Moving Towards a Social Metabolic Alternative: Dialectics of 21st Century Socialist Construction

Classical Marxism posited a necessary withering of the state as a prerequisite for transcending the capitalist mode of production. Soviet Marxism as well as Western Marxist theory instead posed the necessity of a strong state consolidation of a command economy in order to establish socialist hegemony. 21^st Century Marxism has inherited this conceptual tension in its attempts to theorize a socialist transition. This paper adopts the view that there is no “half way house” between capitalism and socialism. The definitive transcendence of capital requires a radically different metabolic system of social reproduction in which the state is displaced as the primary mode of social coordination. This view continues developing a strain of Marxism that was initiated by the Praxis School of thought in the former Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and has been further developed in the 21^st Century work of the Hungarian theorist István Mészáros.