Date: Sat, 25 Jan 1997 23:20:47 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: The State, The Market and Libertarian-Marxist Dialogue


On Sat, 25 Jan 1997 LeoCasey-AT-aol.com wrote:

> I find it interesting that this dialogue of Marxists and libertarians should
> focus on the state in the way that it does, with an apparent common agreement
> that the state should be eliminated. 

Sez who? Not me. I've been arguing that we can't do without law and the state.

> socialist dreams of a conflict-free social community. The problem here, as
> Poulantzas so brillantly showed in _State, Power, Socialism_, is that this
> anti-statist yet thoroughly utopian vision leaves a gaping vacuum in the
> Marxian theoretical corpus which is filled by the statist formulations of
> Leninism and its later Stalinist and Trotskyist progeny.

I'm no Leninist, but are you thinking of "The State and Revolution" as a
statist formulation? Not very plausible.

> 
> I would suggest that the state, like the social conflict and division and
> social power and authority it expresses and embodies, is an ineluctable
> element of any modern society. The appropriate focus of a radical praxis of
> the left is not the dreams of a new Jerusalem, a heaven on earth,  but how
> one ensures the maximum democratic restraints and controls of authority and
> power, and on the state which is their point of condensation. In this
> respect, the orthodox utopian variants of Marxism and libertarianism share a
> common myopia which is a barrier to this development.

I rather agree, but this is pitched at too high a level of abstraction.

We need a state because we need an institutionalized way of implementing
democratically decided upon policies. It has to be a state, that is,
something with a monopoly on the use of force in the territory it covers,
because its determinations have to be finally effective and final, at
least till the next round of democratic policymaking. We need law because
there have to be rules to settle questions of ownership, interaction, and
remedies for wrongs, and fair ways of finally settling disputes. Law has
to be enforceable, so law implies the state.

I don't actually think that Marx necessarily saw matters differently. He
wouldn't like these formulations, because he defined the state as an
instrument of class oppression. When class oppression went, so too by
definition would the state. But he acknowledged that there would be
analogues to the functions other than class opression that the state now
served--see the Critique of the Gotha Program. He didn't say what these
would be. But surely, as a former law student, he saw the points I have
been making.

--jks




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