THE ACADEMICIZING OF MARXISM

...The assumption must be that Italy, Germany, Spain, etc., combined the elements of the capitalist matrix in such a way as to render them especially vulnerable to the external pressures emanating from the global crisis...

...This proposition could, indeed, be regarded as the theoretical core of historical materialism, upon whose foundation classical Marxism stands or falls...

...The new Marxism, by contrast, is addressed not to the working-class movement but to the massed ranks of undergraduates and postgraduate students in the social sciences...

...SINCE THE ACCUMULATED contradictions beloved by Althusserian theory sometimes prepare the ground for socialism and sometimes for fascism, it would be of more than passing interest to know in what way the contradictions preceding the one differ from the contradictions preceding the other...

...4 Poulantzas, Classes...

...it is intended also as a critique of the class analysis favored by the strategists of Eurocommunism...

...Poulantzas introduces two classificatory devices that are intended to identify the kernel of the working class within the swollen husk of wage labor...

...As if to make secure its newly won respectability, professorial Marxism, in the manner of all exclusive bodies, carries out its discourse through the medium of an arcane language that might have been especially designed to deter the uninitiated...

...14 1bid., p. 35...

...its content and design mark it out exclusively for use in the lecture hall, the seminar room, and in the doctoral dissertation...

...Of such stuff is Althusserian science made...

...On this reckoning the proletariat is scheduled to follow the old petty bourgeoisie down the path to political extinction...

...In some societies it will be one particular conjuncture of elements that produces the explosive mix, in other societies or at other times it will be a different conjuncture...

...Wage earners in commerce, advertising, etc., do not produce surplus-value and do not form part of the working class .. . Of course these wage earners are themselves exploited, and their wages correspond to the reproduction of their labor power...

...THE ALTHUSSERIAN OPENING GAMBIT is to stress the generic and universal features of capitalism as the main components of the explanatory model, i.e., those features that are taken to be the defining characteristics of capitalism and are therefore present in some combination or other in all capitalist societies...

...15 Not even a few of the "whole series of reasons" that lay behind the transformation of one weak link into fascism, another into socialism, are thought to be worth mentioning...

...This is what Althusser calls the process of "overdetermination," referring to a condition in which the key elements of the superstructure have reached a certain point of combustion, such that they are able to ignite the explosive mix produced by contradictions in the base...

...The first of these is the distinction between productive and unproductive labor...

...Technicians, engineers, foremen, and the like—far from occupying the vanguard role assigned to them by some French theorists of the "May events" of 1968—do not, according to Poulantzas, "belong to the working class . . . because in their place within the social division of labour they maintain political and ideological relations of subordination of the working class to capital . . . and because this aspect of their class determination is the dominant one...

...At the same time due recognition is given to the fact that each society is culturally and historically unique and so will combine the basic features of the system in its own special way...

...Managerial authority would seem, in fact, to have supplanted property ownership as the defining attribute of a capitalist class...

...The primary causes of fascism are not the factors often seen as its basic sine qua non, such as the particular economic crises Germany and Italy were caught in when fascism was establishing itself, the national peculiarities of the two countries, the consequences of the First World War, etc...

...there were, and still are, many local varieties...

...9 RaIf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1959...

...That this kind of Marxism should have such widespread appeal is both surprising and worrying, given the palpable discrepancies between its grand theoretical claims and its puny explanatory performance...

...No explanation is deemed satisfactory that does not engage directly with the facts of the purely national context...

...Since it was not historically doomed it had to be incorporated somehow into the general class model...

...Althusserian Marxism has struck roots in sociology and political science departments throughout the non-Communist world, and there cannot now be many languages that do not have their own version of the exotic vocabulary Althusserians seem to require for common discourse...

...Indeed, the uncomplicated theory that has traditionally inspired that sort of extra-mural activity is now rather loftily dismissed as "vulgar Marxism"—literally, the Marxism of "the common people...

...The global crisis of capitalism in the imperialist stage creates a general disposition to a fascist solution in all capitalist societies, which is then triggered off in a certain few...

...These links gave way under the extreme tension that the entire international chain was subjected to...

...The classical thesis of historical materialism does at least provide some hint of what is entailed in the notion of contradiction between the social forces of production and the social relations of production...

