ABSTRACT
Ralph Miliband’s instrumentalism commits him to the proposition that the character of the state is determined by the struggles among classes, which according to Nicos Poulantzas, who is following Gramsci explicitly, is to misprise the state, which has to it a sui generis reality in its own right. The weakness of Poulantzas’s position is suggested by the very comparison with Gramsci. Poulantzas often had to struggle in print to make his meaning clear. The striking thing about Poulantzas’s formulation of the state’s relative autonomy is that in significant respects it recalls Karl Marx’s foundational argument in “On 'The Jewish Question’.” “Privatization” may appear to have to it a “ring” or meaning that is different these days from what Poulantzas had in mind in the 1970s. It is no accident, that Marx, Gramsci and Poulantzas, in their different ways, took a rather more balanced view, or that Gramsci and Poulantzas developed in a resolutely non-Leninist as well as post-Leninist direction.
