Beyond the state: dominant theories theories and socialist strategies

While most Marxist and non-Marxist writers acknowledge that contemporary state institutions are involved in all aspects of social life, there is a failure to theorise State institutions as more than political and administrative 'super-structures'. In this highly critical work, Boris Frankel rejects the category of 'Civil Society' and especially the division of social relations into the State', 'Civil Society' and 'the Economy.

Partl is a critique of those Marxists who have unquestioningly accepted Marx's crisis theory as well as those who believe in a single 'World System and long wave theory. Instead of re-examining existing State theory, Frankel reformulates Marx's theory of the circuits of capital to clarify and relate it to social relations outside the capitalist labour process.

The second part is an explication of what Frankel calls Electoral, Production, Credit and Food Production Processes. It is the inability of representatives of capitalist classes to co-ordinate each process at regional and national levels. let alone supranational level, he argues, which leads to a crisis of desynchronisation.

Applying this theory of desynchronised processes to a detailed analysis of dominant Left strategies, Frankel argues strongly against alternative economic strategies, market socialism and all forms of stateless socialism based on the 'withering away of the State'. He concludes that socialism needs its own State structures if it is to achieve equality, freedom and democracy.