What is the state, what does it do, and how does anything change? This theme covers theories of the state, debates over strategy (electoral, insurrectionary, dual power, base-building), what political power is, and how movements have tried to take or transform it. It holds the disagreements among traditions open rather than resolving them, and it draws together threads from across the school: the labor movement, the carceral state, and imperialism all meet here in the question of power.
How to use this theme
This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.
- Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
- Historical: How did this come to be?
- Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
- Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
- Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?
A session does not need to use all five lenses. A study circle may move across them. Use what serves the room.
Anchor questions
These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script. Take the ones that fit the room and leave the rest.
- When has the state shown up in your life, as help, as threat, as both? What did it want from you?
- Who really runs things where you live? Is it the people you vote for?
- Have you ever felt powerless before an office, a court, a cop, a form? What would power have looked like?
- What is the state for? Whose interests does it serve, and how do you know?
- When people have won big changes, did they win them through the state, against it, or around it?
- Can the thing that polices and taxes you also be the tool of your freedom?
- If not the state, then what? How would people decide things together?
Recommended sequences
Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document).
Single-session entry point (2 hours). Start experiential: a time someone dealt with the police, a court, or a benefits office, and what it taught them about power. Watch a short explainer together (History Matters’ five-minute Why did the Paris Commune Fail?, or Second Thought’s Mutual Aid 101). Read a few pages of Kropotkin’s The State: Its Historic Role or the opening of Lenin’s The State and Revolution aloud. Close by returning to the opening question. See the single-session template.
Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential and framing (our own encounters with the state; what are we studying and why). Week 2 historical: how the state and the police were made, using Marx’s The Civil War in France and Whitehouse’s Origins of the Police. Weeks 3 to 4 theoretical: what the state is, reading the Marxist theory with Gramsci on hegemony and the anarchist critique. Week 5 practical: strategy now, using the electoral-versus-movement debate and the mutual-aid materials. Week 6 liberatory: the great strategy debate, staging Lenin, Luxemburg, Bernstein, the anarchists, and Poulantzas against each other. See the six-week template.
Weekend intensive. Compress the arc above into a Friday-evening-through-Sunday structure, with the historical and theoretical work on Saturday and the practical and liberatory work on Sunday. A screening of The Battle of Chile or The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution works well as a Saturday-evening anchor. See the weekend-intensive template.
Related themes
This theme ties together several others:
- Labor, Work, and Organizing shares the debate over unions, councils, and how workers build power against the state.
- Race and Racial Capitalism takes up the police, the prison, and the carceral state that this theme analyzes as instruments of power.
- Imperialism and the Global System extends the analysis to the state as war-maker and enforcer of the world system.
- Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration carries forward the anarchist critique of the state and the practice of dual power and mutual aid.
- How Capitalism Works provides the class analysis that the theories of the capitalist state build on.
- Origins: Dialectics, Marx, and the Workers’ Movement traces the reform-versus-revolution argument this theme carries forward.
- Revolution in Power tests the theory of the state and the seizure of power against the record of the states that tried it.
Status
First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.