Notes on a Relational Theory of Power
Or, Poulantzas Should've Been An Anarchist
I wrote in my last letter to him that I understood the real issue to be: “centralism vs. decentralism,” and that State Socialism and capitalism represented the one side of the question, and Anarchism the other.
Adolph Fischer wrote this in Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty from Cook County Jail in Chicago, in February 1887. Fischer saw that the fundamental question is not which group controls the centralized, coercive apparatus of the state, but whether this kind of system should even exist. There is a deep but under-appreciated irony in the twentieth century contest between state communism and state capitalism, despite their cartoonish mirror claims of total ideological incompatibility. Both systems were structurally dependent on, constrained by, and shaped by extremely similar imperatives of government power and the push for economic growth (conceived of in remarkably similar terms). These structural pressures often forced both systems into convergent policies and patterns of behavior both domestically and abroad, and even as they fought one another across the world. Many onlookers both at the time and today fail to make this out, trapped in shallow, mostly meaningless ideological binaries that have nothing to do with describing reality. Both systems undeniably relied on heavy state coercion and central state planning in practice, even as political rhetoric pretended they were opposites. Anarchism is the most important social idea of the twenty-first century because it avoids this mistake, acting and growing out of the true distinction between authority and liberty, allowing no space between means and ends.
As a contrast, to give one a sense of Nicos Poulantzas’s (1936-1979) practical politics, his former teaching assistant, the philosopher Michael Löwy, remarked that Poulantzas saw György Lukács (1885-1971) as “an unbearable ultra-leftist” unworthy of Löwy’s dissertation. For example, he provides the following rather underwhelming reassurance of the impracticality of anarchism or anything close: “Stalinist state-worship, social-democratic state-worship: this is indeed one of the traditions of the popular movement. But to escape from it through the other tradition of direct, rank-and-file democracy or self-management would really be too good to be true.” Generations of anarchists have disagreed, pointing out that if anything is too good to be true, it is the idea of a truly socialist state. Poulantzas’s claim that the state constitutes and drives class relations leaves a gaping theoretical hole for any emancipatory program seeking to employ the state.
Their own positive political programs notwithstanding, Althusser and Poulantzas’s theories of the state further exposed the futility of statist political projects. The deeper one’s structural critique of the state and capital, and the relationship between them, the more seriously they ought to take the anarchist commitment to abolishing all power structures, including the state. If class domination is not natural or anthropological, but is rather historically specific and conditioned by material factors, then it can be abolished. Their work tracks how the structures of the state generate their own logic of domination through hierarchical control, the separation of the powerful from those affected by their choices, the creation of a class of specialist bureaucrats with their own interests, etc. What we observe isn’t a mistake. The state can’t help but reproduce these patterns because they are historically the most fundamental features of centralized political power. Both Althusser and Poulantzas present a state that is not neutral and couldn’t be. The state as we find it in their work isn’t the kind of thing that could be captured and redirected toward emancipatory ends. Everywhere we find it, the state is fundamentally constituted by and constitutive of domination. Happily, Althusser’s theory of the state and its repressive and ideological apparatuses entirely strips away any moral or teleological justification for the state. Althusser stripped away the nonsense to reveal the material reality.
Taking Althusser’s conceptual framework seriously and following it consistently produces a vision of the state as unavoidably a machine of class domination, structurally incompatible with emancipatory or revolutionary politics. That is, it spells out an anarchist position. Althusser’s analysis strongly suggests that any attempt to wield state power, even by a revolutionary vanguard, will perpetuate the subject-forming processes that create and maintain hierarchy and domination. The vanguard party that seizes the state apparatus becomes itself a tool for calling subjects into new forms of subordination. It is possible to bring Althusser’s ideas into constructive dialogue with anarchism without collapsing either tradition. Althusser’s value for the anarchist has nothing to do with his positive political program. It is in his descriptive theory, his distinctive structural-materialist explanation of how the state, the ideological system, and class domination endure and reproduce themselves. This is a powerful explanatory framework that intensifies the libertarian critique and should inform anarchist theory and practice. An anarchism that incorporates these insights and tools becomes far more strategic and future-oriented. It is an anarchism far more able to understand and decompose how political authority reproduces itself beneath the level of conscious political decision or action, through the institutions and discourses that govern and organize the mundane features of daily life. Put another way: it is impossible to struggle against, dismantle, and abolish the state unless we understand it. It is possible to articulate an anarchism that is aware of structure, maintaining the core anti-authoritarian commitments of anarchism, but incorporating a rigorous structural analysis of the current constraints operating on those commitments. Thinkers like Althusser and Poulantzas provide anarchists with a set of critical tools for understanding how domination is reproduced through the state. If the state is a structural mechanism of reproduction, not merely an instrument that can be repurposed, and because subjectivity is formed within its ideological apparatuses, then abolishing the state is a prerequisite for full freedom from domination.
