State Theory Post-Pandemic

Historical Materialism

The Crisis of Reproduction and the End of Relative Autonomy”? The ongoing pandemic has highlighted tendencies within the capitalist state that point to our need to rethink and reorient our understanding of it. Namely, the notion that the state functions to secure the extended reproduction of capitalist social relations no longer appears to clearly explain or neatly fit with the actions and inactions of contemporary states. Indeed, the inability of the state to revise accumulation strategies and reform and regulate capital suggests a fundamental lack of autonomy from the capitalist class and a severe crisis in the ability of the capitalist state to reproduce the conditions necessary for the extended reproduction of existing societies.Peter Bratsis, (CUNY, USA)Rejecting the Autonomous State: a Materialist Ecofeminist TheorisationIt is a time of monsters, and the state appears back on the menu as a means of containing them. It is imperative at this time that the capitalist state be theorised in such a way that the chinks in its form are exposed, further enabling movements seeking progressive change towards explicitly anti-capitalist futures. This paper begins by discussing the importance of rejecting theorisations of the state which, while grounded in historical materialist theory, continue to situate the state as both separate from the ‘economic’, and as a uniform and autonomous actor which is structurally prescribed to work in the interests of capital. Drawing on a theorisation of class struggle grounded in James O’Connor’s second contradiction of capital (Heenan &amp; Sturman, 2020; Rudy, 2019) and the work of materialist ecofeminists such as Ariel Salleh (2017) and Mary Mellor (1997), this paper argues that the capitalist state must instead be positioned as a material condensate of the balance of class struggle over the political economy in its expansive sense. This view of class struggle moves from a narrow focus on exploitation to struggle over the conditions of production, meaning the rate and scale of exploitation and appropriation, as concretised within the internally contradictory and contradiction-ridden state form. This theorisation therefore seeks to establish a nuanced understanding of contemporary configurations of class power and their relationship to, and expression within-against-and beyond, the contemporary capitalist state.The central political implication of this theorisation is to critically reposition the capitalist state to ensure that the structural imperatives of capital rather than the state itself are the primary opponents of various movements seeking to reject the advance of the real subsumption of life to capital. Without this theorisation of the state, the forms of hierarchical coordination which labour, environmental, feminist, Indigenous sovereignty and other movements must navigate in order to meet and fight capital are doomed to fail. As crises continue to compound and the advance of authoritarian neoliberalism continues, as discussed by Bruff (2014), the possible consequences of failing to take seriously the state as a terrain of struggle are catastrophic. Further, the failure to engage on this terrain in the core imperialist political economies is unacceptable for an internationalist praxis. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, this paper will briefly explore the example of Aotearoa New Zealand’s capitalist state rearticulation in the 1980s, one of the most far-reaching, and voluntary, examples of the Washington Consensus in the world, and the social forces which attempted to navigate the contradictions of the earlier state form more and less successfully. The place of decolonial politics and implications for navigating the state are considered.Anna Sturman, (University of Sydney, Australia)There is no Anti-Capitalist Jurisprudence: Abolition and the Form-Theory of Law and StateThe title of this paper comes from Pashukanis’ book Law and Marxism, in which he argues that there is no revolutionary or communist law that can replace capitalist law. Pashukanis lays the basis for a form-theory of the state, where state is defined as the concatenation of law, and law emerges as immanent social form of the capitalist mode of production. Here Pashukanis does more than what state derivationists managed to do in terms of forging a coherent relationship between law/state and Marx’s theory of capital, and moves beyond theorists like Poulantzas in whose state theory was ultimately relegated to superstructure and to the ungrounded category of the “political.”In this paper I will argue that any communist, abolitionist, or revolutionary idea of law or state is based on a misconception of what the state is. The state is not a collection of coordinating and infrastructural networks and practices, nor can the state be derived from the need to enforce class power (though it does enforce class power). The state is the large-scale organization of law, and law is part of what replaces the connections between people once they are severed by capitalist social relations (although as Marx says, law is not only the purview of the state, and gang law remains also law).Law expels at the moment it mandates inclusion, kills the moment it institutes peace, and ravages even when intended to soothe injustice. A law made to protect oppressed people is used to control and subordinate them. Recent authors such as Savannah Shange, J. T. Roane and T. Anansi Wilson have shown how Black people’s treatment by law makers and law enforcers consistently proves that law is a node of hierarchy, not a defense against it. If “Black citizens [are] outside of the protection of law, yet easily and routinely within its disciplinary reach,” so “Black Studies… exists as a critique of all that law has wrought” (Wilson p. 3-4). This literature suggests that law can no more solve its own problems than states can solve theirs. Law and communism are incommensurable, and we must (as theorists and as people in social movements) liberate ourselves from the apparent “immortality of the legal form” (Pashukanis, p. 61).FTC Manning, (SFUSD, USA)PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider making a donation, which would help us enormously in covering the costs of putting of this programme of events. Like all left organisations, HM has had a very tough period since the beginning of 2020 and our budgets are very stretched and bank balance is sinking all the time, with very little revenue coming in. If you can make a contribution to keep us afloat, please don’t hesitate! You can donate by selecting the &#x27;donation&#x27; ticket type at registration.Once you have registered, a link to the live session will be emailed to you on the day of the event. For any technical queries please contact historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.ukPlease consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL. www.brill.com/hima

"Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen": A book launch with Nicolas Helm-Grovas

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State Theory Post-Pandemic

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State Theory Post-Pandemic

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"Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen": A book launch with Nicolas Helm-Grovas

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