...These difficulties have arisen in part because the bourgeoisie and middle class under advanced capitalism have tended to expand well beyond the boundaries set by property ownership...

...6 Erik Olin Wright, "Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies," New Left Review, (93) 1976, p. 23...

...Many groups sell their labor and are exploited by capital, but few it seems qualify for proletarian status...

...And, of course, such a conjuncture cannot be specified a priori but can only be understood in the context of a specific society at a specific period...

...Althusser, For Marx, p. 207...

...This university-based Marxism was not, of course, all of a piece...

...However, the performance of mental or supervisory labor is, in Poulantzas's taxonomy, automatic ground for exclusion from the proletariat and inclusion within the new petty bourgeoisie...

...Revolutionary or crisis situations are never sparked off by purely material factors...

...10 Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdetermination," in For Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969...

...Each entails a charge against revenue and makes no direct contribution to capital accumulation...

...I simply mean that in the particular conjunctures of class struggle in these countries, which for a whole series of reasons led to such different results, their position in the imperialist chain was of crucial importance...

...8 Interestingly, by proclaiming that the supervision and control of subordinates is the new hallmark of bourgeois status, Althusserians have come surprisingly close to endorsing Ralf Dahrendorfs view of the determinate role of authority in establishing the class boundary...

...Expressed more formally, productive labor is that which is exchanged against capital to produce surplus, whereas 173 unproductive labor is merely a charge against revenue...

...It is difficult to name any leading Marxist theorist who now earns his keep in the service of the working-class movement rather than in the service of the university...

...179 7Nicos Poulantzas, "The New Petty Bourgeoisie," in A. Hunt, ed., Class and Class Structure (London: Lawrence & Wishart, l977), p. 119...

...As one of Poulantzas's sympathetic critics plaintively declares, the strict application of his criteria reduces the American working class to pygmy proportions, thus ruling out any possibility of socialism in the United States...

...In Marx's own formulation, the social space between the two great classes was deemed to become progressively less habitable as the centrifugal forces of class struggle flung all intermediate groups into one camp or the other...

...After all, it is one of the central tenets of the Marxist theory of knowledge that the nature of any system of ideas is related in some way to the class or social position of its proponents...

...6 It is somewhat ironic that a theory intended, among other things, as a rebuttal of a sociological model of class that seemed to extinguish the proletariat should itself propose a set of definitions pointing to a similar conclusion...

...Althusser's revision of this proposition results, in effect, in the removal of Marx's vital notion of causal primacy...

...10 In his version, the superstructure not only enjoys a considerable degree of autonomy from the base, it has a definite feedback effect upon it...

...If, moreover, the ratio of unproductive to productive workers is continually increasing, the implication of this analysis for the future of the labor movement is somewhat startling...

...It is an intriguing thought that the Althusserians' obsession with the problems of the superstructure, touched upon in this essay, might not be completely unrelated to their own social circumstances and milieux...

...Althusser's answer seems to be that we can only be certain that the superstructure has reached combustion point after the event...

...Their fate was sealed by the fact that they were marginal to a productive system that was gradually intruding into every corner of society...

...The problem posed by this new intermediate stratum was that, unlike its predecessor, it was in no sense marginal to the capitalist productive system but an integral feature of it...

...The most telling example of this is the tacit acknowledgment of the role of authority in the determination of class position...

...But the fact that the accumulation of tensions and contradictions is politically manageable in some societies but not in others must also be accounted for by recourse to some general proposition if the descent to bourgeois particularism is to be avoided...

...On a somewhat more elevated plane, the unproductive category is also said to comprise state employees, whose incomes are met by taxation...

...Althusser and his followers make much of the "scientific" status of their theories, though to an agnostic eye these appear to be either banal or simply absurd...

...This has resulted in the need to account for the theoretical status of those intermediate groups that cannot be placed unequivocally on either side of the class boundary...

...What common features can be discerned in the make-up of German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese society that were conducive to a "fascist solution" that were absent in the United States, Britain, France, and Scandinavia...

...and the Italian and German links gave way first because of their peculiar internal weaknesses...

...The crucial point of all this is that only those workers whose labor is productive in this special sense are candidates for inclusion in the proletariat...

