Goran Therborn NLB What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules? State Apparatuses and State Power under Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism © NLB, 1978 / '�, I NLB, 7 Carlisl�.S!r���. London W. 1 Filmset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Lowe & Brydone Printers Ltd, Thetford, Norfolk ISBN 902308 39 4 Contents Science and Politics -A Foreword II Part One The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Class Character of the State Apparatus I The Problem and the Q!Iestions 23 The Dictatorship of the Proletariat: the Words and the Concept 23 An Analytical Model 34 A New Approach to the Study of Organizations 37 Modes of Production and Types of Class Relations 42 Dynamics, Temporalities and Contradictions 45 II (Provisional) Answers 49 Inputs into the State Technologies of Organization 49 Tasks 63 Personnel 73 Energy 85 Processes of Transformation The Handling of Tasks 87 The Patterning of Personnel 90 The Transformation of Energy 96 Outputs 97 Tasks I: Foreign Policy 97 Tasks II: Domestic Policy I02 Personnel I: State Personnel in Inter-State Relations I04 Personnel II : State versus Non-State Personnel IOS Energy Outflow II4 The Eff ects of Technology II7 A Note on Petty-Bourgeois Effects on the State I20 Was Lenin Right? A First Conclusion 122 Part Two State Power- On the Dialectics of Class Rule 1 Class, State, and Power I29. A Line of Demarcation 129 ...and Its Rationale I32 Excursus for Sociologists: Max Weber on Class and Power I38 2 Finding the Ruling Class: Defining the Class Character of State Power I# An Analytical Schema I45 State Power and State Apparatus 148 Definitions and Procedures I53 3 Determinants of State Power: the State in the Reproduction of Society 162 The State and the Economy I64 The Three Modes of Ideological Interpellation I7I The Mechanisms of Reproduction I73 Loss of State Power 176 4 Wielding State Power I: Formats of Representation 180 The Ruling Class Problematic x8o Formats of Representation 183 Main Bourgeois Formats of Representation: I85 I Capitalist Institutionalization 185 2 Notables I87 3 The Bourgeois Party I90 4 Statism I96 5 Movement-Statism 205 6 The Party of Labour 209 5 Wielding State Power II: Processes of Mediation 219 1 Repression 220 2 Displacement (Canalization) 224 3 Extraction 226 4 Co-optation 228 5 Judicature 234 6 Support 236 Summing-Up 241 Part Three Taking State Power fr om Advanced Capitalism: Some Reflections on Socialism and Democracy I The History of the Present 247 2 The Future as History Index Science and Politics - A Foreword Two concerns are intimately interwoven in this book: one of empirical social theory and one of the practice of revolutionary politics in the advanced capitalist countries. The first essay, dealing with the state apparatus, owes its conception to the 22nd Congress of the French Communist Party, at which the concept of the dictator­ ship of the proletariat was deleted from the statutes. But it goes beyond the framework of the political debate that accompanied and followed that event. Entering the field of organization theory, it seeks to elucidate the forms of state organization characteristic of feudal society, the classical and modem Western world, and the contemporary regimes of Eastern Europe. The experiences of twentieth-century dictatorship may provide good reasons for abandonment of the bewildering distinctions be­ tween democratic and dictatorial dictatorship called for by classical Marxist-Leninist discourse. However, the concept of the dictator­ ship of the proletariat was centralto the thought of Marx and Lenin, and designates, together with its corollaries, a crucial object that cannot be discarded in a facile manner. Above all, it points to the organizationof the state as a decisive manifestation of definitesocial relations of class domination. To empirical social theory this raises the question: how does the very organization of the state apparatus express and reproduce class relations? To practical revolutionary politics it poses the problem: how should a socialist state in the West be organized so as to reproduce the domination of the pro­ letariat and allied classes and strata of the working population, and so as to further the development of a classless society? Such diffi­ culties can hardly be overcome by reference to conceptual analyses made by Lenin, however penetrating they may have been. Nor is it 12 helpful simply to give up the terminology of Marx and Lenin with­ out fully confronting the underlying problematic. To a certain degree, the origins and development of the second essay are opposite in character. It grew out of dissatisfaction with the academic debate raging within Anglo-Saxon _political science and sociology- a debate about whether pluralism or a power elite should be seen as the dominant force of modern western politics. A first version was presented two years ago at the annual conference of the British Sociological Association. Further elaboration was inspired by current political discussion of the mass