The State Will Not Wither Away? posted by Richard Seymour

Norman Geras has been outlining an argument against the Marxist argument that the state can eventually be made irrelevant as a form of coercive authority. Read:

The Prologue ,
Chapter One ,
Chapter Two ,
Chapter Three and
Chapter Four .

I'll have some words to say about these arguments later, but I thought I'd float them for now and see what sort of reaction they got. Essentially, this argument seems (on cursory glance) to derive from Norman Geras' previously established arguments that a) there is such a thing as human nature and that this is a position commensurable with classical Marxism (Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, 1983), b) this nature can be malign as well as benign (Norman Geras, "Socialist Hope in the Shadow of Catastrophe" in The Contract of Mutual Indifference, 1998) and c) this necessitates the persistence of a coercive state (at least until such time as a) and b) prove to be wrong. On first glance it seems to me that the only approach that could undermine such logic is that of the hard-core deconstructionist. That is, "human nature" is a pure ideological construct with no real referent. There are, of course, biological capacities and needs, but these do not cohere into a persistent notion of 'human nature' in this view.

I am having a nudie wrestle with these ideas at the moment, and will let you know the instant a victor is declared.

The impossiblist has an early answer to Norm.