Yves here. Documentary producer Lynn Fries edited some interviews with John Bellamy Foster on the importance and comparative neglect in the Anglosphere of Beyond Leviathan by István Mészáros. From the extract below, Beyond Leviathan’s take on the unacknowledged problem of the state:
Mészáros’ own position is you can’t transcend capital, and you can’t transcend labor without transcending the state as it emerged in history
By Lynn Fries. Originally published by GPENewsdocs
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER: This is an extraordinarily important work. I think the value of our discussion here is if it gets you interested enough to read Mészáros for yourself and maybe look for answers in it. I think that he has not received enough recognition in the English speaking world.
His books in Latin America have been written in English but translated and sold in the hundreds of thousands even millions. In the Left in the United States and in the English speaking world, his work is hardly known. I think that has to change.
I think this is the most provocative work in Marxist theory certainly related to the state but also in terms of going beyond capital that we have. And we should be studying and discussing it. I’m excited that this seems to be happening finally. I only wish it had happened while he was still alive.
LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.
That opening clip was from a Monthly Review Press conversation with John Bellamy Foster discussing “Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State” by István Mészáros. That conversation marked the book’s publication in 2022.
For the benefit of those of us who for one reason or another didn’t know about or find time to listen to a long form conversation or who like me need repeated views for this kind of content to finally sink in, this segment presents some of John Bellamy Foster’s comments in the short form video format.
John Bellamy Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review. Monthly Review’s seventy-fifth anniversary issue was published in May 2024, John Bellamy Foster revisited the legacy of Albert Einstein and his deep connections to Monthly Review. In its first edition in May 1949, Monthly Review published Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism”.
What is perhaps less well known is the connection between István Mészáros and Monthly Review. As leading publishers of left scholarship, Monthly Review magazineand Monthly Review Press have long been committed to publishing István Mészáros’ work. Mészáros’ critique of the state was left unfinished at the time of his death and posthumously edited by John Bellamy Foster. Monthly Review Press published the book with as noted earlier an introduction by John Bellamy Foster.
In this opening set of comments, John Bellamy Foster discusses the basic premise of “Beyond Leviathan”.
JBF: Well, if you read, “Beyond Leviathan”, you won’t find any references, at all to the Marxist debates on the state in the 1960s and 1970s, most famously associated with the debate between Ralph Miliband and Nico Poulantzas and all of the other contributions.
None of those approaches, none of those discussions enter into his analysis at all, although he’s closest to Miliband’s perspective. Basically, those debates on the state were irrelevant, or are certainly not fundamental from his point of view. And they don’t constitute a Marxist theory of the state.
They were really the result of attempts within Euro-Communism and the Labour Party and Britain to figure out how socialists could take advantage of therelative autonomy of the state. Come to power, basically. Share power with elements of capital within the state and sort of reconfigure, radically reform capitalist society or the capitalist state.
And none of this is central for Mészáros. He starts off with basically Norberto Bobbio’s notion that there is no Marxist theory of the state. And he also quotes, Althusser and Colletti on that.
And the reason this is so important is that the classical Marxist theory of the state that came out of Marx himself with the “Critique of the Gotham Program” and with his writings on on the Paris Commune and in Lenin’s “State and Revolution” was all about the withering away of the state, or how the state will wither away.
And the problem for Marxist theory at that time classically was the eradication of the state. Basically, Mészáros’ own position is you can’t transcend capital, and you can’t transcend labor without transcending the state as it emerged in history.
But he doesn’t take this from the standpoint of: well then, we’ll just analyze the capitalist state. He sees the state as a structure arising out of class struggle over thousands of years.
So he goes back to Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, all the way up. He passes through all the major state theorists in trying to understand how the state arose, what are its dimensions and how do we transcend it.
And this isn’t some sort of utopian fantasy for him. The state is a hierarchical system. of power connected to the maintenance of class society, but he recognizes that all societies have to have an overall political command structure.
It’s just, they don’t have to have it in the form of the state, a hierarchical class based political order. And going deeply into how that evolved historically, its contradictions and the means for its transcendence is what “Beyond Leviathan” is all about.
