The State, Social Movements, Party: Interview with

Nicos Poulantzas (1979)

viewpointmag.com/2017/12/18/state-social-movements-party-interview-nicos-poulantzas-1979/

Nicos Poulantzas December 18, 2017

Venus of the Rags (Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1967)

Editorial Introduction: This interview, which first appeared in the Fall 1979 issue of the left
Eurocommunist journal Dialectiques, is one of Nicos Poulantzas’s last major theoretical
(and empirical) statements and demonstrates the substantial differences that had emerged
between his and Althusser’s later views on the nature of the capitalist state and the
direction of revolutionary strategy. As noted by the interviewers, two other lengthy
discussions with Poulantzas had been featured in the pages of the journal, which trace the
trajectory of his oeuvre in the mid- to late- 1970s. Focusing on “current problems of Marxist
research on the state,” and “the state and power,” respectively, Poulantzas uses this forum
to expound and clarify some of the conceptual terminology that would found in State,
Power, Socialism (especially the notion of the state as the “condensation” of class forces)
and the dynamics of the “political crises” he saw unfolding across Western and Southern
Europe.1 The open-ended conversations allow Poulantzas to develop and elaborate his
analysis of the state form and his critiques of the state monopoly capitalist theorists in the
PCF.

In this text, Poulantzas devotes substantial space to refuting Althusser’s claims in “Marxism
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as a Finite Theory,” posing conceptual, historical, and strategic challenges to his former
mentor’s underlying premises regarding the capitalist state, civil society, and the
institutions, apparatuses, and practices which mark the specific materiality of this shared
terrain. His diagnosis of Althusser’s oversights leads into a discussion of the political
coordinates of the current moment, both the rise of neoliberal policies and authoritarian
statism, but also the “crisis of the workers’ parties” in Western Europe and their difficulties
in responding to the demands and cross-class alliances present in the then-recent wave of
feminist, student, environmental, and regionalist movements. Poulantzas’s final answer
here, where he asks whether “a certain irreducible tension” between party organizations
and autonomous social movements “at a distance from sites of production” is a sine qua
non for a democratic transition to socialism, has not lost its relevance.

Dialectiques: We’ve interviewed you twice in previous issues of Dialectiques, on

power and the state today. Since then, your latest book, State, Power, Socialism, has
appeared and there has been a debate prompted by Louis Althusser’s intervention
published in Il Manifesto and Dialectiques. How do you situate yourself in relation to
this debate?2

Nicos Poulantzas: I would like to indicate beforehand that there are currently important
international discussions around the state (in England, United States, Germany, etc.) that
have not yet had an impact in France. Here, we mainly know what is going on in Italy,
thanks to Dialectiques in particular. This means that the debate is still tainted by a Latinate
provincialism. Nevertheless, it poses some important problems.

Now, of course, I understand that Althusser’s original intervention came in the form of an
interview, so we cannot expect the rigor of a written text. However, this intervention
contains some positions that are grounds for serious reservations.

1. Althusser’s first position: the distinction between the capitalist state and “civil society”
would be an outright juridico-ideological representation of the bourgeoisie.

This position is too descriptive, both true and false. It is too easy, in fact, to elide the real
problem by criticizing the way in which it is posed within bourgeois ideology. Let’s leave the
term civil society and its strong ideological connotations to the side, then, at least for this
interview, and replace it with social relations of production and reproduction.

To a certain extent, Althusser’s statement is true. I’ve tried to show in recent works that,
against Althusser’s initial positions, the state cannot be considered as an instance or level
in itself, totally distinct from already existing relations of production and reproduction, a self-
reproducing state possessing a kind of autonomy through various modes of production.3
The state is already present in the very constitution of the relations of production, not only
their reproduction, as Althusser would later argue in his article “Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses.” The specifically capitalist state, a product and fact of reality, possesses
an eminent positivity. To be able to understand this role of the state, to which Althusser
now seems to refer, we clearly need to move beyond his conception of the state in the
article in question, and which is, more generally, a traditional conception of the state within
Marxism: something that only acts negatively, whether through the exercise of repression
(prohibition), or in the inculcation, however material, of ideological legitimation
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(concealment/obfuscation). The state doesn’t equal repression + ideology. The economic
role of the state, in its specific materiality, needs to be given the utmost consideration, as
does its declared role as the political organizer of the bourgeoisie, and lastly, the
normalizing and disciplinary procedures and techniques of state power.

