What does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules? [antikvár]

Science and Politics -A Foreword Two concerns are intimately interwoven in this book: one of empirical social theory and one of the practice of revolutionary politics in the advanced capitalist countries. The first essay, dealing with the state apparatus, owes its conception to the 22nd Congress of the French Communist Party, at which the concept of the dictatorship of the prolétariat was deleted from the statutes. But it goes beyond the framework of the political debate that accompanied and followed that event. Entering the field of organization theory, it seeks to elucídate the forms of state organization characteristic of feudal society, the classical and modern Western world, and the contemporary regimes of Eastern Europe. The experiences of twentieth-century dictatorship may provide good reasons for abandonment of the bewildering distinctions be-tween démocratie and dictatorial dictatorship called for by classical Marxist-Leninist discourse. However, the concept of the dictatorship of the prolétariat was central to the thought of Marx and Lenin, and désignâtes, together with its corollaries, a crucial object that cannot be discarded in a facile manner. Above ail, it points to the organization of the state as a decisive manifestation of definite social relations of class domination. To empirical social theory this raises the question : how does the very organization of the state apparatus express and reproduce class relations? To practical revolutionary politics it poses the problem: how should a socialist state in the West be organized so as to reproduce the domination of the prolétariat and allied classes and strata of the working population, and so as to further the development of a classless society? Such diffi-culties can hardly be overcome by reference to conceptual analyses made by Lenin, however penetrating they may have been. Nor is it