...At more or less the same time as the major Communist parties were, one by one, abandoning their commitment to the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" and endorsing some form or other of that version of parliamentary Marxism known as Eurocommunism, the universities were disseminating Marxist ideas completely at variance with this accommodating stance...

...The Althusserian account of the emergence of fascism seems to point to a similar conclusion...

...The American working class, he suggests, must be defined in an "imperial context...

...But although Marxism seemed to offer a plausible enough account of the decline of the old petty bourgeoisie, awkward questions were at once raised by the discovery that the social territory vacated by this obsolete stratum was found to be occupied by a newcomer in the guise of the "new middle class...

...As for the credibility of Althusserian class theory, the very existence of "socialist" society is about the worst possible advertisement for it...

...Perhaps this is a line of inquiry that might usefully be followed up by the Marxist professoriate itself...

...14 Poulantzas's theory is resoundingly confirmed by the fact that none of the societies whose internal tensions were politically manageable took the route to fascism...

...ALTHOUGH ALTHUSSERIANS SEEK to place as much distance as possible between their own brand of theorizing and that of academic social science, they are not above smuggling into their work certain "bourgeois" concepts and usages, albeit under substitute names...

...What all this really amounts to is one more version of the commonplace argument that revolutionary change comes about as a result of many complex factors at work simultaneously...

...Although none of these writers would accept Dahrendorfs proposition that authority is a general phenomenon that encompasses property, it is nevertheless the case that their treatment of authority relations, however phrased, takes up far more of their analysis than the discussion of property relations...

...Thus, an Althusserian explanation for the continued survival of capitalist states (despite their intense and recurrent economic crises) is that the superstructural elements are not sufficiently out of joint to produce the necessary climax of overdetermination...

...Luxemburg, Kautsky, Bernstein—all of whom, without exception, were full-time political activists...

...That is to say, all workers employed by American capital, in whatever country, must be regarded as proxy members of the American proletariat...

...All the remaining categories comprise different elements of the new petty bourgeoisie, and are thus politically suspect...

...Tor a fuller discussion of this argument see my Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), upon which this essay freely draws...

...12 Without the international antagonism arising from the imperialist crisis, the national stresses and strains so conscientiously documented by bourgeois writers would not lead to the kind of breakdown that prepares the way for fascism...

...In plain English, it all depends on local circumstances...

...are part of the bourgeoisie...

...9 Their strict avoidance of this term in favor of some synonym or circumlocution ("mental labor," "labor of superintendence") is perhaps a tacit admission of this embarrassing affinity with Dahrendorfs position...

...Mental labor is simply *Let me stress that the distinction between productive labor and exploited labor is one that is pressed by the Althusserians rather than by me...

...it is the only form of wage labor that contributes to surplus value without at the same time being implicated in the apparatus of supervision and control...

...Virtually all the leading Marxist notables today are university teachers: Althusser, Poulantzas, Balibar, Habermas, Offe, Carchedi, Mandel, Miliband, etc., etc...

...Only the productive manual category counts as working class...

...It is hardly sufficient to assert simply that all the elements of the superstructure evolve and develop at a different pace and in divergent directions, since this in itself need not necessarily lead to any kind of crisis...

...The characters singled out 172 for liquidation in this historical drama were those upon whom capitalism had already passed sentence: the small traders, artisans, shopkeepers, and peasants...

...In its original form the thesis states that contradictions between the social forces of production and the social relations of production lead to system crisis and ultimate collapse...

...q 3Poulantzas, Classes..., p. 270...

...This science, it should be said, is a typical product of the new intellectual stratum of professorial Marxists...

...The problem for Althusserian science is how to strike a proper balance between the general scope of its global model 177 and the particularizing slant that stresses local variety and distinctiveness...

...One of the peculiar effects of this schema is to posit a concealed conflict of interests between productive and unproductive workers on the grounds that the latter are in some sense parasitic upon the former...

...Poulantzas does seem to recognize the problem: 178 .. although the revolution was made in the weakest link in the chain (Russia), fascism arose in the next two links, i.e., those which were, relatively speaking, the weakest in Europe at the time...

...By contrast, all those groups that have a future under socialism, including most of the new middle class, are by this very fact part of that heterogeneous political class known as "the people," whose interests are objectively opposed to those of the bourgeoisie...

...This theory is spelled out by Althusser in the course of his general restatement of the relationship between base and superstructure...

