, viable theoretical alternative to the latter’s erasure of the state as a discrete entity and material force. Yet at several key moments, Poulantzas’ analysis collapses into basically Foucauldian anxieties about the supposedly ever expanding power of the “authoritarian state” into “every sphere of social life” (basically the myth of “biopower” under another name). This is a form of non-Marxist, non-empirical, basically liberal/libertarian anxiety that has no place in radical political theory. It also harbors a kind of masculinist fear of “state intervention” in the family/sexual/gender sphere. Poulantzas does say important things generally that run against these moments, but they are noticeable and annoying when present.

3. It is clear that this book was written in a very specific political moment and as such it contains several arguments that no longer make any sense. It is also very focused on Europe/France. First, the chapters on “authoritarian statism” name the wrong/non-existent enemy. Because the book was originally written in the late 1970s, Poulantzas was probably not able to correctly identify what he was seeing as a broader process of the transition from Keynesian to neoliberal political economy. Second, Poulantzas’ final chapter on “the democratic road to socialism” is a confused mess of scattered comments that culminate in a wholly unconvincing rejecting of “dual power” in favor of an argument for what is essentially dual power under another (but somehow more politically conciliatory) name. This I think stems from the fact that Poulantzas was himself involved in statist Eurocommunist politics and couldn’t afford to be wholly consistent with his own arguments for political reasons. The rest of the book militates directly against his strategy of basically “transform the state from the inside but also didn’t get co-opted somehow.” Again, this makes a certain limited but ultimately naive sense given the period he was writing in. The struggles of 1968 were in recent memory, the parliamentary Left and grassroots social movements had been having some limited success in appealing to the liberal/Keynesian state to get funding, start limited initiatives, and win elections, and neoliberal technocracy was not yet fully on the horizon. But ultimately, history has proven Marx right: the proletariat cannot grab hold of the ready made state machinery. Poulantzas also has a line about somehow transforming the police and military for democratic socialist ends, and just.....absolutely not.

So, a good and helpful read for abstract theoretical reflections that needs a good dose of feminism and anti-racism, a more global (non-European) focus, and which offers no concrete political guidance. Like most male and European authored Left theory from this or any period.