On this view, anarchism and Marxism arguably converge at the point of horizon, at least inasmuch as the road to that point can avoid reproducing dominative hierarchical power. They converge in Poulantzas’s claim that “[t]he state is already present in the very constitution of the relations of production,” so to conceive of the state as outside of capitalist social relations is a mistake, because the state constitutes those relations in important ways. The economic conditions could not exist apart from the state. Professor Richard Gilman-Opalsky, a scholar of political philosophy, argues that anarchism “is a crucial part of a future Marxism.” He says that we should finally kill the “idea that there is a hard ideological incompatibility between the insights of the anarchists and those of the Marxists.” Gilman-Opalsky also argues that many of the nineteenth century anarchists’ insights and predictions were borne out in the next century. He also observes that anarchism, far from being utopian, is concerned very often with things we’re already doing.
For their part, the anarchists have never looked at the state as an instrument to be captured; their movement is fundamentally committed to aligning means and ends. A maddeningly deliberative lot who feel obligated to disagree amongst themselves about every last detail, they nonetheless agree that there cannot be a state in a free, classless society (I write of them in this way from a place of love, and because Americans do not have a clue what real-world anarchists are like – they would probably be bored most of the time unless they love endless debates about not very much). Anarchists have frequently stressed that the state is embodied in certain behaviors and kinds of relationships, not a mere tool or a machine to be driven. There is no stronghold to conquer, no machine to seize. “The state,” Poulantzas writes, “is neither a thing-instrument that may be taken away, nor a fortress that may be penetrated by means of a wooden horse, nor yet a safe that may be cracked by a burglary: it is the heart of the exercise of political power.” Through Althusser and Poulantzas, we can build a more sophisticated model of the state as a field-like formation, a dynamic interplay of relations and currents running through people, practices, and institutions. Althusser’s descriptions of Repressive State Apparatuses and Ideological State Apparatuses underscore that these are not discrete organs within a single unified machine, but are expressions of energy or power permeating the social body. The state thus operates from within the material rituals and dialogues of daily life. It operates from within us and is continuously reproduced through prescribed practices. Poulantzas’s description of the state as “the condensation of class relations” further suggests a field of social energy in which the state manifests as diffuse and immanent. This field is an unfolding of interactions distributed throughout society, not limited to the formal state. Yet the state also appears to us as coherent and discrete, distinguishable from other social institutions, even as it operates through them. Within the formal state, there seem to be gradations or degrees of relative stateness, reflecting variations in the concentration and intensity of the kind of dominating, coercive, criminal power that defines the state (perhaps the Pentagon has more stateness than other aspects of the formal state like the social welfare system - what remains of it). Poulantzas’s theory captures the state’s self-contradictory character, as both a deterritorialized field of relational struggle and a relatively autonomous site of crystallized power.
The State is neither the instrumental depository (object) of a power-essence held by the dominant class, nor a subject possessing a quantity of power equal to the quantity it takes from the classes which face it: the State is rather the strategic site of organization of the dominant class in its relationship to the dominated classes. It is a site and a centre of the exercise of power, but it possesses no power of its own.
Poulantzas’s theoretical framework sets forth a fundamental dialectical tension within and defining the capitalist state. On the one hand, the state is described as a relatively autonomous and discrete institution (really, an ensemble of related institutions) with a defined territorial dimension. Here, the state is materially crystallized within its military, bureaucracies, courts, etc., all consolidated within the formal state; Poulantzas remarks upon the modern state’s “historical tendency to encompass a single, constant nation.” But the state, for Poulantzas, is also a diffuse and relational field, the “strategic location of the relationship of forces within a given society.” He writes:
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 . . . .
