请将“Finally, Poulantzas concludes the debate by returning to the issue of whether one must draw a distinction between class power and state power. Poulantzas (1976a, 73) dismisses Miliband’s argument that state institutions must be viewed as repositories of independent power (i.e., coercion) to have autonomy as nothing but a blatant “appeal to common sense.” Rather than responding directly to the theoretical argument, Poulantzas again attempts to drive an ideological wedge between himself and Miliband by insisting that Miliband’s conception of state power is “an old and persistent conception of bourgeois social science and politics.” As if to make his point one last time, Poulantzas (1976, 76) dismisses the entirety of the debate with Miliband by concluding that after all is said and done: “all that remains is a polemical catch-phrase pure and simple, masking a factual and empirical critique.”





THREE





Plain Marxists and Sophisticated Marxists


In his book The Marxists (1962), American sociologist C. Wright Mills drew an ironic distinction between “plain marxism” and “sophisticated marxism” that not only foreshadowed the next decade’s state theory debate, but unintentionally set the stage for many of the misrepresentations that eventually characterized that debate. Consequently, it is no coincidence that renewed interest in Poulantzas and Miliband has also generated “a small but pronounced revival” of scholarly interest in the works of C. Wright Mills after a period when Marxist state theorists rejected his work as that of a vulgar “voluntarist” (Aronowitz, 2003). There are also political reasons for the renewed interest in Mills’ exposé of the American power elite, which he described as a tightly knit and venal coalition of the corporate rich, military warlords, and a servile political directorate.

The direct seizure of American national government by upper-class scions that was orchestrated during the Reagan/Bush Administrations (1980–1992) under the rubric of populist rhetoric seemed to expose itself in the Bush II Administration (2000–2008) (Edsall, 1984). A stolen election (2000), corporate corruption scandals (Enron, MCI), a global financial collapse (2007–2009), and an unpopular war of occupation (Iraq)—all rationalized with bald-faced lying—have made Mills’ (1956, 343) claim that “the higher immorality is a systematic feature of the American elite” seem remarkably timely (Wolfe, 1999). Hence, the idea of the power elite once again resonates with scholars and ordinary citizens even as middle-class complacency with it all makes Mills’ description of Americans as ideologically “inactionary” seem frighteningly accurate (Mills, 1951, 327).1 As a result, four of Mills’ most important books have been republished in the last few years, each with a new introduction by a prominent scholar, and his daughters have published a collection of his personal letters, including his FBI file, for the first time. This small if pronounced return to Mills seems to have culminated in a three volume reassessment of his work edited by Stanley Aronowitz (2004), which also catalyzed a 2006 panel of the American Political Science Association devoted specifically to The Power Elite. More recently, Aronowitz (2012) has published a reassessment of “C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals.”

While the revival of interest in C. Wright Mills has emerged in tandem with renewed interest in the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, it is not yet recognized that these two intellectual currents actually intersect in C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, which was actually the main object of Nicos Poulantzas’ criticism when he first identified “instrumentalism” and “historicism” as the intellectual sources of a “distorted Marxism.” In Pouvoir Politique et Classes Sociale (1968), it was actually C. Wright Mills who was on the receiving end of Poulantzas’ methodological polemic as Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) had not even been published when the original French version of Poulantzas’ book was released in 1968. Yet, equally interesting, and also evidently forgotten is that there was an earlier encounter between Marxists and The Power Elite during the 1950s, when Marxists such as Paul M. Sweezy and Herbert Aptheker took Mills to task, but in ways that yielded a wholly different and far more constructive outcome. The first encounter between Mills and the Marxists was a lively engagement that yielded constructive advances in political theory and, indeed, Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society was at least partially the outcome of that first encounter. On the other hand, during the 1970s, Poulantzas replayed his earlier polemic against “voluntarism” and “instrumentalism” by inserting Miliband into the debate as if he were Mills’ identical theoretical twin. In this respect, Poulantzas and the structural Marxists failed to recognize that Anglo-American Marxists, such as Miliband, had already moved beyond Mills, first, by incorporating his many empirical advances into a theoretical analysis but, second, by criticizing Mills for lacking a theory of political economy and, therefore, ironically for failing to incorporate “structural” factors into his analysis of the power elite (Barrow, 2007).





The Power Elite and Marxism


It is hardly a revelation to point out that the central concept in C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite is a concept of “the power elite,” rather than a “ruling” or “capitalist class.” However, it has always been a source of consternation for Marxists that Mills elaborated this concept by starting from the Weberian position that societies consist of analytically distinct and autonomous economic, political, social, and cultural orders (Weber, 1946). Rather than asserting that an inherent relationship exists between any of these orders, Mills argued that any such claim was a hypothesis until such time, and to such a degree, as it could be demonstrated as the conclusion of empirical sociological research. A second source of concern for Marxists was Mills’ claim that institutions (and not classes directly) organize power in society by vesting certain positions, and the individuals occupying those positions, with the authority to make decisions about how to deploy the key resources mobilized by that institution.

For instance, as an economic institution, the modern corporation vests its board of directors and executive officers with the authority to allocate and determine the use of any economic resources that the corporation owns or controls. Likewise, government vests specific public offices with the authority to employ administrative coercion or police force against anyone who fails to comply with the law. Similarly, as cultural institutions, schools and universities certify specific individuals as possessing expertise in particular fields of knowledge. In this sense, the individuals who occupy positions of institutional authority in a society control different types of power: economic power, political power, and ideological power and it is the authority to make institutionally binding decisions that makes an individual powerful. Thus, power can be imputed to particular groups of individuals to the degree that they occupy the decision-making positions of the organizations that control wealth, force, status, and knowledge in a particular society. A power structure consists of a patterned distribution of resources that is organized by the major institutions of a particular society (Barrow, 1993, 13–16).2

Thus, Mills claimed that:

The power elite is composed of men … in positions to make decisions having major consequences … they are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy. (Mills, 1956, 3–4)”翻译为中文