In 2009, UC Berkeley Economics Professor and former Clinton adviser Brad DeLong took a pot shot at our David Harvey on his blog. Headlined ‘Department of “Huh?”’, and beginning “Why neoclassical economics is an absolutely wonderful thing”, the post quotes 11 straight paragraphs from a Harvey essay, which DeLong proceeds to ridicule.

For DeLong, the essay is contentless waffle. It strings together economic concepts without making an economic argument. He would call it “intellectual masturbation”, he writes, except that it “does not feel good at all”. Only in the eleventh paragraph does he find “the suggestion of a shadow of an argument”. Here Harvey argues that the US stimulus package is bound to fail because the deficit needs to be financed by foreign powers, and the amount of Treasury bonds it will be able to sell to the likes of the Chinese central bank will not fund a big enough stimulus. DeLong responds that this is a question that requires a theory of the bond market and interest rates, which Harvey does not provide: “The question is thus not can government deficit spending be financed… the question is at what interest rate will financial markets finance that deficit spending.” [DeLong, 2009]

[More: Zombie Marx and Modern Economics (pdf)]

My PhD thesis is now available here.

Abstract

This thesis traces the impact of inflation on the making of macroeconomic policy in Australia between the end of World War II and the mid-1980s. I take issue with accounts of policy change that focus primarily on ideological change on the part of policymakers. Instead, I present policy as strategic activity within a complex, evolving economic system which is not centred on policy, and in which, therefore, policy does not have a monopoly on initiative.

I draw on Marxian state theory and Tinbergian theory of economic policy to explore why counter-inflationary policy emerged as an imperative for the capitalist state and how it came to play a dominant role in organising macroeconomic policy in general. I also focus in detail on the development of central banking in Australia, drawing on post-Keynesian structuralist monetary theory. The body of the thesis is divided into two parts, one dealing with ‘the long 1950s’ and the other ‘the long 1970s’. Both are treated as periods of transition, rather than of stable policy regimes.

In the ‘long 1950s’ macroeconomic policy was brand new, and the authorities had to build an effective system of macroeconomic management, sometimes against the active opposition of other groups. A contradiction developed between full employment and price stability, and the latter was prioritised because of limits set by the balance-of-payments under the Bretton Woods international monetary system.

The ‘long 1970s’ was a period of crisis and distributional class conflict. The break-up of Bretton Woods and the movement towards flexible exchange rates changed the form of constraint but continued to impose a counter-inflationary imperative. Monetarism provided an organising and legitimating principle for extremely restrictive macroeconomic policy and the abandonment of full employment as a policy goal, even though policymakers were sceptical of its propositions. Finally, I discuss the movement towards deregulation as something which strengthened rather than undermined the central bank’s power to pursue monetary policy.

It is a little bright spot at the end of the penultimate, gloomiest chapter of Hobsbawm’s history of Marxism: at least the albatross of “really-existing socialism” might not hang around the neck of the latest generation to turn to Marx. “… [E]ven today only those in their thirties and above have any memory of the actual years of Cold War.” The idea that Marx was “the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists… essentially defenders of, if not participants in, terror and the KGB” was no more valid than “the thesis that all Christianity must logically and necessarily lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the glorification of free capitalist competition.” Most “really-existing communists” in the West had been critics of Stalinism since 1956 (yes, says Hobsbawm, who stayed in the British Communist Party into the 1980s, even “by implication” within Moscow-line parties). But the line that socialism meant Stalin and Mao was always an effective rhetorical strategy for anti-communists, always a way to change the subject whenever socialists were in the conversation. As the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward recede into history, surely the shadows they cast over the very idea of a post-capitalist society will lighten. [...]

I’ve had a lot going on since finishing the thesis – some tourism, some house moving, getting a proper job lecturing at Sydney Uni, and best of all getting ready for the arrival of my daughter. But I’m not planning on giving up on blogging. I now think, though, that political blogging is done better as part of a collective project rather than on an individual blog, especially one as low-intensity as this. I’ve promised to contribute to the excellent new Left Flank, and while I have yet to deliver, that’s where I’d like to put any Australian political-economic commentary. Here I plan to keep pottering along posting more of the demi-academic, semi-scholarly and quasi-theoretical stuff from time to time, like the Poulantzas material of the last few posts.

