Marxism and History

The two classic essays by Chris Harman collected together in the very useful volume Marxism and History (1998) are now both freely available online at the Marxist Internet Archive - the 1986 essay Base and Superstructure (which drew comments in response from Colin Barker, Alex Callinicos and Duncan Hallas - you can also listen to a debate on the topic here) - and the 1989 essay From feudalism to capitalism . Those interested in further discussions of Marxism and History might also like to check out these two conferences coming up in London in late June / early July - 'Radical Histories' and 'Marxism 2016'.

Refugees are welcome here day of action Saturday 12 September

Refugees are welcome here - National Day of Action Saturday 12 September 2015,

London details - assemble 12pm, Assembly point Marble Arch 2pm Rally,Downing Street

National day of action, Called by Stand up to Racism, BARAC, Stop the War Coalition, Migrant Rights Network  War on Want, Peoples Assembly Against Austerity, Unite Against Fascism, Movement Against Xenophobia, Love Music Hate Racism and Black Out London
 https://www.facebook.com/events/1629390697300657/

Miners Shot Down - commemorating the Marikana massacre

 

Remembering Marikana - Friday 14 August 2015

On 16 August 2012 South African police opened fire with live ammunition on thousands of striking platinum miners at Lonmin’s Marikana mine in the North West Province of South Africa. One hundred and twelve miners were shot and of those 34 died. The actions of police at Marikana were reminiscent of the apartheid era - Sharpeville in 1960 and Soweto in 1976 - where black people were shot for protesting. The Farlam Commission of Enquiry which was set up to investigate these killings ...largely absolved the police, the state, and Lonmin of any responsibility for this event. To date the families of the miners killed at Marikana have received no compensation.

What made the events at Marikana so shocking is that these killings took place under the auspices of a democratic, post-apartheid state with one of the most progressive constitution and bill of rights in the world. These killings are part of a growing trend of violence by the state toward non-violent protest and dissent in South Africa. The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of the South African state are retrogressive. These tendencies are undemocratic and threaten the right to free expression and legitimate protest.

The struggle to end Apartheid was long and hard. Many people gave their lives to this struggle. Don’t let the deaths of the Marikana mine workers be in vain. Join War on Want to remember the miners and their families

Programme:

• 19:00 Opening Address by War on Want and representative from UNITE the Union
• 19:10 Screening of Miners Shot Down
• 20:10 Marikana: The Aftermath by James Nichol
• 20:30 Q&A with film maker, Rehad Desai

Book your tickets here

Read Ken Olende's piece about the cover up of the South African state here

Migrant Lives Matter protest

Protest at the EU London HQ:

The death of 950 African migrants in the latest loss of a ship crossing from Libya to Europe has exposed the appalling human cost of the 'Fortress Europe' immigration policy imposed by European Union and the British government.

Anti-migrant rhetoric of the establishment politicians, UKIP and the Katie Hopkins obsessed media has lead to thousands of people, many of whom are fleeing nations torn apart by Western intervention, drowning
in the sea.

In the first quarter of 2015, approximately 1,700 migrants have already drowned, 30 times as many as in the same period of 2014, leading to fears of a record death rate this year. Last year nearly four thousand bodies were recovered from the Med, and that figure is just those that were found. The EU needs to change it's policy to stop this and restart the rescue.

Protest called by the Movement Against Xenophobia, supported by:
Stop the War Coalition
BARAC UK (Black Activists Rising Against Cuts)
Global Justice Now Global Justice London
Stand Up To Racism

Time: 1pm.

Date: Saturday 25th April

Place: European Commission, 32 Smith Square, Westminster London, SW1P 3EU (nearest tubes Westminster or St James')

Gary Younge on the killing of Walter Scott

The cold-blooded killing of Walter Scott, who was shot eight times in the back as he ran away from a policeman in North Charleston, South Carolina, is not news in the conventional sense. Such shootings are neither rare nor, to those who have been paying attention, surprising. Sadly, they are all too common. It is news because, thanks to the video footage, we have incontrovertible evidence at a moment when public consciousness has been heightened and focused on this very issue. While in this case the policeman involved has been fired and charged, such a degree of proof is no guarantee of justice. There was video evidence of police choking Eric Garner to death in Staten Island while he protested “I can’t breathe”, and his killers were acquitted; there was video of evidence of Rodney King’s beating in Los Angeles, and his assailants walked free. But in an era of 24-hour news and social media, video guarantees attention.  Black people have been dying for this kind of attention for years...
Full article here

