Nicos Poulantzas

He was born in Athens on 21 September 1936 into a well-established family; his father, Aristides Poulantzas, was a prominent professor of forensic graphology. He entered the Athens University law school in 1953, not to become a lawyer but because it was the only way at the university to pursue philosophy and the social sciences. As a student he belonged to an organisation loosely affiliated with the clandestine Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and took part in the United Democratic Left (EDA), the KKE's legal front, and in 1955 he was briefly arrested at a demonstration over Cyprus.

In 1960 he went to Munich for postgraduate work but within a month moved to Paris, writing that the influence of Nazi ideas was too strong for him to stay. He secured a teaching post in the philosophy of law at the Panthéon-Sorbonne and in 1964 completed his doctoral thesis Nature des choses et droit. In this period he drew on Sartre, Goldmann and Lukács to synthesise existentialism and Marxism and transcend the dualism of fact and value, work he later renounced for its "historicism and humanism". From 1964 he wrote regularly for Les Temps modernes.

He joined the KKE in Paris around 1961 and moved increasingly towards Althusser's structuralism and Italian Marxists such as Gramsci and Colletti. After the Greek military coup of 1967 he was a founding member of the anti-dictatorial committee of Greeks in Paris. When the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia split the KKE in 1968 he sided with the anti-Stalinist, Eurocommunist faction that became the KKE (Interior), and developed his politics within it, often from its left, until his death.

Political Power and Social Classes, which appeared just before May 1968, rejected both the instrumentalist view of the state as a tool of the ruling class and theories of the state as a neutral subject representing a general will. Its central concept is the "relative autonomy" of the state: the capitalist state must be relatively autonomous from the particular interests of individual capitalists and fractions in order to organise the long-term political interests of the capitalist class as a whole, and this autonomy is structurally guaranteed by the institutional separation of politics and economics under capitalism. As the "factor of cohesion" of a class-divided society, the state disorganises the dominated classes by constituting them as individual "citizens" (the "isolation effect") and organises the competing fractions of the dominant class into a "power bloc" led by a hegemonic fraction.

"The Problem of the Capitalist State", published in New Left Review in November–December 1969, praised Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society as a challenge to pluralist theories of the state but criticised it for a "problematic of the subject" focused on the origins and personal ties of the "state elite". For Poulantzas the relation between the bourgeoisie and the state is an objective one, and the direct participation of members of the ruling class in the state apparatus is not its cause but a chance effect. Miliband defended empirical analysis and accused Poulantzas of "structural super-determinism"; the exchange, which ran until 1976, structured Marxist discussion of the state for over a decade.

In the same framework, Fascism and Dictatorship (1970) analysed fascism as an exceptional state arising from a crisis of hegemony in the transition to monopoly capitalism, stressing that it was not a mere tool of monopoly capital but had a mass base in the petty bourgeoisie. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1974) held that classes are defined by an ensemble of structures at the economic, political and ideological levels, and set apart from the working class a "new petty bourgeoisie" of technicians, supervisors and civil servants who, though salaried, perform roles of supervision and mental labour.

When the military dictatorships of Southern Europe fell—Greece and Portugal in 1974, Spain after 1975—Poulantzas analysed the transitions in The Crisis of the Dictatorships (1975), where he began to develop a relational theory of the state as a field of struggle. After the junta fell he returned to Greece, writing in the press and lecturing at Panteion University, while in Paris he engaged critically with Michel Foucault and the Nouveaux Philosophes and joined the struggle for left unity. He described the contemporary state of advanced capitalism as "authoritarian statism": intensified state control over every sphere of socio-economic life combined with a radical decline of the institutions of political democracy—not an exceptional state but a new normal form responding to the permanent crises of monopoly capitalism.

In his last book, State, Power, Socialism (1978), he abandoned the Althusserian division into economic, political and ideological "regions" and argued that the state, like capital, is a social relation: not a thing or a subject with power of its own, but the "material condensation of a relationship of forces between classes", a contradictory "strategic terrain" that crystallises past struggles and provides a field for new ones. He took up Foucault's relational concept of power and analysis of "disciplines" while faulting Foucault for neglecting class and the state's repressive role.

From this followed his socialist strategy. He rejected both the Leninist model of smashing the state from outside in a situation of "dual power" and the social-democratic strategy of simply occupying existing institutions, advocating instead a "democratic road to socialism" that combined struggles exploiting the state's internal contradictions with the expansion of direct democracy—councils and self-management bodies—outside it, transforming the state through "a long series of ruptures and breaks". He took his own life in Paris on 3 October 1979, aged 43. Bob Jessop called him the single most important and influential Marxist theorist of the state and politics in the postwar period.