Sometime soon, anyway.

PS. I should say that despite Maps’ description I’m not really into crisis theory, I don’t think traditional Marxian crisis theory has been all that enlightening regarding the GFC, and that I agree with Panitch and Gindin that there are better things for socialists to do than predict the next crisis (or the indefinite extension of this one).

The average payout ratio is 70 per cent, 70 per cent of the $21 billion [profit the big four banks make] goes back into the community. There is a good story there.

- National Australia Bank chief executive Cameron Clyne to the Australian Financial Review, November 22, 2010 [Matthew Drummond: "Clyne turns on peers over banks row"]

It’s surely a sign of the regression of political discourse when a bank chief making a play for ‘the nice guy of banking’ title thinks the size of dividend payouts makes a good case for profits.

Bob Jessop’s book on Poulantzas [Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist theory and political strategy, 1985, Macmillan] helpfully summarises some of the early papers I can’t read as I don’t know French. There’s some useful background on his view of the law which is highly condensed in the translated papers. This, in particular, is useful in clarifying his view of the nature of the ‘internal’ logic of law discussed in the last post:

One of the most pervasive and fascinating influences within modern legal theory has been the neo-Kantian positivism of Hans Kelsen (and the so-called ‘Vienna School’) with its concept of a purely internal Normlogik. This argues that an effective legal order must be hierarchically unified under a fundamental legal norm (Grundnorm) and backed up by effective coercive sanctions. It also declares the state and law to be identical and insists that in any one society only one sovereign, coercive legal order is possible. Indeed Kelsen argued that in any real, ‘sociological’ state there will be many authorities, multitudinous relations of domination, numerous acts of commanding and obeying: only the unity of the legal order justifies us in considering the state as a single system of domination. For the same reason Kelsen denied that the state is a subject which exercises power – its power is simply that of a valid and effective legal order. At best he was prepared to concede that the machinery of state (‘the bureaucratic apparatus’) is the material personification of the broader formal legal order within a nation-state. He also suggested that the division between public and private law is ideological and simply serves to dissimulate private law as located beyond politics…

Poulantzas accepted that this formal, logical account of law holds for the modern legal system. He denied that it is valid for all legal systems… Thus he attempted to locate this Normlogik historically without denying its effectivity. He suggested that the development of a legal system with a distinctive, formally rational, rechtsstaatlich character can be explained in terms of its correspondence to a distinctive mode of production. At the same time he tried to explain how the modern legal system with its distinctive juridical logic helps to determine the operation of law, economy, and civil society. In this way Poulantzas hoped to break with the unresolved problem of Kelsen’s pure theory of law, namely, the source of the Grundnorm from which all other principles can be derived through a process of legal reasoning. Thus, while recognising the distinctive ‘internal’ structure of the modern legal system, he also offered an ‘external’ account of its determination. [p. 45]

This idea of the law as the unifier of the modern state – or in fact that the state is nothing but the system of law and the institutions constituted by it – is an interesting one. Though of course, it is only true in the legal sense – it is the legal definition of the state. Poulantzas’s point is that the shape of the state and law is determined as much by the shape and pressure of other social domains external to it as by its internal legal principles.

The law is in one sense the most pervasive element of the state, reaching into all corners of society – a ‘witness’ in court can retrospectively make state power present at any site. But at the same time, the law limits the state: one index of modernity is the binding of sovereignty by the ‘rule of law’ – a point stressed by Pashukanis.

Nicos Poulantzas in his final book, 1978:

The constructivist image of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, which is supposed to allow the determining role of the economic sphere to be visualised after a fashion, cannot in fact provide a correct representation of the articulation of social reality, nor therefore of that determining role itself. It has proved to be disastrous in more ways than one, and there is everything to be gained from not relying on it. For my own part, I have long ceased to use it in analysis of the State. [Poulantzas, 1978: State, Power, Socialism, Verso, p. 16]

Nicos Poulantzas in 1964, in the earliest paper that has been translated into English:

When they involve the superstructures, as in the case of art, law and the state, or morality, the most universal-concrete, general-particular – in short, simple-complex – concepts cannot be directly referred to the base: they can only be captured by preliminary research into their historical relations with the base. What analysis can set out from is, on the one hand, the specificity of the superstructure in general and its fundamental dialectical division – for it refers to a historically determinant division – from the base; and, on the other, the specificity of a certain law or state, a certain art, a certain morality, situated in time and space. [Poulantzas, 1964: "Marxist examination of the contemporary state and law and the question of the alternative", in James Martin (ed.), 2008, The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, law and the state, translated by Gregory Elliot, Verso, p. 25]

