Plain Marxists, Sophisticated Marxists, and C. Wright Mills'The Power Elite

Abstract

Nicos Poulantzas identified instrumentalism and historicism as the sources of a “distorted Marxism.” It is often forgotten that Poulantzas's initial critique was actually directed at C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite, rather than at Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society. However, Poulantzas failed to recognize that an earlier encounter between Marxists and The Power Elite occurred during the 1950s, when Marxists such as Paul M. Sweezy and Herbert Aptheker took Mills to task, but in ways that yielded a wholly different and far more constructive outcome. The first encounter between Mills and the Marxists was a lively engagement that yielded constructive advances in political theory and, indeed, Miliband's work was at least partially the outcome of that first encounter. In this respect, Poulantzas and other “structural Marxists” failed to acknowledge that Anglo-American Marxists, such as Miliband, had already moved beyond Mills, first, by incorporating his many empirical advances into their own analysis but, second, by pointing out that Mills lacked a political economy and therefore did not adequately incorporate “structural” factors into his analysis of the power elite.