The State, Crisis, and Working-Class Strategy in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks

This article conducts a philological and diachronic reconstruction of the emergence and progressive formation of Gramsci’s theory of the state in the Prison Notebooks, in the process demonstrating its organic nexus with a specific conception of the nature and dynamics of crises, and its implications for working-class strategy in the struggle to construct a hegemonic alternative to the capitalist state. On the basis of this analysis, it seeks to extract the contemporary relevance of Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, political crises and his strategic proposal of the war of position for our contemporary global conjuncture, defined by the simultaneous existence of multiple interlocking crises – economic, public health, ecological and social.

Policing (as) the Paradigmatic Scene of Rape

A queer renovation of “rape” requires beginning not with actors, but with acts, which brings into view the central role of the state as a perpetrator of sexual violence. Radical feminists moved the “paradigmatic scene” of rape from the stranger in the alley to the acquaintance in the bedroom: rape was a problem not of exceptional perversion, but of ordinary heterosexuality. The works surveyed in this essay center the scene of state detention, showing how regimes of policing in a racial capitalist state always frame and prototype sexual violence. The author pursues this argument in three passes: history (the discourse around Michel Foucault’s treatment of the Charles Jouy case), aesthetics (the conflation of state and domestic violence in the installations of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum), and activism (the convergence of abolitionist and antirape movements in the 1970s writings of Angela Davis and the memoirs of the Scottsboro Boys).

Notes on exhaustionism, the latest moment of the global organic crisis

This essay seeks to build on the concept of exterminism developed by E. P. Thompson in his 1980 New Left Review essay ‘Notes on exterminism, the last state of civilization’. Thompson’s polemical focus on weapons systems in his analysis was the product of a particular moment in history; one where the most precipitous threat to human security was the Cold War. The concept of exhaustionism developed in this piece describes the governance ideologies and frameworks found within advanced capitalist state/societal complexes in response to the present ‘organic crisis’ of post-Cold War global capitalism; one accelerated by the 2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic. The exhaustionism of political leadership within the contemporary world order has contributed to widely held assumptions that the collapse of civilisation and the planet is either occurring or imminent. Moreover, it is also implied that it is too late for a novel or fundamental transformation in governing ideology, global governance and political economy to reverse the current predicament. This exhaustionism in many ways mirrors the absurdity and cynicism of the Cold War military technicians and nuclear regimes described by Thompson’s concept of exterminism, but with notable differences related to the host of actors involved, temporal horizon, and emphasis on class, imperialism and supremacism.

Conclusion

The chapter summarizes the main argument of the book and draws out its broader theoretical implications. An account of the relationship between party, capitalism, and the state should begin by establishing the historical conditions of possibility for articulation. By understanding when articulation is possible and when it is not, we gain insights into how social fragmentation might enable political organization. The social fragmentation produced by economic and political primitive accumulations is—perhaps paradoxically—conducive to party organization. The discussion in the chapter is organized around three sorts of conceptual relationships that can be approached from the vantage point of the theory and evidence presented so far: the relationship between party and the modern capitalist state, the relationship between socio-economic structure and modalities of political activity, and, finally, the contemporary relationship between the party-form and neoliberalism.

THE CRISIS OF 2008 AND THE RISE OF THE SLOVENIAN CONSOLIDATION STATE

The purpose of the article is to explain the creation of the Slovenian debt state and its transformation into a consolidation state after the crisis of 2008. When the crisis struck Slovenia in 2009, the banking system was near collapse. Through the recapitalisations of the banking system the public debt began to grow. After a couple of years and under the structural pressures of rating agencies and pressures from the EU, the Slovenian state had to adopt austerity measures to consolidate its public finances, while limiting the scope of democracy. The main finding of the article is that the crisis of 2008 fundamentally changed the Slovenian state. Keywords: capitalist state, consolidation state, debt, Slovenia, democracy

‘The ideal collective capitalist’ in times of the pandemic

The article analyzes the actions of capitalist countries in the situation of the crisis, related to the Covid-19 pandemic, primarily the actions of the world’s leading economic, powers (the United States, China, Japan, Germany, India). An attempt is made to find, the characteristics and motifs of these actions. On this basis, an assessment is made of the, adequacy of the definition of the capitalist state by Friedrich Engels as “the ideal collective, capitalist”.