Raymond Williams once wrote that “any Marxian theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure”, even though “from a strictly theoretical point of view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to begin.” [“Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory”, New Left Review, I/82, 1973: p. 3] Poulantzas seems to have felt similarly obliged in his early work, and a similar discomfort is evident in the shifty, hedging, ill-defined terminology that make it unclear  in places (“universal-concrete, general-particular – in short, simple-complex”?!).

The first two of his papers I will deal with – “Marxist examination of the contemporary state and law and the question of the ‘alternative’” (1964) and “Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and law” (1965, also in the Martin ed. Verso 2008 collection) – are pervaded by the problem of honouring the letter of the base-determines-superstructure metaphor while subverting its spirit. In my view, the centrality of the metaphor within some strands of Marxism is the blowing up of a single paragraph far beyond all proportion in Marx’s work. But, as Raymond Williams argued, because of its importance to the tradition, if you ditch everything that employs it, a lot of baby will go out with the bathwater. In any case, it has been deployed with completely different meanings and emphases: the determination of the superstructure by the base may highlight the division between the two spheres, i.e., their relative autonomy from one another, or it may emphasise the determination, reducing the ‘superstructure’ to a reflection of the base. The metaphor, in itself, does not say very much.

In Poulantzas’s case, from the beginning he uses it to emphasise the autonomy of superstructure – and the law in particular – from the economic ‘base’. The early work can be read, then, in light of his later escape from and rejection of the metaphor, and I will trace this thread through his work as I progress.

In the 1964 essay he leaves the terms undefined, working instead by criticising earlier Marxian accounts of law, and thereby building a negative picture of his own view from which we are left to infer the meaning of his concepts. He begins with Reisner and Vyshinsky (the latter best known as Prosecutor General during Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s and his related jurisprudential principle that ‘confession of the accused is the queen of evidence’). He agrees with their definition of the law as a “conceptual ensemble of behavioural norms and rules” – that is, it expresses ‘what should be’ socially to reinforce the practices that reproduce the base (alongside other superstructural domains such as morality, religion, the state and “even art (albeit in a different sense)” [p. 26]). But he charges them with reading the ‘what should be’ directly from the interests of the capitalist class. Their picture of capitalist law is (at least in Poulantzas’s telling) an uncomplicated instrument by which capital maintains its domination.

I have no problem with his rejection of such a view, but the precise argument is unclear because his own conception of the structures is not spelled out. He argues that Reisner and Vyshinsky misconceive the relationship between “the juridical-state sphere” and the economic base:

Establishing an external, direct relationship, in the indicated sense, between law and the state and class struggle, which (let us not forget) is situated on the level of social relations of production – not on the economic level of forces and modes of production – this conception shuts off access to the economic level. [p. 27]

The criticism of an ‘external’ relationship between law/state and class struggle is well and good, but how does this sit with the apparent drawing of a firm distinction between ‘social relations of production’ and ‘the economic level of forces and modes of production’? The ‘let us not forget’ implies a confidence that readers within his milieu (this was originally published, by the way, in Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes) would know exactly what was meant by the distinction – but it is not clear to me. I am sympathetic to Derek Sayer’s interpretation that ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ of production are different ‘cuts’ from the whole economic structure rather than ontologically separate spheres. [The Violence of Abstraction, 1987] My best guess is that Poulantzas means to distinguish between ownership relations on the one hand, and the market system of production on the other.

In contrast, he argues that the legal superstructure crystallises certain normative values – i.e. of ‘what should be’ – from the practices which make the economic base function in the way that it does. The owners of the means of production benefit from the functioning of that system, simply because of their position within it; further state/legal intervention in their interests is unnecessary to make them the ‘ruling class’, and in fact the crystallisation of the values of the base in laws and state activity may appear to conflict with their interests in particular cases.