Now, this may seem like an enormous project. And it may seem to some to be almost irrelevant because the capitalist state is everywhere. But the point is that, theoretically, you can’t actually have a Marxist critique unless you can step outside the system.
And Marxist critique is based on stepping out of the capital relation. It also involves stepping out of the alienated labor relation. But it also requires that we step out of the state relation which holds the system together.
The modalities of capital consist of capital, labor, and the state. And they reinforce each other. And you have to basically eradicate all three. Eradicating labor means eradicating alienated labor. And you have to eradicate all three to transcend capitalism.
And you have to create a new social metabolism in its place with a new form of, new political command structure. In order to be able to develop a critique, a revolutionary response; in order to be able to actually talk about how we create a society ofsubstantive equality.
And then we can fight the struggle on the ground as it is. But with this wider, more radical, more revolutionary perspective in mind, it changes strategically how we operate and of how we conceive of a transition away from the system.
So this is basically the premise of “Beyond Leviathan”. It has a lot of elements in it that grew out of his work “Beyond Capital”.
There are all sorts of concepts involved. The most important being substantive equality but the basic framework is how do we understand the problem of transcending the state and how does that inform our everyday practice.
Rather than taking the liberal conception of the state which is circular and based on a kind of lawlessness and just trying to reconfigure that. That goes nowhere. We need a more revolutionary theoretical critique, in his view.
The capitalist state claims to be based on law. It’s actually very dependent on lawlessness.That is all sorts of constant exceptions that maintain the power; that break with any rule of law. So be behind the facade of law is this realm of lawlessness.
All this is also tied up with the structural crisis of capital which provides the basis for more revolutionary approaches.
LF: This next set of comments delves into difficulties in transcending the state. And Mészáros’ critique of this and his ideas of what a viable pathway to move beyond the state, so “Beyond Leviathan” would need to involve.
JBF: One of the problems is that the path beyond the state or the path to the withering away of the state passes through the state. So it’s not possible to simply say: well, the state’s going to wither away.
There is actually immediate struggle over the state. And that struggle has dominated the left. If you don’t have a long term strategic perspective, you can even supposedly gain control of the state and and fall into a trap. Because you end up simply reinforcing the capital relation.
So the two dominant strategies of the left in the 20th century, were of course, the Soviet model (which became actually a very centralized state – it didn’t start out exactly like that) and the other was the Social Democratic model pursued by the left in the West. And part of Mészáros’ work is involved with explaining why both of those failed.
So, a very large part of “Beyond Capital” is about why the Soviet type societies failed and the capital relation persisted. And in many respects, the labor relation persisted in the Soviet Union through the model of a very centralized state. So he critiques that. He also in his analysis explains why the Social Democratic model collapsed and went in the direction of neoliberalism.
In Latin America because of US dominance, Latin America was the experimental region for neoliberalism. And Venezuela’s revolution actually was a response to that.
The place where Mészáros had the most impact of course was on Chavez in Venezuela where a large part of the Bolivarian Revolution under Chavez’s leadership was modelled after Mészáros’ ideas.
So there the idea, at least while Chavez was in charge was to have a state that was subject to popular sovereignty but also that dissolved much of the state power and handed that over to the communities and to the communes. So it involved in some ways gaining the state so that the state or political command structure could be restructured away from a class state model.
“Beyond Leviathan” has to be the goal but to institute that have to confront the state directly. And even gain popular sovereignty over the state in order to be able to affect the changes.
Even in the case of Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution, he said to Chavez: you will fail. Right? Because no one country can solve these problems, the solutions have to be global. And at the very end of Chavez’s life, he and Mészáros were working on trying to create a call for a New International. As they called it, globally, that would try to create a global response which for him is necessary.
Mészáros doesn’t believe that there is only one single path in which the state can be transformed. It does require a lot of the state power and passing that to the people. So the state begins to wither away while the political command structure is strengthened at the bottom of society. So this is a long transition. He doesn’t depict a single path
The crisis of the state is actually centered in the advanced capitalist world. It is no longer able to function and we are going to be forced to transcend. It can’t solve the environmental problem. They can’t solve the economic problem. It can’t solve the problem of world war, the increasing dangers of a thermal nuclear exchange. And the system becomes more and more corrupt and extends to the media system and everything else.
