ABSTRACT
Alien politics failed to resound for so long largely because of what did come down to us as Marxist, or even Marxian state theory, which is in large measure a melange of dogmatic, functionalist, instrumentalist and/or essentialist arguments that appear to owe nothing of any significance to alien politics at all. Discussing The State and Revolution, A. J. Polan claims that “Lenin incorporated into his politics the theory of the commune-state as elaborated by Karl Marx, without additions and without omissions.” The state existed only to maintain the monopoly of power and wealth held by the privileged, and was consequently a machine of “monstrous oppression.” State monopoly capitalism, he said, had created “a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism.” The state’s ability to reproduce its dominance depends upon a network of relations in society that may be only tangentially related to the structure of the state itself.