...Thus, Althusser's major work comes complete with a lengthy glossary to render intelligible the Master's private terminology...

...But unfortunately class and authority relations under "socialism" are not deemed suitable topics for discussion by the Althusserians...

...13 Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, p. 34...

...It is in other words a multicausal explanation similar to that advocated by almost any political or social theorist working 176 within the tradition of orthodox social science...

...Poulantzas rejects the line of thought that equates the category of wage labor with membership in the working class—an equation that would seem to bear an uncomfortably close affinity to the familiar conservative claim that "today we are all working class...

...Poulantzas quite firmly argues that wage workers who do not perform productive labor (in the Marxist sense) are nevertheless typically exploited labor (also in the Marxist sense...

...Contrast this with the position of the leading theorists of Marxism in its heyday: Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Rosa NOTES INicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975...

...Poulantzas is the leading exponent of class theory working within the Althusserian schema, and his numerous publications add up to the most ambitious attempt to solve what he refers to as the "boundary problem"—that is, the location of the politically relevant line of class cleavage under monopoly capitalism.' One of the standard difficulties encountered by classical Marxism is that of translating the conceptual abstractions of capital and labor into the concrete social categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat...

...What, then, is the nature of the fatal flaw running through these societies that distinguishes them from the rest...

...According to Carchedi, "the manager, rather than the capitalist rentier, is the central figure...

...In the German case, it arose largely as a result of the country's late entry onto the imperialist stage...

...In this account, the expansion of the white-collar sector is said to result in a shift from a pyramid-shaped class system with a heavy proletarian base to a diamond-shaped system with a large "middle mass" and an ever-diminishing working class...

...Generally, of course, productive and unproductive workers can be found side by side in the same labor union and the same political party...

...In Poulantzas's treatment of the problem, the notion of an "imperial stage" is felt to provide the necessary theoretical framework for examining each national variant of fascism: Fascism in effect belongs to the imperialist stage of capitalism...

...In the absence of this kind of comparative information, all we are left with is one more addition to that long line of theories useful only for predicting the past...

...Starting from the assumption that the entire capitalist system in the interwar period was in a state of severe crisis, the problem is to explain why some capitalist societies developed in the direction of fascism while others held fast to bourgeois democracy...

...Certainly, no one could accuse the Marxist professoriate of spreading the kinds of ideas likely to cause a stampede to the barricades or the picket lines...

...12Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 17...

...Althusserians have addressed themselves to this task with the aim of rebutting the analyses offered by both academic sociology and the "vulgar Marxists" of the working-class movement...

...q 180...

...Almost all of Marx's subsequent analyses of class conflict, property relations, internal contradictions, and the direction and causation of historical change hinge directly upon this assertion of a determinate relationship between base and superstructure...

...Poulantzas's recent reply to this objection is a vintage piece of Althusserian reasoning...

...I refer to the ever-widening gulf between the Marxism of the European working-class movement and the brand of Marxism propagated in the European universities...

...Poulantzas's answer is that fascism triumphed in those countries that were the "weakest links" in the capitalist chain...

...This is a distinction that bears not upon the actual nature of the work performed but on the social context of its performance...

...Moreover, Althusser suggests that the notion of internal contradictions has wider applicability than Marx himself recognized...

...The condition of "overdetermination" refers to a particular conjuncture or constellation of different elements as providing the key to system change...

...rather, there must be a cumulative buildup or amplification of general contradictions before the mechanism of collapse is finally triggered off...

...3 Now those who perform supervisory functions are not only wage workers but usually productive laborers to boot, in so far as they are just as instrumental in creating surplus value for the capitalist as the workers whose activities they oversee...

...Thus, in seeking to account for the vulnerability of certain bourgeois societies to fascism, Althusserians attempt to integrate the variety of local and specific causes into some general, global explanation...

...5 Here again it would seem that the opposition between workers who create value and those who are a drain upon it is thought to override all unity arising on the basis of a shared exploitation...

...the crucial division is between those social groups whose functions are necessary only to capitalism, and those whose services would be required in a socialist society...

...it is the latter that now settles the issue of class location.* The effect of this is that the line of class demarcation is drawn at a considerably lower point in the social hierarchy than it is in the classical Marxist model...