The only possibility is to move away from this state structure towards a different kind of political system. And it has to involve increased sovereignty from below.
Well, this is Volume 1 and Volume 2 and 3 were going to be even more substantial. He has a discussion of Hobbes and Hegel who he considers to be the two greatest modern theorists of the state in “Beyond Leviathan”. But the bulk of his analysis of Hobbes’ and Hegel’s approaches to the state and therefore the really deep theory of the state is actually in the 2nd and 3rd volumes in draft. They were only a second draft and not the final draft. So, with that he is able to kind of go forward more and talk about not only how the bourgeois state works but how to transcend it.
So in some ways “Beyond Leviathan” is fairly complete. Some of the chapters were missing of this volume that we’ve just published. And some of it had to be taken out of the notes. But it is incomplete in the sense that the 2nd and 3rd volumes where he was going to develop the argument are not there yet. So a “Critique of Leviathan” [the remainder of the originally drafted “Beyond Leviathan”] will make that available.
LF: We are going to leave it there for now. Viewers who would like to know more about this book and conversation can find full details at monthlyreview.org along with excerpts of John Bellamy Foster’s introduction and Meszaros’ preface to “Beyond Leviathan”. For an overview of the book’s aims and scope, see John Bellamy Foster’s introduction to the “Review of the Month” by Mészáros in the December 2017 issue of MR.
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as a major environmental sociologist. His is author of The Dialectics of Ecology (2024) and Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (2022). Among numerous other publications, earlier books include Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000), The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (with Fred Magdoff, 2009), The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010), The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy (New Edition, 2014), and The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (2020).
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While certainly empowering communities, the Bolivarian Revolution relies on the nation state – with a central government creating policy, allying with other central governments, and maintaining a powerful army – in order to survive. In the world in which we live, I don’t think a revolution can exist without a powerful state apparatus to support it.
This was my reaction when I listened to this — it looks like there are external pressures in the international system which create an environment where state formation is adaptive. I believe Mészáros acknowledges as much when he says that the challenge posed by capital requires an international response, perhaps similar in this regard to the challenge posed by climate crisis.
My thought exactly. The Soviet Union’s early days were fraught by armed challenges from both Russian aristocracy and Western militaries. The new state had to defend itself; perhaps in the process it lost Marx’s flexibility to “wither away.” And with the Social Democrats in Europe, they failed to exert control over the capitalist forces which eventually recaptured the state. Note that China has managed to do this.
Isn’t transcending the state exactly what the capitalist/globalists are trying to do? Create an unfettered, superanational capitalism? / ;)
yep the era of big government is over.
https://academic.oup.com/book/47560/chapter-abstract/422632358?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
Food Rights, Free Trade, and Fascism
Vandana Shiva
Free trade has hijacked our most powerful aspiration—the will to be free. It has substituted corporate for personal freedom, and passed off increased freedom for corporations as the expansion of democracy and human rights.
The West has been considered one of the sources of the notion of human rights, but brutality was integral to the Western project of colonialism and imperialism. The North has dominated the South by systematically denying full human status to the Southern peoples. This was first done through the West’s ‘civilizing mission’—the white man’s burden; now it is done through globalization and free trade. Globalization is today rewriting the human rights agenda by redefining what being human means.
Modern neoliberal economics and bacteria operate on the same infinite growth formula. The problem is when they reach effective boundaries. Whether the edge of the petri dish, or resources and geographic and political limits.
The advantage of multi-cellular organisms is being able to better navigate the situation.
In terms of societies as larger social super organisms, government is the nervous system, while money and banking function as blood and the circulation system.
As cells within this body, people tend to resent the power of government, while becoming addicted to the desire to accumulate money. Which gives finance the upper hand and so the only real job the flunkies allowed in office have, is running up the debt the banks need to grow metastatically.
