On Nicos Poulantzas . (In Radical history Review).

Nicos Poulantzas

The suicide of Nicos Poulantzas has received scant, if any, attention
in the United States. This is not so much because Poulantzas committed
an unthinkable act by jumping out a window, an act which is
not easily confronted by anyone. The reason for the silence is instead
more forthright than that: though his work was emblematically
known here, it never had the enormous theoretical and political impact
it did in Europe.

It is indeed hard to make clear for an American audience the
overpowering impact of Poulantzas’ first mature book (Political
Power and Social Classes, 1968) on a Marxist political theory which
had gone manifestly stale at the time. Older positions, whether of
Soviet or Chinese orientation, were widely felt to be drastically inadequate
for the purpose of understanding the capitalist state in the West.
By offering what may be called a structuralist approach, inspired by
Louis Althusser, whose importance he equalled, Poulantzas recast
the categorical arsenal of Marxist theorization in this field. His book
raised to a remarkable degree the general level of debate by becoming
the normal, if controversial, point of reference for others. The idea of
the State as a structure in its own right enjoying ‘relative autonomy’
from other instances within the social formation, is now somewhat of
a commonplace in Marxist thought, but emphatically it was not in
1968. A much needed conceptual clarity was thus brought into the
multitude of sharp internal contradictions which characterized the
Left in the wake of that year. So, for instance, the CP Swedish Youth
Party split in a confrontation between rightwing Maoism and an entirely
novel tendency very much based on the analyses of Althusser
and Poulantzas, leaving some badly confused traditional revisionists
behind.

In 1962 Poulantzas had moved, as is the practice among many
Greek intellectuals, to Paris, which became his main home for the rest
of his life. He differed from most other Parisian thinkers by being aware of debates outside the French capital, and by engaging himself
directly in politics. He worked with unions in France on their internal
political education, while he remained a member of the anti-Moscow
Greek CP, for which he stood as an unsuccessful candidate in the
latest election. All his theoretical work in fact raised immediate questions
of socialist strategy; it was always consciously political in
character. In no case was this more evident than in his last book
(State, Power, Socialism, 1978) which was a straightforward intervention
in the French election of that year. Besides being a justification of
sorts for the united Left, it was, too, an attempt to rethink his previous
positions; to provide new ways of seeing socialist revolution; to go
beyond Leninism, partially by reaching back to Rosa Luxemburg.

Poulantzas identified with what has been named "Left Eurocommunism,"
a position not without harrowing problems. As a Communist
he was immensely disappointed by the obstructive role, as he
saw it, played by the French CP in the electoral alliance with the
Socialists, an alliance which of course ended in defeat in March 1978.
Reportedly he never joined the French Party because of its rigidity;
most likely he was more sympathetic to the leftwing socialists for that
reason. It is clear, however, that his depression began with the
disintegration of the united Left and the surging climate of intellectual
anti-Marxism in Paris. As the single-most prominent Marxist
philosopher of politics in France-which he was-Poulantzas became
a target of much rubbish from various "new" ideologues of the right.
Likewise the university authorities treated him shabbily by never giving
him a professorship. Political and personal despair followed.

Alain Touraine, a well-known Socialist intellectual, pronounced
Poulantzas’ death the symbolic death of Marxism. Such triumphant
claims are surely erroneous. But his suicide is not something we can
shrug off. We would all do well if we did more than just register a
desperate act, if we gave Poulantzas’ legacy the close attention it so
richly deserves. For his problems and questions are ours. So his
agonies.

Anders Stephanson

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