Lenin’s The State and Revolution , is a historically- and theoretically-engaged work that provides extraordinary analytical clarity regarding state power.  Writing against the liberal conceptions that consider the state above society, an impartial entity that reconciles class antagonism, Lenin asserts that the state, as a manifestation of irreconcilable class antagonism, is necessarily the dictatorship of a single […]

I. Recap of last year, and some notes on the reading Last year at this time, reading Kant’s Perpetual Peace initiated a yearlong discussion around the tension between international law and sovereignty. Kant’s political theory of constitutional forms entailing overlapping rights and duties was our departure point, in some ways, to a series of subsequent conversations on […]

In the course of last year’s discussion, the state frequently emerged as an important factor in understanding capitalism’s tendency toward generating both crisis and imperialism.  Recognizing the state’s imbrication in processes of capital accumulation and destruction, however, does little to clarify our analytical understanding of the relationship between capital, social formations and political authority. Lenin’s […]