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The state cannot be other than Leviathan in imposing its structurally entrenched power on overall societal decision-making. Yet a way must be found to extricate humanity from the ever more dangerous, arbitrary, and alienated form of the Leviathan state. Indeed, the survival of humanity depends on it.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Unlike materially grounded and strictly determined primitive equality, the realization of universally shared substantive equality is feasible only at a highly developed level of social/economic advancement that must be combined with the consciously pursued non-hierarchical (and thereby non-antagonistic) regulation of a historically sustainable social reproductive metabolism. That would be a radically different social metabolism, in contrast to all phases of historical development hitherto—including of course the spontaneous primitive equality of the distant past rooted in the grave material constraints of directly imposed natural necessity and struggle for survival.… "Materiality" of that kind, despite its unquestionable substantiveness, as linked to the corresponding hemmed-in "spontaneity," is obviously not enough in order to achieve historical sustainability.… The requirement of materiality, in the case of the human being whose fundamental existential substratum is objectively determined nature, is essential. The seminal condition of materiality with regard to equality can be swept aside or wished out of existence—as a rule in a revealingly discriminatory and class-bound self-serving way—only by some idealist philosophical conception; one that predicates the commendability of some kind of equality (e.g., "in the eyes of God" or "before the Law") and at the same time denies the realizability of materially embodied substantive equality, in its defense of a most iniquitous social order.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The allegedly less and less power of nation-states is a great exaggeration, voiced by governments in the interest of justifying their failure to introduce even some of their thoroughly limited and once solemnly promised social reforms.&hellip; The overwhelming historical failure of capital was&mdash;and remains&mdash;its inability to constitute the <em>state of the capital system as a whole</em>, while irresistibly asserting the imperatives of its system as the material structural determination of societal reproduction on a global scale. This is a massive contradiction. Inter-state antagonisms on a potentially all-destructive scale&mdash;as presaged last century by two world wars still without the now fully developed weapons of total self-destruction&mdash;are the necessary consequence of that contradiction. Accordingly, the state that we must conquer in the interest of humanity's survival is the <em>state as we know it</em>, namely the <em>state in general</em> in its existing reality, as articulated in the course of history, and capable of asserting itself.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-4" title="Vol. 67, No. 4: September 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>