This is the text of a discussion of Álvaro García Linera and Sandro Mezzadra, responding to questions by Matteo Polleri. In this dialogue, Álvaro García Linera and Sandro Mezzadra discuss the relevance and irrelevance of Nicos Poulantzas’s thought. After tracing the role played by Poulantzas’s theory of the State in their respective works, the conversation turns to its potential uses in the present. The conversation touches on a number of key issues for the critical analysis of contemporary capitalism, such as recent changes in the global economy and the international scene, the rise of the far right and the possible horizons of a post-capitalist transition.
Álvaro García Linera: After his militancy in the Tupac Katari guerrilla in the early Nineties, Álvaro García Linera has been the vice-president of the Pluri-national State of Bolivia under Evo Morales (2006-2019). His intellectual work is worldwide recognised as one of the most important contemporary Latin-American contributions in political theory and sociology.
Sandro Mezzadra: Italian philosopher and militant, he teaches political philosophy at the University of Bologna. His work is focused on the autonomy of migrations and the role of borders in contemporary capitalism. With Brett Neilson he recently published The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019) and Border as Method, or The Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013). Their last book The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World has been published by Verso.
Matteo Polleri: Let’s start talking about the role that Nicos Poulantzas’ political thought plays in your respective work. Given your different backgrounds, I imagine its role has been different. Influenced by Italian Operaismo and postcolonial studies, Sandro Mezzadra probably inherited scepticism regarding the Euro-centered interpretations of Gramsci and Poulantzas’ “Eurocommunist” perspective. In the tradition of Operaismo, state power has often been conceived as a juridical and political form of command over living labor, rather than as a strategic field of class struggle—a machine of domination to be abolished and replaced, rather than an institution to be contested and occupied. This account is very different from Poulantzas’ view, to which Sandro and Brett Neilson surprisingly refer in their book The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism[1] (2019). Deeply involved – to use an understatement! – in social struggles as much as in left-wing politics in Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera explicitly and systematically mobilises Poulantzas’s ideas. In the introduction (2015) of his book Forma valor y forma comunidad,[2] for instance, he puts Marxism and indigenous political thought in dialogue. What does Poulantzas represent to you?
Sandro Mezzadra: Well, to be honest I first read Poulantzas in the early 1980s, long before my encounter with “postcolonial studies”. At that time, I was a student of philosophy at the University of Genoa, and my intellectual as well as political formation in the previous years had been indeed highly influenced by Italian workerism, most notably by the work of Toni Negri and by autonomous struggles in Italy and elsewhere in the late 1970s. I was young, and “historical compromise” and “Eurocommunism” were anathema to me, as well as the notion of the “autonomy of the political” developed by Mario Tronti (although if I pick my BA thesis on Thomas Hobbes, I immediately realize that I was heavily influenced by Tronti’s work on Hobbes, Cromwell, and the English revolution of the 1640s). At the same time, I had a pronounced interest in state theory, nurtured, in particular by, Negri’s book La forma stato (1977),[3] such an engaging and important book for my training! Even beyond what I had to read for university exams, I studied eagerly German, French, British, and US thinkers who had made key contributions to the Marxist debates on the state in the previous decade. My map was pretty Eurocentric, as you can see. But my first encounter with Poulantzas was a kind of misencounter. For reasons I have explained elsewhere, I was not at all attracted by Gramsci, I tended to associate his name to “historical compromise”, and indeed – except for Notebook 22 on “Americanism and Fordism” – I ignored his work.[4] I systematically studied it only much later, in the wake of my “discovery” of cultural, subaltern, and postcolonial studies. This is not to claim, or even excuse my ignorance at that time, I repeat that I was young. It is only to locate my first reading of Poulantzas (indeed of an essay in a collective book on The Crisis of the State[5]), whom I ranked as a representative of the “neo-Gramscian variant” of communist state theories (to quote from Negri). To put it quickly, it seemed to me that Poulantzas made a distinction between the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour in the realm of production and the reproduction of capitalism in the spheres of circulation and distribution, foreshadowing an intervention of the state in the latter without really confronting the antagonism shaping relations of production. Civil society, ideology, and the state itself were therefore the fundamental terrains of political struggle for Poulantzas. Perhaps more interestingly, I had a sense (to put in a conceptual language that I started to employ much later) that his nuanced and sophisticated discussion of the “crisis” of the state never addressed its bounded nature, the processes of bordering and the actual borders that make it a nation state. The boundaries of the nation were taken for granted and superimposed onto the territory of the state. In any case, after reading the essay I mentioned, I read other works by Poulantzas, including his discussion with Cardoso on the concept of class and State, Power, Socialism. In later years, I would return to him, and I would find much more to appreciate than I had thought in those early days. For that matter, since the mid-1980s I continued to work on the issue of the state, combining a persistent engagement in Marxist theories with an in-depth study of more traditional approaches, most notably German constitutional history, public and constitutional law.
Álvaro García Linera: My encounter with Poulantzas was early, when we were studying mathematics at university, and it was directly through the text State, Power, and Socialism. At first, his discussion of the state did not attract my attention, because the readings I had of Marx on the European revolution of 1848 already showed this interpenetration between state and society that Poulantzas developed. What initially attracted me was his reading of the nation, the effort to find a materialist explanation for this cultural and subjective experience of the national identity. I was already obsessed with understanding the struggles of indigenous and peasant nations in Bolivia, and, while his concern is to understand the spatio-temporal dimension of the nation-state in capitalism, I was encouraged by his call to articulate the material and cultural dimensions. But my enthusiasm for Poulantzas was later strengthened when I tried to understand a defining stage in the history of the Bolivian organised labour movement: the great marches of thousands of mining workers to the seat of government in 1985-86, the defeat of which marked the end of the figure of the worker of large industry and the beginning of the fragmented and nomadic ‘workerisation’ (obrerizacion) of neoliberalism. I was impressed by the strength of the collective presence of the workers, the assembly democracy, the in-depth socialist political debate, but, at the same time, the unwavering adherence to the commitments, loyalties and rights instituted in the national-popular state form that had been established since 1952, as a result of a victorious democratic revolution. In the face of this social fact, the instrumentalist or mechanical readings of the state, predominant on the Marxist left, proved fallacious. On the other hand, the relational understanding offered by Poulantzas was far more fertile for understanding the social movement that was unfolding before our eyes. During those years, the predominant logic among the political and intellectual left was that the state was a machine of oppression of the popular classes. However, what this mechanical conception cannot answer is why the state, a ‘mere instrument of domination’, is paradoxically continually claimed by the struggles of the working classes to inscribe their new rights or to institutionalise many of their social conquests. The response that the popular classes are living a ‘deception’ because they do not understand that the state is merely the machine of their own oppression, or that they are involved in conditions of domination which oblige them to see the world from their position of domination, in order to continue to be dominated, condemns the subaltern classes to a condition of perpetual idiocy which can only be overcome by the work of those who, due to the magic of the holy spirit, possess the ‘truth’ and have not fallen into the clutches of deception: the party, the intellectuals, etc.
It is not surprising that the instrumentalist reading of the state has gone hand in hand with a pedagogism that is lenient towards the poor. It is not wrong to see the state as a machine of political oppression. That is also what the state is. But it is more than that; moreover, and above all, it is a form of political organisation of the entire society, which cuts across all, their struggles and in which all the inhabitants of a country, including its subaltern classes, are active co-participants and co-producers of the state fabric. State institutions, laws, decrees, functions, spaces, etc., are thus this fluid fabric of the material correlation of forces between the different classes. And although, because of their economic resources capable of bribing public officials, because of their business property capable of pressuring governments and controlling the media, the wealthy classes are in a better position to make the state institution an apparatus that defends these business interests with greater emphasis, with greater insistence and in an overwhelming manner, this does not prevent the fact that, through the struggle of the popular classes themselves, fragments of their interests, bits and pieces of their needs and sometimes most of their particular demands are also taken into account, albeit subordinately, in the structures and actions of the state. And, when this condensation of different social forces disappears, when the state appears as a mere class patrimony, the state loses its ‘magic’ of organising the entire society; it becomes a mere class instrument. Revolutions have thus far been extraordinary moments of rearrangement of the correlations of forces between the competing social classes within the state form itself.
MP: Despite your different “experiences” of Poulantzas, it seems to me that you both recognize the importance of his definition of state power as a “condensation” of material and conflictual relations between social classes. It is quite evident that Poulantzas derives this definition from his critical dialogue with Michel Foucault’s analytics of power, which he completes through Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony”. According to Poulantzas, the “autonomy” of political power over the social relations of production is indeed only relative, because it is a provisional outcome of the class struggles. What role does this theoretical innovation play in your reflection?
AGL: The relational reading of the state promoted by Poulantzas refocuses the Marxist debate on its critical foundations. Like capital, when Marx studies it as a social relation, he does not confuse it with a tool or a building or a printed paper. These are mere representations and provisional objectifications of a deeper fact, a relation of separation between human labour in action and the appropriation by others of that labour which dominates the former. Capital is alienated labour, turned against itself by a form of the process of production and ownership. In the same way, the state as a relation is not merely buildings, written papers, or even weapons that should be thrown on the bonfire to get rid of it. It is a form of political unification of society, but an alienated one, which is superimposed on society itself by a particular way of unifying itself. How this particular way of unifying itself is established by the state is something that Poulantzas was no longer able to develop, and it is what we have been working on in recent years. And we have done so by rejecting the illusionist readings of the state that base the efficacy of its action on ‘deception’ or ‘lack of consciousness’. In response, we have proposed a materialist reading of the form of state unification and its social efficacy resulting from the continuous centralisation of common resources, common beliefs, common protections, common practices that a society possesses, produces and achieves in a specific territory. In other words, the state is a constant centralisation of a society’s universals, usually produced by the society itself outside the state, but appropriated and refunctionalised by the state. The force of compliance with state decisions is not sustained by bayonets. Coercion works, and is effective, when it is exercised punctually against specific segments of society under the justification of the defence of the rest of the majority of its members.
