Brad > Recent Status Updates

"The question is, therefore, how to acknowledge, on the one hand, the demands of immediate temporality without being trapped by it; and on the other, how to remain firmly oriented toward the ultimate historical perspectives of the Marxian project without becoming remote from the burning determinations of the immediate present."

“From the political point of view the state and the system of society are not two different things. The state is the system of society.” - (Marx, Critical Marginal Notes on an Article by a Prussian, in Marx & Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3)

"The long established 'civil society,'...both secures and safeguards the capitalist domination of the political state.

...Any reversal of such power relations in favour of the authoritarian [state] at times of acute crises is a double-edged sword, threatening the established order as much as defending it; by disrupting the...overpowering inertia of the formerly accepted state of affairs."

"What is to be done and what can be done at this juncture of history with regard to the great problems of the state? These are the problems to which we must now turn."

And so Chapter 13, armed with the deconstructive critique, at last turns to the positive project! Hopefully, this is where the serious academy-transcending side of the analysis will shine.

The state may well be the executor of such violence, going as far as a massively destructive global war, but it cannot be identified as the deepest cause of such events in and by itself.

...the causally determining ground of violence is the social metabolic order of the capital system itself. The state, to be sure, is an integral part of this system as a mode of social metabolic control.

The state has its superstructural dimension, legitimately characterized as the 'legal and political superstructure'. But the state as such cannot be reduced simply to a superstructure.

The state, for Mészáros, is a fundamental function of the "system of social metabolic reproduction". An interesting contrast is Fanon ("In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure.")

The unavoidable hostility and subversion by capitalist states also carries the danger of adopting ultimately self-defeating strategies by socialists, like the uncritical strengthening of state power that creates its own vicious circle of internally exercised state repression.

Such is the paradox of a transitional state project's need for 'staying power' so that it may later 'wither away'!

In order for "freedom" to be achievable, it has to be measured in terms that tangibly advance popular sovereignty and autonomy.

Freedom “must be freedom for doing or realizing something in order to acquire a humanly meaningful content.

Contrast this with freedom as 'pure thought' [I think I am free, therefore I am?].

Venezuela as model: Given Mészáros's admiration for Chavismo, I'm curious how he'll square the circle of conflicting operative logic on the international sphere (only hinted in passing yet).

Sympathetic we may be to his experience in Hungary, yet we'll before recent events, a member of Venezuela's El Maizal commune: "You can do politics with or against the state, but you'd be fucked trying [without] the state."

Mészáros stresses longue durée epochal rupture, from: 'primitive communism' as everyday life custom---> to extraction of surplus value by a ruling class (with a State as "the separate antagonistic overall command structure of the decision-making process").

Reclamation of popular decision-making power as autonomy and substantive equality as the socialist sine qua non.

"Tragically, Kant was proved to be right in that the system of law enforced by the state prevailed—and continues to prevail—in the sense that the [merely formal] ‘equality of the citizens as subjects’ acknowledges only the ‘form and not the matter’ of the vital issues over which a radically different solution is absolutely imperative..."

"For it was never enough—nor could it ever be even remotely enough in the future—to advocate, no matter how genuinely…a more equitable distribution of wealth without clearly defining the modality of its production."

On the supposed neoliberal transcendence of the nation-state form:

"The idea of harmonious globalization on the ground of capital's antagonism is a self-contradictory fiction."

A protégé of Lukács and close friend of the late Hugo Chavez, who considered Mészáros a 'pathfinder' of 21st century socialism and 'one of the most brilliant thinkers on this planet'. Also, once denied a visa in Canada on grounds of being a supposed 'security risk'.

This purports to be a fleshing out of a Marxist theory of the state in light of the fate of experiments of 20th-century 'actually existing socialism'.

Picked this up somewhat serendipitously, thinking that after indirect undergraduate "engagements" with Kantian philosophy and years of reading philosophy afterwards, it was time to go straight to the source.

...Finished the editor's intro and the Prefaces to both editions, and already know I'm in way over my head. Planning on taking my time with it.

"While the Debt Collective states it 'spent hours on the phone and email with them explaining how we did our work and connecting them to other experts and resources,' at the last minute a researcher from Last Week Tonight told them the show 'did not want to associate themselves with the work of the Rolling Jubilee due to its roots in Occupy Wall Street' (Debt Collective 2016)."

Sigh.

"CADTM [Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt] coordinated a 'Call to national and European MPs: For an audit of Tunisia’s debts to the EU,' which was signed by a larger number of members from European left parties, including Alex Tsipras."

Suspension of "odious, illegitimate debt" as a potential point for international solidarity is informatively central to this book, as are risks of unilateral refusal.

"there is an incentive for creditors to engage in risky and often dodgy high-yield activities that offer more profits than responsible lending options – while the potential loss is the same for responsible and irresponsible debtors alike. (Ellmers & Hulova 2013, 23)"

"Readings of the events ranged from the perception that 'Syriza had no choice' all the way to 'Syriza sold out the street,' and an organizer of the anti-authoritarian wing soberly commented at an internal meeting:

'I mean we have discussed the problems of reformist parties for years so why’s everyone’s all disappointed again?'"

"Institutional advocacy created incentives to perform a politics of respectability and credibility, that is to distance oneself from radical movements and convince polity insiders of a certain level of knowledge and expertise."