Debate: Syriza and Socialist Strategy

Hosted by International Socialism
 
Wednesday 25 February 2015, 7pm

With Stathis Kouvelakis, member of Syriza’s central committee and Alex Callinicos, editor, International Socialism

The victory of Syriza in the Greek elections has raised important debates about how to achieve fundamental social change. Can the new government overthrow austerity and, more fundamentally, is this confirmation of the method of “seizing power by elections, but combining that with social mobilisation” as Stathis Kouvelakis has written? Alex Callinicos has said that “revolutionary socialists should celebrate the new government’s victory and support the progressive measures it takes. But the entire Greek radical left will be judged by how successfully they promote working people’s self-organisation, confidence, and combativity. That is where the power to end austerity lies.”

Come and debate crucial issues of socialist strategy.

Wednesday 25 February 2015, 7pm @ Peel Centre, Percy Circus, King’s Cross, London, WC1X 9EY Venue is wheelchair accessible

 For more information call 0207 819 1177 or email isj@swp.org.uk - see also the ISJ Day School on China, World Capitalism and Workers' Resistance on 28 February 2015 in London.

Geoff Ellen on the Attlee Government and strike-breaking

'The principles of our policy are based on the brotherhood of man.'
Clement Attlee, July 26, 1945.

 2015 marks among other things the 70th anniversary of the election of the 1945 Labour Government under Clement Attlee - considered the high point of British socialism by many in the Labour Party - and even by socialists outside the Labour Party - the zeitgeist of collectivism which led to the victory of the 1945 election for example was celebrated recently in the documentary 'The Spirit of '45' by the socialist film-director Ken Loach.  Yet as Geoff Ellen showed in a classic 1984 article in International Socialism journal, Labour and strike-breaking 1945-51, the 'socialism' of this Labour government was highly questionable, to put it mildly:

At the hands of what many workers believed to be ‘their’ government, striking dockers, gas workers, miners and lorry drivers were denounced, spied upon and prosecuted. Two States of Emergency were proclaimed against them and two more were narrowly averted. Above all, the government used blacklegs against these strikes, often with the connivance of the strikers’ own trade union leaders. On 18 different occasions between 1945 and 1951, the government sent troops, sometimes 20,000 of them, across picket lines to take over strikers’ jobs. By 1948 ... ‘strike-breaking had become almost second nature to the Cabinet’...

This year there are lots of conferences and events being held to discuss the legacy of the Attlee Government, such as the one being organised by the London Socialist Historians Group on 28 February - and Ellen's article remains relevant and repays re-reading today. As Ellen concluded,

Attlee’s government has left its mark ... Nuclear weapons, NATO, American bases such as Greenham Common, peace-time wage controls, even attacks on the National Health Service – most of our current nightmares, in fact – can be traced back to the 1945 Labour government. Are these the legacies of a socialist government? Even its record of full employment, a Welfare State, improving standards of living and nationalisation, on which its claim to socialism rested, continued throughout the 1950s under the Tories. No-one has yet claimed that Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan were socialists! 

 Attlee’s Cabinet did what all Labour governments have done – it managed capitalism while using the rhetoric in a way that made reforms both possible and even desirable. But once the post-war boom petered out, the bottom fell out of this strategy. Under the Wilson and Callaghan governments, the carrot gave way to the stick: theirs was reformism without reforms. 

 In other words, the difference between the Labour Party in Attlee’s day and in the 1980s is not one of policies but of circumstances. Capitalism’s greatest boom had given way to its present, protracted slump, but Labour’s commitment to managing the capitalist system is as strong as ever. So is its commitment to parliament, and its hostility to working class struggle as a means of change. The strikebreaking record of the 1945 Labour government shows what Labour’s politics meant when capitalism was relatively healthy. With recession making working class struggle more crucial than ever, we can imagine what it will mean in the future.

