As for Negri's view I cannot read the decrease in state legitamacy as equal to it withering away, but I am open to that interpretation and would disagree with it mightly.
My point would be untill the question is wrestled with of Negri's arguments about Imperialism (pages 230 thereabouts) which I do strongly agree with, we neglect a vital debate.
The bourgeoisie (the leading elements of that class) have got out from under the state and dictate from above thus I believe causing a crisis in class hegemony which may or may not be the same as Negri's declining legitamacy.
The state remains the critical objective of struggle, but the context has changed radically.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia
--- Message Received --- From: "Randy Steindorf" <grsteindorf at hotmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 17:09:45 +0000 Subject: Re: Negri interview
The "withering away" of the state results from the establishment of a classless mode of production and its attendant relations of production. The state exists as a result of the struggle between classes for the production and distribution of commodities. The state serves and protects the mode of production and mediates distribution based on that production. If the direct producer as a class raises itself to the ruling class of a nation, it will still require a state, a worker's state, to legislate, judge, and execute its democratically developed directives. From experience it is surmised that worker's councils at the point of direct production will form the political cell for a worker's state. Eventually the economic classes will "wither away" and with it, the state based on class conflict. As Marx points out in the Critique of the Gotha Program, the abolition of classes results in the abolition of the state based! on classes.
But the abolition of classes starts with the overthrow of the bourgeois state, the state based on the supremacy of the capitalists as a class. This could require force. The working class takes the place of the capitalist class as the leading class of the nation. But the working class is a universalizing class. It rule leads to the elimination of the political nature of economic relations, because political power is the forceful suppression of one class by another. The historical role of the working class is to seize the productive forces, accelerate their development, establish relative overproduction of means of subsistance and production, leading to the withering away of classes that struggle over wealth.
The "counter-empire" advocates see the "withering away of the state" taking place right now through "globalization." Lex mercatoria has "removed all legitimacy from the state." They have a critical perspective on capitalism, but a utopian perspective on socialism. As Marx points out, this is because they see the historical initiative still in the hands of the bourgeoisie, but not the future historical initiative in the hands of a working class united internationally, that is between national states, ruled by the working class.
RS