But this statement is also partially false. As often happens with my friend Althusser, he
thinks to extremes, he goes from one extreme to the other by bending the stick in one
direction or another. Yes, as Marx clearly argued, a relative separation of the state from the
social relations of production and reproduction is a feature of capitalism and its division of
labor. Not only is this separation the foundation of capitalist state power, but it is also – if
not above all – the foundation of its specific materiality as a “special” apparatus. This
separation, which presupposes the particular presence of this state in the relations of
production, is also the basis for the relative autonomy of the state and modern politics that,
against the tradition of economic reductionism of the Third International, a certain number
of us worked to establish [nous fûmes un certain nombre à établir]; a separation that, I
repeat, has nothing to do with juridico-ideological representation: universality of the state
versus the individualized particularities of civil society, or the totalitarian Moloch-like state
versus the “breakdown” of the social (Touraine, Lefort, Castoriadis, etc.).

Indeed, by denying this separation outright, as Althusser now does, we are led to
conclusions that are obviously wrong, whether we like it or not:

a) On the one hand, we are unable to periodize the the capitalist state, a periodization that
is marked precisely by the differential forms of this separation: the so-called liberal state,
the interventionist state, the welfare state, and the current authoritarian state; on the other
hand, and for the same reasons, we are unable to distinguish between “parliamentary-
democracy” state-forms and exceptional state-forms (fascism, military dictatorship, etc.),
including actual forms of totalitarianism. This inability to distinguish state-forms led to the
Third International theory of “social-fascism.”

b) There is a risk of falling, paradoxically and by following theopposite path, into the worst
or most excessive aspects of theories of “state monopoly capitalism.” While some who
uphold this theory broadly argue that today, for the first time, we are witnessing the
abolition of this separation, Althusser appears content to question the mere novelty of this
phenomenon, by claiming that somehow, it has always been this way.

c) I am afraid that we are then led to necessarily reduce the totality of power relations to the
state, which is supposed to be organically diffused throughout society in regimenting the
latter, thereby reviving the state-centric view of the Third International.

d) Lastly, and above all, we end up unable to ask the question about the requisite
retainment and deepening of political liberties under socialism: this necessarily calls for
specific institutions (radically transformed institutions of representative democracy) that
guarantee them. This then implies a certain separation between state and social relations,
and therefore, necessarily, a certain non-withering away of the state. In short, and so as to
not fall once again into a left neoliberalism, we can absolutely not treat this question –
which is basically a question of the Rechtstaat – by limiting it to a matter of the “rules of the
game” that organize the multi-party system, as Althusser seems to do. In doing so, we
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block the path to a positive analysis of the exercise of power in the transitional period and
under democratic socialism. Bobbio has rightly emphasized the absence of this line of
analysis within the Marxist tradition.

2. Althusser’s second position, related to the first: we are unable to currently talk about a
particular “expansion” [élargissement] of the state, a “politicization of the social” specific to
contemporary capitalism, since the bourgeois state would already be sempre allargato,
always expanded “in its principle/concept.”

Here again is a descriptive position, at once true and false. In fact, this position is correct if
it is applied to bourgeois juridico-political ideology. I noted in Political Power and Social
Classes that “for bourgeois political ideology there can be no limit based on law or principle
to the activity and encroachment of the state in the so-called individual/private sphere.” 4
From Hobbes to Locke, from Rousseau himself to Hegel, this matter is clear.

