View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by CommonKnowledge Pacific University CommonKnowledge Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Faculty Scholarship (CAS) 2017 Writing the Revolution : Poulantzas and the Political Project Christopher D. Wilkes Pacific University Recommended Citation Wilkes, Christopher D., "Writing the Revolution : Poulantzas and the Political Project" (2017). Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work. 5. https://commons.pacificu.edu/sasw/5 This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship (CAS) at CommonKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work by an authorized administrator of CommonKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Writing the Revolution : Poulantzas and the Political Project Description 'Writing the Revolution: Poulantzas and the Political Project' is an extended unpublished monograph on the theoretical work of Nicos Poulantzas. In a shortened version it came to be two chapters from 'The State: a Biography', forthcoming, from Cambridge Scholars Press. Rights Terms of use for work posted in CommonKnowledge. This book chapter is available at CommonKnowledge: https://commons.pacificu.edu/sasw/5 Writing the Revolution : Poulantzas and the Political Project. 1. Context and Biography. There is an unmistakable sense of urgency in the writing of Nicos Poulantzas. Curiously, he was not writing to get tenure – the universe he inhabited was entirely different. He wrote from his experience in Greece, as well as the setting he found himself in Paris., with an intent to understand how revolution could happen, and what might bring it about. Such reasoning seems antique and out of place from the perspective of 21st century late capitalism. But the world in which Poulantzas grew up was, in some ways, entirely different. While many had blithely assumed that, with the overthrow of Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese Empire, that an era dominated by fascist dictatorships had come to an end, no-one raised in Greece after World War Two could reasonably entertain such a view. Indeed, dictatorship remained in the heart of Europe well after 1945, sporadically in Greece, but consistently in Portugal and Spain. In Portugal, a military dictatorship came to power in 1926, and lasted, in various forms, until 1974. In Spain, a long and bitter civil war had resulted in the rise of General Francisco Franco in 1939, who then maintained his power until 1974. In Greece, the 4th of August Régime had been established as an authoritarian government from 1936 until 1941, and from 1967 until 1974 ‘The Régime of the Colonels’ came to power, which was, if not formally fascist, then certainly did meet all the criteria for a dictatorship. These three active dictatorships, which soon became the focus of attention for Poulantzas,1 brought an immediacy to his writings that was compelling. In the introduction to The Crisis of the Dictatorships, he comments : The past two years in Europe have witnessed a series of events of considerable significance: the overthrow of the military dictatorships in Portugal and Greece; and the accelerated decay of the Franco régime in Spain, so that its overthrow is now also on the historical agenda. Both the path taken by the fall of the Portuguese and Greek dictatorships, and the process now under way in Spain, raise a number of important questions which are still far from being resolved. The basic pivot in these is as follows. The Portuguese and Greek regimes were evidently not over- thrown by an open and frontal movement of the popular masses in insurrection, nor by a foreign military intervention, as was the case with Italian fascism and Nazism in Germany. What then are the 1 See especially The Crisis of the Dictatorships, New Left Books, 1976, London. (First published by Maspero in Paris in 1975) The earlier Fascism and Dictatorship text, which was published in 1970 ( Maspero, Paris) looks back to Italian and German fascism, whereas The Crisis of the Dictatorships writes about contemporary conditions as Poulantzas found them in the mid-1970’s. The continuing existence of fascism and these three dictatorships leads Poulantzas to take up many of the same themes that had concerned Gramsci. Indeed, there are many references to Grasmci in Poulantzas’s writing. Poulantzas was criticised by Althusser for his Gramscian tendencies. The connections between the two are inescapable. factors that determined their overthrow, and what form has the intervention of the popular masses taken in this conjuncture?2 Poulantzas was in the middle of these struggles, and the intensity of his interest could not be clearer. We must remember how Poulantzas came to be writing these books. He had been born in Athens in 1936, and was a child during the Second World War. He was born into a prominent Greek family. He came to maturity in Greece during the 1950’s. He moved to France when he was 25 in 1961. James Martin3 usefully highlights the key biographical elements of this period : start here. Poulantzas