请将“Secondly, although institutionalised forms of political representation (such as clientelism, parliamentarism, corporatism, and pluralism) play a major role in securing and reorganising the social bases of support for ‘normal’ state forms, this should not lead to neglect of other means of representation and other political channels (such as Gramsci’s ‘force, fraud, and corruption’) that may be deemed useful for the consolidation of support. Conversely, although ‘exceptional’ state forms typically suspend or nullify the effective operation of formal democratic institutions and rely on more restricted forms of representation and/or on the ‘black parliamentarism’ of informal representation through branches of the state apparatus, it is still necessary to consider how formally undemocratic institutions and informal channels serve to consolidate support and disorganise resistance rather than assume that they have no effects. It is only through an analysis of the complex articulation of forms of representation and intervention and the various social forces active on the political scene that we can understand the complex nature and dynamics of political domination.

OFFICIALDOM vs. PEOPLE

Hitherto, I have concentrated on the state apparatus as a system of political class domination and have considered state power largely as a form-determined condensation of the balance of class forces. But I have also hinted that the state can be examined in relation to other axes of determination and have noted that the class aspects of the state will be overdetermined by various kinds of non-class relations. The latter comprise private, non-economic relations grounded in civil society and ‘public’ relations among political categories. In this section we shall expand these hints and allusions through a brief sketch of the state as a site of ‘officialdom-people’ relations and its implications for class hegemony and popular-democratic struggle.

To establish the theoretical space for an analysis of this kind we must first consider the nature of social classes and the state in more detail. In opposition to the view that classes can only be defined in terms of the totality of economic, political, and ideological relations in a pure mode of production or even a complex social formation, we argue that classes must be defined at the level of economic relations and that ‘civilian’ and ‘public’ relations are relevant only in so far as they serve as conditions of existence of economic reproduction and/or are themselves affected by economic relations. Thus the relations among political categories are not class relations per se but they may well be class-relevant relations and/or be subject to overdetermination by class relations. Indeed, just as the institutional separation of the economic and political regions implies the relative autonomy of state apparatuses and state power from economic apparatuses and economic power, it also implies the relative autonomy of relations among political categories from relations among economic classes. There is certainly no obvious or immediate isomorphism or coincidence between class relations and relations among political categories: thus the state intervenes against particular capitals and individual members of the dominant economic class as well as against members of subordinate classes and state functionaries themselves do not necessarily belong to the dominant economic class. This means that the precise articulation between class and political relations will depend on the overall structure of the social formation and the prevailing balance of forces in the exercise of state power.

In this context it is essential to examine the internal organisations of the state apparatus (e.g., bureaucracy, administrative law, financial controls), the complex relations between the state and the forces liable to state intervention, and the complex relations between the state and those non-functionaries involved in policy-making and/or implementation. If we focus on the relations among political categories it is possible to establish a ‘people-officialdom’ axis of determination parallel to the class axis emphasised so far in our analyses. In these terms we can say that ‘bureaucratic despotism’ exists where state functionaries are dominant within the ‘people-officialdom’ relation and that ‘democratic government’ exists where the targets of state intervention comprise the dominant force in ‘people-officialdom’ relations. In both cases dominance should be understood in the sense of a form-determined condensation of political forces and not merely as a relation among individual wills. Thus a ‘pure theory’ of democracy should focus on the forms of representation and accountability and on the organisation and interpellation of the political forces whose relations are mediated through these forms. It should also be noted that between the extremes of ‘bureaucratic despotism’ and ‘democratic government’ will be a series of intermediate cases ranging from the dominance of one branch or fraction of the state apparatus (e.g., military, bureaucracy, political police) to the dominance of one sector or fraction of the ‘people’ (e.g., whites, men, those meeting restricted suffrage qualifications).