This representation does hold, let’s say, a partial truth. But what matters in this
representation is not that it covers over any kind of natural principle regarding the
expansion of the bourgeois state. It covers over a historical tendency inscribed in the
materiality of this state and its reproduction. Indeed, as I have insisted upon elsewhere, the
separation of the modern state and social relations does not tie back some preliminary
demarcation, to the intrinsic limits between the public/political and the individual/private.
The individualization of the social body is located in the practices and techniques
(economic, repressive, ideological, disciplinary, normalizing) of a state that, in the same
movement, incorporates the unity (the cohesion) of this divided monads. The
individual/private sphere is not an inherent obstacle to state actions, but a space that the
state constructs by tracing its contours; this becomes a retractable horizon, while also being
the base for resistances over the course of the state process [démarche étatique].

This doesn’t mean that there are no determinant historical limits to the expansion of the
state, but that these limits do not adhere to the same naturalness of the individual/private
sphere. The state is therefore not always expansive in its principle, as Althusser argues, as
if it were a question of the transhistorical nature of the state, manifested and/or concretized
in reality in diverse ways. This expansion is a tendency and thus contains – against
Keynesian or other illusions – its own limits, posed both by the process of production and
class struggle and, moreover, by the structural framework of the state. We can see that the
demarcations of this expansion, corresponding to historical periods, are of the highest
importance. Who and what has expanded and towards what or whom? From the liberal
state to the interventionist state after the crisis of the 1930s, from the welfare state to
contemporary authoritarian statism, the very terms public/private, state/social relations, and
the variations in the expansion of the state between them, have completely changed.

We are thus doubtless witnessing currently a new stage of this process, namely the direct
presence of the state at the very center of the production of surplus value and the
reproduction of labor-power (collective consumption, healthcare, housing, transportation,
etc.). The prodigious extension of state functions, including its expansion into the domains
of knowledge and science, and the concentration of power and knowledge are only
indicators of this. We are seeing a complete reshuffling of public and private spaces, as
well as a considerable modification of the articulation of the political and the socio-
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economic (which poses the question, among others, about a new articulation of their
respective organizations, parties/unions). The presence of state networks in “everyday life”
indeed leads to what [Pietro] Ingrao calls the politicization of the social.

This is on the condition, however, that we do not lose sight of the limits of this current
expansion of the state, the transcription of the separation between state and social
relations in the social field, which also show the borders of this politicization of the social.
Limits that seem to be lost, by the way, in both Althusser’s and Ingrao’s perspectives: for
Ingrao, when he seems to understand politicization as an exhaustive or expansive,
possible and even desirable “inclusion” of the private/social “in” the state-politics
“synthesis”; for Althusser – who criticizes Ingrao on his understanding of the politicization
of the social – in his consideration of this as bourgeois politics (the political) while also
upholding the possibility, and I will return to this, of another politics, this time proletarian, but
radically situated “outside” the state (politics) in a phantasmic non-place. It seems to me
that despite their differences, to a certain extent Althusser and Ingrao indeed adopt the
same essentialist-topographical conception of the state; this leads both, if through different
paths (exhaustive or expansive politicization of the social within the state for Ingrao,
proletarian politicization outside the state for Althusser) to an effectively generalized pan-
politicism.

Let’s stay with Althusser for a moment: contrary to what he believes, every class struggle,
every social movement (trade-union, ecological, regional, feminist, student), insofar as it is
political, or rather, in its political dimensions, is necessarily situated on the strategic terrain
of the state. A proletarian politics cannot simply be located outside of the state, any more
than a form of politics situated on the terrain of the state is therefore, or necessarily,
bourgeois. If there are in fact limits to the expansion of the state, to the politicization of the
social, then it is precisely to the extent that class struggles and social movements always
spill over, away from the state (even viewed in an expanded sense, including the ISAs), or
to the extent that everything is not political – politics is not the sole dimension of social
existence. Overcoming the state-institutionalist fixation of the Third International, or even
privileging the impact of social movements (“civil society”) does not entail attributing the
honorable, supreme title of POLITICS at any cost, seeing everywhere the diffusion of
politics or the political. Powers and struggles are not reducible to either the state or politics:
it can’t be left to Foucault to remind Marxism of this! This doesn’t mean that these powers
and struggles don’t have particular effects in this case, or political importance, nor is it to
say that the state has no effect on them.

D: You are referring here to Althusser’s position in the interview in question, where
the working class party must be situated or located “outside” the state.