Poulantzas then argues that Stuchka and Pashukanis make a different error. By focusing on the shaping of capitalist law by the practices of commodity exchange, they relate law to the base in a more general way, without a presumption that it is an emanation of the interests of the capitalist class. But according to Poulantzas, “they reduce law and the state to the base. They disregard their specific character as a coherent system of norms and thus completely ignore their relative autonomy.” [p. 28] This is tempting, he says, because class relations of production are defined in terms of property ownership, so that law might seem to be immediately part of the base. But he objects to the idea of one-way causation from the base to the legal/state superstructure.

This is the main thrust of what I take to be Poulantzas’s positive argument: that the legal form by which the norms guiding and restricting some aspects of social practice cannot but affect the norms themselves, and thereby practice. This is suggested in the quote at the beginning of this post: “on the one hand, the specificity of the superstructure in general and its fundamental dialectical division – for it refers to a historically determinant division – from the base; and, on the other, the specificity of a certain law or state, a certain art, a certain morality, situated in time and space”. Values arise from social practice, and social practice is in turn guided by norms deriving from values. The norms guiding practice, and thus underpinning a given social structure, may be moral or religious norms, or they may be legal norms – and it is interesting, and makes a difference, that the rise of capitalism was associated with a great expansion and sharpening of the legal sphere – ethical and religious norms alone were incapable on their own to sustain. It makes a difference because the legal form has a logic all its own, which cannot be reduced to determination by other social spheres: e.g., it entails consistency within the system of laws, involves concepts of legal personhood, political soveriegnty, posits judicial institutions etc. (Incidentally, Pashukanis’s General Theory of Law and Marxism [1924] is brilliant on the internal logic of capitalist law and its partial determination by commodity exchange, and I think Poulantzas’s criticism is a little unfair.) The law transforms values simply by giving them juridical form.

The legal sphere is shaped partially ‘externally’ by the values (needs?) arising from the base, and partially ‘internally’ by the legal form. Specifically, Poulantzas sees the structure of contemporary capitalist economic practices as generating the values of liberty, equality, calculability and predictability, while the legal form itself shapes these values to generate norms that are general, abstract, formal and strictly codified.

How exactly the base generates these norms is unclear. Functionalism is implied, but not of a simple kind. In the argument against Vyshinsky and Reisner, he accepts that the law and other parts of the superstructural ‘normative ensemble’ express “what should be socially” – but that this is not necessarily “what the bourgeoisie wants”. Why the values of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ rather than ‘obedience’ and ‘stratification’, which are certainly functional for the capitalist economy? It is not set out explicitly, but it seems that class conflict plays a role here in generating compromise values, and Poulantzas argues that the values are capable of being turned against the capitalist social structure – that ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ can be footholds for socialist strategy in the political sphere:

…in the process of production, the democratic values of real, concrete liberty and equality – this particular expression of the generic socialisation of man – are increasingly experienced as a pressing lack, because they are a lack that can be made good. And if the hegemonic organisation is also a strategic channeling of this ‘material force‘; and if this channelling consists in proposing models to this already existing positivity at the global political level – i.e. historically objectifying it by suggesting objectives that suit it… It is in the concrete positivity of working-class praxis that its positive political realisation must be sought, while taking account of the mediations requried to transpose a democratic economy into a revolutionary political democracy. (p. 45)

(Yes, the style is somewhat tortuous.)

Elsewhere, in a footnote, Poulantzas suggests that it is not so much that the base directly generates the value-content of the ‘normative ensemble’ that guides its practices. Rather, it determines its limits, because dysfunctional norms will be unsustainable:

For Marx… a false ideology or a superstructural system that distorts the base… remains wholly real (real-ideal) can exist ontologically as such, and possesses a historical effectivity, while not being ‘adequate’ - monism of contradiction – to the real-material. Precisely to the extent that they are not adequate, they are axiologically invalid. In effect, although genetically ‘grounded’, as historical values, in the base… they do not, or they do no longer, conform to the true meaning immanent in the real-material. Thus they are not – or are no longer – legitimated and validated by those material realities of the base that structure, at this particular moment, its historical meaning. [p. 415n]

It should be clear that Poulantzas is coming from a highly abstract philosophical position, and it makes for uneasy social science. His academic background up to this point is in jurisprudence. This paper is unsatisfactory in many ways. But it is Poulantzas’s starting point, not the end-point – and the direction in which he is straining against the traditional ‘base-determines-superstructure’ metaphor is the right one.

