Status Updates From The Poulantzas Reader: Marx...

So far (1: Marxist Examination of the Contemporary State and Law and the Question of the 'Alternative') Poulantzas's greatest contribution is complicating the picture of ruling class rule. In the "relative autonomy" of the bourgeois state, we see moving parts supporting or limiting each other. At the same time, there are limits to how pretenses of liberal values can be leveraged, so a radical break is necessary.

It is in the concrete positivity of working-class praxis that its positive political realization must be sought, while taking account of the mediations required [!] to transpose a democratic economy into a revolutionary political democracy.

Reminiscent of Meszaros on means/ends coordination, and a left-factional tendency to be dismissive of the complex balance of appropriate mediations.

Felt compelled to read James Martin's introduction for background, but...ugh, his way of reading Poulantzas and Gramsci as some sort of epistemological break from an "economic reductionist" Marx just presumes his own crude economistic reading of Marx.

Critiques aside, Poulantzas's reading of the state as a relational field of 'condensation of class relations' seems like it willl fruitfully capture some key nuances.