But this security of protection it provides is more secure for one section of the population than for others. This is the second structural component of the state: it is the common good of a society, but by monopolies, that is, by means of a specialised bureaucratic apparatus that administers what belongs to all ‘in the name of’, or ‘on behalf of’, all. It is not the mobilised society nor the workers in struggle who have produced this or that collective right, this or that conquest, who administer the fruit of their work, effort and struggle. It is others, the bureaucracy, which manages, organises, regulates, administers these common goods of society.
Differently from capital, in which alienated labour is expropriated by the capitalist and remains his private property, in the state, the common effort, common goods and common struggles of society, of workers and of social organisations, remain under the control of state bureaucracies, which cannot privately appropriate these resources, but monopolise them in their management. This is a partial appropriation, because the bureaucracy cannot privately usufruct all these resources, but it can prioritise their use for the benefit of some and to the detriment of others. The whole labyrinth of ministries, secretaries, undersecretaries, offices, reports, commissions and regulations are the bureaucratic grammar of this partial expropriation and structural favouritism towards certain sectors of society. This is not an anomaly, it is its structural condition. It should therefore be no coincidence that the sectors that always benefit most from the bureaucratic management of the state, with the exception of moments of social upheaval and popular protagonism, are the wealthy social classes, who can corrupt officials, who offer public recognition in their media or later well-paid consultancy work in a company. Monopoly engenders this structural coupling between those who monopolise the economic wealth of a society and those who monopolise the management of public decisions in that same society. The social origin of those who monopolise public decisions does not matter. The exercise of monopoly establishes its own common sense articulated with the common sense of the other monopolisers of social wealth. It is from this that Marx conceptualises in a very precise way – and developed the components of this conception throughout his life – his definition of the state as an illusory community. Consequently, the machine-like quality of the exteriority of the state and the precision with which Marx proposed to break this machine.
In light of these reflections, the Poulantzian, and partly Althusserian, ‘condensation of the correlation of forces’ and the ‘relative autonomy of the state’ take on greater force. Relative autonomy of the state vis-à-vis the economically dominant classes because, if it merges with them, the “commons of society” [lo común de la sociedad], which is centralised in the state, disappears and, with it, legitimisation and social adherence to its decisions is diluted, rupturing the material efficacy of domination. Condensation of forces, because the monopolisation of the commons and the management of this monopoly is not an automatism, but the result of a permanent tension, of intense historical struggles for rights and common goods; of struggles to exercise or delegate them; of struggles to regulate the forms of their management; of struggles to extend the benefits of these rights; of struggles to prevent the favouritism of a few; of struggles to break through the bureaucratic labyrinths and make society’s access to its goods and rights effective, etc. The state is, therefore, the space of class struggles for the monopolies of the commons of a society with binding effect on a territory.
SM: It was against the background of the experiences of social struggles and new “progressive” governments in Latin America since the beginning of the new century, and then also of the ascent of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, that Poulantzas became again important for me. The state appeared again as a campo de lucha (a field of struggle), to quote the title of a book published in 2010 by Álvaro García Linera and other members of the Bolivian Comuna collective. And the big question was whether it could play a role (and which role) in processes of liberation. It is from this angle that Brett Neilson and I hark back to Poulantzas in The Politics of Operations (2019). And, surely, his famous definition of the state as a material condensation of a relationship of forces among classes and class fractions – as a relation and not as a thing, which reminds us of Marx’s definition of capital – remains helpful and thought provoking. As Stuart Hall writes, Poulantzas goes beyond an alternative that has dominated Marxist debates on the state, i.e. between considering the state simply functional to the needs of capital or merely the product of class struggle (Hall in State, Power, Socialism, xvi). Class struggle becomes internal to the state, inscribed onto its structure. This is a point that becomes particularly clear in Poulantzas’ last book, State, Power, Socialism. Although he had used the phrase “material condensation” before, it is here that he challenges any “essentialist” definition of the state, the kind of definition that had nurtured (and continue to nurture) specific forms of state fetishism in and beyond Marxism. You mention the critical dialogue with Foucault in your question. I think it is important to stress, again with Stuart Hall, that, even beyond the tone of that dialogue, Foucault’s work steadily became a major influence for Poulantzas, and that, in his last book, “the material processes of state action have been transformed by Foucault’s concepts” (xiv). The very institutional unity of the state cannot be taken for granted anymore, which seems to me a particularly important question today. “We must discard once and for all”, Poulantzas writes, “the view of the state as a completely united mechanism…” (133). Also, his understanding of the vexed question of the “relative autonomy” of the state takes on new characteristics in his late work. Allow me to simplify. In Poulantzas’ previous writings it was discussed mainly “from above”, with reference to the relations between state apparatuses and to the position of the state as a whole. In State, Power, Socialism, it is analysed “from below”, stressing the limits posed by class struggle to the state. Even in his previous books, Poulantzas had stressed a kind of primacy of class struggle (of its “constitutive effect”, to continue to quote Stuart Hall), in a way correcting the “hyperstructuralism” of Althusser at the time of Reading Capital, which was his main theoretical reference (viii). Now, he explicitly acknowledged that “in their material basis, struggles always have primacy over the institutions-apparatuses of power (especially the state), even though they are invariably inscribed within their field” (149). I guess we will return later on to Poulantzas’ “relational theory of power” and to his critique of Foucault’s understanding of the relation between power and resistance. For now, let me say that I find the combination between a relational theory of the state and the primacy of struggle an important contribution to our ongoing attempt to forge political tools to criticize contemporary capitalism.
MP: Both of you also underline, albeit in different ways, that contemporary critical theory must be complemented with an anticolonial gaze, taking in account the forms of domination suffered (and the struggles acted out by) subjects once considered as “marginal” – migrants crossing state borders, for Sandro, and indigenous communities practicing anti-capitalist forms of social production and cooperation, for Álvaro. Is it possible to use Poulantzasian hypotheses in this regard or is it more appropriate to employ other analytical tools?
SM: Well, this is not an easy question… Maybe I can first provide a tentative reply, adapting to Poulantzas a famous quip of Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth regarding Marxism and say that his analysis “should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial and postocolonial question”. But I am afraid it is too simple. Sure, you can use Poulantzas’ hypotheses and conceptual language in Latin America, as for instance Álvaro does in Bolivia and Latin America and as happens in other parts of the world. By the way, also another great Bolivian intellectual, René Zavaleta Mercado discusses Poulantzas in his work, for instance in an essay of 1982 where he takes issue with the question of multinational corporations to which I will hark back later in our conversation.[6] But the fact remains that you need at least to integrate Poulantzas with other traditions of critical thinking and other conceptual approaches to come to term, say, with the question of state and capital in Latin America – or with the question of popular politics in India for that matter. The important question that emerges here, a theoretical and political question at the same time, is the one that with Gramsci we can call “translatability”. It is not simply a linguistic issue, of course. Poulantzas’ work on the state is located within the history of the communist movement but it also has its own geographical coordinates. When he writes “state”, to put it quickly, what he has in mind is the European state. His emphasis on the relative autonomy of the state with respect to economy, his view of state apparatuses, and even his understanding of the “material condensation” of power relations among classes all reflect his focus on the history and material constitution of the state in Europe. And we know that we cannot anymore (if we ever could!) take that peculiar historical experience as a “standard”. Historically, the global dimension of the operations of capital since the beginning of its modern history confronts us with a panoply of forms of domination and exploitation that cannot be reduced to the norms of territorial sovereignty, citizenship, and “free” wage labour. In the present, even European, “Western” political forms are traversed and “deformed” by processes of migration, flexibilization and precarization of labour, neoliberal reorganization of welfare systems that challenge established institutions and related conceptual languages. Anyway, once you are aware of this you can start the process of translation of Poulantzas’ hypotheses and tools that I was mentioning before. And, of course, in doing that, you have to stage a kind of clash between those hypotheses and notions and a materiality (of historical context, political and social struggles, subjective claims and modes of life) that resist being “subsumed” under Poulantzas’ language. You mention indigenous communities and migrants in your question. One could say that they are both subjects that tend to decentre the state, even if we understand it as a “material condensation” of class relations. The point is simply that, in different ways, indigenous and migrants share a history (and often a present) of exclusion from that condensation that is not going to be simply “compensated” by a politics of integration. It is here that the labour of conceptual and political translation of Poulantzas’ definition of the state may lead to discover new political horizons of action and even institution building. But it is not an easy task!