base of bourgeois rule. How has the tiny bourgeoisclass, or the even smaller leading fraction of it, been able to rule in democratic forms marked by legal freedom of opinion-making and equal and universal suffrage? This problem has been posed, yet hardly answered by (among others) Louis Althusser, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and supporters of the tradi­ tional Gramscian focus on hegemony. In attempting to provide the initial elements of a solution, I have presented an overview of the political modalities of class rule. The analysis undertaken here is also related to an essay which is not included in this v:olume: 'The Rule of Capital and theRise of Democracy'.1 The political conjuncture in which this book has' been written is significantly characterized by the fact that advances towards socialism have again become a concrete possibility in certain developed capitalist societies: in particular, France and Italy. The strategic debates and programmes appearing in these and other countries have fired the keen but largely stereotyped interest of the mass media in something called 'Eurocommunism'. The third text contains some reflections on the way in which the present political constellation has arisen, and especially on the content, problems and prospects of the democratic-socialist strategy. This work is a collection of essays rather than a book divided into chapters. But the three parts should be read in the light of one another. For example, the concept of organizational technology developedin the first essay bears up:on the operation of the processes of state mediation conceptualized in the second. The mechanisms of reproduction, formats of ruling class representation and processes of mediation are not only inter-related to one another in the exercise of state power; they are also operative in the reproduction of the state apparatus- a task which is central to the maintenance of state 1 New Left Review No. 103 (1977). Science and Politics IJ power. The strategic problems raised in the last essay are largely based upon the provisional findings of the two preceding ones. The range of topics discussed- from the state of medieval feudal­ ism to that of the contemporary USSR, from Max Weber's sociology of bureaucracy and classes to Western Communist strategy- will no doubt appear to many as foolhardy, and perhaps even fatal. How­ ever, in one important sense, the investigation has a rather limited scope: it is intended neither as a ready-made historical analysis nor as a compilation of recipes for revolution, but as a framework for empirical analysis and serious political discussion. For both political and scientific reasons, I have tried to keep one eye constantly open to problems of empirical investigation and corroboration. Regard­ less of the value of this particular attempt, the present domination of research by non-empirical theory and narrow empiricism obliges historians and empirical social scientists to adopt as their own the words of Danton and Lenin: 'Audacity, audacity, still more audacity!' This volume advances a number of positions which will arouse scientific as well as political controversy. But it is written for readers of diverse experience and opinion, for political comrades of different organizations and academic colleagues belonging to various disci­ plines and schools-in fact, for everybody interested in social analysis and politics. It draws heavily on existing theory, research and politics, both non-Marxist and Marxist. As far as possible, I have tried to come forward with positive alternatives, rather than purely negative polemics. The terms 'empirical social theory' and 'social science' are neither cautious paraphrases nor synonyms for historical materialism, although, as I have argued in my Science, Class and Society, the latter is the basic, although not the ori.ly science of society.2 Arising out of a break with German philosophy, Marxism defined itself as an empirical science of society and social history committed to a revolutionary standpoint. But since the classical age of Lenin, Kautsky and their contemporaries, Marxist theory in Europe has been mainly philosophical in character and subject to the domina­ tion of professional philosophers. Consequently, the relation of philosophy and politics has been more central to modem European Marxists than that of science and politics. This paradoxical evolution of Marxism - from philosophy to 2 NLB, London 1976. 14 science and then back to philosophy- is described by Perry Ander­ son, with characteristic erudition and brilliance, in Considerations on Western Marxism.3 However, our understanding of the con­ temporary history and future prospects of Marxist theory may be assisted by a few supplementary observations. It is true, of course, that since about 1920 the basic determinant of the trajectory of European Marxism has been the defeat and retrenchment of the revolutionary labour movement in the West, coupled with a dearly­ bought victory in the East that was defended by authoritarian means.