was born in Athens on 21 September 1936. He grew to adolescence during a turbulent period which encompassed the authoritarian regime of General Ioannis Metaxas in the late 1930s, followed by the Nazi puppet regime during the war, the civil war of 1946-49 and the Western-backed, conservative democracy of the 1950s … Graduating in law from the University of Athens in 1957 and, following compulsory military service, he set off in 1960 to undertake doctoral studies in German legal philosophy in Munich. That decision was soon aborted, however, and Poulantzas relocated to Paris, the home of a large Greek diaspora that included figures such as Kostas Axelos, Cornelius Castoriadis and other exiled left-wing intellectuals. Poulantzas enrolled as a teaching assistant at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne and continued his research on law, submitting a mémoire de doctorat in 1961 on natural law theory in Germany after the Second World War. By 1964 he had completed his doctoral thesis, published in the following year as his first book, Nature des choses et droit: essai sur la dialectique du fait et de la valeur. Poulantzas came from an academic background. His father, Aristedes Poulantzas, was a ‘forensic graphologist’ and a ‘leading figure in Greek legal establishment’.4 His mother, according to Jessop, was a traditional woman who ran the house and stayed at home. He was a brilliant student, destined, one imagines, to go far from an early age : His secondary schooling was undertaken at an experimental school, the Peiramaticon Gymnasium, attached to the University of Athens, and at the local Institut Francais,̧ where he studied for the Baccalaureate. He had already acquired fluency in the French tongue through private lessons. He graduated first among Greek students of the 'Bac' in his year and obtained 'very good' in both the general examination and the second, philosophical part.5 There is no full-length biography of Poulantzas available in English as far as can be established. Bob Jessop has perhaps the most detailed account of these early days.6 Poulantzas was an early believer in socialism – where precisely these ideas came from is unclear. Liam O’Ruairc reports that his family were major landowners, and that his father was a senior legal official in the ‘Régime of the Colonels’.7 Perhaps, though, his family’s involvement in this notoriously autocratic régime was instrumental in shaping his thinking – this certainly seems plausible. In any event, it is clear that Poulantzas completed his early training in law in 1957.8 Jessop’s account tells us that, in line with many young Greek intellectuals, disaffection with Greek politics and with Greek intellectual life led 2 The Crisis of the Dictatorships, op. cit., (now referred to as CD), page 7. This is the second of his books on fascism. It is telling to read the tone of this text. It is cautious, lacking any intellectual hubris, or any sense that a final analysis has been made. The introduction emphasises the preliminary nature of the remarks. He calls the work only an essay, even though it runs for 162 pages. He also ends the introduction by admitting he has had a change of mind since he wrote Fascism and Dictatorship, not just because conditions have changed, but also because his views have altered. 3 James Martin (editor), The Poulantzas Reader ; Marxism, Law and the State. Verso, London and New York, 2008. 4 These words come from Bob Jessop’s Marxist Theory and Political Strategy, Palgrave, 1985, London, page 6. 5 Ibid., page 6. 6 Op. cit. Much of this material is based on Jessop’s introduction, from his 1985 book, pages 3-24. 7 See footnote 1, Introduction. 8 Jessop, page 7. 2 them to seek training elsewhere, and he followed many of his contemporaries in moving to Germany, and then, very quickly, to Paris. During this time, he was clearly affected by the leftist currents flowing through the intellectual sphere, and in its early manifestation, this infatuation led him to Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and existentialism.9 It is also fairly clear that Poulantzas exhibited some relatively orthodox male attitudes towards women, and spent much of his time in romantic entanglements, a trend that was to carry through to his life in Paris, and on into his marriage to Annie Leclerc.10 In Paris, he did his first post-graduate thesis on a legal topic, and his legal training seemed a useful precursor to wider concerns, not just with law, but with the broader apparatus of the State. His first major piece of graduate research was on ‘The Rebirth of Natural Law in Germany after the Second World War’,11 followed by his doctoral dissertation entitled ‘The Nature of Things and Law : an essay on the dialectic of fact and value’.12 Poulantzas, who was now teaching law at the University Pantheon-Sorbonne, was becoming heavily involved in both the politics and in the thinking of left intellectuals in Paris in the early 1960’s, and this could only mean Sartrean existentialism.13 Sartre was a dominant figure of the left during this period.