AGL: Some 2.5 billion people, about 30% of the economically active population, make their living from agriculture, most of them in southern countries in the form of peasant communities. A significant proportion of these communities are indigenous, i.e. they belong to nationalities other than the dominant one. So, we are not talking about minorities or marginalised sectors. In fact, a large part of the revolutions of the 20th century have had this peasant-communal agrarian world as their fundamental subjects. Likewise, with migration. All nations are the result of historical migrations and, even today, about 3.5% of the world’s population migrates every year, i.e. some 280 million people. It is a powerful reality that has a decisive influence on the shaping of modern societies. However, Poulantzas’ reflections are relevant when addressing these social relations in the shaping of political dominations in colonial and postcolonial societies, where social relations are more complex and convoluted because, in the case of indigenous communities, they involve the overlapping-articulation of different modes of production and different political temporalities. Marx worked on this reality in its economic dimension under the concept of formal subsumption.
The colonial state was a form of political domination imposed by force (invasion), but it did not succeed in unravelling the social structure of the colonised peoples. It annihilated their elites, in some cases co-opted them, and then superimposed an external command structure on the colonised society’s network of urban-rural institutions, mainly indigenous-peasant communities, in order to subjugate, exploit or annihilate them. This allowed it to erect a colonial pax for centuries, intermittently punctuated by uprisings and wars of communal emancipation. And that meant some form of integration, of recognition, of communal structures. Respect for communal lands in exchange for tribute in labour, in kind or in money. Recognition of their local communal authorities as intermediaries before the coloniser in exchange for certain unpaid work, etc. In all cases, the colonial political order could not function without an inscription of the communities’ rights in the normative order of the state. The fact that the government bureaucracy and the new economically powerful classes were of foreign origin marked cultural chasms between colonised and colonisers, with its sequences of racialisation of domination, but did not prevent this tense web of minimal ‘benefits’ for the colonised, including local spaces of self-government specific to agrarian-peasant communities.
In societies where agrarian communities shared a historical-cultural identity with ruling classes, as in tsarist Russia, the state relationship was similarly built on rights and tolerances regarding forms of authority and communal organisation. In all cases, the concept of ‘material condensation of a relation of forces’ retains its relevance, although, of course, it requires complexifying the analysis with other categories referring to forms of social organisation, political temporalities and non-capitalist civilisational systems, etc.
MP: Let’s shift to another topic that brings us closer to our present. Fascism is an ineluctable issue in the historical conjunctures analysed by Poulantzas, who witnessed both the formation and the dissolution of the Greek military junta and the two Iberian fascist dictatorships. One of the Poulantzas’ conceptual strengths is to develop a materialist theory of fascism. So, how do we approach, with but also beyond Poulantzas, the advance of the far right – or of “post-fascist” parties, to use Enzo Traverso’s formula – on the international political landscape?
SM: Well, let me start from something that can appear as marginal within Poulantzas’ engagement with fascism, which is basically instantiated by his book Fascism and Dictatorship. The Third International and the Problem of Fascism (1970). In an article entitled “On the Popular Impact of Fascism” (1977), he speaks of “fascism’s corrupted ideological recuperation of deep-seated popular aspirations” (Poulantzas Reader, 268). I think this is an important point to grasp the working of fascism even beyond the historical cases of Italy and Germany analysed in the book I mentioned before. I think it also provides us with an effective viewpoint for the critical analysis of the contemporary forms of “postfascism” (let us use this word following Enzo Traverso’s proposal) that you mention in your question. Poulantzas’ point is not completely original, of course, but it strikes me precisely because it stems from a rethinking of ideology within Althusserian Marxism. And, in a way, it anticipates later developments in debates on ideology, focusing on the “capture” and recoding of the yearning and aspirations of the dominated within ideological formations that continue to serve the ruling classes. Étienne Balibar made, for instance, important contributions to such debates. Poulantzas was speaking of the attitudes of the Italian and of the German Communist Parties in the face of fascism while making that point. This means that what he had in mind were proletarian and popular imaginaries and corresponding behaviours that shaped class struggle in the age of fascism, he was thus opening a view on the subjective dimensions of class struggle, which is, for me, a crucial aspect of an “economic” standpoint. Rather, we can say that what Poulantzas calls “ideological recuperation” definitely provides us with an important entry point into the analysis of fascism (historical or otherwise) but is not specific of fascism. A similar approach has, for instance, inspired critical analyses of neoliberalism. Therefore, to try to answer your question, I have to hark back to Poulantzas’ book on fascism, which indeed since the beginning states that the topic is far from being “the concern of academic historiography alone” in a time that is characterized by a “major world-wide crisis” of imperialism. Allow me to say that the economic analysis pursued in that book is often detailed, nuanced, and sophisticated. Nonetheless, from a theoretical point of view it continues to refer to a quite traditional understanding of (state) monopoly capitalism (although there is a need to say that in his last book, State, Power, Socialism, he attempts to go beyond its rigidity). What I find interesting and, in a way, helpful for us today is Poulantzas’ stress of the fact that we have to understand fascism as a regime that emerges in a “transitional phase”, which means in countries where the establishment of monopoly capital is not yet accomplished and needs to be forced. There are several points that I find interesting in Fascism and Dictatorship, such as the critique of the concept of totalitarianism and the analysis of the political and legal characteristics of the fascist “exceptional state”, but this link with transitions within the capitalist mode of production seems to me the most relevant. Again, this is a second angle that we can take in our critical analysis of new political formations of the right in many parts of the world. And then, sure, the relation with fascism and imperialism, instantiated by Poulantzas’ modification of Horkheimer’s famous dictum on fascism and capitalism (it is “he who does not wish to discuss imperialism”, he writes, “who should stay silent on the subject of fascism”). I will come back to this point in a while.
AGL: Poulantzas’s studies on fascism are full of guiding categories for understanding contemporary processes of authoritarian and (post) fascist drifts of conservative political projects. The tensions between the fractions of the capitalist power bloc, the crisis of political representation of the traditional parties, the reactionary politicisation of the middle classes, etc., are part of these categories. However, there are two lines of Poulantzian reflection that seem to me to be the most fertile. The first is what Sandro points out about the ability of fascism to recuperate, in a corrupt way, certain popular aspirations of society. When one reads Scurati’s voluminous work on Mussolini, one cannot help but feel how the fear of historical uncertainty emerging after the First World War and the decline of the liberal regime, the demand for order and the search to cling to certainties of life, runs through the collective soul of Italian society, including its popular classes. And it is there that fascism will not only find a space of social availability, but around which it will create its mythology of the invention of a new world, strict but secure and hopeful. This reflection by Poulantzas is very powerful, because it even allows us to go beyond his own hypothesis about the defeat of the working class as a precondition for fascism. In reality, the emerging fascism culturally defeats the organised labour movement, and the left parties, in providing practically, even by force, a new predictive horizon for society, when the old liberal order has collapsed. In doing so, it completes the political defeat of the labour movement for the next two or three decades. Today, the strength of the far-right projects is growing and gaining popular support because they also instrumentally recuperate the fear and social uncertainty caused by the hyper-globalised devastation of capitalism. In the case of Latin America, the social ascent of impoverished and indigenous segments of societies that have devalued the recognitions and small educational and territorial privileges of the traditional middle classes, added to the instability of this social ascent, have created a cocktail of new uncertainties to which the right wing offers corrupt, violent and illusory ‘solutions’, but which are certainties to which to cling in the midst of chaos.
The second reflection of great utility in the present is the one that refers to the type of general crisis of hegemony of the ruling classes in moments of transition from one form of organising capitalist accumulation to another. In the case studied by Poulantzas, is what he calls the transition from competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism. When one form of economic accumulation and political legitimation of capitalism gives way to another, it does so in the midst of harrowing symptoms of the exhaustion of the old economic regime, of society’s cognitive unease at the twilight of its old beliefs that gave order to the imagined predictive horizon of its families and, of course, in the midst of devastating uncertainties about the future that seems to have been extinguished. It is the distressing experience of the suspension of historical time in which the mad race of physical time and human activities seem to have lost their destiny in the arms of a suffocating present that never ends. Gramsci called this time the interregnum. I have suggested speaking of ‘liminal time’ precisely because everyone knows what is wrong, what is about to end, but no one has the convincing and hopeful certainty of what is to come. At the present moment, the symptoms of the decline of globalised neoliberalism are unmistakable. The free market has been corrupted as a safe market and globalism is being cornered by what Nobel laureate Krugman calls ‘economic nationalism’ and the IMF calls ‘geo-economic fragmentation’. Societies’ predictive horizon has fractured; uncertainty is the only certainty, with its inevitable dose of despondency and intermittently explosive malaise. This cannot last forever. Thus, after a long period of stupor and disaffection where multiple societal projects dispute possible courses of action, the social classes will be ready to open their cognitive availabilities towards one of these competing projects in order to replace the old belief system. The authoritarian right, the new fascisms and post-fascisms are part of these competing projects. And although historical time has not yet decided in favour of these horizons, it is clear that today they have a notable advantage, especially in Europe. To prove this, it is enough to see how warlike pan-Europeanism has become common sense, even among moderate political and cultural elites.
MP: Alvaro’s last sentence builds a bridge to another topic that I would like to stress with you. Inter-capitalist conflicts are another point clearly present in Poulantzas’ reflection, which comes clearly to the fore today. The rise of post-fascism is indeed accompanied by the return of heightened tensions, proxy wars, genocidal projects and potential escalations between the global superpowers such as US, Russia, and China. These phenomena point to what Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein called the hegemonic crisis of the “capitalist world-system”, opening the unpredictable and potential chaotic transitional scenario that you just mentioned. How do you understand these processes and how can Poulantzas’ analytical tools help us?
