This previously unpublished essay is taken from volume 1 of Mészáros’s Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in October 2017. —The Editors
Author Archive | István Mészáros
Political power and dissent in post-revolutionary societies
Marx’s original definition concerned political power as the direct manifestation of class antagonism, coupled with its opposite: the abolition of political power properly so-called in a fully realized socialist society. But what happens in between? Is it possible to break entrenched political power without necessarily resorting to the exercise of a fully articulated system of […]
Barbarism on the Horizon: An Interview With István Mészáros
Mr. István Mészáros, you are coming to visit Brazil to talk about György Lukács. As a profound expert of the work of the philosopher, how do you evaluate the importance of his ideas today? György Lukács was my great teacher and friend for twenty-two years, until he died in 1971. He started publishing as a […]
A Structural Crisis of the System: Interview with István Mészáros
István Mészáros won the 1971 Deutscher Prize for his book Marx’s Theory of Alienation and has written on Marxism ever since. He talks to Judith Orr and Patrick Ward about the current economic crisis. The ruling class are always surprised by new economic crises and talk about them as aberrations. Why do you believe they […]
Marx and the Credit Crunch
Part 1 Part 2 Part 2 István Mészáros: First of all, I would like to be fair to Gordon Brown. Our friend mentioned here that he promised to abolish boom and bust. And we must concede he managed to keep half of his promise. He abolished boom, but not bust. And there’s compensation. We […]
The Unfolding Crisis and the Relevance of Marx
Some of you may have been present at our meeting in this building in May this year, when I recalled what I had said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the historic French May 1968. In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of “organized capitalism,” which was supposed to have successfully left […]
Dual Crisis
“When we talk about a financial crisis, it’s really only a symptom. . . . Financial adventurism is essentially what we have been witnessing for the last thirty or forty years, exploding from time to time in the form of financial crisis. It’s really adventurist, speculative capital which has to find in some way […]
