Replace the State. How to Change the World when Elections and Protests Fail. By Sasha Davis. University of Minnesota Press. 2025. 175pp.
A book with a title like Replace the State cannot but catch the eye of an organisation like the Socialist Party that advocates a stateless system of society. Appearances can be deceiving of course. So to what extent does this book live up to the promise of its title?
The first thing to say is that, for the author of this book, replacing the state does not mean establishing a society without a state or states. What it means is small groups taking ‘direct action’ to manage or take over ‘contested sites’ where the existing system may be oppressing local communities and causing societal or environmental damage. Many of these sites referred to in this book are ‘indigenous’, that is to say they are what remains of the local original communities there before they were taken over by governments for use as part of the state and the capitalist juggernaut. The kind of action the writer is talking about is occupation of spaces (the term he uses for this is ‘counteroccupations’) in which, for example, excluded people can be offered sanctuary, or people can demonstrate their opposition to unwanted local projects (eg military or nuclear bases) and in so doing engage in mutual aid and what he calls ‘participatory governance’ and ‘inclusive and sustainable practices’. Specific examples of this would be, in his own words, ‘worker-run cooperatives, community land trusts and farm spaces dedicated to sustainable food systems and social justice’. And examples he gives of successes in this area are the civil rights movement in the US and the stopping of military training and bombing on one of the small islands of Puerto Rico. ‘Relational governance’ is the umbrella term used here to identify this way of operating, which, the author states, ‘arises from a worldview that recognises the fundamental interconnected and interdependent nature of our societies, ecologies, economies, political systems, bodies and minds’ and ‘contrasts sharply with the view many modern states conceptualize the world and act towards it’.
In terms of ‘worldview’, there is little here we would disagree with. But, given the overwhelming planetary presence of the capitalist system and the power of the national states that exist to administer it, we would have to regard the kind of action the author advocates as a drop in the ocean. He seeks to make a clear distinction between the activities and campaigns he would like to see undertaken and those protest movements that demand social change or reforms via petitions or demonstrations or support for one party considered more ‘progressive’ than others in elections. He refers to such activities (and quite rightly in our view) as ‘chasing our tails’ since, though they may sometimes have the effect of making life a little more bearable for wage and salary earners, they cannot change the fundamental nature of the system of massive wealth inequality we all live in. But it is hard to see how the kind of activity he does recommend – carving out small spaces in the existing system where he hopes things can be run more fairly, more justly and more sustainably – can make a great deal of difference either, or how any benefits arising from it can be more than short term. The writer himself seems to recognise this at one point when he states that, though in many places activists have managed to carve out ‘spaces of self-determination’, it is a strategy that rarely works meaningfully in the long-term and rather, as he puts it, ‘frequently succeeds only for a short period of time and/or in a relatively small space’. Even so, seeming to share the playbook of Trotskyist groups, he insists that workers’ experience of such struggle and striving is essential as it will build to a point of consciousness which will lead them to revolt and to bring in wholesale changes of a radical kind. It can cause, so the author tells us, ‘alternative ways of life to be practiced, modelled, and disseminated’. Yet nothing of this, it must be said, is borne out by examples of this happening in the real world.
We would not, of course, want to seem to be pouring cold water on what are clearly genuine and long-term efforts on the part of the author to propose and encourage ways of changing the world for the better in the face of what he rightly describes as ‘the cascade of catastrophic problems coming at us from every direction’ and of seeking the achievement of what he refers to as a system of ‘equality, inclusion and environmental protection’. He shows clearly too that he recognises the class-divided nature of capitalist society (‘owner vs wage earner’) and the role the state plays in preserving it (‘The State Won’t Fix Our Problems’ is the title of one of his chapters) and sees no mileage in trying to address social ills through the institutions that have caused them. But we would have to ask him to consider whether activity to secure real, widespread – in fact global – social change which he would no doubt wish to see doesn’t rather reside elsewhere. To be precise, whether it doesn’t reside in campaigning to change the outlook of the majority who, the world over, have to work for a wage or salary to survive, and to bring them round to the self-emancipatory consciousness that impels them to vote for an equal, inclusive and environmentally sustainable society of common ownership and democratic control, a society that will genuinely ‘replace the state’ and enable all to fulfil their potential both individually and collectively.
Howard Moss
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