SM: This is a very important question for me, both theoretically and politically. I have long been quite sceptical with respect to “world-system theory”, I still remember reading Wallerstein’s and Arrighi’s diagnoses of a relative decline of the US global hegemony in the 1990s and making fun of them. Well, I was simply wrong. Over the last years, I have in particular continuously harked back to Giovanni Arrighi’s work, I have often discussed it, and I am convinced that it provides us with some of the most powerful tools to come to grips with the current conjuncture of war and global turmoil. His notion of “hegemonic transition” enables us to make sense of the global reactionary cycle that started in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007/8 (in which “exceptional states”, indeed, proliferate: think of such names as Modi and Erdogan, Al Sisi and Duterte, Bolsonaro and Trump, to mention just a few). Moreover, Arrighi’s rigorous analysis of the shifting position of the US in the capitalist world system allows to grasp the stakes of the current war in Ukraine, which, of course, are European stakes but go well beyond it, in particular involving China. This is an important issue at stake in a book I am just finishing with Brett Neilson, entitled The Rest and the West (forthcoming from Verso). To put it quickly, I am convinced that we already live in a multipolar world, but such multipolarity is “centrifugal” and conflictual, to quote Adam Tooze. The effort to find a peaceful and just solution to this predicament is a crucial task today, which appears even clearer if one remembers that historical hegemonic transitions have been characterised by catastrophic concatenations of wars. At the same time, there is a need to think anew the question of imperialism, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the reorganisation of NATO as a global actor, and rearmament in many parts of the world demonstrate. Does Poulantzas help us in this respect? Let us see. Not surprisingly, the backdrop of his understanding of imperialism is again provided by the theory of (state) monopoly capitalism. Sure, Poulantzas emphasizes Lenin’s political definition of imperialism to criticise the “economistic” conception held by the Third International. And he has quite interesting points on the fact that imperialism is a “chain”, which requires “links” hierarchically articulated according to the logic of “uneven development”. But these links are unilaterally denominated by Poulantzas in national terms (“the various national formations which constitute the chain”, as he writes in Fascism and Dictatorship). As you may notice, I am coming back to a point I made before, in my first reply. But what matters now is that such an emphasis on “national formations” did not allow to grasp the specificity of imperialism (and of the transformations of capitalism) in the 1970s. Nonetheless, there are powerful oscillations in Poulantzas’ writings on imperialism. Speaking in 1973 of the “current phase of imperialism”, Poulantzas focuses on a double movement of integration of relics of previous ages of capitalism within the “reproduction of monopoly capitalism” and of further penetration (and “direct domination”) of the capitalist mode of production into the “dominated and dependent formations” (Poulantzas Reader, 226). This image of continuity did not take into account the break announced by the delinking of US dollar from gold in 1971. At the same time, Poulantzas is acutely aware – as Luciano Ferrari Bravo stressed in 1975 in an important work on imperialism – of the new quality of the pressures of multinational corporations on states, whose “traditional functions” are “requalified as functions of the very international cycle of capital based on the multinationals” themselves.[7] I think this is a relevant insight, that we may want to further develop in the contemporary multipolar world.
AGL: Wallerstein’s contributions on ‘hegemony in the inter-state system’ and Arrighi’s contributions on ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ are undoubtedly powerful conceptual tools for understanding the present. These great Marxist contributions to the study of what we might call the long imperial cycles in the history of capitalism have been unfairly forgotten. When these reflections were proposed at the end of the 20th century, despite their documented rigour, they were left aside and not followed further because they seemed to go against the tide of the great moment of expansion and triumphalism of the North American hegemon after the collapse of the USSR, the irradiation of liberal democracy and its economic, military and cultural imperial unilateralism. A part of Marxism, battered, marginalised and on the defensive, preferred to entrench itself in the exaltation of triumphant globalism, as if they were postmodern variants of proletarian internationalism.
Today, the symptoms of the downward phase of US global dominance, advanced by Wallerstein and Arrighi, are overwhelming, as is the global rise of China. The documentation provided by Dalio and the US National Intelligence Council itself are unobjectionable regarding the phase of decline (US), and increase (China), of the determinants of imperial dominance (education system, economic production, participation in world trade, competitiveness, innovation, power as a financial centre, status of the currency as a reserve currency, etc.). Even American strategists are already speculating about the ‘Thucydides trap’ and the risks of a pre-emptive war between the dominant but declining power and the rising but not yet dominant power. The overlapping of downward cycles, the ‘short’ cycle of neoliberal accumulation (40-60 years), and the ‘long’ cycle of US imperial domination (130-150 years), further complicates the current systemic chaos and increases the similarities with what happened at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 70s-80s of the last century, there was also a transition of ‘short’ cycles of accumulation and domination, with the passage from the Fordist economic cycle and welfare compromises to the neoliberal accumulation cycle; but this transition was made under the umbrella of the great cycle of US imperial domination. In contrast, the current transition from the neoliberal cycle to something that we do not yet know what it will look like is taking place in the midst of the decline of US imperial dominance and the rise of China, similar to the end of the nineteenth-century liberal cycle that was mounted at the end of British hegemony and the rise of US imperial hegemony in the 1920s and 40s. Today, Poulantzas’s contribution on the conditions for the emergence of fascism in regional powers devalued by the new configurations of the internationalisation of capital can be an important inspiration that helps to understand the ways in which the authoritarian rights have taken root in their territories.
MP: In this global hegemonic crisis, there has been a renewed interest in national sovereignty as a key political concept and battleground. Especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, the state hovers again on the agenda of contemporary left-wing parties, social movements, and critical theory. Nevertheless, the classic dilemmas connected to the invocation of the state as a ready-made solution for transformative theories and politics have also been highlighted. How might one address the “spectre of the sovereign state” within and beyond Poulantzas’ approach today? Given your different backgrounds, I imagine that your views might be different in this respect, but not necessarily antithetical…
AGL: Since the 1980s, there has been a strange convergence between neoliberal readings of the state, which proposed its minimisation in order to make way for the ‘laws of the global market’, and Marxist political and academic currents that abandoned the state in favour of ‘post-state’ readings, which, in the end, were only sophisticated readings of a kind of liberal cosmopolitanism. It is possible that this major setback was influenced by the political defeats after the fall of the USSR. However, it is also possible that this strange concurrence between neoliberalism and ‘post-state’ critical thinking has deeper roots in the very conceptualisations of the state that prevailed throughout the 20th century. Of course, if the state is merely an ‘instrument’ of oppression of the ruling classes, then it’s easy to have some sympathy for the liberal dismantling of many state institutions. There is thus an underlying problem in these instrumentalist views of the state. They cannot understand that the working classes are also in the state, dominated, fragmented, but they are there with their struggles, their conquests, their resources, crystallised, alienated, but which are the fruit of their own struggles, their limitations and also historical victories. They are there not only as subjugated or deceived (a vanguardist illusion), but also as subjects producing rights, common goods, failed emancipations, and the materiality of collective memory. And the neoliberals who use the state as a great bank of social wealth to be appropriated and privatised in order to expand the accumulation of capital know this more than anyone else. They expropriate public companies to hold on to their private wealth; they expropriate labour rights to reduce wages and increase profits; they expropriate everyone’s natural resources to accumulate family incomes. They indebt the state in order to finance their companies. It is a kind of internal colonisation that takes away a substantial part of the social wealth in the state, the rights and gains of the last 100 years.
The bourgeoisie that exists outside the state and deploys extra-state transactions, as Marx reminds us in the chapter on primitive accumulation in Capital, and later Braudel in Material Civilisation and Capitalism, has always strengthened and expanded hand in hand with the state, either to consolidate agreements with the working classes on rights, or to expropriate those rights and common resources. And also to protect itself from crisis, as it does now. In the crisis of 2008 and then in the crisis of 2020 with the ‘great lockdown’ provoked by Covid-19, European and North American businessmen have turned to the state to mobilise in an extraordinary way the monetary resources of each country, to pay wages, to buy shares, to pay debts. Today, swallowing their rhetoric about the free market and the ‘minimal state’, they applaud trade wars against the Asian competitor, they praise state subsidies to produce microprocessors and clean energy in their ‘own’ countries, they resort to multi-million loans from central banks to clean up the bankruptcy of their private banks. Does this mean that the state is back? No. It was always there, and the capitalists knew that much better than some ‘Marxists’. It is just changing its form. From a state that mutilates resources and collective rights, it is mutating into an indebted state to save the capitalists who now reclaim, amidst the crisis, their ‘nationality’. But the state never went away for the subaltern classes either. Not only because every cutback in rights was made by the state, but also because every struggle they undertook in neoliberal times was to maintain those rights in the state order. It is not that every social struggle is statist by definition. In fact, struggles often arise against the state’s own decisions, but they always, in one way or another, pass through the state and are recorded, objectified, crystallised in state institutions.
It is a paradoxical tension. Social struggles emerge on the margins of the state, and usually in confrontation with it. If they become radicalised in the course of contingent events, they can overtake it and even replace, at times, its monopolies by democratising the deliberation and control of their needs directly. This is the moment of social protagonism. Sometimes, by their own choice, this protagonism leads to some kind of state institutionality that will be the fruit of these struggles (working time, access to public services, social security, etc.) and over which they will be able to exercise regular control through future mobilisations. In other cases, social protagonism ceases to radiate to other issues and other regions, which would have allowed the consolidation of non-state forms of unification of society as a whole. A slow retreat then begins which, before losing the effect of its initial vigour, leads the mobilised forces to fix what has been achieved in legislation and state rights that will serve as a starting point for a new wave of social struggles that will be able to go beyond what has been crystallised so far.