Just about everybody works in services these days – more than 85 per cent of the employed workforce. That share has risen fairly steadily since the end of World War II, from just over 55 per cent. In the post-war period the growth of the service sector picked up the slack from the declining rate of growth in agriculture; since the late 1960s it has taken over from manufacturing too. In absolute terms, this is a story of service sector expansion rather than decline elsewhere: net employment growth since the war has been almost all about services. Mining has remained steady at around 1 per cent of employment.

When it comes to output shares rather than employment, the picture looks different. Manufacturing and agriculture shares in nominal value added are about the same as their shares of employment. But mining’s share is much bigger, at 7 per cent over the past decade, while services’ share is lower at 78 per cent. Mining is extremely capital intensive, and hence accounts for a much bigger share of value added and investment than its share in employment would suggest, while services tend to be more labour intensive.

When a sectoral category makes up around four-fifths of the economy, it loses much of its usefulness as a category. Connolly and Lewis break services down into five sub-sectors, and the data begin to get more interesting. The distribution and utilities sector – i.e., services related to moving and selling goods, energy and communications – has declined in its employment share since the 1960s. (It would be interesting to see a further breakdown of a category that includes everything from wastewater to supermarkets and internet service providers.) The employment share of social services enjoyed a great leap in the 1970s – and especially the Whitlam years – from around 13 per cent to 20 per cent, and climbed more slowly over the next three decades to reach 25 per cent, to become the largest service sector today. This includes education and health care, public and private, as well as public administration, police and so on.

Business services (including finance, insurance and real estate) have grown more steadily, but especially rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s before stabilising at around 17 per cent of employment over the 2000s. Personal services – restaurants, hotels, cinemas, etc. – had a modest burst of expansion in employment share in the 1980s and early 1990s, taking them from a steady 10 per cent to a steady 12-13 per cent since. Construction’s share has remained between 6 and 9 per cent since the 1970s, though responsible for much of the growth in the share of services as a whole over the 2000s.

Although these shifts are long-run trends, they have run faster at some times than others. The most interesting thing Connolly and Lewis do with this data is to generate ‘structural change indices’ to show the waves of change. These indices measure the average movement in industry and state shares of nominal and real output, employment and investment, to give a simple indicator of structural change over the previous five years. Such a measure is only as meaningful of the categories into which the industry structure is divided – it clearly doesn’t capture movements within the categories. The figure shows two major waves of structural change since the 1960s – one during the 1970s, and one in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (Note that the indices are backward-looking in that each year’s figures compare the average shares of the previous five years with the average shares of the five years before that.)

In terms of real output and employment, the last decade has apparently been more structurally stable than the previous three decades, though not as stable as the 1960s. Things look different in nominal terms, largely because of the effect of booming commodity prices on the value of mining output. Connolly and Lewis expect the commodities price boom to have a delayed impact on the structure real output through the great increase in mining investment over the last half of the 2000s.

The structural change index for employment shows only one wave of accelerated change, rather than the two apparent with output, peaking at the turn of the 1980s, though never returning to the low level of the early 1960s. The 1970s were, of course, the decade that ended full employment. Connolly and Lewis make no connections between the structural shifts they chart and macroeconomic developments, but there would certainly be connections to draw. The reconfiguration of the last quarter of the 20^th century was far from painless: manufacturing job growth collapsed long before services growth replaced them, and even in the 2000s unemployment remained well above that of the postwar period.

Connolly and Lewis include ‘economic reform’ among the factors behind the structural changes – in particular, deregulation of service industries and reduction of trade protection. It would be wrong to overemphasise the impact of policy, however – it probably had more impact on the timing of the ‘waves’ than on the long-run processes themselves. The growth of low labour cost manufacturing in East Asia inevitably undercut the profitability of many kinds of manufacturing here, while the proportion of incomes spent on consumer services has long shown a tendency to rise with those incomes.

Although mining accounts directly for a small proportion of output and a tiny proportion of employment in Australia, it is now responsible for more than half the value of exports. The conceptual framework used by Connolly and Lewis has its limitations in understanding the meaning of mining. First, as they note themselves, the sectoral break-down they use misses the cross-sectoral linkages through which mining activity has its multiplied effects: through services – especially construction – and manufacturing oriented towards the mining industry. The statistics on the inter-state shifts in population and output towards Western Australia and Queensland capture these effects of the mining boom better.

