The Critique of the State

The allegedly less and less power of nation-states is a great exaggeration, voiced by governments in the interest of justifying their failure to introduce even some of their thoroughly limited and once solemnly promised social reforms.... The overwhelming historical failure of capital was—and remains—its inability to constitute the state of the capital system as a whole , while irresistibly asserting the imperatives of its system as the material structural determination of societal reproduction on a global scale. This is a massive contradiction. Inter-state antagonisms on a potentially all-destructive scale—as presaged last century by two world wars still without the now fully developed weapons of total self-destruction—are the necessary consequence of that contradiction. Accordingly, the state that we must conquer in the interest of humanity's survival is the state as we know it , namely the state in general in its existing reality, as articulated in the course of history, and capable of asserting itself. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website

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