Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas’s Theory of the State

Political developments in the last ten years have led to a very considerable renewal of interest in Marxist economic and political analysis, and to a concerted attempt to reinvigorate Marxist theory as a revolutionary force. The focus of this movement is the attempt to develop a Marxist critique of Stalinist dogmatism and of post-Stalinist revisionism. Its material conditions are the end of the long wave of post-war capitalist expansion and the reappearance of capitalist crisis, on the one hand, and the development of working class resistance to the domination of capital independently of the orthodox Communist Parties, on the other. This Marxist renaissance is taking place in conditions which make it extremely vulnerable to absorption into the frame of reference of bourgeois ideology. Since 1930 Marxist theory has been positively or negatively dominated by the official Marxism of the orthodox Communist Parties (which I shall refer to as ‘dogmatism’). Those Marxists who were not prepared to subordinate themselves to dogmatism were not able to challenge it either. The period of cold war and the absence of independent working class resistance to capital meant that there was no basis on which such a challenge could be mounted. The independence of such Marxism was maintained by its diversion of attention from political and economic concerns. It was dominated by the attempt to explain the apparent solidity of bourgeois domination by reference to specific superstructural features which varied from one country to another, thus constituting various national schools of ‘Western Marxism’, which borrowed heavily from the dominant bourgeois cultural theories in the various countries. The ‘Marxist’ alternatives to dogmatism systematically evaded the fundamental theoretical issues which would have been raised by any direct challenge to dogmatism ( Anderson, 1976). The development of capitalist crisis and the corresponding development of political alternatives to revisionism has created new conditions for Marxist theory. These dictate a return to the foundations of Marxism, to the generality of the capital relation, and a confrontation with the dogmatist orthodoxy. However the novelty of these conditions also indicates a weakness of contemporary Marxism. In the absence of a Marxist critique of dogmatism, various forms of bourgeois ideology, and above all bourgeois sociology, have monopolised such