Yves here. Documentary producer Lynn Fries edited some interviews with John Bellamy Foster on the importance and comparative neglect in the Anglosphere of Beyond Leviathan by Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros. From the extract below, Beyond Leviathan\u2019s take on the unacknowledged problem of the state:<\/p>\n
M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019 own position is you can\u2019t transcend capital, and you can\u2019t transcend labor without transcending the state as it emerged in history<\/p>\n
By Lynn Fries. Originally published by GPENewsdocs<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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 M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros for yourself and maybe look for answers in it. I think that he has not received enough recognition in the English speaking world.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I\u2019m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs.<\/p>\n
That opening clip was from a Monthly Review Press conversation with John Bellamy Foster discussing \u201cBeyond Leviathan: Critique of the State\u201d by Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros. That conversation marked the book\u2019s publication in 2022.<\/p>\n
For the benefit of those of us who for one reason or another didn\u2019t 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\u2019s comments in the short form video format.<\/p>\n
John Bellamy Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review.\u00a0 Monthly Review\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cWhy Socialism\u201d.<\/p>\n
What is perhaps less well known is the connection between Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros and Monthly Review. As leading publishers of left scholarship, Monthly Review magazineand Monthly Review Press have long been committed to publishing Istv\u00e1n M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019 work. M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
In this opening set of comments, John Bellamy Foster discusses the basic premise\u00a0 of \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d.<\/p>\n
JBF: Well, if you read, \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d, you won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
None of those approaches, none of those discussions enter into his analysis at all, although he\u2019s closest to Miliband\u2019s perspective. Basically, those debates on the state were irrelevant, or are certainly not fundamental from his point of view. And they don\u2019t constitute a Marxist theory of the state.<\/p>\n
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 therelative autonomy of the state.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
And none of this is central for M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros. He starts off with basically Norberto Bobbio\u2019s notion that there is no Marxist theory of the state. And he also quotes, Althusser and Colletti on that.<\/p>\n
And the reason this is so important is that the classical Marxist theory of the state that came out of Marx himself with the \u201cCritique of the Gotham Program\u201d and with his writings on on the Paris Commune and in Lenin\u2019s \u201cState and Revolution\u201d was all about the withering away of the state, or how the state will wither away.<\/p>\n
And the problem for Marxist theory at that time classically was the eradication of the state. Basically, M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019 own position is you can\u2019t transcend capital, and you can\u2019t transcend labor without transcending the state as it emerged in history.<\/p>\n
But he doesn\u2019t take this from the standpoint of: well then, we\u2019ll just analyze the capitalist state. He sees the state as a structure arising out of class struggle over thousands of years.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And this isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s just, they don\u2019t 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 \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d is all about.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t actually have a Marxist critique unless you can step outside the system.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And you have to create a new social metabolism in its place with a new form of, new political command structure.\u00a0 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 ofsubstantive equality.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So this is basically the premise of \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d. It has a lot of elements in it that grew out of his work \u201cBeyond Capital\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The capitalist state claims to be based on law. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
All this is also tied up with the structural crisis of capital which provides the basis for more revolutionary approaches.<\/p>\n
LF:\u00a0 This next set of comments delves into difficulties in transcending the state. And M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019 critique of this and his ideas of what a viable pathway to move beyond the state, so \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d would need to involve.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not possible to simply say: well, the state\u2019s going to wither away.<\/p>\n
There is actually immediate struggle over the state. And that struggle has dominated the left. If you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 it didn\u2019t start out exactly like that) and the other was the Social Democratic model pursued by the left in the West. And part of M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019 work is involved with explaining why both of those failed.<\/p>\n
So, a very large part of \u201cBeyond Capital\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
In Latin America because of US dominance, Latin America was the experimental region for neoliberalism. And Venezuela\u2019s revolution actually was a response to that.<\/p>\n
The place where M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros had the most impact of course was on Chavez in Venezuela where a large part of the Bolivarian Revolution under Chavez\u2019s leadership was modelled after M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros\u2019 ideas.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s life, he and M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros 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.<\/p>\n
M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t depict a single path<\/p>\n
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\u2019t solve the environmental problem. They can\u2019t solve the economic problem. It can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d. But the bulk of his analysis of Hobbes\u2019 and Hegel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
So in some ways \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d is fairly complete. Some of the chapters were missing of this volume that we\u2019ve just published. And some of it had to be taken out of the notes.\u00a0 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 \u201cCritique of Leviathan\u201d [the remainder of the originally drafted \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d] will make that available.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s introduction and Meszaros\u2019 preface to \u201cBeyond Leviathan\u201d. For an overview of the book\u2019s aims and scope, see John Bellamy Foster\u2019s introduction to the \u201cReview of the Month\u201d by M\u00e9sz\u00e1ros in the December 2017 issue of MR.<\/p>\n
John Bellamy Foster\u00a0is editor of\u00a0Monthly Review\u00a0and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He has written widely on political economy and has established a reputation as a major environmental sociologist. His is author of\u00a0The Dialectics of Ecology (2024) and Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (2022). Among numerous other publications, earlier books include\u00a0Marx\u2019s Ecology: Materialism and Nature\u00a0(2000),\u00a0The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences\u00a0(with Fred Magdoff, 2009),\u00a0The Ecological Rift: Capitalism\u2019s War on the Earth\u00a0(with Brett Clark and Richard York, 2010),\u00a0The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy\u00a0(New Edition, 2014), and\u00a0The Return of Nature: So\u00adcialism and Ecology\u00a0(2020).<\/p>\n
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