The state isn’t operating as a monolith, but as a dynamic interplay in which class struggles are always in progress, reshaping both the state’s structures and the social institutions it touches and influences. These two modes exist in a mutually constitutive relationship, with the state-as-relation shaping formal institutions and the broader social order, incorporating pressures from both within and without. Class conflicts are then refracted, constrained, and transformed through their encounters with the territorial-institutional state in a recursive dialectic. What becomes clear is that, for Poulantzas, both claims are true: that the state is in fact the central strategic terrain of power, yet “possesses no power of its own.” When we observe the state as structurally coherent, this is not the reflection of some fixed essence, or a permanent or intrinsic property, but reflects a point of conjuncture “in which contradictions are condensed.” The state is a site of class struggle; indeed it is the key site of class struggle, its behaviors at any given time conditioned by existing class relations and ideology. It represents the condensation of class relations and the balance of power among classes, never neatly reducible to any one class’s will.
In discussing his theories, Poulantzas is at times confronting Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Poulantzas thinks they see Marxists as locating power only in the formal state. The power and insight from Foucault’s approach are in his pioneering reconceptualization of power as something diffuse, embedded in diverse social practices, and importantly productive, as opposed to only repressive. Foucault reveals the micro level, the level of “capillary power,” helping to explain subtler forms of power and domination that may escape a more structural, class-based model. For Foucault, knowledge and power are connected and constitute one another, with power defining official truth and truth reinstating power. But Poulantzas sees a critical problem with Foucault’s theoretical approach in the absence of any mechanism capable of explaining how and why Foucault’s dispersed disciplinary practices happen to systematically align to serve the system of production and its beneficiaries. If Foucault shows that power functions through comprehensive surveillance, normalization, and institutional examinations and judgment, Poulantzas argues that he nonetheless fails to provide an account of why apparently separate, autonomous instances of such disciplinary practice so consistently line up with the maintenance of brutal class hierarchies.
Poulantzas did not tend to pull punches, and Foucault and Deleuze come in for frequent condemnation in State, Power, Socialism. Often treating them together as representatives of the same problematic approach, Poulantzas saw their philosophical contributions as overly-idealistic and detached from material reality. The frequent charge of voluntarism from the Marxists is the worry that a theory in some way overstates the role of conscious human intention and choice in social dynamics and transformation, at the expense of accounting fully for structural constraints, particularly those imposed by the state and class relations. For his part, Poulantzas readily acknowledged that the state represented diffuse power; he argues that “the popular classes have always been present in the State, without that ever having changed anything of its hard core.” Poulantzas explains his theory:
They [that is, relations of power] go beyond it even if we abandon the narrow, juridical definition of the State that surprisingly remains present in Foucault or Deleuze. All the apparatuses of hegemony, including those that are legally private (ideological and cultural apparatuses, the Church, etc.), all these form part of the State; whereas, for Foucault and Deleuze, the State is always limited to the public kernel of army, police, prisons, courts, and so on. This allows them to say that power also exists outside the State as they conceive it. But in fact, a number of sites of power which they imagine to lie wholly outside the State (the apparatus of asylums and hospitals, the sports apparatus, etc.) are all the more sites of power in that they are included in the strategic field of the State.
Poulantzas does not hide his disdain for theories he sees as too abstract or metaphysical, that underplay the connection between power and economic class. Later in the book:
They will be explained there in terms quite different from Foucault’s mysterious and almost metaphysical diagram—and above all different from the Deleuze-Guattari version, which, in the purest spiritualist tradition, posits an original machine (Urstaat) or ideal-abstract Despot-State haunting the history of various States and powers in search of a perfect incarnation.
Among Poulantzas’s core theses is the claim that political domination and economic exploitation are co-constitutive, not sequential, emerging together as the state institutionalizes the class struggle. Domination and exploitation are there together from the start—unlike in Clastres where the state comes along first. For Poulantzas, the state apparatus and economic structures develop together as mutually reinforcing elements of a unified system of power and class rule. Rather than insist that one precedes the other absolutely, Poulantzas recognizes their mutual constitution and historical contingency; he contends that there is an ongoing tension between political and economic power, even as they serve one another. If the state is the structural crystallization of the class antagonisms of the moment, then it is shaped by the logic of class domination and cannot be wielded against it. The state’s role in capitalism is a necessary, foundational one, not a mere contingent association. The maintenance of structural coherence seems to demand that the Marxist treat every state, even those that are proletarian in formal designation, as an aspect of the same relational matrix of domination. We already know that such putative dictatorships of the proletariat have accomplished the structural reproduction of capitalism’s core features, their post-revolutionary character notwithstanding. The state form creates class domination and exploitation.
