Marxist Theory of State

Every other theory of the state begins by asking what the state is for. The Marxist theory begins by asking whose interests it serves, and answers that the question of purpose is itself part of the disguise. The state does not stand above society arbitrating between its members; it arises from a division within society and exists to hold that division in place.

This makes the Marxist account a critique before it is a theory. Marxism is a critique of liberalism, so the Marxist theory of the state is specifically a critique of the liberal-capitalist state — of the claim that a body which taxes, polices and legislates can be a neutral umpire between the classes it is composed of.

The Starting Point: Class, Not Contract

• The state comes into existence when society divides into two antagonistic classes — one owning the means of social production, the other constrained to live by selling its labour.
• The divider is the emergence of private property. Those who own the means of production acquire the power to dominate the other class not only economically but in every sphere of life.
• The three foundational claims follow directly, and they are the mirror image of the liberal ones.
  • Origin — the state is not the product of a contract but of force: the subjugation of the weak by the strong. The contract is an ideological story told afterwards.
  • Function — the state is an instrument of coercion, working in the interest of the propertied class.
  • Nature — the state is not neutral but a class institution, and its apparent impartiality is the form its partiality takes.

• The final row of that table is the deepest difference. Liberalism has no theory of a stateless future because the state answers a permanent feature of the human condition; Marxism requires one, because the state is defined by the class division it would outlive.
• The row above it is where the argument actually lives. The disagreement is prior to any evidence about how states behave: liberalism explains the state by what individuals want, Marxism explains what individuals want by their position in production.

Historical Materialism: Why the Theory Is Materialistic

The Marxist theory of the state is not a free-standing political doctrine. It is an application of historical materialism, and every distinctive claim it makes derives from that method rather than from observation of particular governments.

• The foundational statement is that in the social production of their existence people enter into definite relations independent of their will; the totality of those relations constitutes the economic structure of society; and it is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.
• Society is analysed as a base and a superstructure.
  • The base comprises the forces of production — labour, tools, technique — and the relations of production, meaning property relations.
  • The superstructure comprises law, politics, religion, philosophy and art. The state belongs here.
• The technological formulation is Marx’s most quoted compression: the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist.
• Change is driven by contradiction. When the forces of production outgrow the existing relations, an epoch of social revolution begins — the political superstructure is transformed because the economic foundation has already changed beneath it.
• The theory is materialistic in three distinct senses, and separating them is what makes the claim precise rather than a slogan.
  • Ontologically — political institutions are not autonomous ideas but arise from material conditions of production.
  • Methodologically — to explain a state you examine who owns what, not what its constitution declares.
  • Historically — the state has not existed from eternity. It appeared at a determinate stage of development and can disappear at another.
• The essential qualification is Engels’s, and omitting it produces the caricature the theory is usually attacked as.
  • In his letter to Bloch he conceded that the economic element is determining only in the last instance, and that neither he nor Marx ever asserted more.
  • The superstructure reacts back upon the base. Law, politics and ideology are not passive reflections; they shape the conditions in which production continues.

Engels on the Origin of the State

The canonical text is Engels’s account of the origin of the family, private property and the state, and it supplies what the Manifesto only asserts.

• The state is not imposed from outside. It is a product of society at a certain stage of development — the admission that society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself.
• Because these antagonisms cannot be reconciled, a power becomes necessary that seemingly stands above society and moderates the conflict — keeping it, in Engels’s phrase, within the bounds of order.
  • The word seemingly is carrying the argument. The state’s elevation above society is real as appearance and false as description: it is above society only because it emerged from it and needs the distance to do its work.
• Its historical emergence is tied to the dissolution of gentile or kinship-based society under the impact of the division of labour and the accumulation of private wealth. Kinship could organise a society without surplus; it could not manage one with classes.
• The prediction follows from the origin. A society that abolishes classes will have no more use for the state than for the institutions it has already discarded — the whole machinery will be put into the museum of antiquities, beside the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

The Classical or Instrumentalist Position

“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” — Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

• The formula is deliberately deflationary. The state does not originate in the will of the people, and it does nor for the benefit of all — it is a device invented by a dominant class for its own benefit and imposed from above.
• Its relation to economic power is one of subservience. Having secured economic power, the dominant class invents a second form of power — political power — of which the state is the embodiment.
• It is therefore not a means of conflict resolution but a device for the suppression of class conflict. It maintains order not because it secures willing obedience but because it can compel compliance.
• Alongside coercion it deploys ideological power, which does two things at once: it manufactures the illusion of consent among the governed, and it supplies a moral justification for the state’s own existence.
• Whatever its form, it remains an instrument of the dominant class. Historical forces changed the state from slave-owning to feudal to capitalist, but none of these transformations altered its class character — only the identity of the class it served.