 Incidentally, who was Geoff Ellen, one might ask? Well, in the preface to what was to be his last work, The Vote: How it was won and how it was undermined (2005) Paul Foot gave us some sense of this socialist activist:

 In 1972, I joined the staff of Socialist Worker and worked there full-time until 1978. It was, and is, sold as widely as possible by a small handful of agitators. The few full-time journalists on the paper were all my friends, all exceptionally able and engaging people. 

The gentlest and most dedicated of them was a professional sub-editor called Geoff Ellen. He came from Chelmsford in Essex and was, among other things, an absurdly devoted West Ham supporter. He spent pretty well all his spare time organising for socialism. There was not a trade unionist in Essex he had not tried to push or pull into some form of revolt. On Tuesday nights we were kept late at work by the printing of the last few pages, and indulged ourselves in takeaway kebabs and long, heart-searching conversations. 

As the great industrial climax of the early 1970s, to our astonishment, fell back, I began privately to worry that the entire revolutionary project, and the ideas that gave rise to it, were misconceived. One evening, as we waited for the proofs, I blurted out my apprehensions to Geoff. I had joined the staff in the autumn of 1972, at a time of huge convulsions and great hope for the future. If anyone had asked me, I would have said at once that I was hoping for, and confidently expecting, a revolution. By late 1975, however, I complained to Geoff, that change had not come. It was obviously not going to come from Harold Wilson or Dennis Healey, but we had always known that. In the decline of the movement, the issue seemed to have changed. Was the revolution going to come at all? And if not, what was to become of us if our grand aim in life was to be frustrated and even ridiculed? 

 To my enormous relief, Geoff cheered me up with his speciality: a huge all-enveloping grin. "If the revolution doesn't come," he said, "there is nothing much we can do about that. Whether it comes or not, there is nothing for us to do but what we are doing now: fight for it, fight for the workers and the poor." 

 Some years later, Geoff, still a young man, went to bed one night with a headache and died from a brain haemorrhage. All his adult life, he stuck firmly by his advice to me that dark winter evening in 1975. And so, I hope, have I.

Revolutionaries and 'workers' governments'

The very nature of bourgeois government excludes the possibility of socialist class struggle. It’s not that we fear for socialists the dangers and the difficulties of ministerial activity; we must not back away from any danger or difficulty attached to the post in which the interests of the proletariat place us. But a ministry is not, in general, a field of action for a party of the struggle of the proletarian classes. 
 The character of a bourgeois government isn’t determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. The government of the modern state is essentially an organisation of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister. 
 The social reforms that a minister who is a friend of the workers can realise have nothing, in themselves, of socialism; they are socialist only insofar as they are obtained through class struggle. But coming from a minister, social reforms can’t have the character of the proletarian class, but solely the character of the bourgeois class, for the minister, by the post he occupies, attaches himself to that class by all the functions of a bourgeois, militarist government. 
 While in parliament, or on the municipal council, we obtain useful reforms by combating the bourgeois government; while occupying a ministerial post we arrive at the same reforms by supporting the bourgeois state. The entry of a socialist into a bourgeois government is not, as is thought, a partial conquest of the bourgeois state by the socialists, but a partial conquest of the socialist party by the bourgeois state... 
 Within bourgeois society the role of social democracy [the socialist movement] as an opposition party is prescribed by its very essence. It can come forward as a ruling party only on the ruins of the bourgeois state
Rosa Luxemburg, 1899.

Although a left government cannot steer a path to socialism, revolutionaries are not indifferent as to whether such a government comes to power. Even though the bourgeoisie has only retreated from the front-line positions and still retains control of the economy and the state, immense possibilities can be opened up.

In both France and Italy, the entry into government of both communists and socialists for the first time since the late 1940s would lead to increased confidence and perhaps, militancy of the workers movement. To this extent the election of a left government provides the possibility of a major advance of the workers’ movement; if the masses take advantage of the temporary confusion of the bourgeoisie. But the advance is not inevitable, the government will be attempting to stabilise the situation, and the bourgeoisie will be regrouping. If the workers fall into the delusion that they have taken power, rather than crossed the first barrier, if, in other words, they rely on the government rather than their own activity, then their advance will be limited to reforms which can be clawed back by a resurgent bourgeoisie.