That they go play cowboys and Indians on the other side of the planet is a side effect, of irresponsible people having too much power.
Russia and China have effectively gone back to private government, with Putin and Xi as respective CEO’s, specifically to control their oligarchs, which is why our oligarchs and their prostitutes hate them so much.
Basically the banks are having their let them eat cake moment. Eventually we will come to realize that if government is to function as a public utility, banking has to be one as well. When the medium enabling markets is privately managed, we are all tenant farmers to the banks.
Yes, I think this is what Hudson and Desai at Geopolitical Economy Report mean by the need for the state to “control the commanding heights of the economy.”
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/
The idea of the state as a command post over the economy is Lenin’s dead duck, which unfortunately still quacks around in people’s heads.
Thank you. that was very interesting. I’m going to look for JBF’s book “The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology” – it sounds spot on. Taking Nature’s perspective seems like the only way to step outside the State because it is pointless at this level of the evolution of modern politics to expect the State to correct itself. Capitalism or maybe consumerism is like a lethal disease that has run its course and left society too crippled to cope without the medication that is also killing it. But still plenty of decisions to be made, mostly negative ones like decisions not to do the most destructive things. Which seems to be an intelligence or wisdom ubiquitous to Nature’s other creatures. They abide the Laws of Nature.
Maybe the natural evolution of the state is Kennedy realizing the health of human beings needs to transcend state. What the body needs to be healthy physically and mentally should be recognized as higher than state, capital and labor. And that we can no longer deny that this disease within our societies structure is terminal and needs to be addressed.
The world needs to agree that poisoning ourselves needs to stop. The big ag, big pharma, big hydrocarbon- small FDA,USDA, EPA with inside dealing needs to be front and center to someway forward that helps humanity. Pretty sure this issue fits within what and where some of this thought might gain traction.
I will order that book.
I confess to not having read the book, but much of this sounds like hand-waving. How exactly are we going to “transcend” a system which he says has been in existence in some form for three thousand years? Are we going to have “popular sovereignty” over the state (whatever that is) or does the state wither away “while the political command structure is strengthened at the bottom of society,” (how?) It sounds great fun theoretically, but in many ways it’s just the Marxist equivalent of an MBA telling us to “think outside the box.”
Marx’s conception of the state dates from a time when the state was essentially responsible just for law and order, war and justice. He argued that it would “wither away” once there was no class system and thus no need for oppression. He simply didn’t have experience of a state which operated universities, ran a health service, enforced safety standards at work, issued passports and driving licenses and a million other things. Marx’s conception of the state is, frankly, an anachronism
Thank you. Since I also haven’t read the book and the article doesn’t explain I’ll belatedly add a general comment that reinventing the wheel is hard because wheels are based on certain natural physical principles that we can’t change. And states too are based on immutable principles that can only be changed by changing human beings. Social theories that don’t recognize the real problem are indeed hand waving
Some of the comments are talking about how the USSR failed because the capitalist world opposed but that’s the same excuse–external threats–that Napoleon used for crowning himself emperor. And so it goes. History tells us what is, since we are still the same human beings, and not just what was.All of which isn’t an argument against reform but is one against trying to make very complex problems into simpler theories. Now I guess I need to go find the book.
Generally, it’s not a good idea to criticize books you haven’t even read. Or authors, apparently.
Alternatively, maybe your own ideas of what did and didn’t exist in the 19th century are wrong. Much of what you’re talking about already existed: state-enforced occupational safety measures had already been won and existed in his lifetime; he didn’t have to foresee what already existed, and he was actively involved in organizations fighting for increased protections. The state was also already involved in education at every level in some European states; in fact, Prussia’s state-run educational system was well-known and often imitated.
“Marx’s conception of the state dates from a time when the state was essentially responsible just for law and order, war and justice” is just wrong historically, unless you’re going to stretch “essentially” to mean anything you like.
That aside, “what body has the authority to issue passports to travel to other states?” isn’t a question that makes sense in a world without states, so I’m not sure why you listed that one.