Poulantzas follows Althusser in the claim that ideology is not a mere subjective illusion or mistake, but is structurally implicated and embedded in institutional, practical, and legal forms. Ideology here is a concrete, material practice rather than ideas in heads. Lenin’s strategy takes for granted a temporary state in the hands of the proletariat, one that will wither away when it is no longer necessary. But Althusser’s theory strongly suggests that the state is the core element in the reproduction of exploitation, and that its logic can’t simply be suspended. While the state exists, there is class society, domination, and exploitation—the apparatus cannot be managed for the common good, but must be destroyed. Althusser may have misunderstood his own theory of subjectivity and subject-formation: his idea of ideological interpellation contends that individuals are hailed into their subjectivity, becoming subjects after internalizing overlapping, frequently contradictory ideological demands. The unavoidable implication of this paradigm is that a Leninist revolutionary subject is not a coherent one that could be made to follow a centralized vanguard party, but is instead already always fragmented and caught in the nets of multiple ideological forces.
Within this paradigm, Poulantzas is able to elaborate an explanation of how the state shapes and constrains individual behavior in the interests of the ruling class, even as it enjoys relative autonomy. He introduces a concept everyone has observed in one form or another, the tendency of those in power to favor certain groups and interests in selective, systematic ways, even as the liberal state holds itself out as maintaining impartiality or neutrality. Like Althusser, Poulantzas sees this as structural, not resulting from any conscious conspiracy or intention, which contains the important implication, perhaps, that a revolutionary takeover of the state or a change in ruling personnel won’t reach the underlying structural imperatives of the system. There is a challenging question of whether it’s possible to make the state serve an emancipatory movement or project. The state’s structural selectivity ensures that official policies and norms will grease the wheels in reproducing the relationships of domination. Poulantzas rather brilliantly discusses the state’s insidious co-optive tendency and power, its ability to absorb and neutralize dissent, even recruiting it to stabilize and administer capitalist power. Poulantzas’s insights give us one of the most sophisticated descriptions of the state and how it actually functions in the world. But it’s a description that seems to imply a very different politics from either Leninism or Poulantzas’s own nondescript social democracy. Any state, even a nominally socialist one, should be vulnerable to the dynamics that Poulantzas so expertly explains.
One of Poulantzas key projects in State, Power, Socialism is to develop a relational theory of power (the title of the third chapter is “Towards a Relational Theory of Power?”), conceptualizing power as a relationship between people rather than “a quantity or object of possession” held by a particular class. Althusser’s structural theory holds that the state is not a pure instrument of class rule, but an ensemble of interconnected apparatuses that together reproduce the ruling ideology.
Americans need a new way of thinking about freedom and its ramifications. The claim that the current economic system represents freedom in the abstract, referring to it as a “free market,” is not really a descriptive or empirical statement. It’s an ideological one. The function of this kind of obscurantist rhetoric is to naturalize an economic system that is historically particular and imposed by violence, to make the system seem genuinely spontaneous, free, neutral, and fair. The terminology is a way to force the worldview of the ruling class onto the masses, to make them misrecognize themselves and their interests while hiding the structural roles of the state and capital in their domination. Capitalism asks us to accept the most outlandish and factually unmoored story about the system of production, to pretend that the modern corporation, in its history and current practices, reflects or showcases liberal, free-market relations, with patterns of wealth ownership emerging from something like principles of Lockean homesteading and voluntary exchange. In fact, the origin of the corporate form is historically and structurally embedded in state-created monopolies, colonial violence and extraction, and alongside various similar legal fictions created to concentrate capital and insulate its holders from liability or accountability to the public. The corporate form was born of explicitly anti-liberal and anti-democratic special privilege. The U.S. government today operates as a de facto private organization, designed to extract wealth from the popular masses and to redirect it to an ever-shrinking group at the top. The empirical evidence is overwhelming. In the past few years alone, private contractors have received trillions of dollars in public money, much of which has gone to aggressive warmaking, causing crises around the world. Today, there are more than two private contractors for every federal government employee, meaning that much of the U.S. government’s work is completed by private corporations that are a black box for American citizens. The energy and pharmaceutical industries each receive hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and other freebies every year.