Hence the all-important paradox: the advent of a left government will only strengthen the workers’ movement inasmuch as the class, or at least its vanguard, do not have illusions in this government. The more independent and strong the workers’ movement is, the more reforms it will force from the government. The more it relies on its own forms of organisation, the more the way is open to a fundamental change in the balance of power between the workers and their allies and the bourgeoisie. But the more it is tied to the structures of state power, the greater is the possibility of bourgeois reaction.

This means that the role of revolutionaries is not to enter such a government ‘in order to accentuate the contradictions within it’, for to do this is to precisely tie the workers to the bourgeoisie.

Rather the job of revolutionaries is to break the illusions that the workers have in a ‘left’ government— and that means taking up all the partial limited struggles of workers, generalising them and leading them even if they conflict with the strategy of the government. In short, it is to organise a left opposition to the government, seeking to replace the reliance on the state with the self-organisation of workers.

Of course, tactically there are times when the revolutionary left defends the left government or perhaps particular measures; when it is open to attack from the right and the bourgeoisie trying to regain positions it has lost. But this should never obscure the fundamental positions that the revolutionary party has to adopt: the strategy of developing working class forms of power, which by definition will conflict with the bourgeois state power still in existence, in order to overthrow the government from the left and replace it with a workers state.

Otherwise, revolutionaries can find themselves in the same situation the Chilean left found itself in occasionally-appearing to defend unpopular governmental decisions against movements of the workers and petty bourgeoisie, so allowing the forces of the right to manipulate those movements.

Chris Harman and Tim Potter, 'The workers' government', SWP International Discussion Bulletin, No.4, 1977 - see also  Paul Blackledge, 'Left Reformism, the state and the problem of socialist politics today', International Socialism, 139 (2013)

Resist the racist offensive against Muslims

As well as Hassan Mahamdallie on levels of Islamophobia before the horrific Paris attacks (in this month's Socialist Review), see this week's  Socialist Worker for the anti-racist arguments more necessary now than ever to challenge the rising racist backlash underway - while there is also some useful commentary on Charlie Hebdo itself here, here and for some essential historical background see Robert Fisk - while on a related point Jim House and Neil MacMaster's work, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory recovers some of hidden history of another Paris massacre - one which saw 200 Algerian protesters killed by the police in Paris.

Conference: The Arab Uprisings Four Years On

The Arab Uprisings Four Years On
A conference organised by MENA Solidarity, Egypt Solidarity Initiative and BahrainWatch
6-9pm Friday 13 February – 10-5pm Saturday 14 February
School of African & Oriental Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG 
£5 student or unwaged / £10 waged

Four years after uprisings swept the Middle East millions of people still struggle for freedom and social justice. In 2011 dictators fell and new movements emerged in countries from North Africa to the Gulf. Their demands won support worldwide and inspired a host of campaigns for radical change.

Challenged by the prospect of democracy, regimes have since attempted counter-revolution. Some have used extreme violence; some have encouraged sectarian division or attempted to co-opt and control organisations of the mass movement. Activists across the Middle East nonetheless continue to work for change.

This conference addresses achievements of the revolutions and the challenges that now confront them:

• what can we learn about struggles from below and the responses of the state?
• have attempts at counter-revolution been successful?
• how are activist networks sustained – and how can we support them?

The conference will draw on experiences in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Morocco – and other countries in which activists have attempted to launch movements for change. It will consider the centrality of Palestine for movements across the region – and the impact of the uprisings within Palestine. Speakers will include activists from the front line, with assessments from academics, human rights experts and media analysts.

Speakers include: Ali Abdulemam – Gilbert Achcar – Anne Alexander – Miriyam Aouragh – Joseph Daher – Kamil Mahdi – Nadine Marroushi – Sameh Naguib – Ala’a Shehabi and others.

