[lbo-talk] The State

Marv Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Tue Sep 29 12:47:10 PDT 2009


Don't know about others, but I'm talked out. The class character of the state is an interesting issue, but doesn't really affect the more empirically grounded views we hold in common with respect to contemporary class and other conflicts, or am I missing something?

----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Rudy" <alan.rudy at gmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 3:09 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The State


>I keep waiting for SOMEONE, ANYONE, to reference - and for others to
>respond
> directly to - something ANYTHING written about the state since 1945...
> Yeah,
> sure, Marx is important but, uh, to say that this whole discussion has
> gone
> on and on and on with only ever so few even moderately contemporary
> references is pretty silly.
> I proposed - more than a week ago? - that, perhaps, Baran and Sweezy,
> Habermas and O'Connor might have something to contribute... has anyone
> read
> and taken Monopoly Capital seriously? Legitimation Crisis? Fiscal Crisis
> of
> the State? Or are these folks apostate rather than classical Marxists
> (and
> yes, I know, H and O'C see the world differently, if more similarly than
> Baran and Sweezey did.)
> Our once-Polish colleague has raised Skocpal a few times, and someone else
> raised Poulantzas once or twice, but no one's even taken THEM up... come
> on
> y'all it seems to me we can do better than these repeated
> pissing-off-a-bridge competitions.
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 2:53 PM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> --------------
>> Chris Doss:
>> I think the point was to address the question, "do states in
>> capitalist societies sometimes act consciously against the interests
>> of both domestic and foreign capitalists?" The answer appears to be
>> "yes," with the conclusion to be drawn that the Marxist notion that
>> the state in a capitalist society is merely the tool of the capitalist
>> class is false.
>>
>> ^^^^
>> CB: Which Marxist has said that the state in a capitalist society is
>> "merely the tool of the capitalist class ?"
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