The Critique of Bourgeois Democracy

• Liberal democracy is not dismissed as a fraud but analysed as the most effective form class rule has taken, precisely because it secures consent rather than merely compelling obedience.
• Formal political equality coexists with substantive economic inequality, and the first conceals the second. One person one vote leaves untouched the question of who owns the newspapers, funds the parties and decides where to invest.
• Universal franchise therefore does not transfer power; it legitimises the arrangement under which power continues to be exercised elsewhere.

Lenin: From Analysis to Strategy

• Lenin’s central formulation, and the one most directly examined, is that the state is the product and manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.
  • The claim is diagnostic. The existence of a state is itself evidence that class contradictions cannot be resolved within the existing order — if they could be, no special apparatus of coercion would be needed.
• Stripped of constitutional decoration, the state consists of special bodies of armed men with prisons and institutions of compulsion at their disposal.
• The strategic conclusion is the decisive break with reformism. The bourgeois state cannot be captured and used by the working class — it must be smashed and replaced by a state of a new type.
  • The lesson came from the Paris Commune, which Marx analysed in The Civil War in France: the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes, because that machinery was built for a different purpose.
  • Marx called the Commune the political form at last discovered under which the economic emancipation of labour could be worked out.
• The dictatorship of the proletariat — a phrase Marx used in the Critique of the Gotha Programme — names the transitional period between capitalist and communist society, whose state can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
  • It is a state, and therefore an instrument of class rule; what changes is that the formerly dominant and dependent classes exchange positions.
  • It corresponds to the lower phase of communist society, in which distribution is still according to work done. Only in the higher phase does the principle become from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
• Democracy and the state are in tension by definition. Lenin’s formulation is stark: so long as the state exists there is no freedom, and when there is freedom there will be no state.

The Withering Away

• The end-state is a classless and stateless society characterised by cooperation instead of conflict, equality instead of domination, and justice instead of exploitation.
• The mechanism is that as classes disappear, the state’s repressive functions become unnecessary — there is no longer a class to be held down.
• What remains is not nothing but administration: in Engels’s formulation, the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of processes of production.
• The precision is worth preserving, because it is where most accounts blur.
  • The bourgeois state is abolished — smashed by revolution, not allowed to fade.
  • The proletarian state withers away, because it has no opposing class left to suppress. What withers is not this or that government but the state as state.

Relative Autonomy: The Structuralist Turn

The instrumentalist reading cannot explain a state that legislates against particular capitalists — factory acts, antitrust law, progressive taxation, the welfare state. The structuralist tradition exists to explain those facts without abandoning the class analysis, and its foundations are in Marx himself rather than in his later interpreters.

Bonapartism: Marx’s Own Structural Account

• In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx analysed a regime that could not be described as the instrument of any single class, and produced the concept of the Bonapartist state.
• The term came to describe a dictatorship or authoritarian centralised state under a charismatic strongman, resting on anti-elitist rhetoric, army support and conservatism.
  • In Marx’s specific usage it names a situation in which counter-revolutionary officers seize power from revolutionaries and use selective reforms to co-opt the popular classes — preserving and masking the power of a narrower ruling class in the process.
• The condition that makes it possible is a stalemate between classes. Where no class is confident enough to rule in its own name, a leader who appears to stand above the class struggle can take the mantle of power.
• Marx judged the arrangement inherently unstable: the apparently all-powerful leader would be swept aside once the class struggle in society resolved itself.
• In The Civil War in France he generalised it — Bonapartism is the only possible form of government at a moment when the bourgeoisie has already lost the capacity to rule and the working class has not yet acquired the faculty of ruling the nation.
• Engels stated the general principle that later theory built on: when warring classes balance each other so nearly, state power acquires a degree of independence from both.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” — Karl Marx

Relative autonomy is not a revisionist patch applied from outside. It is present in Marx’s own historical writing, and the later theorists systematised what he had described in a particular case.

