Nicos Poulantzas (1936 – 1979) was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist. Wikicommons. Some rights reseved.Fifty years after the ‘1968 moment’ or more broadly the 1960s and 1970s ‘new left’, what orientations lie within today’s radical spaces concerning the capitalist state? And how do they compare to fifty years before?
Several imaginaries, arguments and perspectives exist concerning a socialist state or prefigurative practices beyond the state. Contestation also exists over the tools, potentials and processes of changing or transforming state structures. Most notably there continue disagreements concerning the arenas for mobilization; not so much the question of whether state institutions should be engaged with at all – the most recent representative example of this being Podemos’ ‘movement party’ with government aspirations – but rather how the functioning of left-wing activism and partisanship can be balanced between state and non-state arenas in order to maximize the result.
The radical left and the capitalist state
Without a doubt both institutional and extra-institutional sites of struggle are seen as legitimate by today’s radical left. As regards the search for citizenship defined beyond constitutionalism, a large proportion of the published material – written, verbal as well as graphical – is pre-occupied with resistance and extra-statal forms of self-, grassroots and community organization. Together they vividly suggest the rise of a bottom-up politics, protest, disruption and generalized dissent, feeding off a wider scepticism towards representative democracy in its capitalist liberal variety. Social movements have turned to citizenship as both a collective identity and a central demand, which organises various claims for civil, political and material rights that have been lost or damaged in the process of neoliberalization and its associated austerity programmes.