Thank you for this. I was going to write a longer piece but decided I had to study Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program again. Marx’s concept of the state (he had a robust one) is not an anachronism, it was based on social relations (class productive relations) which are much the same today as they were then, even if the state has become an increased set of contrivances to maintain those relations. It is about power, who wields it and how they maintain it. And most importantly with his keen intellect, to vitalize a concept, he carefully chooses his words. For some today his words could be better understood if updated in a glossary. And the concept requires careful consideration.
I made a comment in Kamala’s Failed Opportunity which could have been here.
What were the obstacles for the Soviet Union achieving a stateless society after the Bolshevik Revolution and right up to Gorbachev’s capitulation? The communal decision making didn’t work, or was not allowed to work?
Lenin’s concept of centralized democracy (within a single party, but not outside, expressed first in What Is to be Done 1902) with the one party which would represent a Vanguard of the Proletariat (because the proletariat had not developed sufficient class consciousness) virtually guaranteed a strong state and its maintenance. Rosa Luxemburg said as much in 1903 (and Trotsky at nearly the same time, but he switched sides). Gorbachev wanted to reform that, but from the top down, too little, too late. There was a significant Anarchist element in Russia in 1917 which demanded worker’s control and with the State and Revolution (September 1917) Lenin expressed support for that view. The Bolsheviks were aghast that he had thrown in with the Anarchists, but after the Coup of October (it wasn’t a revolution), their fears were completely allayed as he went back on his earlier words and crushed any workers control. Though Lenin leaned heavily on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, in my view, he missed the finer points altogether. He was not aware of Marx’s earliest works (the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (not published until 1931) which described the alienation of labor in the capitalist mode of production. If he had, he might have understood that his employment of Taylorism was alienation on steroids. I don’t know how much that would have helped. Well, did I mention that I’m not big on Lenin? Marx’s critique is highly nuanced, it shows how humanity would develop to a higher stage of communism (and a withering away of the state) after social relations emerged into socialism and then an initial stage of communism. The Soviet Union never got to socialism, imho. Humanity has a long way to go. It’s not the fault of Marx. My 1&1/2¢.
Adding – the soviets were local councils, they were destroyed as well, though the name was taken.
Thank you, something to ponder on.
A pre-requisite for the withering away of the state, if I understood it correctly, is the process of achieving first a classless society and the USSR, in all its existence, has a rigid hierarchy of bureaucratic rulers on the one hand and the peasant workers on the other. Political power didn’t really get passed on to (or were not seized by) the proletarians, although Lenin might have claimed otherwise.
Yes, indeed and thank you.
The point – I can only assume – being however, how far would RU economic and industrial power at that early time of 1917 in fact enable Lenin to accomplish?
Imagine in comparison what would have happened and been possible with an interwar Germany turning truly left. The biggest labour movement at that time. In comparison to RU former truly was terrifying for any elite power in Europe and the US.
Workers´ control of German steel, chemical, engineering industries in 1930? Possibly then – early domino theory – coalescing with France under the Popular Front and crushing Franco in Spain? Interesting scenarios for British Foreign Office creating nightmares, possibly.
And alternative history novels.
p.s. same “fear” resurged in the 1940s and early 1950s, this time countered by the US.
I have been reading Domenico Losurdo book about Stalin for a couple of nights now (It has been translated into English not long ago, so far it is a page turner for me). This question is answered at the beginning. You can’t have a stateless society when you have capitalists literally invading you with armies and trying every means of subversion against you. As a Marxist your primary directive is dealing with an actually existing reality it is argued.
That sounds like some of the problem third parties face in the US. It’s hard to build a winning alternative to the twin rich wings of the US uniparty while fending off their many-pronged effort at subverting (and silencing) that alternative.
But some people keep trying. The Green Party has been doing it for a quarter of a century, ith those people who’ve been willing to help, and — well . . . (musical interlude).
For some time I’ve been contemplating of buying and reading Reclaiming the State, which was published the same year Mészáros died. Now I’m wondering if it would make sense to read Beyond Leviathan first for the context?
Talking like I had time to read all I want to read… sigh.