In all cases, there is a relation of co-belonging of the social classes in the state. The fact that it is an alienated inscription, because these achievements are ‘guarded’ by monopolies (the bureaucracy) separated and autonomised from the mobilised society itself, does not prevent them from seeing and recognising themselves, albeit in a distorted way, in these achieved rights. The state is also the practical materiality of the struggles of the underprivileged classes; it is part of their history, their needs and the knowledge they have attained. It is even the consciousness of its temporal limits. If you like, it is a form of the existence of the subaltern classes and of the historical efforts to overcome that subalternity. We have seen this in Latin America in the struggles for natural resources, for the distribution of wealth and popular government. We see it in the US in the struggle for wage increases and unionisation. Likewise in Europe in the defence of wages, decent pensions and the recognition of women’s rights. This paradoxical feature of class struggles being simultaneously intra-state and anti-state has been one of the shortcomings in the reflections of contemporary Marxist lefts. But the ‘real movement’ unfolding before our eyes unfolds in these ambivalences, in these constitutive paradoxes, and it is here that Archimedes’ “fulcrum” must be found to move and help change the world.
SM: Well, yet another return of the state, one may quip! If you think of Latin America in the first decade of the century la vuelta del estado was one of the main angles on the new “progressive” government. And it was often associated to the notion of “post-neoliberalism”, taking for granted that neoliberalism was simply associated with the “downsizing” of the state. This was indeed the prevailing view in the 1980s and 1990s. But today we have much more sophisticated and nuanced readings of the history and the very political rationality of neoliberalism. I am thinking of such works as the ones of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, in the footsteps of Michel Foucault, or of Quinn Slobodian on the concerns with the global order of thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke since the 1920s. What these and other studies demonstrate is that neoliberals share the view that the market cannot take care of itself. Institutional arrangements and regulations are key from this viewpoint, which means that neoliberalism aims at reorganising the state as well as its junctures with emerging assemblages of power at the transnational level rather than simply “downsizing” it. Moreover, we have learned to look at neoliberalism not merely from above, but also “from below” to put it with the words of an important book by Verónica Gago on Latin America. The imbrication of the “neoliberal reason” within the wider fabric of social relations requires a political approach that can definitely be facilitated by a popular and “progressive” government but cannot be limited to state policies. In any case, we can say that the state never went away and therefore we must ask in which sense it “returns”. In the current conjuncture, I would say that the return of the state has taken an ambivalent shape, as the addressee of widespread demands for social protection during the Covid-19 pandemic and as the monopolist of violence against the background of the Ukraine war. Needless to say, these are two constitutive sides of the modern state. But the suddenness of the shift has troubled many people on the left who were imagining political projects to prompt a return of the state centred upon the pole of social protection and welfare. Moreover, my main problem with discourses celebrating the return of the state lies in the fact that this returning state is often understood as a kind of transhistorical entity, so that we can ironically say that its return builds a kind of instance of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence”. There may well be structural continuities that pertain to the very form of the modern state, but I think that what matters more today is to focus attention on the dramatic transformations that have reshaped, in a way disrupted, and “deformed” it in the last decades due to the neoliberal hegemony and to the persisting action of global processes. We have many analyses of these transformations in different parts of the world. To mention just one example, Saskia Sassen describes in her Authority, Territory, Rights (2006) the ways in which globalisation – far from being opposed to the state – has tested its very institutional unity from the inside through the dissemination of logics of privatisation and contractualisation. In a very different historical conjuncture, this is a question that one can see at least methodologically foreshadowed in Poulantzas’ State, Power, Socialism as part of his emphasis on the relational nature of the state. Allow me to quote a bit more at length a passage that I already mentioned before. We must “discard once and for all”, Poulantzas writes, “the view of the state as a completely unified mechanism, founded on a homogeneous and hierarchical distribution of the centers of power moving from the top to bottom of a uniform ladder or pyramid” (p. 133). I think this remains an important statement, that we may keep in mind in our effort to get a realistic picture of the contemporary state and of its capacity to confront capitalism. I want to repeat what I wrote with Brett Neilson in The Politics of Operations (2019), which means that the state today is simply too weak in this respect. And let me stress that this does not lead me to discard the role a state can play, under a left government, in a politics of liberation. My point is simply that the focus of such politics cannot be exclusively or even mainly on the state.
MP: Both of you have insisted of the fact that the formal and substantial state power is paradoxically constituted, and continuously transformed, by a sort of puissance coming from below: a “counter-power” exerted by the subaltern and the oppressed. The social movements, the cycles of class struggle, and the mass uprisings thus represent, at the same time, the challenge and the motor, the destabilisation and the restructuration force of the political form of the state.
In this regard, the current situation presents at least another novelty when compared to Poulantzas’ time. Beyond the economic claims, contemporary social movements speak the language of ecology, feminism, and antiracism, that is, figures of social mobilisation that Marxists have often reduced to “secondary” or “derivative” contradictions. I think, for instance, of the global trans-feminist strike launched by the Argentinean movement Ni Una Menos and of the different attempts of coordinating the global climate strike launched by young activists in the last few years…
SM: Today’s movements and struggles revolve around issues and speak languages that are way different from the ones at the centre of Poulantzas’s reflections and theoretical elaborations. I would add the question of race to your examples, a question that takes different shapes in different parts of the world, including Europe and Latin America, but remains crucial in our time. One could add that such issues as gender and race, but also climate justice are not new. Already in the 1970s, there were movements and struggles revolving among them, just think of migrant workers’ struggles in several European countries, of feminist mobilisations, or movements against nuclear power to give a couple of instances. The point is that Marxism long ignored or at best ranked such issues as “secondary contradictions”. It is the continuity of powerful feminist, anti-racist, and ecological mobilisation over the last decades that dramatically changed the situation. And, today, there are many people who are working along the lines of an “intersectional Marxism”, including you, Matteo. Even the notion of the “multitude” is now reframed by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in an intersectional perspective.[8] I am also convinced that rethinking a politics of liberation from the angle of the panoply of differences that crisscross the composition of living labour is one of the most important challenges we face today. But, I repeat, it is not surprising that we do not find this problematic in Poulantzas’ writings. Even in State, Power, Socialism, class and “popular struggles” are valorised and investigated with respect to their relations to the state, while their composition and nature are not really discussed, are taken for granted if you wish. Sure, under the influence of Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses but also due to his critical engagement with Foucault’s work, Poulantzas writes that popular struggles (and “not only class struggles”) are always inscribed in apparatuses that crystallize a relation of forces – and he gives as instances not simply factories or companies but also “the family” (p. 141). However, he doesn’t draw theoretical consequences for his understanding of “popular struggles” from such recurring statements in his work. Having said this, I think Poulantzas continues to be relevant for the way in which we conceive of struggles, although we clearly need to combine his contribution with the ones coming from quite different approaches to meet the challenges of our time. I am thinking, for instance, of Poulantzas’ critique of Foucault, that, as I mentioned before, runs parallel to a creative appropriation of some of his concepts. It is precisely on the issue of struggles, nonetheless, that the paths between the two thinkers diverge in an irreconcilable way. At stake here is a question that, in the following years, would become a vexed one, which is Foucault’s notion of resistance. Poulantzas takes issue precisely with the missing determination of “resistance” in Foucault’s work. “Why”, he asks, “should there ever be resistance? From where resistance should come, and how would it be even possible?” If resistances, as Foucault happened to write, are everywhere, in fact they are nowhere, “they are a pure affirmation of principle” (p. 149). It is from this point of view that Poulantzas emphasises the peculiarity of his concept of struggles and contends – as I anticipated before – that they always have a “primacy” over “the institutions-apparatuses of power (especially the state), even though they are invariably inscribed within their field” (p. 149). One could ironically quip that Poulantzas anticipates here Deleuze’s famous dictum “resistance comes first”. Without going into the details of Foucault’s notion of resistance to test Poulantzas’ critique, I think that his reflections on the constitutive effect of struggles continue to be inspiring today, even facing a different composition of struggles that requires of course other conceptual tools to be grasped.
AGL: Clearly, social structures today are much more complex and diverse than they were 40 or 50 years ago when Poulantzas was doing his research. Other collective concerns have emerged, such as the environment, access to water, and other movements have been strengthened, such as the feminist and indigenous movements, while others, such as the trade-union movement, have been weakened by the fragmentation and casualisation of the workforce. However, this has not annulled or replaced the importance of other demands and movements with a longer tradition, such as access to land for peasants, the de-racialisation of power to equalise indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, wage increases for workers to overcome inflation, access to decent basic services for people living in the urban peripheries, the nationalisation of companies that retain the economic surplus for the benefit of the entire population, the right to good health and public education, or the defence of a decent retirement, etc. At times, the identity struggles are the visible ones and manage to articulate others, and then, after a while, the trade-union struggles or territorial demands take the lead.