NP: Exactly. I think that Althusser strongly upholds the traditional position of the Third
International concerning the state. I have shown in several places that it is an
instrumentalist view: the state as a tool or machine (the keyword is said!) which is open to
the manipulation at the will and hands of the dominant classes. Power would then be a
quantifiable entity, embodied in the state as a hypostasized object. In passing from the
mechanistic metaphor to the topological metaphor, it leads to this rough conclusion: the
state constitutes a monolithic bloc with no cracks, except those stemming from
bureaucratic dysfunctions. The internal contradictions of the state, as class contradictions,
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would not apply to its hard core, but, at most, only the ISAs [Les contradictions internes de
l’Etat comme contradictions de classe ne seront jamais de mise pour son noyau dur, mais,
à la rigueur, pour les seuls A.I.E.]. This state will remain a castle strongly fortified against
the revolutionary struggles of the dominated classes. An instrumentalist, but also
essentialist conception of the state: either the popular masses are included – “integrated” –
and thus contaminated by the bourgeois pest infecting the castle; or they remain pure in the
quest for their for-itself/class consciousness (the party) and thus are located absolutely
outside the walls. Seizing state power can therefore only mean, for its hard kernel at the
very least, penetrating the fortified castle from outside, by a war of movement/assault or a
war of position/encirclement (Gramsci): in short, always via a “frontal” strategy of a kind of
dual power. The party can thus only be situated radically outside the state, operating as an
anti-state in the constitution of a second power (the Soviets) that will substitute itself for the
first (destruction of the state).

Against this essentialist conception, I have proposed that the state be viewed relationally,
or more exactly, as the material condensation of the relation of forces between classes and
class fractions. Power is not a qualifiable essence, but a relation. The state is properly
constituted by the class contradictions which, under a specific form, become the internal
contradictions of the state, and this does not concern or involve the ISAs. Statist or state-
centric politics are the result of this contradictory process; what is decisive in political
decision-making is not what happens below, above, or beyond the state, but what happens
within the state. Rather than in terms of outside or inside, this must be considered in terms
of terrain and strategic processes: popular struggles, via their political dimensions, are
always located – I repeat – on the terrain of the state. If this is a permanent trait of the
capitalist state, it nonetheless presents new dimensions in the current moment. The
expansion of the state into all domains of everyday life intensifies the contradictions on the
state terrain, giving rise to a crisis completely specific to the contemporary state.

The party cannot, therefore, situate itself as radically outside in relation to the state, The
seizure of state power depends on a long-term strategy of modifying the relation of forces
on state terrain itself, pressing on its internal contradictions. But contrary to what certain
currents in the Eurocommunist parties accept, we must not forget that the state is not a
simple relationship: it always holds a specific materiality as an apparatus, which cannot be
radically modified by merely shifting the relation of forces. That this party must situate itself
on the terrain of the state does not mean that it must wed itself to the materiality of the
state as an apparatus, by exactly copying the latter’s administrative model or identifying
itself with it – indeed, the opposite is the case. Here lies precisely the question of the
autonomy of the organization of the working class and the popular masses, and not in the
division of this organization outside the state.

However, to modify the balance of power [le rapport de force] within the state, and
furthermore, radically modify the materiality of the state, is only one aspect of a democratic
transition to socialism. The other aspect of the process depends on, at the same time,
grassroots social movements propelling the spread [l’essaimage] of spaces of direct
democracy: in short for movements to ground themselves in popular struggles that always
spill over beyond, and keep a distance from, the state. To remain limited to the state
terrain, even in order to adopt a strategy of ruptures, is to unwisely slip towards social-
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democracy; because of the specific weight of the materiality of the state, to even change
the relation of forces within the state can only happen by also relying on struggles and
movements which go beyond the state.

