State Transformations: Classes, Strategy, Socialism

It is often remarked that critical - and especially Marxist - state theory began to lose its central place in the study of comparative politics in the 1980s. Ironically, this shift occurred just as neoliberal policies were transforming the social form and spatial scales of the state, radically restructuring the practices of state economic intervention, and extending the capabilities of the coercive arms of the state. This volume addresses the ’impoverishment of state theory’ over the last decades and insists on the continued salience of class analysis to the study of states. The book’s title, State Transformations, reflects several central themes in the comparative study of states: the neoliberal restructuring of capitalist states, the changing economic and political architecture of imperialism, and the prospects of a democratic transformation of capitalist states. The essays collected here on these themes are in honor and memory of Leo Panitch, whose influential body of work has shaped debates on the state, imperialism, and socialism over the past four decades.

Contributors are: Clyde W. Barrow, Caio Bugiato, Frank Deppe, Ruth Felder, Ana Garcia, Sam Gindin, Doug Henwood, Martijn Konings, Colin Leys, Sebnem Oguz, Bryan D. Palmer, Dennis Pilon, Larry Savage, Charles Smith, Michalis Spourdalakis and Hilary Wainwright

Greg Albo, PhD, Carleton University (1994), teaches Political Economy in the Department of Politics at York University. He has recently co-edited Divided Province: Ontario Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism (2018); Beyond Market Dystopia (2020); and Beyond Digital Capitalism (2021).

Stephen Maher, PhD, York University (2020) is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Ontario Tech University. He is assistant editor of the Socialist Register, and co-author with Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin of the second edition of The Socialist Challenge Today (2020).

Alan Zuege is an assistant editor of the Socialist Register and co-editor of the Socialist Register Classics book series with Haymarket Books. He has also co-edited Phases of Capitalist Development; Value and the World Economy Today; and The Globalization Decade.