Gramsci: The Integral State

• Gramsci wrote to answer a question the theory had failed: why the predicted revolution had not happened in the advanced capitalist West, where the objective conditions were most developed?
• His answer, influenced by Croce’s emphasis on cultural factors, was that Marx had underestimated the superstructure. He is accordingly called the theoretician of the superstructure.
  • For Marx the superstructure is a reflection of the base — change the mode of production and it changes automatically, so one revolution suffices.
  • For Gramsci the superstructure is a structure in its own right, which must be fought on its own terrain. The base can change in a day; the superstructure may take centuries.
• He divides the superstructure into two levels which together form the integral state.
  • Political society — state power in the narrow sense, exercising direct domination through juridical government, and relying on force.
  • Civil society — closer to the base, exercising domination through consent, and functioning as the first line of defence and shock absorber for the order.
• Hegemony is the name for that second kind of power.
  • It is the capacity of the ruling class to have its values live in the minds of subordinate classes as the spontaneous expression of their own ideas — a web of beliefs, institutions and social relations that makes bourgeois rule appear natural.
  • It is not simply imposed. Hegemony requires that the ruling class absorb some of the values of those it rules, which makes it a continuous process of transaction, negotiation and compromise rather than a fixed achievement.
  • It cannot be taken for granted and must be reproduced continuously. Where hard power acts on the body, hegemony acts on the mind; where coercion is visible, consent is invisible.
  • Its highest achievement is to define the limits of common sense — to make an arrangement that is historically contingent appear simply obvious.
• Intellectuals are the agents of this process, and Gramsci redefines the category.
  • Every person is an intellectual, but not everyone performs the function of one, because all work involves intellectual as well as manual labour while only some work is socially recognised as intellectual.
  • Organic intellectuals are produced by a rising class and are organically linked to it — for the bourgeoisie, the engineers, managers, doctors, bankers, technicians and civil servants who create the culture of capitalism and act as its deputies.
  • Traditional intellectuals were recognised before the new dominant class emerged — the clergy in Europe — and therefore appear autonomous, which is exactly what makes them useful when the new class recruits them.
• The strategic conclusion is a two-stage revolution.
  • The war of position is fought in civil society to build a counter-hegemony, and it is necessarily protracted.
  • The war of manoeuvre is the frontal assault on the state, possible only once the war of position has been won.
• The working class must therefore do what the bourgeoisie did — build a coalition and produce its own organic intellectuals, since there is no revolution without them. Gramsci’s term for the potential allies is the subaltern classes, which in Indian conditions extends well beyond industrial workers.
• Gramsci’s lasting effect on the theory of the state is that Marxism can no longer fairly be described as crude economic determinism. He restored agency, culture and struggle to a framework that had been read as mechanical.

Althusser: Apparatuses and Interpellation

• Althusser treats ideology as inescapable — not a set of false beliefs held in the head but something realised in actions and behaviours, and therefore possessing a material existence.
• He divides the state’s apparatus in two.
  • Repressive State Apparatuses — police, army, courts, prisons — which function primarily by repression and show themselves rarely.
  • Ideological State Apparatuses — churches, schools, families, media, the whole private domain — which function primarily by ideology and are accepted as ordinary features of society.
  • Schools are the pre-eminent ISA, because teachers hold the undivided attention of the young in what is presented as a neutral environment, which renders whatever is taught obvious.
• Interpellation is the mechanism. Ideology hails individuals as subjects, offering an identity they accept as natural — a form of power over people that is quite different from force.
  • There are, on this account, no individuals, only subjects, brought into being by being hailed. People are always-already interpellated, from birth and even before, since others have already conceived the role the child will occupy.
• His four compressed theses are the standard summary: ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence; ideology has a material existence; all ideology interpellates individuals as subjects; and individuals are always-already subjects.
• His methodological contribution is overdetermination — any social outcome is produced by multiple relatively autonomous levels rather than by the economy alone, and the economy’s determination in the last instance is real but permanently deferred in practice.

