3 October 2019 was the fortieth commemoration of the death of Nicos Poulantzas. Poulantzas was a Franco-Greek constitutional-law scholar, student of Louis Althusser, and is still today among the most important of Marxist state theorists. His understanding of the state as the ‘material condensation of a power relation between classes and class fractions’ not only
3 October 2019 was the fortieth commemoration of the death of Nicos Poulantzas. Poulantzas was a Franco-Greek constitutional-law scholar, student of Louis Althusser, and is still today among the most important of Marxist state theorists. His understanding of the state as the ‘material condensation of a power relation between classes and class fractions’ not only influenced generations of Marxists but also broke with Stalinism’s reductionist, simplistic conception of the state.
His last book, State, Power, Socialism, is still a standard work of neo-Marxist analysis of the state and its specific structure. This is evident in numerous new publications that grapple with his understanding of the state. Alongside his writings on state theory, Poulantzas also inspired many scholars by his reflections on class analysis and the space-time matrix.
originally published at rote-denkfabrik.at