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The Marx Revival and State Theory: Towards a Negative-Dialectical Critical Social Theory of the State

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Marxism and the Capitalist State

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Abstract

This chapter brings critical state theory into the Marx revival by developing a negative-dialectical critique of the state. The chapter first points to a number of antitheses and shared assumptions between the two most prominent approaches to state theory in the Marx revival—the revolutionary crisis theory of the state and the democratic socialist theory of the state—that prevents both approaches from fully grasping the relationship between the state, the reproduction of capitalist society, and its emancipatory abolition. The chapter then proceeds to develop a negative-dialectical critique of the state’s role in the reproduction of the negative totality of capitalist society that draws together Horkheimer and Adorno’s Marxian critical theory and its subterranean lineage: the new readings of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some have also made later contributions to state theory that have been overlooked and do much to redress the gaps in their earlier work (see, for example,   Jasper and Clover 2014; Benanav and Clegg 2018). Since this contribution is more concerned with criticizing what I take to be the prevalent revolutionary crisis theories of the state within the Marx revival that have drawn on the particular aforementioned works by these thinkers, I do not address their later overlooked work here.

  2. 2.

    Why this perspective has been missing is not clear or straightforward. Given the context in which the current Marx revival has occurred, the criticisms of crisis theory and periodization developed by this Marxian critical theoretical approach may have been untimely. The preoccupation of what passes for contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory with justice and discourse ethics may have also contributed to this perspective being overlooked.

  3. 3.

    Such an approach has certainly been interpreted as moralist and humanist, or criticized for its incomplete normative standpoint. However, the crucial difference between such a conception of critical theory and moral or humanist criticisms of capitalism has to do with the fact that suffering and misery are not premised on human essence or abstract notions of the good, but instead pertain to the socially mediated experiences of suffering and misery incurred by the organization of capitalist society.

  4. 4.

    As this implies, my extension of Bonefeld’s reading of primitive accumulation differs from other contemporary readings developed by Wood (1999) and Harvey (2004) by grasping primitive accumulation as a historical and ongoing process that is the premise and the result of capital accumulation and reproduction.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and the editors for their patience and support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saint John’s University, Queens, NY, USA

    Chris O’Kane

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  1. Chris O’Kane
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Correspondence to Chris O’Kane .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Washington, DC, USA

    Rob Hunter

  2. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Rafael Khachaturian

  3. Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Eva Nanopoulos

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O’Kane, C. (2023). The Marx Revival and State Theory: Towards a Negative-Dialectical Critical Social Theory of the State. In: Hunter, R., Khachaturian, R., Nanopoulos, E. (eds) Marxism and the Capitalist State. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36167-8_11

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