In the lead up to doing a PhD, I completed a Masters by Research at the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS). It took a long time. A very long time. I undertook the research whilst working full time, and completed in early 2011. It has been extremely pleasing therefore, to see two pieces from that research published this month.

I  have a chapter  in a new book Marxism and Social Movements (BRILL), edited by Laurence Cox, Colin Barker, John Krinsky and Alf Nilsen. Under the copyright arrangements, we are allowed to post a PDF of the chapter on our personal website, so I have made it available here. I’ve also written a little about my experience of being involved in the dialogue the editors commenced to develop the book here. 

The chapter outlines how we might conceptualise the activist practice of my research participants within the Australian global justice movement. I conclude, based on my analysis, that there emerged two particular ‘types’ amongst activists: movement campaigners and movement networkers. I place this distinction in theoretical perspective by interrogating Gramsci’s conception of the ‘organic intellectual’, and asking about the missing ‘modern prince’ of the global justice movement.

I also had a journal article published in Globalizations. My hard copy arrived in the post last week, and it will shortly be available for download from the journal website if you have access. The article reports the key data from the research on the impact of 9/11 on the global justice movement in Australia.

NOTE: Further chapters from the Marxism and Social Movements book, including the introduction, are available on the personal website of the editor Alf Nilsen. The editors chose to publish the book with Brill, as there is a guarantee of a paperback edition (with Haymarket) 12 months after the hardcover as well as a version with Aakar books in India. The more affordable Haymarket paperback will be released next year. If you want to read the essays immediately, ask your university or local library to purchase a copy.

Once again, I’d like to thank the activists who agreed to take part in this research. Their careful and detailed recollections and thoughts meant this work could happen.

These are some early thoughts on Leo Panitch’s work on the nature of the state, who I see as the best contemporary proponent of aspects of the work of Poulantzas and Miliband. There is further work to do on the critique of the concept of ‘relative autonomy’, but also on Panitch’s more recent work with Gindin on the international system of states (where I used Colin Barker’s work in more detail) but more on that later. I emphasise this text is in its early days, but comments and criticism are most welcome.

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Since the economic crisis of the 1970s and the era of neoliberal ‘free trade’, most mainstream analysis of the capitalist state has emphasised the role of globalisation in the state’s apparent weakening. Such analysis argues that there has been a demotion of national state power and the rise of the international. A similar position has also been taken up by some Marxists who argue nation states are disappearing with power relations reforming on transnational lines, a position exemplified by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire (2000). The implication of this shift in analysis of the state is that the role and power of international institutions are primary and that there are few, if any, possibilities to have national states mediating the worst aspects of capitalism. The analysis argues that national states are largely powerless in the face of globalisation and international competition.

Many Marxists have argued strongly against this understanding (Panitch 1994; Panitch 1999; Harman 2007), and contend that while the state has changed to some extent the belief that nation states has been usurped is incorrect. Leo Panitch (1994; 1999) is an important figure in Marxist political economy writing on aspects of capitalist development, class struggle, imperialism and economic crisis — often in collaboration with Sam Gindin (Albo et al. 2010; Panitch & Gindin 2012). Panitch’s essay ‘Globalisation and the State’ (1994) criticises the argument that the era of globalisation has seen the bypassing of the state through the rise of transnational governance, or the external political power of transnational capital. His work on theorising the capitalist state is informed by that of Nicos Poulantzas (1994, pp.66–67) and Ralph Miliband (1999, pp.25, 29–30) in particular. Panitch argues that it was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, with the emerging work of Miliband, Poulantzas and James O’Conner, that Marxist state theory moved from being a critique of established theories (such as pluralism) into a positive project that sought to develop an alternative and better model — including the development of new conceptual tools for that purpose (1999, p.20). Panitch argues that:

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