Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom
Grace Blakeley
Atria Books, £14

ANIMUS towards the state long predates the conclusion of Marx and Engels that it would “wither away” in a socialist society. They were not alone — most radicals foresaw the disappearance of the state in some form, but mainly in terms of its seizure by workers in the same way that one regime would topple another.

However, Marx, and in particular Engels, were imagining the state not as a discernible institutional structure governing our lives from above, but as a reflection of social relations — more chimera than entity. Over time their emphasis edged from expecting the active abolition of the bourgeois state when the class war is won by workers, to its passive dissolution when there is no requirement to enforce the strictures of capital — the state would simply cease to exist.   

It’s hard to get one’s head around this notion today in a world in which we defer in almost every aspect of our powerless lives to state intrusions — it is everywhere. But doing so is important to understanding what the state really is, and the possibility of radical change. That is because of the state’s relationship with capital, a theme at the heart of Grace Blakeley’s exciting reminder that in our conceptual imprisonment not only do we reify both the “market” and the “state,” we forget that they represent two sides of the same coin.