请将“The Problem of the Subject


In his critique of Miliband’s instrumentalism, Poulantzas (1969, 70–71) defines the problem of the subject as “a problematic of social actors, of individuals as the origin of social action.” If individuals or groups of individuals are considered as social actors, then Poulantzas argues that theoretical research is diverted from “the study of the objective co-ordinates that determine the distribution of agents into social classes and the contradictions between these classes … to the search for finalist explanations founded on the motivations of conduct of the individual actors.” Historically, this is one of the attributes that has always defined “historicism,” “voluntarism,” and even Vulgar Marxism. In this respect, Poulantzas (1969, 71) claims that Miliband’s empirical and institutional analysis of states in capitalist societies “constantly gives the impression” that:

social classes or “groups” are in some way reducible to inter-personal relations, that the State is reducible to inter-personal relations of the members of the diverse “groups” that constitute the State apparatus, and finally that the relation between social classes and the State is itself reducible to inter-personal relations of “individuals” composing social groups and “individuals” composing the State apparatus.

Consequently, Poulantzas chastises Miliband for offering explanations of the corporate elite, the state elite, and state managers that are “founded on the motivations of conduct of the individual actors” (i.e., ideology and conscious interests) and that Miliband fails to comprehend “social classes and the State as objective structures, and their relations as an objective system of regular connections, a structure and a system whose agents, ‘men,’ are in the words of Marx, ‘bearers’ of it.” According to Poulantzas, the same problem of the subject resurfaces in Miliband’s treatment of the state bureaucracy, the army, regulatory agencies, and other personnel of the state system. The problem appears to reside in the fact that Miliband places so much emphasis on the role of ideology in linking these agents to the capitalist class and the governing state elite, because this explanatory mechanism suggests that the criterion for membership in a particular class is the shared motivations and subjective orientations of a group of individuals. Hence, Poulantzas (1969, 73) concludes that Miliband “seems to reduce the role of the State to the conduct and ‘behavior’ of the members of the State apparatus.”

In contrast, Poulantzas (1969, 73) claims that:

… the direct participation of members of the capitalist class in the State apparatus and in the government, even where it exists, is not the important side of the matter. The relation between the bourgeois class and the State is an objective relation. This means that if the function of the state in a determinate social formation and the interests of the dominant class in this formation coincide, it is by reason of the system itself: the direct participation of members of the ruling class in the state apparatus is not the cause but the effect, and moreover a chance and contingent one, of this objective coincidence.2

According to Poulantzas, it is the general function of the state that gives cohesion and unity to the state apparatuses and personnel and that make it possible to refer both to a state and to the capitalist state. However, from Poulantzas’ perspective, Miliband relies on factors exterior to the state itself and, therefore, he lacks a theoretical capacity to conceptualize the necessary unity and cohesion of the state. Poulantzas (1969, 77) insists that “the State in the classic Marxist sense of the term, possesses a very rigorous internal unity which directly governs the relation between the diverse branches of the apparatus.”3

Poulantzas’ critique was aimed mainly at Miliband’s and others’ efforts to empirically document the extent to which capitalist elites colonized the top command posts of the state apparatus. While my earlier reconstruction of Miliband’s theory of the state in Chapter 2 demonstrates that this was only one component of his overall analysis, Gold, Lo, and Wright (1975a, 33) nevertheless sanctioned this misrepresentation of Miliband’s position by claiming that “most of his analysis still centers on the patterns and consequences of personal and social ties between individuals occupying positions of power in different institutional spheres.” Indeed, they (1975a, 34) insist that even in “sophisticated variants of instrumentalism,” such as Miliband’s, the functioning of the state is still “fundamentally understood in terms of the instrumental exercise of power by people in strategic positions, either directly through manipulation of state policies or indirectly through the exercise of pressure on the state.”