This matters today more than ever. With new forms of state control and contemporary
administrative procedures, with mass neo-corporatist initiatives which engage the state by
spreading multiple networks of control (social assistance, authorized police, psychiatric,
and judiciary networks) throughout the social fabric, and in the context of economic crisis
and the crisis of the welfare state – which triggers a tendential and widespread legitimation
crisis but without leading to a rupture in consensus – popular revolts are translating into
new forms. Revolts or uprisings cannot assume the same forms as during the “savage”
crisis of 1930, and cannot emerge via the form of a general strike or an alternative overall
political project. But in their place both upstream and downstream of the apparatus of
production, these uprisings or revolts can no longer be stamped with the seal of
marginality, as has been more or less the case for several years. They are the
condensation of diffuse and wide-ranging popular protests, and also redirect these protests
towards the cultural sphere: the student, feminist, regionalist, and ecological movements,
neighborhood committees, citizen commissions etc., to which one must certainly add the
new forms of revolt in the factory.

These movements are certainly not detached or separated from class contradictions, as
Alain Touraine has argued through his opposition between “class contradictions/social
movements,” since they are organically linked to contradictions (economic, but also political
and class ideological) immanent to the expanded reproduction of capital. They nonetheless
possess a specificity: they condense and reflect class conflicts without being reducible to
the latter. By locating themselves within a self-management perspective, these movements
substantially move beyond the institutions of representative democracy.

At stake is the articulation of two dimensions of this process. It is not a question of

“destroying” the institutions of representative democracy – which are also, if not primarily,
an achievement [une conquête] of the popular masses – solely in favor of struggles outside
the state or direct democracy (this is the original Leninist solution, for the most part adopted
by Althusser). Nor is it a question of deserting, even stifling, these grassroots movements
in lieu of the slight reforms of representative democracy (the classic strategy of social-
democracy).

Two aspects of the process which must remain relatively distinct. It is here that Ingrao’s
position poses certain problems from the other side. Ingrao is well aware of the risks of
corporatism, of atomized or socio-professional re-privatization, of the fragmentation which
threatens the workers’ self-management [autogestionnaire] movement. We also know that
for the Deleuze-Guattari-Foucault current, this fragmentation is set up as or transformed
into a positive theory of social movements: singular micro-revolts, scattered resistances,
isolated experimentations – this is the only way, according to these theorists, of avoiding a
strategy that would risk imprisoning this movements within the nets of statist politics,
stripping them of their “autonomy.” Of course, for these movements to remain there is the
best way for them to be recuperated by the vertical, institutionalized neo-corporatism and
neo-clientelism of the state such as it exists today, integrated in the repressive
permissiveness of the state: we already find a little bit of this recuperation all over. What are
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the means that Ingrao recommends to ward off this very real danger, however likely it has
been exaggerated by French and German thinkers with a tendency to generalize too hastily
from the traces of Nazism and Fascism which remain in their countries (Habermas for
example)? It would be a matter, as it were, of articulating social movements with the
process of transforming the state by their subordination-insertion within the institutions of a
democratic state. The state here is considered as “the moment of totality,” the “general
synthesis”; a conception which, although diametrically opposed to the one Ingrao ascribes
to Althusser (state as object), nevertheless evinces, to a certain extent, the same
essentialist view of the state (for Ingrao, the state as the subject of social rationality).

In any case, Ingrao’s conception has actually been applied in the political experience of the
Austro-Marxists who, wanting to take equal distance from Bolshevism and social-
democracy, attempted to articulate both aspects of the process in question, but by
incorporating the second (social movements of direct democracy) within the first
(democratic representative institutions). This experiences shows that because of the
specific materiality of the state apparatus, these movements end up dissolving within the
nets of the state by being integrated in and identified with its administrative circuit. For my
part, I am asking whether, and to what extent, a certain irreducible tension between these
two dimensions of the process is a risk to be assumed, and what’s more, whether or not
this tension is an integral part of a dynamic in the transition to democratic socialism.

D: This raises the question of the role of the party in these movements today, and
the crisis traversing Communist parties in the West.

NP: Exactly. To begin with the second question, I don’t think that it’s at all about a crisis of
the “party-form,” as is sometimes said today (by Balibar in particular): to talk about the
crisis of the “party-form” seems as totally misguided as to talk about a crisis of the “state-
form.” On the one hand, there is the matter of a general crisis of the political party “system,”
relating to new economic realities, the current crisis of the state, and the new form of state
authoritarianism – a crisis which to some degree involves the Communist parties in the
West. On the other hand, there is the matter of a crisis specific to the mass workers’ parties
in the advanced capitalist countries.

