Quotes
In truth the “withering away of the state” refers to nothing mysterious or remote but to a perfectly tangible process which must be initiated right in our own historical time. It means, in plain language, the progressive reacquisition of the alienated powers of political decision-making by the individuals in their enterprise of moving toward a genuine socialist society. Without the requisition of these powers—to which not only the capitalist state but also the paralysing inertia of the structurally well-entrenched material reproductive practices are fundamentally opposed—neither the new mode of political control of society as a whole by its individuals is conceivable, nor indeed the nonadversarial and thereby cohesive and plannable everyday operation of the particular productive and distributive units by the self-managing freely associated producers.
The environmental and military cataclysms brought on by today’s Leviathan states are “bound to destroy humanity” eventually if an alternative mode of social metabolic reproduction is not developed (54). There is no choice for
humanity, therefore, but to pursue a critique of the state aimed at a revolutionary praxis of going beyond Leviathan.
humanity, therefore, but to pursue a critique of the state aimed at a revolutionary praxis of going beyond Leviathan.
Two strategic elements of Mészáros’s work were to prove essential for Chávez and for the course of the Bolivarian Revolution.52 The first
of these was the conception, drawn from Marx, of capital as a system of social metabolic reproduction, a self-reinforcing, integrated system of complex reproductive relations, which could not be simply abolished, or else changed piecemeal, but had to be replaced with an alternative organic metabolism based in communal relations.53 The second was the core framework of “The Communal System and the Law of Value” as depicted in of Beyond Capital, in which Mészáros provided the strategic foundation for the revolutionary institutionalization of a system of “communal social relations,” whereby the population reabsorbed sovereign rule into itself: a new kind of communal state or system, key to the transition to socialism. Such shifting of power to the people was at the same time a way of making the revolution, in Mészáros’s terms, “irreversible,” since the people would defend with their lives what was their own.5
of these was the conception, drawn from Marx, of capital as a system of social metabolic reproduction, a self-reinforcing, integrated system of complex reproductive relations, which could not be simply abolished, or else changed piecemeal, but had to be replaced with an alternative organic metabolism based in communal relations.53 The second was the core framework of “The Communal System and the Law of Value” as depicted in of Beyond Capital, in which Mészáros provided the strategic foundation for the revolutionary institutionalization of a system of “communal social relations,” whereby the population reabsorbed sovereign rule into itself: a new kind of communal state or system, key to the transition to socialism. Such shifting of power to the people was at the same time a way of making the revolution, in Mészáros’s terms, “irreversible,” since the people would defend with their lives what was their own.5
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