In fact, Gold, Lo, and Wright (1975a, 35) contend that with “rare exceptions, there is no systematic analysis of how the strategies and actions of ruling-class groups are limited by impersonal, structural causes … the exercise of state power and the formation of state policy seem to be reduced to a kind of voluntarism on the part of powerful people.” Bob Jessop (1977, 357) echoes this theme with the claim that Miliband “reproduces the liberal tendency to discuss politics in isolation from its complex articulation with economic forces. To the extent that he does relate them it is only through interpersonal connection” (Cf. Jessop, 1982, 22).4 Simon Clarke (1991, 19) repeats this assertion by claiming that the main weakness in Miliband’s theory of the state is its lack of “any theory of the structural relationship between civil society and the state.”





Miliband on Structural Constraint


Miliband firmly rejected this indictment of his work by pointing out that Poulantzas and others had greatly underestimated the extent to which he did take account of the objective structural relations that constrain elite decision making and the role of the state, but he also argued that the nature of the state elite was not irrelevant to understanding the concrete differences between states and state policies in various capitalist societies.5 In fact, in a chapter on “The Purpose and Role of Governments” that follows his analysis of the state elite, Miliband (1969, 79) specifically takes account of the structural constraints on state elites:

The “bias of the system” may be given a greater or lesser degree of emphasis. But the ideological dispositions of governments have generally been of a kind to make more acceptable to them the structural constraints imposed upon them by the system; and these dispositions have also made it easier for them to submit to the pressures to which they have been subjected by dominant interests.

However, Miliband does not regard the “bias of the system” or its “structural constraints” as purely a limitation of state elites’ and state managers’ ideological outlook, or even as the exclusive result of campaign contributions, lobbying, and the other political processes of ruling class domination (Cf. Domhoff, 1978). Indeed, in a chapter entitled “Imperfect Competition,” Miliband (1969, 146) argues that “business enjoys a massive superiority outside the state system as well, in terms of the immensely stronger pressures which, as compared with labour and any other interest, it is able to exercise in the pursuit of its purposes.” In fact, the analysis of state power in this chapter spins off a passage that clearly articulates the mechanism of structural constraint later identified with the works of Amy Beth Bridges, Claus Offe, Fred Block, and Charles E. Lindblom (Barrow, 1993, 58–63). In defining capital’s “massive superiority outside the state system,” Miliband (1969, 147) observes that:

One such form of pressure, which pluralist “group theorists” tend to ignore, is more important and effective than any other, and business is uniquely placed to exercise it, without the need of organisation, campaigns, and lobbying. This is the pervasive and permanent pressure upon governments and the state generated by the private control of concentrated industrial, commercial, and financial resources. The existence of this major area of independent economic power is a fact which no government, whatever its inclinations, can ignore in the determination of its policies, not only in regard to economic matters, but to most other matters as well.

Thus, as Domhoff (1990, 193) has pointed out previously, it should have been clear even at the time that when Miliband (1969, 23) states that “in the Marxist scheme, the ‘ruling class’ of capitalist society is that class which owns and controls the means of production and which is able, by virtue of the economic power thus conferred upon it, to use the state as its instrument for the domination of society” that he means exactly “what more recent theorists mean with their talk about structures and autonomy and privileged position.” If there were any doubt about Miliband’s meaning or intent, he (1969, 150) further clarified his position a few pages later in a discussion about whether government can use its political power and financial resources “as an instrument of long-term economic policy” by compelling individual firms or industries to radically change their methods of doing business. Miliband (1969, 150) concludes that there is not much evidence that “governments have been notably effective in the use of this power in their relations with private enterprise.” The underlying structural reason for this failure, according to Miliband (1969, 150), is that:

in the abstract, governments do indeed have vast resources and powers at their command to “wield the big stick” against business. In practice, governments which are minded to use these powers and resources—and most of them are not—soon find, given the economic and political context in which they operate, that the task is fraught with innumerable difficulties and perils.”翻译为中文