No struggle is predestined to lead or articulate the others. Leaderships are contingent. They always have been, and will be in the future. And if collective actions are radicalised, if issues of political power or substantive democratisation of decision-making are raised, it is not because any of them are meant to be so. It depends on random circumstances, on the responses of governments to this or that demand; on the rupture of the moral tolerances of the governed towards the rulers as a result of a sum of grievances; on the capacity to unify collective forces and expectations around specific objectives that add up to partial victories and feed confidence in new victories; on the social willingness to substitute beliefs, etc., etc., etc. Unrest can be triggered by a specific social demand, but, in the course of time, this can be substituted or merged with others, and only the course of action will determine which of the multiple collective demands that are liquefied in action has the capacity to unify the diversities. Likewise, although today there are better conditions of social interconnection that help to synchronise mobilisations on a continental scale, most of the mobilisations and those with the greatest political impact are those that take place at the territorial level of the state. This is not because of some sovereigntist prejudice of the popular classes, but because it is the basic space of cohesion and strong common bonds (shared history, common goods, collective representations) of society. Despite the whole network of global interdependencies driven by the market, today there is no other space of unification, real or imagined, of societies other than states. It is the place of the commons, by monopolies. It is enough to see how, in the face of the most basic fear, the death unleashed by Covid-19 in 2020, the first thing that all societies unanimously turned to in an attempt to protect themselves were states. Markets fell silent; international organisations hid their heads like ostriches; transnational corporations took refuge in their countries of origin and flags flew when it came to retaining masks, respirators and vaccines. As Marx studied more than 150 years ago, every revolutionary struggle is initially ‘national’ in character, even if its triumph inevitably lies in its internationalisation. The latter must always be sought. But it must never be forgotten that one starts with the first.
MP: We can also stress the relationship between state power and social struggles from the viewpoint of political strategy. A controversial point in Poulantzas’ thought concerns his conception of the historical transition beyond capitalism. In the last section of State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas sketches a dual strategy, that articulates multiple but synchronised political practices: the exercise of government through the state’s apparatuses occupied by left-wing parties, on the one hand; and self-government and the direct democracy organised by autonomous social movements, on the other. With this proposal, that must be historically contextualised, Poulantzas tries to surpass the alternative between the Western communist parties’ strategy of gradual hegemony and the perspective of the insurrection. This attempt could be read today to overcome an orthodox interpretation of Marxist-Leninism and to rethink the Leninist idea of “dual power” …
SM: It is important to read State, Power, Socialism remaining aware of its context. The book came out in 1978, soon after the notion of “Eurocommunism” began to circulate among Communist parties in Western Europe. One can say that Poulantzas was open to the rethinking of the relation between socialism and democracy prompted by the Italian Communist Party, while he did not accept its political foundation through the idea of a split between a “bad” state of monopolies and a “good” state corresponding to the growth of popular forces within the state itself, giving rise to a kind of double power within the state. At the same time, he was critical of the Leninist orthodoxy still strong with the French party, endorsed by his former mentor Louis Althusser and by Étienne Balibar, who had authored in 1976 a short book on the persistent relevance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is why Poulantzas criticises the idea of “dual power”, associating it with the Leninist theory of insurrection, predicated upon an intensification and centralisation of the dualism in order to break it. “The repetition of a revolutionary crisis leading to a situation of dual power”, Poulantzas contends, “is extremely unlikely in the West” (Poulantzas Reader, pp. 339-340). Nonetheless, he envisages a strategy to address the issue of transition that is indeed characterised by the interplay between two dimensions, and indeed between two powers, that remain separated although necessarily articulated. The struggle within the state, “designed to sharpen the internal contradictions of the state, to carry out a deep-seated transformation of the state”, needs to be paralleled and complemented by “a struggle outside the institutions and apparatuses, giving rise to a whole series of instruments, means of coordination, organs of popular power at the base, structures of direct democracy” (p. 138). There is a need to stress that the “outside” is always problematic in Poulantzas, due to his relational theory of the state. But, in a way, he is indeed anticipating here at least the basic logical framework of the rethinking of dual power I have been pursuing over the last years in my writings with Michael Hardt and Brett Neilson. Indeed, we have taken the Leninist notion as a point of departure while trying to move beyond Lenin’s understanding of transition as a short-term process. I will come back to this point. For now, it is important to say that we emphasise even more than Poulantzas the relevance of struggles in the very constitution of the “second” power, which provides us with an important viewpoint on its shifting social composition. We further expand here on a notion that we have often employed in past years (and that was key to the Italian autonomous movement in the 1970s), the notion of “counterpower”. Combining struggles and counterpower leads us to move beyond an understanding of social movements as actors that basically raise “demands”, or “claims”, to be picked up and implemented (or ignored and even repressed) by governments. This means that we look at struggles from the angle of their capacity to be sources of a power that remains different from the one of states. While we work toward a theory of dual power disentangled from the prospect of insurrection (while we do not discard the question of rupture, of what Poulantzas discusses in terms of the “test of strength”), we remain close to Lenin on a crucial point. Describing in April 1917 the features of the second emerging power – of the power of the soviets – he underscores a profound asymmetry with respect to the one of the provisional government. In the case of the soviets, power is based “on the direct initiative of the people from below, and not on a law enacted by a centralized state power”. This profound difference, Lenin comments, is “often overlooked, often not given enough thought, yet it is the crux of the matter”. I guess it is not very original to say that the continuity of what Lenin calls “the direct initiative of the people from below” is a crucial factor in any process of real transformation of the “present state of things”, be it revolutionary or otherwise – and that any revolution is over when the masses disappear from the streets. In any case, our engagement with the theory of dual power aims at tackling precisely this question, keeping into account the syncopated pace of the action of social moments and struggles and of course the fact that it is not possible to plan moments of social insurgency. Nonetheless, what we need to conceive is an assemblage of counterpowers created by struggles and movements and capable to stabilise and prolong through peculiar institutional forms their action and transformative effects.
AGL: What happens is that reality is the way it is, regardless of the sterile debates of some leftists as to how reality should be. What we can see from the logic of the times of profound social change are at least four recurrent and interconnected processes.
First. The processes of weakening of the dominant social order and the emergence of revolutionary possibilities of social transformation do not happen at just any time. They are extraordinary but inevitable in the history of peoples. And, when they do occur, they do so unexpectedly and in contingent ways. Remember the anguish with which Lenin, at the beginning of 1917, thought that it would not be his turn to see the beginning of a revolution that would break out two months later. Social upheavals are neither manufactured nor planned. They occur like volcanic eruptions from deep within the layers of collective experience. It is possible to establish conditions of greater possibility for them to emerge, but it is impossible to guarantee their explosion with a date. And it is there, when it happens, that all the previous work of organisation, debate, agitation that was deployed by parties and social organisations for decades is put to the test to dispute the direction of the cognitive availability that, exceptionally, has opened up in broad popular sectors. It is there, in the heat of events in which dissimilar actions, proposals and temporalities are intensely intertwined, where the accumulated capacities to understand the historical moment, to interact with the most revolutionary tendencies emerging from collective action, to tactically irradiate leaderships on other mobilised sectors, to further fissure the rifts of the dominant classes, etc., that social protagonism can take one direction or another, successful or failed, transformative or conservative.
Second. The modes of collective action with social protagonism, that is, with the direct participation of broad popular social sectors (wage earners, peasants, indigenous people, students, women, neighbourhood dwellers, etc.) in the collective deliberation of their problems, emerge as more vigorous and irradiating in these exceptional moments. To the extent that the old institutions have shown themselves to be inoperative or even harmful in the face of society’s needs, its most active or locally organised sectors feel compelled to participate in the organisation of its demands, in the deliberation of the struggles to be undertaken, and even in the management of possible solutions to its awakened needs. These are inevitably forms of ‘counter-power’, or, rather, social power in opposition to the state, because, in word and deed, they dissolve the state’s monopoly on the management of common affairs, which are reabsorbed by society. It doesn’t matter if this collective daring was done to ask the state for some demand (a law on water management, on pensions, employer abuse, recognition of equality, etc.). In fact, they are diluting the power of the state by taking on, on their own account, the debate of their problems (dilution of the monopoly on the debate of common affairs), the organisation of their actions in the face of the burdens they have endured and the management of the solutions (dilution of the bureaucratic monopoly on common affairs). In other words, they are creating forms of direct power from within society. This is double power or dual power. And, if we look closely, they are not another state, because they are not a monopoly. They are a reticular and multiform ‘non-state’.
Every exceptional revolutionary moment generates forms of dual power by collective initiative in the face of the inoperative or aggressive state power. This is what Marx observed at the time of the social outburst of the Paris Commune of 1871, and which is present, with greater or lesser intensity, in the great social outbursts throughout the world. There may be exceptional moments of passive social availability, which do not give rise to dual power. But any moment of social availability with collective protagonism creates multiple particular forms of dual power. This does not prevent society from regularly producing other forms of self-organisation to directly resolve issues that affect it. But they are usually fragmented, local and refer to ways of resolving issues that involve the activity of a small number of people. For example, the use of stream water, the extraction of fish from a river, the solution of a basic service in a popular neighbourhood, the management of the authority and common lands of a peasant community, the care of a local area, etc. These are certainly experiences of the productive force of problem-solving associativity. But these are always local, territorially limited experiences. Some sociologists have called them ‘communes’, which is valid if the ‘common’ is limited to the inhabitants of a neighbourhood, an agricultural community, or a workplace. However, if the common involves the members of an entire society, its majority sectors, it is clear that these experiences of associativity are not a ‘common’. This does not limit the social importance of these experiences of self-organisation, as schools of shared management that can potentially spread. And they are all the more important if they are territorially expanded local “associativities” (asociatividades), such as peasant communities in societies with a significant rural population. But neither can we lose sight of the fact that many of these initiatives emerge in the ‘gaps’ of the state, where the state has not yet managed to expand, and in the ‘frontier spaces’ of capitalism, where non-capitalist labour productive forces (the urban domestic unit, the rural community) are formally subsumed to capital, preserving pre-existing modes of labour self-organisation.
