Power Bloc

Formation of the concept

The term begins from Gramsci's analyses of hegemony and the dominant class and was formalized by Nicos Poulantzas. Poulantzas held that the capitalist class is divided into competing fractions such as industrial, commercial and financial capital, and that the state must organise them into a coherent political alliance, which, following Gramsci, he called the power bloc. In Political Power and Social Classes (1968) he reworked Gramsci's analyses of hegemony, arguing that political domination depends on the dominant class's capacity to promote a hegemonic project that links individual interests to a national-popular interest serving the power bloc. That book is presented as a more systematic concretisation of insights in Marx, Engels, Lenin and Gramsci, and his 1969 critique of Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society launched the Miliband-Poulantzas debate.

Poulantzas restated his main ideas, with unorthodox changes, in his final book State, Power, Socialism (1978), where he moved toward a relational theory of the state, defining it as the 'material condensation of a relationship of forces between classes', a reworking of the power-bloc framework. His other works analysed exceptional forms of the state: Fascism and Dictatorship (1970), Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1974) and The Crisis of the Dictatorships (1975). He died in Paris on 3 October 1979, ending the concept's development at his hands.

Both his first major text on the capitalist state and his last tackle the form-analytical question of why the bourgeoisie disposes of the modern representative state. Because direct class rule would be regarded as illegitimate, the modern representative state offers a flexible framework that unifies the long-term political interests of an otherwise fissiparous power bloc, disorganises the subaltern classes and secures the consent of the popular masses.

Relative autonomy and relations

The power bloc is bound to the state's relative autonomy: the state must be relatively autonomous from the particular interests of individual capitalist fractions in order to organise the long-term political interests of the class as a whole into the power bloc, an autonomy structurally guaranteed by the institutional separation of the political and economic spheres under capitalism. The unity of the power bloc is mainly facilitated by the state, both at the level of governance (policies, institutions, apparatuses, agencies) and at the level of political representation in government, through the continual negotiation of fractional interests in an 'unstable equilibrium of compromises'. Dominant factions may also form interest groups and try to influence the political scene directly.

The state performs two complementary tasks: it disorganises the dominated classes by constituting them as individual 'citizens' rather than a collective class, the 'isolation effect' that prevents working-class political organisation, and it organises the dominant class into the power bloc. The state is therefore not monolithic but traversed by contradictions among class fractions, reflected in struggles among state branches and apparatuses, such as legislature versus executive.

Preserving the unity of the power bloc is crucial for the stability of the capitalist system. Tensions among the dominant classes can transform the form of regime, and if compromise fails and this is paired with a political crisis of disunity within the power bloc, the state can reassert its autonomy from the dominant classes in the form of a dictatorship, of which Marx's 'Bonapartism' is the prototype and fascism and military coups are modern examples. A crisis of hegemony within the power bloc, when no class or fraction can impose its 'leadership' on the other members by its own political organisations or through the parliamentary-democratic state, is the one type of political crisis that produces an exceptional form of state; symptoms include a crisis of party representation, attempts to bypass parties, and apparatuses imposing order outside formal channels. Such phenomena can undermine the institutional and class unity of the state even where it continues to function, provoke splits between top echelons and lower ranks, and the state may even lose its monopoly of violence. Normal states correspond to stable bourgeois hegemony, where consent predominates over constitutionalised violence, and exceptional states to a crisis of hegemony, in which physical repression and an 'open war' against the dominated classes intensify.

Poulantzas presented 'authoritarian statism', that is intensified state control over every sphere of socio-economic life combined with a radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and a draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called formal liberties, not as an exceptional state but as a new normal form, emerging in response to the permanent economic and political crises of monopoly capitalism. It arises amid crisis-tendencies that include the sharpening of contradictions within the power bloc, for example the tendential division of labour between comprador and interior fractions of capital. Its features include a transfer of power from legislature to executive, the decline of political parties in favour of direct administration and mass media, an erosion of the rule of law, and the growth of parallel power networks alongside official state structures.

The concept was crucial in moving Marxist theory beyond the instrumentalist and economistic models of the state, and the relative autonomy of the state became a cornerstone of Marxist political theory in the 1970s and 1980s. In the supplied material Jessop describes Poulantzas as the single most important and influential Marxist theorist of the state and politics in the postwar period.

Examples

In Fascism and Dictatorship (1970) Poulantzas analysed fascism in Italy and Germany as an exceptional state that arose during the transition to monopoly capitalism; it smashed the labour movement and reorganised the power bloc under the hegemony of monopoly capital. He rejected simplistic accounts, stressing that fascism was not a mere tool but had a specific mass base in the petty bourgeoisie, whose revolt it mobilised. He contrasted the 'flexible' fascist regimes, with their mass party and complex ideological apparatuses, with the more 'brittle' military dictatorships of Southern Europe.