I ordered the book from Interlibrary Loan and they already responded,
The state is in strife,it needs to reduce complexity because the costs are spiralling, but can’t because the way it has developed means control has to increase with associated complexity, Catch 22. Just stand back and let the thing self destruct.
The latest from Tim Watkins at Conciousness of Sheep is good on this
Sovereignty, as we understand it today, is actually a rather modern concept. Prior to the French Revolution, states were the private property of royalty, as I learned from a thought-provoking interview with Natasha Wheatley author of “The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty” (2023). https://www.americanprestigepod.com/p/e168-the-habsburg-empire-and-the?r=1zil48&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.
The growing rejection of the “system,” which of course includes the modern state, is largely due to an explosive and expanding mistrust among citizens.
This same mistrust is now also propelling the loss of left-right divisions (to the despair of the professional diagnosticians). The most recent primitive stumbling and rumbling in this direction is the tentative and fragile Trump/RFK Jr. alliance.
Now, an important issue becomes whether national populists are actually interested in average citizens’ deep participation in public affairs or do they simply prefer the alternative of creating a resemblance of such participation. A conception of the people, who are always depicted as virtuous and innocent, versus the elites, who are always uniformly seen as predators and guilty, is a vision quite susceptible to deception and disillusionment.
Maybe James Madison was right when he stated that “if men were angels, no government (or state) would be necessary.”
While it might seem like a long time from our point of view, that humanity has gone from mostly tribal cultures to nation states of many millions of people in 3000 years, is actually fairly short, in evolutionary terms.
Consider that in a tribal system, one’s status would be a function of what one adds, not what one can extract.
Societies were about collective responsibility, with rights as reward. While this would be anathema to our current world, that is just how deep the current delusional thinking goes.
Basically we are surfing that couple billion years of stored solar energy.
Trial and error. Live and learn.
We know a great deal about what happens when states “wither away.” State-like functions have to be performed by somebody and, in the absence of a formal state, the best organised and strongest informal actors take over. This usually means organised crime, in some countries theocratic religious movements and in others a mixture of the two. Even in parts of some European cities, enforcing the law everywhere is too politically explosive, so certain communities are effectively run by drug dealers in cahoots with local elected politicians who protect them. If you are tired of drug gangs fighting under your window, and have had your car stolen, or are worried about your children’s safety on the way home from school, you might swallow your instinctive distaste of the state as a class-based system of oppression enough to go to the local police station. In most cases you won’t get help because it’s too politically sensitive.
In many parts of the world, of course, even the option of looking to the state for help does not exist. There’s a rigid law that when you make the state weaker, you make organised and powerful non-state actors more powerful. You choose.
Yeah, Rwanda appears instructive in this regard. The pursuit of security — even if it turns out to be illusory — is a deeply rooted need for which human groups must meet some minimum standard in order to remain viable.
Thus the need to strengthen bottom-up communities. Yes, we know a great deal about what happens when states “wither away” – when those structures are not in place.
This is very much one of the firm laws of history.
I’ve always been strongly attracted to the more anarchist/libertarian side of ideology, but this is the constant rock on which anti-statism always falls. Someone will fill the vacuum, and its only sheer luck if those people who do are relatively benign. Of course, there are many fairly primitive societies that have found ways to maintain stability and good lives for people through various forms of co-operation, although when you peer too closely into how they work its rarely quite as nice as it can seem from the outside. But its very unclear to me as to how a fairly modern society can operate fairly without a defined state.
As you say above, a lot of theorising on this depends hugely on vigorous handwaving away of problems, so many of which are deeply rooted in human nature and simply the way power works. Or put another way, lovely theory, shame about reality.
Please, tell us more about this “garden”, Mr. Borrell… ;)
Kidding aside, “Is this what I get after all I’ve done for you” isn’t really an apt response to a critique of an entire institutional field. You also need to acknowledge the state’s own, positive role in preventing people from self-organizing according to their own narratives.
But the whole thrust of both Beyond Leviathan and Beyond Capital actually acknowledged most of your point while turning attention to the possibility of developing the needed structures after the seizure of state power. So as to build the preconditions for government by the associated producers.
