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The one high brow European Marxist who is worth reading would be Nicos Poulantzas for how he conceptualized capitalism as a system that is ever evolving, how class position is structually determined by systemic oppression, and how the state is less an organ and more a terrain.
Skip Althusser unless you’re a sociology major, skip Lukacs unless you’re a philosophy major, and skip Dunayevskaya unless you want to be a European chauvinist. Poulantzas may write in technical prose a but it’s very relevant material to read.
He studied law. As such he saw capitalism and imperialism from the point of view of power relations and politics. Just make sure you read Sakai, Du Bois, Fanon, et cetera to get the big picture because on his own he is just an upscale Althusser.
He offered a nice Marxist framework for a more modern outlook that didn’t hold to old campist dogma, avoided the most serious pitfalls of European Marxism, and was more complete than Althusser’s framework.
Here is a brief explanation of a few of his technical terms:
Structural Class Determinations: The social relations that determine class position. Race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, et cetera are all factors that determine class position.
Structural Class Determinations: The social relations that determine class position. Race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, et cetera are all factors that determine class position.
Polarization: The process by which a social class will become polarized between a more ‘proletarian’ and a more ‘bourgeois’ fraction. In layman’s terms this means that those with social privilege tend to have higher economic and social mobility than those without.
Class fractions: The parts of a social class with different interests and different economic and social positions. Classes are social groupings that are not homogeneous at all.
Example: Often the bourgeoisie are only united insofar as they want to keep state power.
Example: Often the bourgeoisie are only united insofar as they want to keep state power.
New petit bourgeoisie: A group of highly educated white collar professionals who do not employ wage labor but have a high position in the labor aristocracy, and as such are functionally petit bourgeois in nature. They produce no surplus value whatsoever.
Periodization: How capitalism adapts to changing social and political conditions.
Example: We are seeing now how COVID-19 has forced capitalism to adapt to survive via more automation and cutting of jobs, along with more bureaucratic centralization.
Example: We are seeing now how COVID-19 has forced capitalism to adapt to survive via more automation and cutting of jobs, along with more bureaucratic centralization.
Important points to consider when reading Poulantzas:
- Multiple modes of production can exist in a social formation at once.
- Different forms of capitalism can exist simultaneously and compete with each other, such as monopoly capitalism competing with more local capitalism.
- Multiple modes of production can exist in a social formation at once.
- Different forms of capitalism can exist simultaneously and compete with each other, such as monopoly capitalism competing with more local capitalism.
- The state is not a set of organs of power, but the entire terrain of class struggle.
- Ideological state apparatuses can be repressive in nature, such as systems of school discipline utilizing police on campus.
- Ideological state apparatuses can be repressive in nature, such as systems of school discipline utilizing police on campus.
- The school is not the main ideological state apparatus unless you’re a student or an academic. It can also be the trade union, the media itself, et cetera depending on your class position and your relationship to labor and capital.
- There are multiple repressive state apparatuses that have ideological underpinnings, such as how the military of imperialist countries convinces itself that it is in the right when plundering and genociding the global south.
Anyway, this was a long thread and I don’t know if any of you even care to read it, but I just thought I would put the information out there since Poulantzas gets so little attention.
I usually don’t do this too much here since I usually vent about my frustrations with transmisogyny and intra-Jewish racism, but I thought I would give my followers some information.
