4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST that is, a society with non-exploitative production relations.1 Yet, Side by side, we can *see relations of domination and a high degree of absolutization of power. How do we understand this phenomenon? To argue that what existed was not socialism in the first place, is _of course, one possible line of argument: that production relations themselves were not socialist/socialized. This argument raises more questions than it answers. It even fails to ask why every single project to build socialism ended in a miscarriage /disaster, always bringing forth something that was "not socialism"? Such a position only reduces socialism to a mere idea, a transcendental something that is always deferred, that never arrives. The question that we must necessarily ask is why socialism failed to live upto its j a gigantic emancipatory project of human history ended in whimper? A second line of argument that seeks to lay the blame of this historical defeat on extrinsic factors, conspiracies, misdemeanours of a Gorbachev and the like, is an argument that does not merit serious theoretical attention. It in fact, does violence to Marx's own notion of history that change is always internally generated internally, though modulated and conditioned in important wavs by the external environment. If, therefore, we see the former state-socialist societies as monstrous distortions, we cannot but start by asking where, and precisely how, socialism turned into what it did? If it was its claim that the socialized means of production were non-exploitative (and we have no reason to disbelieve this claim in any fundamental sense), there is no getting away from the reality of the disjunctuion of the field of power and the field of production. And to raise the question of the disjunction between the political and the economic is also to raise the question of the possibility of an "autonomous problematic of power".2 This question may, in fact, also be raised in relation to oriental societies were the political seems to determine the economic. From the standpoint of Marxist theory, the question of an autqnoumous problematic of power is a difficult one, for it immediately raises questions of a philosophical nature. If power is not a function of the economy and production relations, then does not granting the autonomy of power bring us within the realm of an idealist philosophical position? The problem that this paper seeks to address then is: Is it possible, within a materialist account of history, to have a non-reductionist theory of power? The argument in this paper answers the above question in the affirmative and further indicates that the resources for such a theory already lie scattered within Marxist texts.3 In a sense, we argue, power figures in Marxist discourse in much the same way as labour-power does in the disourse of classical political economy—in its absence. Let us illustrate this point briefly. Althusser,