论国家的“相对自主性”——马克思国家理论中的上层建筑难题

马克思的国家理论是马克思政治哲学研究中的核心问题,上世纪70年代英国马克思主义者引发了有关“国家相对自主性”的讨论,认为国家并不完全受经济基础的决定,其自身具有相对独立的能动能力。与之类似,阿尔都塞以“多元决定论”强调了上层建筑与经济基础之间具有复杂的结构关系,社会机体的冲突与发展不可能被简化为某个单一的中心矛盾,相反,社会机体的矛盾是以多元决定的方式出现的。这些相关的国家自主性理论,都意在挣脱经济决定论的机械主义倾向,从而从上层建筑的视角来解释社会矛盾与社会结构的运动。从思想史上看,马克思先后面对着两种国家类型:弱的政治国家与强的政治国家。前者以抽象的形式主义与市民社会保持着距离;后者则自上而下地要求干预经济政策,体现为过分强烈的国家主张。因此,马克思本人关于政治国家的理解存在着视角上的转化。青年马克思的国家批判理论认为市民社会与政治国家的分离造成政治国家并未真正吸纳社会要素,凌驾于市民社会之上的国家具有虚假的自主性。成熟时期的马克思更加关注资本与现代国家的同构关系,由此面对着现代民族国家的崛起问题。
Abstract：Marx's theory of the state is a central topic in the study of Marx's political philosophy. In the 1970s, a discussion on “the relative autonomy of the state” rose among British Marxists who believed the state not to be completely determined by the economic base but to have within itself a relatively independent capability of activity. In a similar way, Althusser with his notion of overdetermination emphasized the complex structure existing between the superstructure and the economic base, and the impossibility of reducing to a single central contradiction the conflict and development of the social organism; rather, the contradictions of the social organism emerged as overdetermined contradictions. All of those theories on the autonomy of the state aimed to get rid of the mechanistic tendency of economic determinism and hence to explain social contradictions and movements of the social structure from the perspective of the superstructure. With regard to the history of ideas, Marx witnessed two successive types of the state, i.e., the weak and the strong political states, the former distancing itself from civil society in an abstract manner, while the latter attempting to intervene from above with economic policies that embodied overly strong wills of the state. There is therefore a shift in perspective in Marx's own understanding of the political state: the young Marx's critique of the state claimed that the separation between civil society and the political state led to the failure of the political state to truly absorb elements of society and a false autonomy of the state over and above civil society; the mature Marx, however, paid more attention to the isomorphism between capital and the modern state and thus took into account the issue of the rise of the modern nation-state.