Third. These forms of dual social power have, until now, had an ephemeral existence. They emerge at moments of large collective mobilisations. They appear around specific issues; at times, they expand to other sectors and other issues in parallel to the irradiation of social enthusiasm for these own efficient ways of addressing and finding solutions to their demands. In some cases, they are drowned in blood by the response of a counterrevolutionary state that cannot tolerate the duplicity of powers over the common good of a society. After a moment of cathartic protagonism, people return to individual daily life. The working classes cannot be permanently mobilised; they need time to deal with their family and personal affairs; after a while, they choose to delegate the power resulting from their struggles and victories and the management of common affairs to state power; renewed and with a new social composition; but monopolistic. This will eventually turn this victory into an alienated victory that will turn against them. It is not a social law that it happens this way. But, for now, it is. It is likely that, at some point, the configuration of collective experience and the continental and global irradiation of the dual powers will allow for a more lasting course.
Fourth. Every form of social dual power arises outside the state and against the state because it is a way of democratising the decision-making and management of some common societal issue. But, at the same time, dual power arises initially to demand something from the state and, if there is no universal irradiation of dual power that allows the state form to be overcome, dual power will seek to enshrine in the (new) state itself the institutionality, the management of the new right, of the new resource or recognition achieved in the collective struggle. At the same time, the state will have to reconstruct its social legitimacy if it manages to incorporate the imprint of dual power in its new legal order, in its institutional reorganisation and in the social composition of its officials. It is a paradoxical relationship. Dual power is the antagonist of the state; but, at the same time, so far, neither can live without the other. In mathematics, one would say that they are a continuum. And this is so because they both have the same material basis of existence: the commonality of a society. The state is the commonality of a society, but by monopolies. Dual power is the commonality of a society, but through protagonism and social self-organisation. Thus, when Mezzadra and Hardt propose a strategy of emancipation centred on dual power, without neglecting the (temporary) struggle for the seizure of state power, while Poulantzas proposes a struggle for the power of state apparatuses and simultaneously the self-government of autonomous social movements, all three are addressing the same complexity of emancipation contained in this paradoxical relation. The difference is the emphasis they place on one of the polarities. Yet, a problem to be solved in practical experience is the continuity over time of social self-organisation on common issues or, what Mezzadra and Hardt call the dual power as a ‘relatively stable’ political framework.
MP: Still on this point, I wonder whether the weakness of “dual power” (that is, of auto-organised massive practices in a conflictual interaction with the state) has contributed, among other factors, to the fragility of left-wing governments over the last decades, both in Latin America and the south of Europe…
AGL I think we are facing a catastrophic convergence of weaknesses. Some from the side of domination; others from the side of emancipation.
From the pole of domination, the economically powerful classes and the political coalitions that accompany them are facing structural problems of economic growth, the emergence of deep social unrest, the ageing of their belief system that ensured the legitimacy of their decisions, as well as a divergent fragmentation of their political elites. The times of historical optimism and collective enthusiasm for the neoliberal regime are a thing of the past. Collective uncertainty, improvised and contradictory economic policies that aggravate social discontent, and the constant popular protests erupting everywhere, are indicative of a structural weakness of national and global business leadership. At the same time, efforts to rebuild left-wing projects beyond a faltering social democracy generally fail to move beyond their status as political minorities. And, when they do, as in Latin America, they fail to consolidate a new, lasting model of post-neoliberal, let alone post-capitalist, economic organisation. This also speaks of a weakness on the side of emancipatory struggles. We are in a moment of short victories and short defeats for both projects, without either proposal being able to achieve a lasting hegemony capable of relaunching a new cycle of economic organisation and long-term political legitimisation. Even the emergence of reactionary projects and their efforts to consolidate themselves in an authoritarian manner are limited, further increasing the state of indeterminacy of historical time. These are the classic symptoms of moments of transition from one phase of economic accumulation/political domination to another phase, which is not yet known. In this vortex of epochal transition, everyone is weak. Of course, the weakness of the inertial dominators is much less weak than that of the forces of emancipation.
But these are the only moments when the weakness of the weak can become strength. At other times, when economic growth, stability and social enthusiasm for this course coincide, domination is unassailable. There, the left’s attempts to transform the world are marginal, merely cumulative. The ‘spirit of the times’ is on the side of the moneyed classes. However, when the ‘spirit of the times’ fades, it is the only ephemeral moment when the weakness of emancipatory projects can turn into strength. It is not automatic and far from obligatory that it turns into strength. It is only a real possibility that depends on what we can do, on the struggles we can deploy in all fields with frantic persistence. Again and again. And, from today, for another decade or two, in the midst of this convulsive concurrence of weaknesses struggling to become triumphant strength, the structure of the new economic and political order that will govern the world for the next historical cycle of accumulation and domination for the next 40-60 years will have to be defined.
SM: In a way I do think that what you call the weakness of dual power (and of the “organs of popular power at the base”, to put it with Poulantzas) provides us with a key to an understanding of the limits of left-wing governments of the last years. Even more importantly, it provides us with a viewpoint that can help to draw critical lessons for the future from those experiences. I remember the enthusiasm surrounding the first months of the government of Alexis Tsipras in 2015. What struck many people, including myself, were not simply the rhetoric and politics of a left government that seemed willing to challenge and confront the “troika” of creditors of Greece (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund). Besides that government, there was a mobilized society, the legacy of years of struggle against neoliberalism in terms of organizations, experience, and knowledge. There was a network, called “Solidarity for All” that included self-managed health clinics and factories, food centres, kitchens, and legal aid hubs. And Syriza, Tsipras’ party, was part of all that and seemed willing to incorporate these movements and struggles within governmental processes while, at the same time, acknowledging and even enhancing their autonomy. All this disappeared within months, after the agreement Tsipras reached with the Troika in July notwithstanding the amazing victory of the “No” at the “bailout referendum”. In the following years, the original features of Syriza were steadily dismantled and it became a kind of classical social-democratic party, in a way taking the place that had been long occupied by the PASOK (the Greek Socialist Party). Under completely different circumstances, and within a much longer political cycle, I think that this problem has also haunted the experiences of the new “progressive” governments in the first long decade of the 21st century in Latin America. One must remain, of course, aware of the huge diversity of those experiences, but I think it is fair to say that, in the first years, most of them were able to combine innovative social policies with an acknowledgment of the constitutive role of social movements and struggles. I am thinking for instance of the misiones in Venezuela, of the CONALCAM (National Coordination for Change) in Bolivia, but also of the involvement of social movements in Brazil and Argentina in public policies to fight poverty. The situation changed in the following years, in particular when the financial crisis of 2007/8 hit Latin America and populist characters became more visible in the rhetoric and politics of progressive governments. Movements themselves bear their own responsibility, by accepting to contribute to the establishment of an alternative beyond conflict and co-optation that has shaped the political and academic debate on the relation between social movements and “progressive” governments. My point is that the rooting in the action of social movements as well within a wide fabric of struggles was a major condition of the power of those governments, and that they were basically weakened when they began to centre their politics in an exclusive way on the state (and, at the same time, on the nation, discarding the relevance of the processes of regional integration of the previous years). In a way, I am convinced that it is a matter of political realism – of “revolutionary political realism”, as Rosa Luxemburg once put it – to work toward a political theory and practice that acknowledges the need to combine different sources of power to confront capitalism in a conjuncture in which, as I explained above, the state is simply too weak to do that. This is the way in which I frame the notion of dual power today, and I am aware of the pitfalls and problems that surround it, of the huge amount of theoretical elaboration and practical experiences that we need in order to test and further develop it. It is a hypothesis, but I hope one that can open new spaces of research on what I like to continue to call the politics of autonomy. While this politics is often conceived in exclusively social, “communitarian”, and even anarchist terms, as I explained in an article on Latin America written some years ago with Verónica Gago I understand it as a flexible criterion of political action and organisation that emphasises the power of movements and struggles to drive processes of social transformation, establishing a wide range of relations with existing institutions, with different measures of antagonism and cooperation.[9]
MP: We talked about Poulantzas’ theoretical, historical, and political tools. We also discussed their strengths and their limits to understand contemporary capitalism and the global (dis)order – its logic and recent transformations. Do you have a question, or a remark, for each other?
AGL: I have a lot more I would like to learn from Professor Mezzadra, but to keep the thread of what we have been discussing, I would like to know how he thinks the brief existence of dual power experiences could be traced back to a strategy of emancipation.
SM: I learned a lot from Álvaro García Linera in past years and during this dialogue. My question for him regards our discussion of imperialism even beyond Poulantzas, and more specifically the tensions and conflicts that crisscross the emerging multipolar world today. I would like to hear more from him about the prospect of Latin American integration in such a conjuncture. I remember he endorsed Lula’s proposal of a single regional currency last year, even before he won the election. I know it is not an easy endeavour, nonetheless there were advances along the axis between Brazil and Argentina and Lula framed it within a more general emphasis on “de-dollarisation” during his visit in Beijing in April this year (soon after Dilma Roussef was elected president of the BRICS Bank). I think this is an interesting opening, which could lead to multiply the dimensions of the process of regional integration (infrastructural and commercial, cultural, and political, etc.) – a process that must negotiate the presence of both China and the US in Latin America. As I said, I would like to hear more from Álvaro García Linera on this topic and on these scattered observations.