Your examples seem to be of state collapse rather than state transcendence.
As Aurelian has pointed out, when the State withers away some other entity will fill the void to perform essential functions. Examples are many: the Catholic Church when the Roman Empire fell apart, mafias in periods of instability, and today the multi-national corporation. This latter is not so much taking advantage of the withering away of the state, as actually pushing it aside. Bottom up is great, but there needs to be a way to deal with the lawlessnes behind the law. The law of the jungle is not the desired end state. Achieving order in human society has a parallel in achieving order in the environment. There is a proper scale for everything, and it is not a one size fits all. Some of the things I have read, and not completely understood, about how the current Chinese government is actually very decentralized but held together by a Communist Party that serves as sort of a ¨human resources¨ (horrible term) department are interesting.
Yes, the way China works in reality is very different from how outsiders perceive – much the same can be said of most of the longer lasting leftist States like Vietnam. The Party acts less like a hierarchical centralised force (as they tried in the USSR), more like a shepherd trying to get his flock to all go in the same direction. This is one reason why the Chinese CCP is so comfortable with allowing free markets and capitalism – so long as they perceive that they can control the overall direction (i.e. they can keep it as a sheep, not a sheepdog), then they see no ideological objection to it. But this can only work if you are prepared to be extremely ruthless if some of the sheep get ideas above their station. Or, for that matter, if your collie decides he’s tired of listening to your whistling.
The reality of course is that once you dig deeper into how countries work above a simplistic model, every nation has some very complicated sets of power rules under the surface. The great success of past Empires was that they understood these rules in various places and used them to their advantage. This is how tiny England grabbed control of the vastness of India without apparently too much trouble.
There does have to be some locus of structure. Some ideal or ideology. With capitalism it is simply the amount of wealth.
It wasn’t so much that Catholicism took over from the Roman Empire, as it provided the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed.
Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The various elements, ideals, factions interacting.
Remember to the Ancients, gods were metaphors. Monotheism amounted to monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.
Constantine adopted Christianity for the monotheism as he was bringing the sides of the Empire together.
When the West went back to public forms of government, it required separation of church and state. Effectively culture and civics.
Which tends to be schizophrenic, as it separated the state from its presumed moral basis. Though we still have “In God we trust” on the money.
The recently deceased James C. Scott in “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,” according to a succinct summary from Wikipedia (I can’t get the link function to work), argues that “people had to be forced to live in the early states, which were hierarchical, beset by malnutrition and disease, and often based on slavery.”
I took from it that the state is necessarily coercive, but also an unavoidable feature of what can be called “civilization,” the development of settled communities with fixed institutions. In his obituaries, Scott was described as an anarchist, of which I wasn’t aware, but it fits with the subject matter. However, in the book, I don’t recall Scott suggesting a more preferable alternative to the state. He did say that people in ancient times often were able to drop out from the state and live nomadic lives if the state became too onerous. I don’t think that is possible today, except possibly through revolution. But the result would be another state. I also took from it that politics is how people attempt to control the state and either manipulate it toward their own ends, or seek stability through different arrangements of equity. Sometimes, rulers would see the wisdom of providing some level of welfare to the people. I would be interested in Michael Hudson’s opinion of the book.
Great post, thank you.
as Bellamy Foster in the post says:
“The capitalist state claims to be based on law. It’s actually very dependent on lawlessness.That is all sorts of constant exceptions that maintain the power; that break with any rule of law. So be behind the facade of law is this realm of lawlessness.”
John Mearsheimer in his Substack today:
„(…)This article about the DNC and Israel’s genocide in Gaza reminds me of why I am a realist.
Realism emphasizes that there is no higher authority in the international system that can come to your rescue if you are in serious trouble and that you cannot depend on other states to come to your aid in the crunch. Indeed, those other states might someday put their gunsights on you. After all, who can know the future intentions of another state? In those circumstances, there is no chance that international law or just war theory will save you.