Sessions include:

• Revolution and counter-revolution: the people and the state
• Neo-liberalism and struggles for change
• Sectarianism
• Gender matters: women and the movements
• The workers’ movement and social justice
• Democratic agendas
• Solidarity and regional links
• Palestine and the struggle for liberation in the Arab world

Day School: China, World Capitalism and Workers' Resistance

A one day Conference Hosted by International Socialism

Saturday 28 February 2015
10.30am – 5pm
Central London

Sessions on:

• The Political Economy of China Today
• China in the World
• Labour struggles, the umbrella protests and new movements for democracy

Speakers include:

Tim Pringle, lecturer at SOAS and author of Trade Unions in China: The Challenge of Labour Unrest 

Jenny Chan, lecturer at Oxford and expert on labour in China and the workers at Foxconn in particular. 

Jane Hardy, professor of political economy at University of Hertfordshire and author of Poland’s New Capitalism 

Adrian Budd, lecturer in politics at London South Bank University and author of Class, States and International Relations: a critical appraisal of Robert Cox and neo-Gramscian theory

For more details and how to book see here

Still the Enemy Within

Short of ideas for Xmas presents?  Why not pre-order the Still the Enemy Within film about the Great Miners' Strike of 1984-85 on DVD?

Hands Up! Don't Shoot! Justice for Michael Brown!

No more racist police killings!
Assemble: 5:30pm, Wednesday 27 August.
US Embassy, 24 Grosvenor Square, London W1A 2LQ

Called by: Stand Up to Racism.
Supported by: Unite Against Fascism, Love Music Hate Racism, Stand Up to UKIP, United Friends and Family Campaign, Justice Campaigns, Marcia Rigg, 

On Saturday 9 August, unarmed, black teenager, Michael Brown<á> was shot dead by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

People in the United States and around the world have rightly been outraged. Brown’s murder is the latest in a long line of killings by US police of black men. Five have been murdered in the past month alone. Protestors have taken to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri every night since the incident demanding justice for Michael and an end to police killings. The Police response to the demonstrations has harked back to the days prior to the Civil Rights Movement. They have used tear gas, dogs, automatic weapons and armoured cars on demonstrators. Michael’s murder highlights the deeply racist nature of US society today, however, deaths in police custody are not limited to America. As we have seen in the cases of Mark Duggan, Smiley Culture, Sean Rigg, and Christopher Alder to name but a few.

Show solidarity with the family of Michael Brown, and the Ferguson demonstrators.

Join the demonstration outside the US Embassy in London to demand an end to racist, police killings.
Assemble: 5:30pm, Wednesday 27 August. US Embassy, 24 Grosvenor Square, London W1A 2LQ

Also: Join us at Notting Hill Carnival to raise the issue of racist police killings! 11am - 2pm, Monday 25 August, Westbourne Park tube station (look for our Hands Up! Don’t Shoot! signs)

#JusticeforMikeBrown #Ferguson #DontShootLDN

www.standuptoracism.org.uk  @AntiRacismDay tel: 0208 9717 426

Judith Orr reports for Socialist Worker at Michael Brown's funeral 

Ferguson Movement website

Marxism and Trade Union Struggle

Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926 (1986)by Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein is now online...

Egypt Solidarity Initiative

Egypt Solidarity Initiative is an important international iniative against state repression in Egypt - they have a workshop on revolution, resistance and repression in London tomorrow.

Sameh Naguib on Egypt's second revolution

We have just removed the second president in only 30 months. It is a second revolution, a mass movement of millions. The scale of the mobilisations is unprecedented.  On the ground people have gained huge confidence in their ability to change history.

This is a contradictory situation. It is formally a military coup. The army has effectively arrested the president and 77 leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.  They intervened to save themselves from a new revolution.

But at the same time it is a mass popular revolt. The people forced the army to act, and the army only did so because they were worried about their own future. 

This is the second time they have done so. They are running out of choices. If Morsi was a failure then the bourgeois alternatives, such as Mohamed El Baradei, are weak.

This is not the end of democracy, nor a simple military coup. Revolution is actually an extremely democratic process. Simply voting every few years is a joke compared to this. The army is trying to cut this process off.

Major strikes were planned for tomorrow, Thursday. Bus and train workers, cement workers and Suez canal workers were all due to walk out. The protests could have developed into a general strike—the vast majority of the protesters are working class.

