78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST (historicist) claim that the question of 'power' is something that has been posed by 'history' seems to confirm our suspicion, but I shall let that pass. For Marx and Lenin, power is always political power, which is therefore a tautology. Politics is politics only in so far as it is tied to the existence of classes and the class-struggle. Political practice is precisely the production of new class-relations (or the dissolution thereof) by working on determinate class-relations, through the use of determinate means (of political practice). No classes, no politics, no state. With this we come to the central issue straight away—the 'state'. In the discussions of the state, standard Marxist historiography (not theory) has tended to identify state with an administrative apparatus. This is an empiricist confusion alien to Marxist theory. All societies have some (howsoever rudimentary) administrative/regulatory apparatus, but not all administrative apparatuses are states. It is only in so far as the administrative/legal apparatus functions in order to reproduce class-relations does it become a state. The state therefore is not so much a direct 'instrument' of the ruling class(es) but is rather the site of reproduction of all class-relations and relations of oppression deriving from these class-relations. No classes, no state. This is not some semantic scholasticism, but an essential pre-condition for avoiding empiricist banalities. All 'power-relations' exist in the material practices inscribed in the state-apparatuses, thus there is no politics prior to its mode of existence in these apparatuses. The forms of the state-apparatus, therefore condition all political practice, which themselves are determined in the last instance by economic relations. Therefore, although political practice has a relative autonomy, (and therefore its own history) its content goes beyond this political level, i.e., its effectivity within the social formation as a whole is determined by the economic level. This determination by the economy (in the last instance) is essential for Marxist theory, labels of reductionism notwithstanding. Therefore all spontaneous politics within a social formation is ultimately tied in form to the state apparatuses. A revolutionary party, armed with Marxist theory, ought to recognise this inherent effective presence of the state even in the most radical of politics. Thus the communist movement must constantly criticise the political forms it utilises and within which it is partly formulated, as these political forms are always inscribed within state apparatuses. It is precisely because of this that Lenin insists that revolution must of necessity involve the destruction of existing state apparatuses. The take-over of state-power by the proletariat does not involve a taking over of a ready-made apparatus of state-power, but the institution of new state apparatuses under the control of the new ruling class—the proletariat.