Substantive Equality

 “Beyond Leviathan,” by István Mészáros, edited by J.B. Foster, 2022

This is a book that attempts to provide a Marxist theory of the state. It is ultimately based on Marx’s insight that socialism / communism consists of the “withering away of the state.”  Mészáros was an inspiration for Hugo Chavez, a colleague of Gyorgy Lukács and one of the foremost modern theorists in the Marxist movement.  Venezuela’s “The Organic Law of the Commune” in 2010 was inspired by his writings.  Mészáros understood there would be a transitional, post-revolutionary period prior to socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat (workers' state).  This would slowly dissolve as capital’s remnants died with the increasing involvement of the population in power, and the first version of the socialist commune would be born… a commune without a state, with administration by elected members instead. Eliminating the state in this way was the unique task of the working-class and Marxist movement, as an oppressive ‘state’ had been a feature of most prior social / economic formations – slave, tribute, feudal and capitalist.

As can be guessed by this analysis, conceptions like ‘state socialism,’ ‘the state of the whole people,’ 'socialist state,' 'really existing socialism,' 'people's democracy' and other similar formations are theoretical and lazy bombast. While some Marxists think 'socialism' began in November 1917, Lenin clearly said in Pravda:  "Everyone agrees that the immediate introduction of socialism in Russia is impossible."

“Leviathan” of course is the term used by Thomas Hobbes to describe the early capitalist state.  Mészáros highlights the highly destructive nature of modern imperial and monopolistic capitalist states, which, due to their world-wide reach, now threaten international carnage on unimaginable terms – nuclear, environmental, economic and war. Quite literally they have to be overthrown for humanity to begin to survive. We see this today in the new cold/hot war, the inability to deal with climate change, resource limits, failed states, economic collapse and the continuation of nuclear threats.

Mészáros takes apart theorists of the state from Plato to Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, Weber and dozens of lesser-known theorists, who mostly substitute actual, substantive social equality with inadequate ‘legal equality.’  He considers Hegel and Hobbes to be the greatest bourgeois philosophers of the state, though few present bourgeois thinkers reference them. Mészáros claims that real freedom is the child of equality, and does not consist of abstract legal nostrums.  As he puts it: “Freedom as such, divorced from its necessary connection with materially substantive human equality, is inevitably idealistic/mystifying.”  Today we can see the failure of Leviathan’s ‘laws’ to create equality, abundance or justice.  Economic and political control still rests in the ruling class, not among the population, no matter how many (bourgeois) democratic gains have been won.

Mészáros solution is the increasing control of society by the whole working class, by the ‘associated producers,’ by the commune, in line with Marx’s conception of the state’s ‘withering away.’  Then substantive equality and democracy can be achieved and capital definitively left behind.  This concept replaces the bureaucratic version of a ‘socialism’ which includes a state that never disappears, with a Party or its leaders substituting for the working classes forever.

A society is a ‘social metabolism’ to Mészáros, which includes an organic unity of every facet of society – the economy in all its forms, the legal system, the repressive apparatus, the propagandist media, the school system, cultural institutions, the electoral system and lastly the government.  All reinforce one another.  They ultimately rest on a mode of production and how it extracts the natural, financial and labor surplus.  The fact that capital can swing between fascism, political dictatorships and a descending scale of liberal democratic standards indicates the subterranean similarity between them all.  The fact that war, waste and environmental destruction are now ‘normal,’ along with severe inequality and the threat of nuclear annihilation, shows the extent to which capital has become destructive and outmoded.  He calls it a 'centrifugal' and 'descending' mode of production.

The Leviathan State.  Game of Thrones was a documentary.

This book is more erudite, abstract and philosophical than I let on, as I boil it down, but there it is. The point of reading this book is to see what kind of new light can be shed on the nature of the capitalist state – or any state – as well as the resolution of that contradiction.  Mészáros uses frequent repetition, philosophic terms, large words, many italics and a somewhat wandering argument.  Hegel thought that the bourgeois-democratic state was the ‘endpoint’ of history.  Unlike Hegel, Mészáros sees the necessary human dialectic as moving towards the abolition of the state, capital, class and scarcity, on a world-wide basis.

Other points made by Mészáros:

     1.   Capital is in a global, universal, extended and creeping structural crisis.

     2.   This is not a normal ‘boom and bust’ cycle.

     3.   “Socialism in one country” is not possible.  Solutions must go beyond national borders.

     4.   In an argument with Sartre / Marcuse, he rejects their characterization of the working class in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries as bought-off.

     5.   Hence, their and other’s theories of only waging ‘cultural struggle’ are inadequate.

          6.  'Evolutionary socialism,’ the ‘welfare state’ and the “New Deal” have failed.

     7.   He warns against increasing global ‘adventurism’ by political/military capitalist elites.

     8.   It is not enough to simply overthrow a capitalist state or nationalize industries.  The ‘capital complex’ remains mostly in place, while an overthrow can be reversed.  

     9.   Debates about ‘morality versus realism’ or ‘representative democracy versus direct democracy’ are straw men.

     10.               At present states and economies are inter-dependent, dominated by global imperialist state combines and great-power logic.  The state has actually strengthened in the declining period of capital’s rule, which is logical, as it needs more control over a restive population.      

     11.               States are supposedly founded on ‘the law,’ yet state lawlessness abounds in the international arena.  No explanation is ever given.

     12.               According to the bourgeoisie, the law and the state are identical.  Which in practice means ‘might is right,’ justifying repeated domestic state lawlessness. He uses the 1984 British miners’ strike as an example.  This lawlessness is not an exception.

     13.               Marx never gave up his conception of the withering away of the state.

     14.               Mészáros opposes both liberal/utilitarian and liberal democratic ideas of the state, which many times rest on the individual.  As he quotes the utilitarian Bentham:  “The community is a fictitious body, composed of individual persons…” thus beating Margaret Thatcher to the punch.

     15.               The goal of a classless society is the real goal of human emancipation. Capital and state stand in the way.

     16.        The goal is not a "utopian bucolic village community" a la Robert Owen.  True wealth consists of disposable time, based on eliminating scarcity.  

     17.         Capital creates 'failed states,' but cannot curtail their own war adventures that create those failures due to liberal imperialism's and capital's drive for control and profits.  Mészáros thinks this is because of the impossibility of a capitalist 'world state,' as the world only consists of antagonistic nation-states. 

The last chapters are detailed analyses of Plato, Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, Campanella, Bacon, Harrington, Paine, Owen, Thomasius and Bloch on the state, which I’m not going to cover. 

Mészáros doesn’t answer the question of what happens to the revolutionary organizations or single ‘Party’ after the revolution.  It would seem that they would also wither away as the dictatorship of the proletariat fades and socialism develops. He does not address the ‘nation’ as separate from the state.  Like Marx, he does not fully describe ‘statelessness.’ These are the largest theoretical questions left in this otherwise clear book.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive of reviews, using these terms: “The Necessity of Social Control” (Mészáros); “Georg Lukács: Record of a Life,” “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukács); “Marx and Human Nature” (Geras) or words like Marx, state, stateless, communism or Hegel.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 16, 2022