Revisiting Class Struggle and State Power

This book considers the lessons that can be gleaned from the Occupy movement, some 14 years after its inception. The Occupy movement brought with it many things, including a renewed interest in class and class struggle. Using the work of Nicos Poulantzas as its departure point, the book considers the theoretical and conceptual parameters of class structures under the most contemporary form of capitalism: the monopoly finance capitalist stage. An examination of state responses to the Occupy movement reveals the ability of the exploiting classes to maintain and reproduce the capitalist system via an expression of political power through the state and its tendency to deploy both ideological and physical defenses against any significant attacks on capitalism. The analysis offered reveals how some degree of anti-capitalist opposition is tolerated until such time that it must be forcefully censored and stopped, coined here as ‘the authoritarian state with a democratic alter-ego’, offering a nuanced conceptualization of state power for readers to explore and apply for themselves in other contexts. For the nature of the state to change significantly, social class agents need to find ways to access greater autonomy from the shackles of its power. This book explores the ways in which attempts to take up counterhegemonic class positions are persistently thwarted by a pervasive and yet intricately configured state power, backed by profit motivated corporate interest. It also poses urgent questions about the role and nature of alliances when trying to challenge both ideological and forcefully repressive state practices under capitalism. The book considers how we ‘find each other’ again in future struggles against capitalism and the attendant harms that it produces for the whole of humanity and the planet.

Samantha Fletcher is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Having worked in higher education for over 18 years, Samantha gained her doctoral thesis award from Liverpool John Moore’s University in 2019. Samantha’s research and teaching interests are concerned with the crimes and harms of the powerful and critical perspectives on justice. Samantha also writes and researches with William McGowan about death, dying, and marginalised mortalities