Regarding his question to me, I can only repeat that our work toward a new theory of dual power consists of a series of research hypotheses, to be further elaborated and tested both theoretically and politically. Nonetheless, it is important to note that we are not alone in following this line of research. Such important scholars as Fredric Jameson and Alberto Toscano, to mention just two names, have recently taken up the issue of dual power reframing it in thought-provoking ways.[10] Toscano discusses Zavaleta Mercado’s book on the truncated experiments in dual power in Bolivia and Chile (El poder dual en América Latina, 1974) and he endorses his critique of Trotsky’s systematisation of dual power as a regularity, a “social law of revolution” and his emphasis on the distinctiveness of Lenin’s proposal in 1917. In this respect, Toscano comments, dual power – as well as transition itself – “is a problem (or a metaphor in Zavaleta’s sense) not a general concept or theory” (p. 177). Remaining faithful to Lenin also implies to acknowledge the “distinctiveness” of the Russian situation in 1917 and of the related theory and practice of insurrection (to hark back to a point made by Poulatzas in State, Power, Socialism). And it requires taking stock of a long history characterised by the internalisation of class and popular struggles within the very structure of the bourgeois state to enable the continuity of the expanded reproduction of capital. Although I must say that I became aware of the relevance of these processes while studying Toni Negri’s work on the “constitutionalisation of labor” from the early 1960s, Poulantzas is again an important reference here. The purpose of the material structures of the state, he writes, “is not simply to confront the dominated classes head on, but to maintain and reproduce the domination-subordination relationship at the heart of the state: the class enemy is always present within the state” (State, Power, Socialism, p. 141). Importantly such dynamics have been altered, distorted, and even corrupted by neoliberalism, but they have not been wiped out. To acquire its “distinctiveness” and effectiveness as a strategy of liberation, a theory of double power in the present conjuncture must be based on a careful and grounded analysis of both class and popular struggles and of the ways in which they continue to impinge on governmental processes. I know that one of the main problems in this respect lies in the “stabilisation” of dual power, of what Lenin understood as an exceptional and conjunctural manifestation. Nonetheless, this is a crucial task today to prolong and root the transformative action of struggles and movements for liberation. What is needed is to forge autonomous institutions outside the state (although, as I argued before, not necessarily against it). It may seem a kind of paradoxical task to people who identify institutions with the state. But, without going into the details of a theoretical discussion of the very notion of institution, allow me to give just one historical example, which is labour unions. They emerged from within the dynamics of class struggle, without being recognised by the state, and as independent institutions they provided in many places not only tools for organising at the point of production but also a panoply of self-managed social services according to a logic of solidarity. And they were not ephemeral experiences and organisations. In his Critique of Violence, written in 1921, Walter Benjamin famously argues that once labour unions and above all the right to strike were eventually recognised, the organised working class becomes “the only legal subject entitled to exercise violence” apart from the state. We can see here the contours of a dual power. And there is a need to add that, as for instance Karl Korsch critically explains in his early writings on labour law, the history of the Weimar Republic is characterised by a process of steady incorporation of labour unions within the structure of the state, by a loss of autonomy that was also a loss of power, as became tragically apparent in 1933. But to conclude, let me come back to Lenin, and let me stress that, toward the end of the Civil War, he became acutely aware of the pitfalls and shortcomings of his own understanding of transition, as outlined in State and Revolution. Far from being a short-term process, its temporality appeared to him now as prolonged and multi-dimensional. In such a conjuncture, the role of trade unions is particularly important, and it is worth harking back to the controversy between Lenin and Trotsky on the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (March 1921). There is a wonderful set of lectures by C.L.R. James on that controversy, that it would be worth discussing at length.[11] While Trotsky contended that labour unions must be state organs in the socialist state, Lenin emphasised the necessary autonomy of workers’ organisations as a political force in the period of transition, adding with his characteristic style that they are needed by the organised proletariat to “protect itself” from its state while the government needs the independence and power of workers’ organisations to get the workers “to protect our state” (“The Trade Unions, the Present Situation, and Trotsky’s Mistakes”, December 30, 1920). I know, these are just fragmented echoes from a quite distant past, but I hope they may contribute to inflame our political imagination in the completely different conjuncture of the present and facing the difficult tasks I was describing before.
AGL: The world is undergoing an awakening of structural imperial tensions. The US in slow decline and facing difficulties in imposing-convincing the world of its economic leadership. China, slowly rising, radiating successful planetary economic articulations, but not yet contesting US military leadership. Russia and Europe (especially France and Germany), seeking to territorially rearrange their new roles as second-tier powers. The BRICS trying to improve their countries’ chances in a twilight hegemonic order. The imperial unipolarism of the past 30 years, in which everyone derived some benefit from their subordinate relationship to the great US hegemon, is giving way to what the IMF calls a ‘geo-economic fragmentation’ with no predictable destination. This breakdown of imperial hierarchies is complicating the global crisis by superimposing the downward phase of the long cycle (100-150 years) of US hegemony with the downward phase of the short cycle (40-60 years) of the neoliberal regime of accumulation-domination. Uncertainty about the arrow of any imagined historical time clouds any predictive horizon in the medium or long term. It is the interregnum.
But, as old beliefs and old certainties corrode, so do old positions in the world order and the hierarchical division of planetary labour. In particular, Latin America’s position in the world.
Clearly, each individual country, including Brazil, lacks sufficient strength to influence the global realignment underway. But, together, 640 million inhabitants, with a young, relatively educated workforce, possessing multiple strategic natural resources (lithium, rare earths, copper, fresh water, oil, biodiversity), directly linked to the three centres of the imperial geopolitical dispute, can be a factor that can influence the direction of the world that will emerge, in time, from this global chaos. But the sine qua non for this is to act together. National isolation is the condemnation to global irrelevance and the re-actualisation of the centuries-old colonial subjugation in which it still finds itself. This requires articulating regional bloc policies in relation to other world economic blocs. To be viable, with the strength to create spaces of lowest common regional denominators, they must be punctual, practical and gradual.
For now, macro-agreements capable of covering many economic, legal or political areas simultaneously are impossible. Although the second progressive wave today is more extensive than it was 15 years ago, which could suggest a common continental strategy, it is also weaker, with more difficulties and local self-absorption. Therefore, regardless of temporary political differences or sympathies, it is possible to make progress on concrete issues of shared benefit. Initially, two or three. Concentrate energy on them, let them advance, let them bear fruit, and then, in time, move on to others. For example, a regional currency, as proposed by President Lula, which would allow part of regional trade to be conducted in that currency. In addition to willingness, this requires strong economic backing from one country, in this case Brazil, to reassure others that the use of the currency is backed by convertibility, if necessary, into dollars, as is the case now. Another area that could have rapid shared benefits is a regional lithium policy that would allow control of the global lithium market (the world’s largest reserves are in Latin America), take advantage of the industrial base of car manufacturing in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina; inputs from other neighbouring economies, and regional consumption organised under the umbrella of a planned energy transition. Another area of common interests and policies could be the sovereign control of the lungs of planetary life, the Amazon. Common criteria on its regulation and protection, to force the transfer of monetary resources from large polluting economies and practical commitments to de-carbonise their development, etc.
In all cases, strong, forward-looking (futurista) and sustained leadership is required. May Brazil rise to these historic opportunities.
[1] S. Mezzadra – B. Neilson, The politics of operations. Excavating contemporary capitalism, Duke University Press, London-Durham, 2019: 97, 232-233.
[2] Á. García Linera, Forma valor y forma comunidad, Traficantes de Sueños, Madrid, 2015 (1995): 9-33.
[3] A. Negri, La forma Stato. Per la critica dell’economia della Costituzione, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1977.
[4] See P. Capuzzo – S. Mezzadra, “Provincializing the Italian Reading of Gramsci”. In N. Srivastava – B. Bhattacharya (eds), The Postcolonial Gramsci, London – New York: Routledge, 2012: 34-54.
[5] N. Poulantzas, “Le transformazioni attuali dello Stato, la crisi politica e la crisi dello Stato”, in La crisi dello Stato, Bari: De Donato, 1976: 3-38.
[6] R. Zavaleta Mercado, Horizontes de visibilidad. Aportes latinoamericanos marxistas, Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2021: 351-352.
[7] L. Ferrari Bravo, “Vecchie e nuove questioni dell’imperialismo”, in Id. (ed), Imperialismo e classe operaia multinazionale, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1975: 7-67, 53. Ferrari Bravo refers to N. Poulantzas, “L’internazionalizzazione dei rapporti capitalistici e lo stato nazionale” (1973), translated into Italian in the same book: 283-317.
[8] M. Hardt – A. Negri, “Empire, Twenty Years On”, in New Left Review, 120, 2019: 67-92
[9] See V. Gago – S. Mezzadra, “In the Wake of the Plebeian Revolt. Social Movements, ‘Progressive’ Governments, and the Politics of Autonomy in Latin America”, in Anthropological Theory, 17 (2017), 4:. 474-496.
[10] See F. Jameson, An America Utopia. Dual Power and the Universal Army, London – New York, Verso, 2016 and A. Toscano, Terms of Disorder. Keywords for an Interregnum, London – Calcutta – New York: Seagull Books, 2023, chapter 9.
[11] C.L.R. James, You Don’t Play With Revolution. The Montreal Lectures, Oakland, CA – Edinburgh, AK Press, 2009: 161-213.
