Foreword Dylan Riley fascism and dictatorship in context Why would a Greek Communist (Poulantzas had joined the KKE as a student in Paris) write a long and difficult book about inter-war fascism in the heady days of the late sixties? 1 To answer this question requires placing the work at the intersection of two major ‘external’ historical events, and Poulantzas’s own intellectual development. Fascism and Dictatorship was written in the aftermath of the 1967 military coup in Greece, and the student uprising of May 1968 in Paris. While the coup prompted Poulantzas to carefully specify a typology of authoritarian regimes in reaction to what he saw as the erroneous but widely held view on the Greek Left that the regime was fascist, the May events brought home the urgency of an explicit treatment of revolutionary strategy.2 Fascism and Dictatorship, in addition to its connection to the conjuncture of the late sixties, must also be understood in relationship to its author’s intellectual biography. Following his legal training, Poulantzas’s initial project was to blend existentialism with the philosophy of law. It was only in the later sixties that he emerged as a theorist of the State, with the publication of Political Power and Social Classes. In this text, Poulantzas dealt with fascism in the context of some extremely interesting, but highly abstract, remarks on the concept of ‘totalitarianism’. However, its main thrust was to establish the ‘Fundamental Characteristics of the Capitalist State’, which Poulantzas treated in an openly functionalist way, arguing that all capitalist States had the dual task of preventing the political organization of the dominated classes, and of organizing the dominant class.3 In part because of his ambition to identify the common features of all these States, Poulantzas neglected the problem of the different forms of capitalist State. In particular, he never posed the question of the conditions under which capitalist 1. I would like to thank David Abraham, Perry Anderson, Sebastian Budgen, Michael Burawoy, and Cihan Tugal for helpful comments. 2. Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas, London, 1985, p. 264. 3. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, London, 1978, pp. 188–9.
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