Poulantzas: The State as a Condensation

• Poulantzas drew a clear distinction between the position of the capitalist class and state power, and argued that class domination is not automatically translated into state power.
• The state therefore not the instrument of a class, and its relative autonomy is structural rather than accidental.
  • Two features of Western democracies make it necessary: universal adult franchise, and a competitive party system in which every party must offer something to every class.
• The autonomy is functional for capital, not a departure from it.
  • Only a state not captured by any particular capitalist faction can impose the long-term interest of capital as a whole against the short-term appetites of individual capitalists.
  • It also has a double legitimating effect: the state gains legitimacy by invoking the authority of “the people”, and the capitalist class gains legitimacy by dissociating itself from state repression.
• His later work sharpens the formulation. The state is neither a thing nor a subject but a material condensation of a relationship of forces between classes and class fractions — meaning that class struggle runs through the state, not merely against it.
  • This carried him toward a democratic road to socialism and an explicit critique of statism, on the ground that a strategy of simply seizing state power reproduces the authoritarianism it opposes.

The Miliband–Poulantzas Debate

The exchange between them is the classic confrontation within Marxist state theory, and the two positions remain the reference points.

• Miliband accepted the unity of state power and class power, adhering to the classical position that the state is invariably an instrument of class power — but he argued it empirically, which is what distinguished him from a restatement of the Manifesto.
  • His target was double: the pluralist claim that power in Western societies is competitive, fragmented and diffused, and the post-war Keynesian claim that public policy is autonomous from capitalist interests.
  • His method rested on the composition of the state elite — the degree to which members of the capitalist class control the apparatus through interlocking positions in the governmental, administrative and coercive institutions. State power lies in those institutions and is wielded by the people who occupy their leading positions.
  • His central empirical finding was that the most important political fact about advanced capitalist societies is the continued existence of private and ever more concentrated economic power.
  • He also exploded the myth of the managerial revolution — Burnham’s claim that decision-making had passed from owners to an open managerial class — arguing that it remains extremely difficult for the children of workers to reach those positions.
  • He was not the crude instrumentalist he is charged with being. He argued explicitly that dominant classes not solid, congealed blocs, and that it is precisely for this reason that they require political formations to reconcile, coordinate and fuse their interests.
• Poulantzas replied that this concedes too much. If the state served capital only through the people staffing it, then staffing it differently would change its character — which would make socialism achievable by a recruitment policy.

• Relative autonomy has a limit, and naming it keeps the position Marxist. In normal conditions the state appears neutral; in a crisis it intervenes on the side of capital.
  • The Left Front government in West Bengal, self-described as the protector of the poor, ultimately used force against protesting peasants at Singur and Nandigram — and lost power to a rival who occupied the ground it vacated.
  • Governments across the West bailed out banks during the financial crisis while clearing the protests against the inequality that crisis exposed.

Later Developments in Marxist State Theory

• Offe and Habermas identified a structural contradiction inside the capitalist welfare state that neither instrumentalism nor structuralism had captured.
  • The state must simultaneously secure accumulation — the conditions for profitable investment — and legitimation, the popular consent on which democratic government depends.
  • These pull in opposite directions: measures that satisfy capital erode legitimacy, and measures that buy legitimacy burden accumulation.
  • Habermas’s conclusion is that an economic crisis is displaced upward into a legitimation crisis, and finally into a motivation crisis in which the cultural resources sustaining the system are exhausted.
  • O’Connor gave the fiscal version: the state’s twin functions generate expenditure faster than they generate revenue, producing a structural fiscal crisis of the state.
• Jessop’s strategic-relational approach is the most influential contemporary formulation.
  • The state is neither a thing nor a subject but a social relation — an ensemble of institutions with no power of its own.
  • It is a strategically selective terrain, structurally more open to some strategies, actors and time horizons than to others, without being determined to serve any of them.
  • This dissolves the old debate: asking whether the state is an instrument or is autonomous is asking the wrong question, since selectivity varies with the strategy and the conjuncture.
• Analytical Marxism, in Cohen, Elster and Przeworski, rebuilt the theory on rational-choice foundations and produced a troubling result — Przeworski’s demonstration that under democracy workers may rationally consent to capitalism, because the transition costs of socialism fall on the generation that bears them while the gains accrue later.
• The Frankfurt School shifted the terrain from the state to culture, arguing that domination in advanced capitalism operates through the culture industry and a consumerism that reduces a multi-dimensional person to the one-dimensional man of a one-dimensional society.

