Some thoughts on what is called the Marxian theory of the state (perhaps incorrectly). I address some implications & interpretations drawn about Marxians and their critics and then briefly discuss their significance.

Engels posits the state as emerging from class division,& imposition of one upon another. He later specifies it as the bourgeois & landlords against peasants & workers. In the Manifesto and Manuscripts Marx defined the states as organized force & the bourgeois executive committee

But these raise siX points:
1. This tells us nothing bout what the state does. Even if the states function is class domination it could be that any realistic form of state to exist must necessarily undertake structures & functions that undo that.

2. Origin does not exhaust function and function does not exhaust structure. The state could have taken on new functions, and to organize as a specific structure it may acquire logics of its own.

3. As many different states may exist as class configurations. An ‘antiquity’ state, an empire, city state, feudal state, ‘asiatic’ state, mercantile state & capitalist state could all co exist and interact & this alone would create novel emergencies.

4. Inasmuch as the state is an organ of class struggle it does not speak to the outcome of class struggles. Therefore the relative balance of class forces between labor etc and capital is contingent & can produce many different outcomes.

5. Similarly as an executive committee that balances the state itself among the different types of rulers it must balance landlord against capitalist, it must balance different sectors, geographies, forms& countries of capitalist, and it must be the site of competition between

5. Individual capitalists in their quest to capture it. Because geographic, national, cultural, sectoral, firm, individual, kin, organizational & other interests will always exist alongside class in r would be a kind of liberal pluralism to assume they must balance.

6. Finally, if we take the more sophisticated idea that the state must act against the short term or static interest of capitalists to maintain their long run and dynamic interests this opens up entirely new fields of action.

Suffice it to say, each of these six points on their own is sufficient to make states act as though they have their own interests, to act against capitalist class interests, to act against other states, or to produce contingent emergent configurations of class & power.

These six considerations therefore do not save the theory, per se, because in light of any of them, albeit perhaps as a specific historical contingency, the states behavior could be more accurately described and predicted by other theories.

If you add any of these two points together, this makes it even more indeterminate. For example, 1+4, 2+6, 3+ 5 together each result in situations where states will develop a logic of their own in order to mediate the push and pull of these multiple points.

Elsewhere in their writings both Marx and Engels describe the state as organized coercive institutional domination within territory. And Marx’s later writings indicate a massive shift to anti statism where the state itself can be said to imply class relations.

However SocDems and MLs both took up a version of the above theory of the state. But they added new twists to it. First they presumed that the state was a tool of class domination, but a constituent one, based in slotting & class character.

Secondly they assumed the state was strong enough to repress but weak enough to be taken over. That it was a tool of class domination enough to be reducible, but not so structurally caught that it couldn’t be repurposed for socialist aims.

The more sophisticated DemSocs take the state either to be inevitability or to be one on the short term and they do not think it can be use so on its own. Political power is a constant struggle alongside worker power.

Some concede the inevitability of the state& market and thus their theory posits a sort of constant struggle. Others think it can be eventually superseded. These formulations are somewhat consistent even though they are wrong.

The ML view splits into those that do not see states as per se bad and thus see the goal of socialism as either a world of socialism in one country nation states or a single global world state. Others see the state as withering away in class struggle.

The witherers insulate themselves through a careful trick. Since the state is the result of class domination and will wither away when class struggle is complete, the existence of a state is a priori proof that class struggle has not ceased, retroactively justifying the state.

MLs also often posit campist ideas, which basically concede key ideas to theories from IR, realism, geopolitics & so on. This helps explain away why Socialist states that act identically to capitalist & imperialist ones aren’t subject to the same critique.

This either takes the path of positing necessity of material conditions (why these do not apply symmetrically to all states is unstated), and/or the path of vanguard ism and the friend enemy distinction.

Now when I speak of these theoriesI do not reference key thinkers as I did in the first half because they are largely detached from them. For example, Kautsky had a more complex notion of the state, counter power and civil society.

As much as Bukharin claimed to be a class reductionist it’s clear his theories of economy did not allow that. Trotsky always asserted the coercive nature of the states and eventually conceded its tenacity & autonomy.

Lenin’s theory of the state ends up being very modernist and technocratic,and he uses stage thinking to account for inconsistencies. Gramscis theory of state draws heavily on social science & classical political theory and need not be pursued in depth here.

The theories of the state of third worldists are too, of Mao, etc are too diverse to cover in depth but they also don’t raise too many new issues relevant to my concerns in this discussion. Stalin’s theories are too derivative to matter here.

Later relative autonomy theories often end up either just ways to cleave other understandings of the state on to the current one, or to deal with the conceptual problems I mentioned above.

However they’re either a concession to critique while denying it, or they don’t represent a fundamental change over older theories. I.e. they’re either derivative or discordant.

Theories deriving the necessity of multiple states are more convincing but they still have a hard time dealing with change, a world system containing multiple interacting systems , and explaining state conduct in non ad hoc way.

Theories which see capita and the state as both downstream from a more fundamental kind of domination also have strengths. Some, like Postone or very late Marx, fall in the Marxian tradition. Others see themselves as critiques of it.