In the contemporary United States the hegemonic fraction of the power bloc is finance capital (Wall Street), with big tech (Silicon Valley) and the fossil fuel industry among the other dominant factions; the bailouts of the financial sector after the 2008 and 2020 market crashes are offered as evidence, the state justifying them as saving 'the economy' as a whole. By revitalising the stock market the state replenished the diminished capital of top companies, with finance capital at the centre of the circuit of capital. Manifestations of the power bloc vary from country to country and sometimes among regions.

In liberal democracies unity is maintained primarily through compromises, and if a unity crisis between social classes or dominant fractions threatens the stability of the system as a whole the state reasserts its relative autonomy. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, with tax and regulation policies such as the Glass-Steagall Act the bankers likely opposed, saved the capitalist class from its self-induced misfortunes while containing class conflict and stabilising the long-term interests of finance capital.

Under German and Italian fascism the state apparatus was primarily governed by people from the petty bourgeoisie recruited through the fascist party, while big capital stood as the hegemonic class fraction. The party bureaucracy unwittingly played the role of 'clerks' for a dominant class they did not belong to. In social-democratic governments, for instance Austria, Germany and Sweden governed by cadres recruited mostly from the petty bourgeoisie, and France, monopoly capital remained the hegemonic faction despite concessions to the working class; the character of the governing class can mask the real political hegemony of big capital.

Distinctions

Poulantzas identifies three class positions that may or may not overlap: the hegemonic class fraction of the power bloc, which has the most economic hegemony, leads the bloc and tends to have interests corresponding with the state; the ruling class, whose party or parties dominate the 'political scene' at the level of representation; and 'the class in charge of the state', the governing or reigning class from which the upper personnel of the state apparatuses are recruited. The hegemonic class fraction 'should not be confused with the class or fraction which is in charge of the state apparatus'; it need not govern the state and may not even always constitute a 'ruling class'. In the case Poulantzas cites, Britain 1832, the hegemonic fraction was the financial (banking) bourgeoisie while the landed aristocracy occupied the political scene and provided the top bureaucratic-military personnel. Which fraction becomes hegemonic usually depends on its ability to frame its political interests as those of the people and the nation as a whole.

The 'ruling class' is distinct from the power bloc proper: Poulantzas states that the ruling class or fraction may not only not be hegemonic but may even on occasion not be part of the power bloc, a class merely allied to the bloc being able for a brief period to be the ruling class. He contends that 'the capitalist state best serves the interests of the capitalist system when the members of this class do not participate directly in the state apparatus, that is to say when the ruling class is not the politically governing class', and the relationship between the bourgeois class and the state is an objective relation, direct participation being 'not the cause but the effect, and moreover a chance and contingent one'.

The concept contrasts with instrumentalist conceptions of the state as a mere instrument wielded by the ruling class, and with views of the state as a neutral subject representing a general will. Poulantzas holds that the capitalist state performs its functions primarily through its objective structures, its 'institutional materiality', with the subjects steering it playing a secondary role. Because he rejects theories that separate political from economic power without considering the underlying foundation of power, he dislikes the terms 'political elite' and 'political class', and does not consider the bureaucracy a class in the real sense but a particular social category: if the bureaucracy establishes a place for itself in the relations of production through the state, it constitutes a class not by virtue of being the bureaucracy but by virtue of being an effective class. What matters is not formal position or the class backgrounds of its agents but 'the concrete functioning of the state apparatuses'. His relational view of power, defined as 'the capacity of a social class to realize its specific objective interests', likewise rejects theories that portray power solely as an interpersonal relation.

C. Wright Mills rejected the phrase 'ruling class' because 'class' is an economic term while 'rule' is a political one, adopting 'power elite' instead. Poulantzas's framework posits no necessary identity between the economically and the politically dominant class, and his 'ruling class' category can in some cases come close to Mills's 'power elite'. Theories of the ruling class based on corporate kinship, however, cannot account for cases such as social democracy or Nazism, where the party dominating the political scene is not affiliated with the dominant classes.

The power bloc is not the same as Gramsci's hegemony as such. Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, in which the bourgeoisie uses cultural institutions to maintain wealth and power, developing a hegemonic culture through ideology rather than violence alone; a class cannot dominate in modern conditions merely by advancing its own narrow economic interests or purely through force, but must exert intellectual and moral leadership and make alliances and compromises. Poulantzas reworked these Gramscian analyses into his own structuralist state theory rather than reproducing them: his originality lies in a synthesis of French philosophy, Italian Marxism and Romano-German law.

Note: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy URL cited for this entry was retrieved as a 'Document Not Found' error page and supports nothing.