Criticisms

• Economic reductionism. Even with Engels’s “last instance” qualification, the theory struggles to explain political outcomes that track religion, nation, caste or language rather than class — and those have proved the more powerful mobilisers over the last century.
• Weber’s rejoinder is the most serious challenge. Rejecting economic determinism, he argued the state commands powerful resources of its own: exclusive control of the legitimate use of force, and a bureaucracy able to formulate, implement and monitor policy. State power therefore cannot be reduced to an instrument of class interest.
• The withering away did not happen, and the opposite did. This is the decisive empirical objection, and an honest treatment states it plainly.
  • States built on the theory became more coercive rather than less, and the transitional dictatorship showed no tendency to dissolve.
  • Trotsky described the Soviet outcome as a degenerated workers’ state in which a bureaucratic caste had usurped power from the class it claimed to represent.
  • Djilas went further, arguing that the bureaucracy had become a new class — defined, like every ruling class before it, by its control over the means of production, exercised through the party rather than through legal title.
  • The theory has no account of how the state that suppresses a class is prevented from becoming one.
• The structuralist version is close to unfalsifiable. If the state acting for capitalists and the state acting against them both count as serving capital, it is unclear what evidence could disconfirm the theory. Explanatory power bought at that price is not power.
• The pluralist objection is that the state visibly changes direction when governments change, legislates against capital, and is fought over by organised interests — though Lindblom’s concession that business occupies a privileged position, since governments depend on investment decisions they do not control, converges on Poulantzas from the opposite direction.
• The feminist objection is that the state is patriarchal as well as capitalist, and that Marxist feminism, by treating women’s subordination as a function of the reproduction of labour power, privileges Marxist categories over feminist ones and cannot explain patriarchy in non-capitalist societies.
• The post-colonial objection is that categories developed for advanced capitalist societies cannot simply be transposed to societies shaped by colonial rule, where the state was overdeveloped relative to indigenous class formation and is not the instrument of any single class.

The Marxist Theory Applied to India

India is the most sustained test case Marxist state theory has, because it combines electoral democracy, deep inequality, an interventionist state and a bourgeoisie that never conquered power in a revolution.

Passive Revolution

Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution — a transformation carried out from above, without a rupture, by absorbing the demands of subordinate classes rather than defeating them — has become the standard Marxist reading of the Indian state, developed by Chatterjee and Kaviraj.

• No single class is hegemonic. Power circulates among industrial capitalists, landed elites and the bureaucratic-managerial stratum through a ceaseless push and pull, with the state retaining relative autonomy while negotiating between them under electoral conditions.
  • Bardhan’s account of three dominant proprietary classes — industrial capitalists, rich farmers, and the professional and bureaucratic elite — supplies the empirical version, and its conclusion is stalemate: surplus is dissipated in subsidies purchased by each class rather than invested.
• Since the 1990s the corporate capitalist class has achieved a moral-political hegemony over civil society without needing to mobilise electorally for it.
  • It operates through media, courts and regulatory bodies rather than through party politics.
  • All major parties now share a consensus on private-investment-led growth, which makes the identity of the governing coalition much less consequential than it appears.
• Primitive accumulation and its reversal is Chatterjee’s sharpest contribution.
  • Capitalist growth requires dispossessing peasants and petty producers of land and livelihood.
  • But under electoral democracy, leaving the dispossessed destitute is politically illegitimate — they vote.
  • So the state builds a parallel apparatus of employment guarantees, poverty programmes and micro-credit whose function is to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation just enough to keep it politically survivable.
• The consequence is a divided polity: civil society, the urban middle classes oriented to corporate capital’s logic, and political society, the rural poor and urban informal populations who deal with the state through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements negotiated with officials — never converted into secure rights.
• Kaviraj supplies the accompanying argument: the Indian state’s modernity is a grafted elite project encountering a society organised on entirely different principles, which produces the permanent gap between the state’s formal categories and how people actually live.

