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Mark Lause wrote:
The problem is that Marxists see "the State" as a mechanism for one class to
dominate the society. So, too, when a revolution happens, it involves the
replacement of one state power with another.
There are basic problems in seeing a revolution or a counterrevolution that
does not blow away the old state and bring in a new one.
ML
...
>From Badiou's Logics of Worlds:
Mao's reactions to the Manual of Political Economy published by the Soviets
under Khrushchev, at the height of the post-Stalinist 'thaw'. The manual
recalls that under communism, taking into account the existence of hostile
exterior powers, the state endures. But it adds that 'the nature and forms of
the state will be determined by the particular features of the communist
system', which comes down to assigning the form of the state to something other
than itself. Against this, as a good revolutionary formalist, Mao thunders:
By nature, the state is a machine whose purpose is to oppress hostile
forces. Even if internal forces that need to be oppressed no longer exist,
the oppressive nature of the state will not have changed with respect
to hostile external forces. When one speaks of the form of the state, this
means nothing other than an army, prisons, arrests, executions, etc. As
long as imperialism exists, in what sense could the form of the state differ
with the advent of communism?
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