which tend to express more than just economic determinants such as productive and unproductive labour, salaried and

unsalaried work, the division between mental and physical labour.

The orthodox Marxist bifurcation of base and superstructure turns out to be a metaphorical representation of certain structural relationships between the dominant and the subjected, grounded, it is true, in an economic determinant in the last instance. But it is an instance which will never come, since it is a methodological abstractionbut real for all thatused to analyse certain social facts. The main theoretical contribution usually noted by interpreters of Poulantzas, is his ability to sift through the overdetermined whole, and foreground those structures in dominance which mark the concrete social formation. He is renowned for his understanding of the relative autonomy of the State from mere class economic interests, as was found in the post-Comintern understanding of State Monopoly Capitalism. The state is in fact the condensation not only of economic, but also of political and ideological factors. When it comes to social classes,

One might venture to explain this in another way. Class membership is apprehended abstractly since it expresses social relations founded on the abstraction of value, the money commodity and capital in motion. The worker, who only has his or her labour to sell on the market as one commodity among others, is him or herself abstracted from real, concrete relations of servitude by this very fact. (One recalls Marxs definition of labour under Feudalism as contracted without mediation and face-to-face). Exploitation is real, that is for sure, but it is also mediated, and thereby obscured, or covered over, by the market and its impersonal equivalents. So when looking at social class, those aspects of class place reinforced through the totality of the production-circulation-distribution of capital must also be

taken into account. That is why only a historical materialist dialectic based on some method of abstraction can properly deal with relations of production; in fact all social relations.