To grasp the first dimension of this question, contemporary ideological processes must be
granted the greatest importance. In effect, I would reiterate that we should not consider
repression or overt violence and the organization of consent as two terms of a quantifiable
power held by the state, akin to the image of the Centaur. In this connection we apply an
empiricist-essentialist conception of “zero-sum power” to the state, of the sort where a
diminishing of the degree of legitimation automatically corresponds to an inversely
proportional increase in repression, and vice versa. In fact, an increase of repressive
violence on the part of the state is necessarily accompanied by an intensified reformulation
of legitimation. This is precisely what is now happening in the state’s response to its own
crisis.

I can insist here on the new repressive forms of the contemporary state, bringing an
intensification of overt state violence (considerable restrictions of liberties, generalized
documentation of electronic information, withering-away of the law, redeployment of the
judicial and police apparatus in their consubstantial assemblage, etc.), and not only an
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intensification of so-called symbolic violence. But this is accompanied by a real
restructuring of right-wing ideology, seriously shaken by the uptick in struggles after 1968,
and which proves once again capitalism’s prodigious capacities for cultural integration (for
example, the diverted recuperation of a whole series of themes from May ‘68). To continue
to speak in this regard of ideologies of crisis hardly seems exact to me, because we are
currently witnessing a veritable restructuring of the dominant ideology.

The novelty of this restructuring is attached to the contradictory assemblage of often older,
diverse ideological currents:

a) An irrationalism specific to the general offensive against Marxism and Enlightenment

rationalism.5 Irrationalism and neo-spiritualism are thus already more than simple
ideological effects of the crisis, but cover it, paving the way for an older type of rationality
that is tending this time to pervade the entire social fabric: the instrumental rationality and
technocratic logic of experts, relatively opposed to those of the law and the general will;

b) Neoliberalism, manifesting in a anti-state discourse under the cover of the liberation of

the individual from the impediments of the state. Although the proponents of neoliberalism
often present themselves as adherents to “anarcho-capitalism,” this should not be
understood by this that they recommend an actual, impossible return to a savage
competitive capitalism: the state continues to assume an organic role in the reproduction of
capital. What neoliberals in fact recommend is the withdrawal, already well underway, of
the “social functions” of the welfare state (crisis of the Keynesian state), which were an
important victory won by the popular masses;

c) Authoritarianism, namely the new discourse of law and order, the security of citizens, and
necessary restrictions on the abuse of democratic liberties (see the Trilateral Commission),
etc.

This restructuring of the content of the ruling discourse corresponds to, even induces and
brings into relief, the considerable modifications in the channels and apparatuses which
elaborate and circulate it. The principal ideological role has shifted away from the school,
the university, and publishing towards the media (see the recent work of Régis Debray). It’s
important to add that this shift is tied, within state circuits, to a broader shift in legitimation
procedures, from the political parties to the state administration, of which they are thereby
the privileged interlocutors. This is probably at the bottom of things: the redeployment of
media is of a piece with the state administration’s multiform and increasing control over it,
with the logic and symbolic order implemented in mediatic discourse reflectively
reproducing those of the current administration.

All this is at the root of a crisis and a decline of political parties, which have still held an
important role until now. If parties are no longer present in the effective sites of decision-
making, which have already left Parliament behind to set up shop [s’installer] within the
executive branches, they still hold a decisive role as the political organizers and
representatives of class interests against the state administration, of whom they are the
preferred contacts. They are, moreover, ideological apparatuses of the first order, by
basically elaborating and transmitting a discourse founded on the general will, and
undergirding the institutions of representative democracy: in the short, the Rechtstaat.