Second, to talk of ‘the structure of the Australian economy’ may give a misleading impression of the coherence of the economic system at a national level. To what extent does it make sense to think of mining exports as ‘national’ exports, when they are undertaken by multinationals funded primarily by international capital, employing relatively few people here? In the days of a fixed exchange rate, with foreign exchange centralised in the hands of the Reserve Bank, it was more natural to think of exports earning the currency needed to pay for imports. Now, there is no centralised nexus of international trade. This is not to say that mining is an enclave completely isolated from the mainly urban economy of the Southeast, but that the links are complex. Perhaps the most direct effect of the mining boom on the living standards of Sydneysiders and Melburnians comes through its effect on the exchange rate, cheapening foreign goods and services. The tax take from mining is another – and still a relatively undeveloped resource.

Pic borrowed from the linked article - Mikey Hamer/Lucien Alperstein

A cool piece in Cyclic Defrost about the temporary, nomadic venues of Sydney’s out music. One of the places mentioned is a few blocks from my house, it was awesome to stumble upon it one night. You could buy beer and red wine at more-or-less cost price and bands and audience sat around on the same concrete floor. A good proportion of the audience would be on the line-up at some point. Following the links from flyer to flyer, I took my visiting brother to another place in Newtown, which turned out to be someone’s flat. “It’s like they forgot everything that makes music good,” he said, “but it’s interesting to see the kind of people that get into it.” Actually a lot of the music is pretty good, and although Sydney has a reputation as a musical wasteland it seems to me like the good swampy kind of wasteland and no longer a desert.

Nicos Poulantzas in days before smoking in the office was structurally selected against

Now that I have some spare time on my hands, one of my medium-term projects is to do a proper engagement with Poulantzas, with the aim of sorting out my own theory of the capitalist state, and of economic policy in particular. I draw on Poulantzas a bit in my thesis, borrowing useful ideas without dealing with his vision as a whole. Now I want to go back and sort out exactly what I think. Poulantzas is one of those theorists who is incredibly helpful even when I disagree with points or even think the framing itself is misguided. He asks the right kinds of questions, and shows what a theory of the capitalist state has to do, even when his own particular constructions (which he kept radically revising throughout his short career) are problematic. Thirty or forty years on, he is still the person to engage with in Marxian state theory – a tradition that reached its high-water mark in the late 1970s, and never died but faded away.

Poulantzas is also difficult to read, and I don’t think it’s the translation. He adopts the language of other theoretical systems – first Sartre’s, then Althusser’s – of which he simply assumes knowledge. So there are a lot of sidetracks to do in dealing with him. On the other hand, once the language is understood, he is a very clear and systematic writer. And the fact that most of his exposition takes place through engagement with other writers is a good thing – in dealing with Poulantzas, you are also dealing with the Marxian ‘classics’, with Gramsci, Sartre, Althusser, Ralph Miliband, Perry Anderson, and Foucault.

The book Paradigm Lost: state theory reconsidered, edited by Aronowitz and Bratsis [2002], has some great chapters on why Poulantzian state theory – along with the work of Miliband, which I’ll also discuss – receded as a research program and why it deserves to be revived. (It also makes clear why Poulantzas and Miliband – their names linked mainly by the polemics they directed against one another – can be seen as part of the same program.) Leo Panitch, in his chapter, “The impoverishment of state theory”, stresses that there was substance and systematicity to the state theory of the 1970s that was new to both social science and the Marxian tradition, especially in its attempts to deal with modern advaced capitalist democracies:

It needs to be stressed today that we did not at all see ourselves as falling back on a prefabricated Marxism; the new theory of the state had Marxist roots but it was founded on the notion that nothing like an elaborated and coherent theory of the capitalist state (in contrast with the complex array of concepts and tendential laws that constituted Marxian economics and historical materialism) had been fashioned either by Marx himself or by his successors—up to and including Gramsci. And the new theory was concerned to displace the narrowly ideological official Marxism of the Communist parties. [p. 90]

My plan, then, is to work through Poulantzas’s major essays and books and some of their reference points – with particular attention to his theory’s relevance for the development of economic policy in the twentieth century. Economics is sometimes said to be a weak point for Poulantzas – but that gives me something to do.