What Is the State & the Challenge to Transcend It?

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 magazine and 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 the relative 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 of substantive 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.