Studies in political science and political psychology consistently show that although the popular masses perceive dramatic partisan polarization, the real-world policy positions of the two major political parties remain in extremely deep, robust structural alignment on institutional and economic issues, in particular on war and empire, surveillance and domestic police statism, and corporate-friendly rulemaking and economic policies. Indeed, the deep convergence between the two teams is a core aspect of the whole system’s functional regularity, as both operate with a framework of constraining economic factors that tend overwhelmingly to push them toward similar outcomes despite their rhetorical differences. In a country like the United States, where there is an apparently fathomless breach separating the citizen’s understanding of the political-economic situation and the reality, there must be some semiotic filter or mediator that explains this. That is, the discourse seems to highlight the symbolic markers of difference through politics-as-entertainment as a way to hide the structural reality. There’s a small tip of the iceberg represented by Republicans’ and Democrats’ debates, but that small piece comes to be recognized by the public as describing the entire system accurately. An interesting confirmation of the power of this symbolic economy is the thoughtless ease with which both parties regularly abandon or even flip prior philosophical or policy positions, if doing this will serve some perceived political advantage. Because the political and economic system doesn’t depend on their substantive stances at all, positions once treated as matters of principle (whether war and peace, economic policy, etc.) can be reversed without materially disrupting the system. But what the system does require is the continuing reproduction of the fight itself, keeping a field of perceived conflict. The performance of the conflict holds the symbolic energy; the charge of the symbolic back-and-forth holds the emotional and cognitive investments of the public masses. Largely symbolic differences have come to obscure the determinative forces that actually shape policy, leaving an epistemic gap whereby even repeated evidence of deep bipartisan alignment is unable to move us into real understanding of the political and economic system (which bears no resemblance to our abstract ideals of freedom, equality, etc.). Americans pay almost no attention whatsoever to underlying systemic imperatives, preferring to be entertained and performatively outraged by turns. The semiotic lens through which we experience political discourse takes us back to Althusser and his way of thinking about the misrecognition at the heart of ideological power.
In the current conjuncture, with ecological collapse, global instability, declining U.S. legitimacy, and extreme inequality, capital doesn’t seem to have as much use for the “libertarian” fig leaf (or the “limited government” fig leaf or even the “rule of law” one, etc.), the ridiculous rhetorical veneer associated with capitalism. Twenty-first century capitalism has reached a point where it can come out and say that capitalism and authoritarianism go together, and that together they’re good for order and prosperity. Poulantzas’s anticipation of authoritarian statism in State, Power, Socialism appears remarkably prescient given the paths capitalist states have taken since the book’s publication. He argued that advanced capitalist systems have a tendency to push beyond the limits of so-called liberal democracy to effectively deal with the unrelenting contradictions of capitalism. In periods of serious crisis, the liberal-democratic state’s reliance on notions of pluralism, democracy, civil liberties, and moderate reform becomes insufficient to maintain social order and continued capitalist rule and accumulation. Instead, states increasingly resort to more centralized, executive-driven governance, reinforced through repressive measures and diminished political pluralism. Poulantzas described authoritarian statism as the institutionalization of “a form of state power characterized by the concentration of power in the executive, the weakening of political pluralism, and the restructuring of dominant-class cohesion through administrative and coercive mechanisms.” This is not a total departure but a structural adaptation that reveals how capitalism and authoritarianism are deeply compatible: authoritarian statism functions as a necessary response to crises that liberal democracy can no longer manage, enabling the capitalist state to stabilize accumulation through intensified control.
We remain in desperate need of new ways of thinking about the state. A more accurate model of the state within our political and economic system is as a kind of private club or closely-held company, the purpose of which is to launder the wealth of the ruling class. It can’t meaningfully be separated from the glaring fact that it exists to grant them license, to give them rent streams from arbitrary privileges. The state seems like a free gift to criminals and thieves, but I think Althusser and Poulantzas showed that the situation is actually much worse than that.