...This arises from the need to find some general principle by which the "managerial class" can be accorded the same bourgeois status as the owners of capital, despite the fact that managers are, in the main, also sellers of labor power...

...This means that the frontiers of class are drawn by reference to expressly political criteria...

...In the case of Italy, this was to do with the contradictions set up between an industrializing north and a backward, agricultural south...

...Clearly, the Althusserian message that they have different class locations and different class interests has not yet got through...

...The Althusserian model is one in which contradictions within the superstructure have virtually equal standing with those within the productive sphere, in which none is singled out as having decisive importance in the process of system collapse...

...But undoubtedly the most influential of all has been that school of thought inspired by Louis Althusser and his disciples—particularly Nicos Poulantzas and Etienne Balibar...

...It was as if the center of political gravity had shifted from the working-class movement to the academy and the custody of Marxist theory had passed from the party leadership to the new professoriate...

...he, rather than the capitalist rentier, is the non-labourer, the non-producer, the exploiter...

...2 IT IS THIS CONCEPTION of class that the Althusserians anathematize as the new revisionism and a recipe for the political defeat of the working class...

...The point is therefore to try to elucidate certain general characteristics of the stage, and their impact on fascism...

...The sociological account of the new middle class, which is held up as typifying bourgeois theory in general, is that which equates the rise of a new white-collar stratum with the virtual dissolution of class and class conflict...

...Althusser, by contrast, presents the relationship between base and superstructure as an essentially reciprocal affair...

...and in part because the proletariat has contracted to a point where it is considerably less than the total of "wage labor...

...THUS, WHAT PURPORTS TO BE a theory of system change based upon a new analysis of the superstructure turns out on closer inspection to be an invitation to descriptive empiricism...

...5 P. M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (London: Dobson, 1946), p. 284...

...But this thesis, Althusser argues, must be supplemented by another stating that contradictions are not confined to the material base but are endemic in the superstructure, too...

...These factors are important only in relation to the stage of imperialism, as elements of one of the possible conjunctures of this stage...

...All the enquiring mind needs to know, it seems, is that fascism and socialism emerged only in those countries where the superstructural conditions were ripe for their respective outcomes, and nowhere else...

...In Marx's own formulation, the social and institutional character of society is held to be governed by the nature of its productive system...

...211-12.] conceptual shorthand for those occupations that include elements of a supervisory or disciplinary nature, as well as professional occupations that enjoy special privileges by virtue of their claim to the "monopoly and secrecy of knowledge...

...But what are the equivalent contradictions that arise within the superstructure...

...If, on the other hand, Marx's barber is a paid employee, he is performing productive labor by creating surplus value for the barbershop owner...

...To make property relations the centerpiece of class analysis would bring with it the duty of explaining precisely why the apparatus of managerial authority and control was thought to depend upon the institution of private ownership...

...It is not especially obscure to argue, for example, that the legal institutions of feudalism are incompatible with a mode of production based upon a market economy and the free movement of labor...

...He, rather than the capitalist rentier, is capital personified...

...and "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses," In Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971...

...This is similar to a position advanced some time ago by Paul Sweezy, who suggested that those workers whose wages were met from surplus value to which they made no direct contribution had by this very token "an objective bond linking their fortunes with those of the ruling 174 class...

...And we know whether or not any given superstructure was in fact ripe for either event because of the way things actually turned out...

...Very simply, productive labor is that which yields surplus value, unproductive labor is that which does not...

...All the main elements of the superstructure evolve and develop at a different pace—Althusser calls this the "law of uneven development"—so that the degree of compatibility or "fit" between these different elements is crucial to the stability of the overall system...

...Their activities would not be transferable to the new society, thereby giving them a vested interest in the survival of capitalism...

...but, at the same time, if these purely national factors are weighted too heavily the explanation would be couched in terms of cultural peculiarities and traditions, and unique historical experiences, which are not essential ingredients of a capitalist system as defined by the general model...

...The view that managerial control and authority are a unique product of capitalism must rest on a belief that these things are ordered in a very different way under 175 "socialism" in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...A further instructive insight into this newII scientific Marxism is afforded by the theory of system breakdown and social transformation...

...He tells us that socialist revolution "could only break out . . . in Russia, in China, in Cuba, in 1917, in 1949, in 1958, and not elsewhere...