The Theory in Indian Political Practice

• Bipan Chandra read the Indian national movement as a Gramscian strategy — a protracted war of position followed by a war of manoeuvre.
  • British rule depended not only on force but on the hegemonic claims of a civilising mission and benevolent despotism.
  • Gandhi’s counter-hegemony attacked the first through his critique of modern civilisation, and destroyed the second by showing a government that taxed salt and beat non-violent protesters.
  • Once the counter-hegemony had taken hold, the war of manoeuvre followed in the Quit India call.
• The Left Front’s three decades in West Bengal are the most instructive Indian case for the limits of relative autonomy, ending with a communist government using police power against peasants resisting land acquisition for industry.
• The Kerala experience is the counter-case usually offered — redistributive land reform, near-universal literacy and public health outcomes achieved through electoral politics rather than revolution, and cited as evidence that the state can be used rather than only smashed.
• The Maoist insurgency represents the “smash the state” position as living practice rather than doctrine, and its concentration in the mineral-rich tribal belt is itself an argument about dispossession.

The Constitutional Verdict

Two rulings of 2024 settled, from the state’s own side, how far the Indian constitutional order is committed to the Marxist reading — and the answer in both is: not at all, and deliberately so.

• In Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra, a nine-judge bench held by 7:2 that not all private property constitutes the “material resources of the community” under Article 39(b), and reasoned that the Constitution embodies economic democracy but mandates no single economic model.
• In Dr Balram Singh v. Union of India, delivered on 25 November 2024, the Court dismissed challenges to the words “socialist” and “secular” inserted in the Preamble by the 42nd Amendment.
  • It upheld Parliament’s power under Article 368 to amend the Preamble and found no breach of the basic structure.
  • Crucially, it read “socialist” down: the word denotes a commitment to a welfare state and does not restrict private entrepreneurship, because India embraces a mixed economy in which the private sector flourishes alongside the public.
• Taken together the two judgments make explicit what the Constitution had left ambiguous. India’s socialism is welfarist, not Marxist — a commitment to outcomes rather than to the abolition of private ownership.

Contemporary Relevance

• The empirical claims have aged better than the predictions.
  • Concentration of wealth, the political power of capital and the naturalisation of market outcomes are now documented by economists who are not Marxists.
  • Piketty’s demonstration that the return on capital persistently exceeds the growth rate restates Marx’s tendency toward concentration on entirely non-Marxist premises.
• The revolutionary subject did not appear. The industrial proletariat has shrunk in the advanced economies, and where it grew — in Asia — it produced accumulation rather than revolution. Class has proved a weaker mobiliser than nation, religion and identity.
• The theory of ideology is its most durable export. Hegemony, ISAs and the critique of formal equality are now used across political theory by people with no commitment to historical materialism — including by feminists and post-colonial theorists whose own critiques of Marxism are sharp.
• China is the standing puzzle. A communist party presiding over the largest capitalist accumulation in history is not readily described by either the instrumentalist or the structuralist model, and Marxist state theory has produced no settled account of it.
• The return of the state cuts both ways. Industrial policy, bailouts and strategic investment can be read as confirmation that the state acts for capital when capital needs it — or as refutation, since it shows the state directing capital rather than obeying it. The theory can accommodate both, which is precisely the objection.

Conclusion

The Marxist theory of the state has been repeatedly declared refuted and repeatedly returns, and the reason is that its diagnostic apparatus outlived its predictive apparatus.

• What has failed is the forecast: the state did not wither, the proletariat did not become the universal class, and the states built in the theory’s name became the most coercive of the century.
• What has survived is the question it forced on every rival: not what the state is for, but whose interests are served by its being described that way. No theory of the state written since can avoid answering it.

The tradition’s own internal argument produced the most useful position. Instrumentalism explains why the state protects capital and not why it constrains it; structuralism explains both and risks explaining nothing. The productive settlement is Jessop’s — treating the state as a terrain that is strategically selective rather than an instrument that is owned, so that the question becomes empirical again: selective in whose favour, on what issues, and under what conditions.

Marxism’s lasting contribution to the theory of the state is not the answer that it serves the ruling class. It is the demonstration that a state’s neutrality is a claim requiring evidence, not a description that can be assumed.