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Currently, the administration has set itself up as the principal political organizer of the ruling
classes and the privileged integrator of the popular masses: it has consolidated itself as the
principal site of decision-making, and to do this it has reached out to various professional
social groups over parties (institutionalized neo-corporatism, manifesting especially in the
numerous tripartite commissions). This has led to a crisis of representation for the “parties
in power,” in the eyes of the classes and fractions they represent. In a parallel fashion, the
role of legitimation is shifted towards the administration. In this way, the discourse of
authoritarian technocratism finds in the administration a site of privileged transmission; this
is also the case for neoliberal discourse (neutral, arbitrary state sets simple rules for social
actors), which returns to the traditional form of the self-legitimation of the state. The
administration’s role also influences in its turn the dominant ideological discourse: the
flattening and rendering uniform of this discourse, plebiscitary and populist forms of
consent coupled with the hermeticism of the language of experts.

This crisis of the party system of course primarily concerns the parties in power, those who
participate in government with regular alternation, including several social democratic
parties. But it also concerns, in certain aspects, the communist parties in the West, to the
extent that they are – independent of whether they belong to the governmental sphere or
not – still present on terrain of the state.

But, more generally, the mass workers’ parties are also affected by their own crisis, which
concerns, in the first instance, the communist parties (a crisis of militancy, amongst others).
Certain politico-strategic orientations of these parties, and certain aspects of their
bureaucratization, definitely have a role to play in this crisis, but the fundamental reasons
are above all social: something that the discussion in France on this question has tended to
obscure. In effect, these parties have been for the most part organizationally built not only
as “workers’ parties” in the strict sense (even if they were really only predominant among
workers [meme s’ils ne furent jamais qu’à dominante ouvrière]), but were also centered on
the contradictions within the productive apparatus itself, the factory (the party–union, state–
enterprise binaries). But social movements, essentially concerning the working class itself,
are currently taking place at a distance from sites of production. These movements and
struggles (feminist, student, regionalist, ecological) are, moreover, already cross-class
[pluriclassiste] in character.

All this is at the root of a crisis unfolding in the same moment when workers’ parties need to
play a new role in the articulation of transformations in the state and the development of
new social movements. In effect, against a particular conception of the “autonomy” of the
“social” vis-à-vis political organizations (which should only be concerned with the state), it
seems clear that, faced with the risks of corporatism and recuperation (and even though
the rise of of a vast, fascist-Poujadist alliance [rassemblement] on the basis of these
movements hardly seems possible), as well as the serious conflicts between these two
aspects of the process (which happened in Portugal), these parties need to be actively
involved in the new social movements.

That this can only be done by way of a significant transformation of these parties, of their
attitudes in regard to social movements (which have until now only been that of contempt, if
not denigration, particularly in the case of the PCF), of their internal organization, of their
relationships to unions and mass organizations – is clear. But the real question consists in
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knowing what form the party’s involvement should be in this field. Here too, Ingrao’s
position, one of the more developed in this domain, is problematic: put schematically, his
position consists in seeing the party as “the totalizing moment” [moment de globalisation] of
the new social struggles, in the sense that a transformed party must succeed in
“synthesizing” these movements, orienting them, even framing them in the form of a
constellation, of which it would be the principal axis. This is the same position that Ingrao
has adopted concerning the relationship between the democratic state and social
movements.6

The questions concerning the party itself are: to what extent can it, or even should it,
transform itself in order to “harness” [capter] social movements, without leading into the trap
of a populist party? But other questions concern social movements: it is not at all clear that
their “integration” [insertion] in a party, however democratic and transformed it is, would not
make them lose their own specificity. All the more so, since these movements have not
(yet?) found specific organizational forms (and should they?), so that their relation to the
party can be a new type of relationship between parties and mass organizations: thus the
risk of their being dissolved into the party is only greater. It is worth asking here whether or
not a certain irreducible tension between the workers’ parties and social movements is a
necessary condition of the dynamic towards a transition to socialism.

– Translated by Patrick King

This text originally appeared as “L’Etat, les mouvements sociaux, le parti,” in Dialectiques
no. 28 (Fall 1979), 85-95. It was subsequently reprinted as “La crise des partis,” in Nicos
Poulantzas, Reperès (Paris: Maspero, 1980), 163-183.

This article is part of a dossier entitled “The Crisis of Marxism.”

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