Necessity of Social Control

• Book: István Mészáros. The Necessity of Social Control. Monthly Review Press,

URL = https://monthlyreview.org/product/necessity_of_social_control/

Description

"Mészáros is the author of magisterial works like Beyond Capital and Social Structures of Forms of Consciousness, but his work can seem daunting to those unacquainted with his thought. Here, for the first time, is a concise and accessible overview of Mészáros’s ideas, designed by the author himself and covering the broad scope of his work, from the shortcomings of bourgeois economics to the degeneration of the capital system to the transition to socialism." (https://monthlyreview.org/product/necessity_of_social_control/)

Contents

1. The Necessity of Social Control
2. Marxism Today
3. Causality, Time and Forms of Mediation
4. The Activation of Capital’s Absolute Limits
5. The Meaning of Black Mondays (and Wednesdays)
6. The Potentially Deadliest Phase of Imperialism
7. The Challenge of Sustainable Development and the Culture of Substantive Equality
8. Another World is Possible and Necessary
9. Alternative to Parliamentarism
10. Reflections on the New International
11. Structural Crisis Needs Structural Change
12. The Mountain We Must Conquer: Reflections on the State

Subsections of the chapter on the state:

• Introduction
• The End of Liberal–Democratic Politics
• The “Withering Away” of the State?
• The Wishful Limitations of State Power
• The Assertion of Might-as-Right
• Eternalizing Assumptions of Liberal State Theory
• Hegel’s Unintended Swan-Song and the Nation State
• Capital’s Social Metabolic Order and the Failing State