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

"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.