Miliband-Poulantzas Debate

This debate occurred between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas in the pages of New Left Review, a radical journal, in the 1970s. It concerned the nature, form, and functions of the state and how to analyze them. It is usually described as pitting instrumentalism (the state is an instrument that can be used by different social forces for different purposes) against structuralism (those in charge of the state are structurally constrained to advance the interests of capital). As such, it framed many theoretical discussions and empirical research on the state in the 1970s and 1980s. This description is misleading, however, and it is important to revisit the debate to see what was really at stake.

This misleading account arises because the two protagonists conceived the capitalist state in radically different terms and adopted different presentational strategies. Whereas Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society (1969) moved from elites as social categories to broader social forces and then to structural factors, Poulantzas's Political Power and Social Classes (1968) moved from structural analysis via class struggles to specific social categories. Focusing on their respective starting points suggests that Miliband was an instrumentalist and Poulantzas a structuralist, even though their overall approaches contradict this.

Poulantzas initiated the debate in 1969. He argued that Miliband's book erred in basing his Marxist analysis on revealing the factual errors in non-Marxist approaches because it trapped him into debating on their terms, and that it was too concerned with individual agents and their motives rather than with classes and their interests. These errors shaped Miliband's critique of the managerial revolution thesis and the alleged neutrality of the state bureaucracy. He had also neglected the distinctive class unity of the state apparatus and so failed to explore the sources of this unity; and overlooked the key role of the “ideological state apparatuses” in securing social cohesion in a class-divided society. In essence, because Poulantzas was more concerned to attack Miliband for not sharing his own approach, he ignored the polemical and cathartic value of Miliband's text in the prevailing academic and political context in the Anglophone world to which it was addressed.

Miliband's immediate response (1970) made four main points: Poulantzas (1) ignored the role of empirical material in developing a critique of the state, (2) relied on “structural superdeterminism” [Page 417]to explain the limits on the state's autonomy from capital, (3) advanced such a strong claim about the state's growing autonomy from popular forces that he could not distinguish democracy from fascism or appreciate the virtues of democratic regimes for democratic struggle, and (4) mistakenly placed ideological state apparatuses inside the state rather than in the wider political system. This first exchange shaped reception of the debate as one between structuralist and instrumentalist accounts of the same analytical object. Yet Poulantzas's book concerned abstract features of a generic capitalist type of state whereas Miliband's book focused on real states in postwar Western capitalist social formations.

The debate was renewed in Miliband's 1973 review of the English translation of Poulantzas's book. He still ignored its specific theoretical object and special order of presentation and focused on Poulantzas's aim of escaping economic determinism. He accused Poulantzas of a “structuralist abstractionism” that mainly produces a “formalized ballet of evanescent shadows” and claimed that economism quickly reenters Poulantzas's analysis through the inevitable class character of state power. Miliband also returned to the importance of democratic politics by noting that Poulantzas exaggerates the state's unity, ignores the role of political parties, and, in neglecting the variability of political regimes, conflates democracy and fascism. This review strengthened the instrumentalist- structuralist polarization. Just as Poulantzas had criticized Miliband for being too empirical, Miliband criticized him for “hyper-theoretical” concern with the essence of the capitalist state. By linking his review to their initial exchange rather than focusing on Poulantzas's book, Miliband missed the influence therein of juridico-political concepts and Antonio Gramsci's analysis of hegemony, with their respective implications for the institutional variation among political regimes and the influence of social forces on the exercise of state power.

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