Nicos Poulantzas’s Analysis of Gender Relations and the Concept of Individualisation

ABSTRACT

Nicos Poulantzas’s account of gender relations in his last book State, Power, Socialism provides insight into the relationship between class struggles and gender issues, mediated by the capitalist state. His account of the family in capitalism owes important influences to Foucault’s work but takes a different turn when it comes to explanations of the stability of domination and its underlying causes. Poulantzas’s concept of individualisation has not been discussed a lot until now and offers a key concept to understand the selective and systematic presence/absence of the capitalist state in relations of domination that are marked as private relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Nicos Poulantzas
• gender relations
• Michel Foucault
• family
• class

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Jörg Nowak holds a PhD in Political Science and is Post-Doc Fellow at the Department of Political Science, Kassel University, and is doing research on inequality for an NGO. His research interests include strikes and social conflicts, labour in emerging economies, class and gender, Althusserian Marxism. His latest publications are book chapters: “Workers Rights, Universal Claims, and Democracy in the Global South” (in Proceedings: International Colloquium Epistemologies of the South: South-South, South-North and North-South Global Learnings, Vol. 1: Democratizing Democracy, 2015), “Mass Strikes in Brazil, South Africa and India after 2008” (in Labour and Transnational Action in Times of Crisis, 2015), and “Postcolonial Nationalism, Labour Migration and Class Politics beyond Borders: The Case of the Turkish Party MHP in Germany” (in New Border and Citizenship Politics, 2014).

Notes

1. This was taken up by Louis Althusser in his text “Marx in His Limits” that dates from 1978, but was only published after his death (Althusser [1978] 2006). The image of the “machine” is taken literally by Althusser: a machine transforms an energy like the steam engine that produces electrical energy out of steam.