The State and/in Left Strategy in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (original) (raw)

NB! This paper draws extensively on arguments that I have developed in collaboration with Laurence Cox in our co-authored book We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto Press, 2014). In their recent book Assembly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put forward a refreshing approach to questions of leadership in collective oppositional action. I say refreshing because their approach seeks so consistently to navigate between the orthodoxies and binaries that simultaneously animate and suffocate strategic debates on the left. Whereas " centralized, vertical forms of organization " are duly criticized for the way in which they come to constitute " fetters to the development of democracy and the full participation of all in political life, " they are also very clear that questions of leadership cannot be dismissed out of hand: " … it is a terrible mistake to translate valid critiques of leadership into a refusal of sustained political organization and institution, to banish verticality only to make a fetish of horizontality and ignore the need for durable social structures. " My intervention here today does not so much engage Hardt and Negri's arguments about leadership. Rather, it works with a similar readiness to think beyond disabling strategic binaries in relation to another key question in left strategy – namely how we think about and approach the state in our efforts to, as Hardt and Negri put it, " to take power differently, to achieve a fundamentally new, democratic society and crucially, to produce new subjectivities. " Here too, polarized terms of debate (an insistence on either reformist engagement or revolutionary confrontation with the state has been pitted against anarchist and autonomist arguments for the necessity of changing the world without taking power) have arguably prevented productive debates about how we might relate to the institutionalization of political power in the bourgeois state if we are serious about winning, by which I mean bringing about systemic change against