It’s not over...
 Read the full article by Naguib - a member of the Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt - here.  Naguib is meant to be speaking at Marxism 2013, and while this would be an amazing privilege for those of us in the UK, I guess the way things are going in Egypt who can say whether this will actually happen now.  To paraphrase Lenin in The State and Revolution (a highly relevant book today given the military coup),  ''it is more pleasant and useful to go through the "experience of revolution" than to go and give speeches about it elsewhere'', and am sure Naguib is feeling the same way...

Edited to add: Four Days that Shook the World - another piece by Naguib

Defend the Sussex Occupation

Sign the statement in defence of the Sussex occupation

A petition has been launched to express our solidarity with the struggle against the privatisation of 235 jobs and express our opposition to the decision of Sussex university management to impose an injunction which bans both protest and occupations on campus until September, thus effectively also criminalising the ongoing Bramber house occupation. 

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/stop-the-protest-ban-at-sussex-university

Please sign and pass on…

More info from Defend the Right to Protest here

Edited to add: The Occupation has been smashed in a brutal manner by police - see this report by Jelena Timotijevic and oppose the trumped up charges against student protesters - see here for more.

John Molyneux on revolutionary politics today

The liberal media (The Independent, The Guardian etc), the left blogs and so on have been awash, recently, with claims that Leninism is over, that vanguard parties have had their day, that broad left unity is the only way forward and so on... Moreover all this comes after the summer and autumn of 2011 which saw the Indignados in Spain and the Occupy movement, in both of which a generalized anti-partyism was prevalent, and in a context of widespread disillusionment with mainstream political parties among the general public and vaguely autonomist movementism among students. Then came the spectacular rise of Syriza in Greece, accompanied by widespread enthusiasm for Syriza across the European left (including Tariq Ali and Richard Seymour), when it became apparent that Syriza had a real chance of winning the election.

Here it should be noted that an anarchist/autonomist type strategy which downplays the role of the state (Hardt and Negri) or rejects the taking of state power altogether (see John Holloway’s ‘How to Change the World without Taking Power’) can more easily coexist with a strategy of a reformist government of the left than either of these strategies can coexist with a revolutionary Marxist perspective of building a revolutionary party and smashing the capitalist state. They, the anarchist/autonomists, do their thing at the base, in the localities etc., while the reformists do their thing at the level of government.  Two interesting historic precedents for this are: 1) the early 20^th century ‘economist’ tendency in Russian Social Democracy who argued that the job of Social Democrats was to restrict themselves to supporting the economic struggles of the working class and not get involved in political struggle which, as Lenin explained at the time, meant leaving politics to the liberal bourgeoisie; 2) the Spanish Revolution where the anarcho-syndicalists refusal to take state power (on the grounds of being opposed to any kind of dictatorship) morphed into support for the bourgeois liberal/ Communist/reformist Popular Front government.

History ... shows that revolutions do happen and that the 20^th century witnessed a large number of revolutionary challenges by the working class. To this must be added the facts of the present deep global economic crisis of capitalism combined with the rapid onset of climate change (demanding an international solution beyond the reach of any national left government) and the need for the overthrow of capitalism, rather than its reform, becomes compelling. In my opinion the likelihood of revolutionary outbreaks and attempts by the working class in the next twenty years or so is extremely high. The real problem will be winning – and that will need a revolutionary party not an alliance of ‘interstitial’ and ‘symbiotic’ strategies or a broad left party a la Syriza or Kautsky's SPD.

From John Molyneux, 'Erik [Olin Wright] and the Zeitgeist' - see also Molyneux on Marxism and the Party

The British Way of Death

Between 1969 and 1999 over 1000 died in police custody in Britain. Film maker Ken Fero, who made the classic film Injustice, writes on domestic British state terror in the new Socialist Review

Remembering Ralph Miliband

The State and Capitalist Society - Forty Years On
One day conference on Friday 22 May, 2009, Leeds.

Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society was first published in 1969 and widely acclaimed as a major contribution to the revival of both state theory and Marxist political thought. The book still stands as a key work in the development of social and political theory in the second half of the twentieth century. This one-day conference aims to revisit the arguments that Miliband laid out in the book and evaluate their continuing relevance in the apparently very different conditions of the twenty-first century. After all, people still do 'live in the shadow of the state' and states still operate in capitalist societies.