In such a world, the best way to survive is to have a state of your own and make sure that state has a lot of military power. This is what we realists call a self-help world.(…)“
I have started to read German historian Jan Assmanns´s text about how religion, theocracy and modern democracy are related. Since Assmann, who died this February, was a historian of ancient religion and Egypt his arguments come from another corner, they imply that the concept of state power today originates with the concept of divinity.
His analysis suggests that Carl Schmitt´s writings about theocracy were a response to the problem of lawlessness which allegedly could only be permanently held at bay by transferring devine power to the existence of the modern nation state.
By which Schmitt, a proto-Nazi after all, is still inherent to the modern German post-1945 Constitution (and any other such state today.) Which offers an explanation for fascist structures within any top down organisation be it a state or a corporation (which would take us into anarchist territory as someone earlier in the comments here has pointed out.)
Since along Assmann´s line divinity and thus theocracy are always inherent to it.
Assmann quotes 1922 Schmitt:
“(…)All concise terms of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological terms (…) in that, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent legislator (…) The state of exception has an analogous meaning for jurisprudence as the miracle has for theology (…)” which is why Schmitt “(…) rejects a rational foundation of political order and only allows a theological foundation (…). As with his political theology he is directed against political theory or philosophy.(…)”
(my translation)
This is preceded by Assmann quoting Roman historian Tullius Varro “(…)who transmitted the concept of “political theology” to the West, and stated that the beginnings of state institutions are identical with the origin of religion.(…)”
* * *
ca. 2005 I had a conversation with German sociologist Heinz Dieterich who was among the group of people advising Chavez see: e.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_of_the_21st_century
(The link even mentions Mészáros once argueing that he eventually was more important to the Bolivarian revoution than Dieterich.)
Dieterich spoke about how he opposed Hardt/Negri planning to tour Venezuela and other places in South America at that time, since he regarded them as propagandists disintegrating – intentionally or not – state structure to replace it with something rather lofty and unsubstantial like their “the multitudes”, and thus open the floodgates for US intrusion. At least those were his worries then.
Dieterich regarded state as the one indispensable base from where one could move into alliances. So Marxism might not have a state theory as such but it offers a concept of power, since any hostile force has to be answered by counterforce.
(On latter point there is interesting work by Bulgarian scholar Boyan Manchev.)
Or to quote Jeffrey Robbins, another historian of religion: “(…)Schmitt’s analysis, which links the transcendence of God with the political concept of sovereignty, is both too nostalgic and too severe. In the place of Schmitt’s political theology that disdains democracy for the failures of modern liberalism, this paper instead draws on the recent collaborative works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to make the case for a more thoroughgoing commitment to democracy, a commitment that goes beyond the modern liberal concept of popular sovereignty by appealing to the disparate and sometimes unruly voices of the multitude.(…)”
Be it as it may, in the real world e.g. you had the Palestine/Kibbutz model pre-1940s where various peoples lived together in communitites under a very weak state structure (Ottoman Empire) and actually practising progressive egalitarian grass-roots and socialist ideas. (Which has always been one of Chomsky´s main talking points when argueing that there was another way forward, which is even acknowledged by Ilan Pappé in his latest conversation with Chris Hedges, at least between the lines, I believe.)
The same set of problems emanating from state theory applies to the conflicts over Ukraine and Taiwan of course, now. Which makes this entire topic as of Mészáros extremely important and timely. It will accompany us for a very long time, unfortunately…
p.s.
re: gunboats & Mészáros
Andrei Martyanov in his highly recommended „Disintegraion“ quotes Michael Hudson many times, .e.g:
„“The gunboats don’t appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your
price theory didn’t have gunboats in them, or the crime sector. And
probably they didn’t have debt in it either.”
re: Venezuela
I forgot, from Germany´s largest indie news blog NACHDENKSEITEN, 24/8/24:
“Voices from Venezuela: On elections and collective emancipation”
In this interview, commune spokesperson and Alexis Vive founder Robert Longa answers our questions about participatory and protagonist democracy in Venezuela and the recent presidential elections. The interview was conducted by Cira Pascual Marquina .
https://www-nachdenkseiten-de.translate.goog/?p=120123&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp