Beyond Leviathan - The Critique of the State as Social Power
In a recent paper, Ross Mittiga argues for the superiority of authoritarian over democratic governance in the context of climate crisis. (Mittiga Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change, 2021). In arguing his case, Mittiga effectively reverts to the old Hobbesian bargain of individuals exchanging their liberty for security and safety. Under pressure of what Mittiga calls ‘dire conditions,’ people might be inclined to sacrifice freedom for survival and hence strengthen Leviathan under the sign of necessity. In a new book to be published by the Monthly Review, entitled Beyond Leviathan, Istvan Mészáros shows how that bargain can be refused and authoritarianism rejected. Mészáros, it is worth underlining, was not only writing on environmental crisis before The Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, he was, importantly, writing on the socio-economic drivers of that crisis. The Club of Rome, and environmentalism generally in the seventies (and after), scotomised political economy and its critique, thus leaving environmentalism without an effective politics. As for those environmental campaigners who persist in claiming that 'Nature doesn't care about politics,' this is wrong-headed in any number of respects. Given that specific social forms and socio-economic drivers are implicated in the way that planetary boundaries are being transgressed, there is a need not merely to identify these forms and drivers but to supplant them, and that implies politics. Presuming, of course, that we are engaged in a project of transformation and reconstruction, rather than merely ‘slamming the brakes on’ the economy. I find it staggering that an environmental movement, staffed from top-to-toe with experts and engineers working in design and technology, resorts to an authoritarian politics and a project of economic destruction. That, I would argue, is down precisely to political deficiency. The 'non-politics' of an appeal from and too Nature cannot but smuggle politics in surreptitiously, delivering us to a Leviathan by default. The environmental movement is strong on science and technology but deficient in politics and sociology, hence its authoritarian tendencies and its political failures.
As John Bellamy Foster writes with respect to Michael Mann’s criticisms of those on the left for targeting the capital system for its role in driving climate change:
‘I am reminded here of Marx’s remark in Capital that natural scientists often “venture quite at random” and without understanding when they move beyond their own specific areas of expertise, and present themselves as authorities on social questions, which they do not even bother to take seriously or investigate. The climate problem (and Earth System emergency in general) does not arise from Earth processes directly, but from the inner drives of our contemporary socioeconomic system, namely capitalism. Failure to understand the nature of capitalism means that one can have little to offer with respect to organizing social action and solutions.’
‘There is no doubt that Mann knows the science well,’ writes Foster, ‘but he seems to have no understanding whatsoever of the existing social relations of production of capitalism.’ That critical point applies to so many in the environmental movement, driven as it is by science and sustained as it is by a planetary fetishism centred on ‘Nature.’
John Bellamy Foster, John Molyneux and Owen McCormack, Against Doomsday Scenarios: What Is to Be Done Now?
I shall be very interested to get a copy of this new book, Beyond Leviathan. Thanks and praise to John Bellamy Foster for publishing this work from Istvan Mészáros. That theme of alien politics and external control, seeking to restitute social power as against the tyranny and violence of abstraction, is all over my work from the 1990s. In research in Manchester I had the opportunity to go down to Sussex and stay with and discuss these and other ideas further with Istvan Mészáros. I didn’t pursue it. I don’t like moving around too much, spending money, meeting people, but Mészáros was very much a mentor. Anyone who has the nerve to read my work from the mid to late 90s would be able to see the extent to which it was influenced by Mészáros.
Here is a quote from Beyond Leviathan:
‘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.’
This is a view that is central to my work and has been since the 1990s and which I repeat, time and again, to this day: the practical restitution of social power alienated to abstract political and economic institutions and systems and its reorganisation as a social self-mediation and self-government is both key to uprooting the drivers behind the tendencies to abstraction, systemic indifference, and institutional failure in the modern world and to constituting the social order that functions with social and natural limits. Fail to do that and you are just looking for surrogates and what Marx called a 'would be universal reformers.'
In the popular image, Marx is the advocate of a state socialism. The truth is that he is anything but. There is a serious issue to address as to whether his vision of the abolition of the state is realisable, and whether, in being impossibly utopian, it invites bureaucratisation in order to impose an abstract unity. Marx argued from first to last that the ‘abstraction of the political state’ is a modern product which alienates power from society and its healthy organs and renders abstract the universality and commonality human beings as social beings need to actualize themselves. (Marx, Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State). Social atomism and political centralisation proceed hand-in-hand. The commonality human beings seek is denied when civil society is reduced to a sphere of universal antagonism and so comes to be projected outwards and upwards to the state as the "illusory community." (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology).
As Marx wrote as a young man in 1843:
“All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself..
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.” (Marx EW OJQ 1975).
Late in life, Marx criticized the newly formed German socialist party for its commitment to realize the principle of a “free state.” “A free state - what does that mean?” asked Marx critically in The Critique of the Gotha Programme:
“It is by no means the goal of workers who have discarded the narrow mentality of humble subjects to make the state 'free'. In the German Reich the 'state' has almost as much 'freedom' as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed on society into one thoroughly subordinate to it; and even today state forms are more or less free depending on the degree to which they restrict the 'freedom of the state'.
The German workers' party - at least if it adopts this programme - thus shows that its socialist values do not even go skin-deep, for instead of treating existing society (and the same holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or future state in the case of future society), it treats the state as an independent entity with its own 'intellectual, ethical and liberal foundations.’”
Whether that project of social restitution overcoming abstract, alien power to further socialisation and democratisation is possible is another question. I do know that if you don't seek socialisation and democratisation to enable a deeper and richer freedom, then you are on the way to the new Leviathan. You will have lost your liberty only to find you have neither safety nor security.
We owe a big thanks to John Bellamy Foster for publishing this work.
John Foster wanted to publish my Introduction to the Thought of Istvan Mészáros a couple of years ago, saying that "there is nothing like it out there." It needed some "revisions and extensions" and I'm afraid it all got lost to the events that overtook my life (I am thankful I am still standing and happy to be sitting pretty in my Welsh Paradise). Mészáros might be a "daunting" read – as someone told me - but his argument is important. Mészáros is well worth understanding, he is full of insights into the contemporary predicament. I can understand people being suspicious of jargon. It often conceals empty thought. But not in Mészáros' case. He is full of insight and makes all the fine distinctions that are normally missed. I am seeing activists make the claim that "government is responsible" for climate change etc. Mészáros would have them understand that governments are second order mediations within a fundamentally irresponsible system. Mészáros addresses the logic and not merely the institutions that lie at the root of our problems. I'm quite proud of this little book of mine. It attempts to distil the essence of a dense and complex thinker. Until people appreciate that, they will carry on missing their targets and, worse, making crisis available for appropriation by the state as Leviathan.
My own work
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