Finally it will be necessary to introduce the overdetermination of such relations through class relations and to trace the implications of this process. Adopting such a procedure reveals a major ambiguity in the conceptual couplet of ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ regimes. For orthodox Marxist analyses have ignored the possibility that a ‘normal’ state could be characterised by the dominance of a unified, autonomous ‘people’ rather than one unified heteronomously under the hegemony of a specific class (fraction) and have only occasionally recognised how the enhanced relative independence of the ‘exceptional state’ permits its degeneration from ‘class dictatorship’ to ‘bureaucratic despotism’. In other words, to the extent that Marxist theories have been class reductionist in approach, they have failed to provide an adequate account of democratic and non- democratic regimes. Let us see how this defect might be remedied.

Whilst class relations are determined in the first instance by the relations of production in the economic region, relations among political categories depend directly on the form and operation of the state. In this context the ‘people’ comprise those agents who are subject to state intervention and ‘officialdom’ comprises the agents of intervention. The exact composition of the ‘people’ will depend on the form and range of state intervention (since it is this that establishes the pertinence of categories such as taxpayer, criminal, citizen, conscript, licensee, pupil, pensioner, and supplementary benefit claimant); and it would be quite wrong to conclude that the ‘people’ is limited to individual agents to the exclusion of collective agents - let alone to these individual agents solely in their capacity as electors. This poses the problem of the relation among different sites of ‘popular’ struggle and thus of the relative unity of the ‘people’ as a political force. It is this heterogeneity and localisation of the ‘people’ that Poulantzas identified as the juridico-political ‘isolation effect’ and to which he attributed a key role in opening the space for the politics of hegemony. It must also be stressed that the unity of ‘officialdom’ can no more be taken for granted than that of the state apparatus and that different public agencies and agents can respond in contrasting ways to ‘popular’ demands and interests as well as to various class demands and interests. Indeed, although the institutional separation of the state from the economic region and civil society is a precondition of various ‘popular’ struggles, the incidence and extent of such struggles also depends upon the precise interpellation of the respective public duties of officialdom and the people. In this sense ‘popular-democratic’ struggle should extend beyond questions of the forms of representation and accountability and the organisation and unification of various ‘popular’ forces to include the definition and dissemination of shared standards of official conduct and civic duties. In the absence of such standards there is an evident danger of replacing ‘bureaucratic despotism’ with ‘authoritarian populism’ rather than ‘popular-democratic’ government.

Seen in these terms, then, ‘popular-democratic’ struggle can therefore be said to cover three areas of political action. First, it involves questions of the formal scope and institutional mechanisms of representation and accountability together with the formal definition of those subjects who are entitled to participate in the democratic process. In this area there is considerable room for particular ‘popular-democratic’ struggles in capitalist societies but there are also significant structural obstacles to a general (albeit still formal) democratisation. For the institutional separation of the state from the economic region and civil society ensures that certain key areas remain beyond the scope of formal democratic political control; and, inside the state itself, further obstacles arise from the separation of powers and/or the insulation from popular control of branches and departments crucial in economic reproduction and the exercise of repression. In this context it should also be noted that, as the extent and forms of state intervention shift with the passage from laissez-faire through simple monopoly to state monopoly capitalism, there is a corresponding shift in the areas most central for successful ‘popular-democratic’ struggle as individual citizenship and parliamentarism become less significant in comparison with membership of ‘corporations’ and functional representation.

Second ‘popular-democratic’ struggle involves questions of the substantive conditions in which popular control can be effectively exercised. This is a key issue in differentiating between ‘pure democracy’ and ‘class democracy’, i.e., between cases where the ‘people’ are autonomously or heteronomously unified. Where the ‘people’ is highly fragmented and massified through the ‘isolation effect’ and is unified, if at all, only through an ‘hegemonic project’ which couples national-popular objectives with the pursuit of the interests of capital, then any resulting democratic regime will be limited and class-biased. To move beyond such a ‘bourgeois democratic republic’ would require the democratisation of the economic region and civil society so that class-determined and class-relevant inequalities in political communication and organisation can be eliminated. Such reforms would not mean that the ‘people’ became autonomous in the sense of a free-willed, unitary, originating subject but only that its objectives and relative unity will no longer be determined in a class-biased milieu: the role of political, intellectual, and moral leadership will not thereby be eliminated any more than the need for compromise and negotiation about popular-democratic objectives.
”翻译为中文