Brad’s Reviews > Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State > Status Update

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.

"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."