...Their Marxism, for better or worse, was addressed specifically to the interests of the working class and the problems of the labor movement...

...After all, supposing they were to discover that factory despotism, the coercive uses of knowledge, and the privileges of mental labor were present not only in societies where the manager was "capital personified," but also in societies where he was the Communist party personified...

...Their obvious reluctance to engage in the comparative analysis of class under capitalism and under "socialism" is therefore understandable...

...It has presumably come to the attention of Althusserians that societies that have done away with property in its private forms nevertheless have their own interesting little ways of seeing to the "superintendence of labor...

...The strategy of Eurocommunism is thus to emphasize the minority character of the political opposition, and to proclaim the unity of all who sell their labor, whatever the color of their collar...

...At one conceptual stroke this class is immediately transformed from one of the smallest to the largest proletariat in the capitalist sphere...

...4 Combining Poulantzas's two sets of variables we thus arrive at four distinct types of wage labor: productive mental, productive manual, unproductive mental, and unproductive manual...

...This idea is enshrined in the "law of uneven development," which, as already mentioned, postulates that the various institutions of capitalism evolve and develop at a different pace and in a somewhat different manner...

...13 For any society known to have embraced fascism Poulantzas is ready to disclose that it was wracked by contradictions sufficiently intense to qualify it for membership in the family of weak links...

...By way of illustration it may be useful to consider the treatment of two problems fundamental to Marxism: the analysis of class under modern capitalism, and the theory of system collapse and social transformation...

...Carchedi, "On the Economic Identification of the New Middle Class," Economy and Society, (4:1) 1975, p. 48...

...The Eurocommunists have tended to conceive of the principal class division as existing at the very top of the social hierarchy, so that the category of working class is understood in the broadest possible terms...

...Postwar Western Marxism in its many varieties is almost wholly the creation of academic social theorists who rose on the crest of the wave of university expansion in the 1960s...

...France, Britain, and the United States, Poulantzas tells us, were also "affected by the transition to monopoly capitalism and by 'economic crises.' But they do not have the accumulation of contradictions which typify Germany and Italy...

...that is, none of the strong links snapped under tension, while all the weak ones did...

...Thus, the barber who trims Marx's beard is performing unproductive labor if he is working on his own account, since the service provided is essentially no different from that given by a household servant...

...Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, pp...

...Here it does indeed seem that something has to give...

...Landlords, rentiers, property speculators, stockbrokers, etc...

...Poulantzas offers no evidence to indicate that the distinction between productive and unproductive labor has any bearing on the political or tradeunion activities of different groups of workers...

...Taxes are siphoned off from the wages of productive workers or from surplus value, so that in effect the labor of "state servants" is akin to that of household servants in being a charge against revenue and making no contribution to capital wealth...

...p. 242...

...In other words, the status of exploited labor is theoretically downgraded, as it were, by comparison with its unproductive status...

...The reason for this is not too difficult to fathom...

...In no sense do I mean that fascism was fated to happen there, any more than the Bolshevik Revolution was fated to occur in the weakest link...

...It therefore comes as no surprise to be told that, after Italy and Germany, "Spain in its turn became the nodal point of imperialist contradictions in Europe...

...Unproductive laborers are dismissed to the ranks of the new petty bourgeoisie...

...the mode of material life effectively shapes the political, legal, and ideological forms, so that when the productive base undergoes a radical transformation the superstructural features of that society will undergo a corresponding change, too...

...What gave the original Marxist proposition its distinctiveness, and its intellectual impact, was the heavy theoretical weighting it gave to one specific set of factors as the causal mechanism of social change...

...They would then be faced with the unwelcome choice of either having to expand the definition of capitalism to embrace "socialist" society, or of disowning the cherished concepts of private property and surplus extraction upon which their class theory is grounded...

...and not in another 'situation' . . . ." 11 Nothing is offered by way of explanation to show that the superstructures in these three societies at these particular times were in some way differently constituted from the superstructures of other capitalist societies...

...5 1bid., p. 24...

...Poulantzas's own account of the new middle class, or the new petty bourgeoisie as he calls it, is designed not only to reassert the political potential and status of the modern proletariat against the claims of sociology...

...Furthermore, this invisible line is pushed down still further by the addition of Poulantzas's second distinction, that between mental and manual labor...