9 Miliband, Poulantzas and Laclauon the Advanced Capitalist state

Varun Patil

Introduction

 

In this module we will be looking into the debates within Marxismon the nature and function of the state in advanced capitalist countries, focusing especially on the much contested issue of the relative autonomy of the state from the social classes. The debate on the relative autonomy of the state concerns the relative freedom of the state to pursue policies that conflict with the immediate interests of the dominant economic classes without becoming so autonomous that they could also undermine the long-term economic and political interests of the latter. We shall examine one such debate in Political sociology between Nicolas Poulantzas, Ralph Miliband and Ernesto Laclau which became a key reference point in discussions on the state during the 1970s and 1980s and was also taken up in many other contexts.

 

Theorising state and politics in Marxism

 

Marxist theorists have traditionally neglected the study of the nature of the State in modern societies; seeing it largely as an epiphenomenon reducible to economic base. They hold that the relationship of domination and subordination in the infrastructure will be largely reproduced in the superstructure, of which the State is a part. Thus the decisions and activities of the state will inevitably favour the interests of the ruling class rather than the proletariat.

 

Marx and Engels’s did not develop a systematic theorising of the political and their work on the state comprises diverse philosophical, theoretical, journalistic, partisan, ad hominem, or purely ad hoc comments. Talking about the Modern State in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx had famously remarked that it was nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie (1992). He regarded bourgeois democracy as the adequate form of political organization in consolidated capitalist social formations; the liberal democratic state form corresponds to the value form of the capitalist mode of production and provides a suitable extra-economic support for it. The freedom of economic agents to engage in exchange is matched by the freedom of individual citizens. Finally Marx and Engels also held that the state would eventually disappear once the classes disappeared. Post World War Two, several Marxist scholars advocated a theory of state Monopoly Capitalism which was based on an immediate identification of the State with the interests of capital. It held that the socialisation of production, and the associated concentration and centralisation of capital, had forced the state to take on many of the functions of capital, in the attempt to avert an economic crisis and to stabilise the class struggle (Varga: 1946).

 

One of the main rivals to Marxist theorising on state was the social democratic theory of the state, which focused on the institutional separation of the state from the economy, and so stressed the autonomy of the state as a political institution. This analytical separation of the ‘political’ from the ‘economic’ was based theoretically on a radical separation of production from distribution. The class character of the state was determined not by its intervention in production but by its relation to distribution, which it could modify primarily through its taxation and expenditure policies. Thus a social democratic government could, in principle, use the instruments of state power to counterbalance the economic power of capital, reconciling the economic efficiency of the capitalist mode of production with an equitable system of distribution. Like In post-war Britain the Labour government was able to carry out massive welfare measures including the setting up of the famed National Health Service which served to buttress the Social Democratic view of state. The state might even serve as the instrument for the transition to socialism, transforming property relations by taking capitalist enterprises into public ownership.

 

However the crisis in the Social Democracies of the west in the 1970’s brought a renewed thinking within Marxism on the role and nature of state and the question about the relative autonomy of the state in capitalist societies. The existing theories were found to be inadequate; if the theory of state monopoly capitalism underestimated the autonomy of the state, the Social Democratic theory underestimated the limits to that autonomy. Nicholas Poulantzas, criticized the existing Marxist approaches to the state as inadequate for many reasons; economic reductionism that emphasized the logic of capitalist development or economic class struggles at the expense of the specifically political dimensions of the state and state power; historicist approaches which emphasized the transformative potential of an autonomous political class struggle without regard to the strategically selective institutional legacies of political structures; and ‘state monopoly capitalism’ views, which claimed power in the contemporary state was exercised exclusively by monopoly capital at the expense of other capitalist groups as well as the subaltern classes (1968). Many Marxist scholars inspired by Italian Theorist Antonio Gramsci began to insist on the specificity of the political and the irreducibility of political to economic conflicts. What were needed were a more adequate theory of the nature and limits of the power of the capitalist state. Within Marxism the debate on the state in advanced capitalist societies coalesced into two contrasting positions, popularly termed as the instrumentalist and the structuralist view of the state.

 

 

Ralf Miliband and the sociology of state in advanced capitalist societies

 

The instrumentalist view of the state saw it as an instrument that can be used by different social forces for different purposes. Within Marxism this view was best epitomised by British Sociologist Ralf Miliband’s landmark work ‘The State in Capitalist Society’ which came out in 1969. To understand the nature of State, Miliband argues for a general political sociology of advanced capitalism. He says that these capitalist societies have many common economic and social features like high level of Industrialisation, an economy dominated by private capital especially corporations, capital-labour as the principal social relation, presence of economic elite and formal democratic institutions. Miliband’s study focused on how, ‘the embedding of a formally democratic state in a substantively capitalist society limits the apparent autonomy of elected governments and thereby promotes the functional adequacy of the exercise of state power for and on behalf of capital’ (1969).

 

Miliband begins by critiquing the lack of Marxist theorising on state, given that, it is for state’s attention that men compete. He also critiques them for not studying the state in the light of the concrete socio-political cultural reality of actual capitalist societies. His main goal is to criticize ‘bourgeois political science’, especially its claims about the separation of ownership and control produced by the managerial revolution and its continuing claims about the open, pluralistic, and democratic nature of government in the modern democratic state. He critiqued the pluralists for treating the question of state’s nature as resolved and focusing on study of political process like voting and political socialisation. The pluralist view of state saw the state as more or less a neutral arbitrator which tried to accommodate the multiple and conflicting interests of different groups in a society. For Miliband however, the state was a special institution, whose main purpose was to defend the predominance of a particular class and that it was an entity that extends well beyond the executive and legislative branches of elected government. Through a detailed examination of empirical data he shows how different government institutions and actors are deeply embedded in a capitalist market economy and a civil society dominated by institutions and forces imbued with capitalist values and more or less committed to capitalist interests. Miliband said that political equality was one of the greatest myths of the epoch and that bourgeois freedom and democracy does not threaten the class domination as the ruling class control knowledge and value production and framing of rules (1969). He argues that class rule in these societies is compatible with a wide range of civil and political liberties. The basic political assumption informing Miliband’s analysis is that there cannot be a parliamentary road to socialism because the bourgeois democratic state will remain inherently unreformable as long as radical movements continue to work only in and through established political institutions.

 

Miliband study shows how capital in advanced societies had a definitive advantage over other groups in influencing the state. Firstly the contemporary western state is run by elites who largely act to defend the interests of the ruling class. These elites share a basic interest in preservation of private property and capitalism. Many of those who occupy elite positions are themselves members of the bourgeoisie. For example he pointed out that how in America from 1899 to 1949, 60% of the cabinet members were businessmen. Like C Wright Mill’s ‘Power Elite’ (1999) which was a landmark study of elite rule in America, Miliband’s study shows how elites in western capitalist societies be it judges, politicians or civil servants are united by ties of close friendship, kinship, common outlook and mutual interest. He argues that capital and labour do not compete on equal terms and that the former has a massive advantage over the later in influencing state policy. Business has much power to veto a bill  which it considers detrimental to the pursuit of profits. Then there is the global power of capitalist class which also limits the autonomy of state in bringing out welfare measures in favour of the proletariat. In India Itself one can see how global investment rating firms and banks pressurise the government against taking broad social development measures like the food security bill. Meanwhile Labour is fragmented and the power of trade unions is limited by its ideology which encourages frequent compromises. The Political class defend interests of capital because they find it easy to equate that with the defence of national interest (Miliband: 1969). Social democratic parties are not radical enough and come to see politics as a matter of parliamentary strategy, tactics and manoeuvre. In recent times Noam Chomsky (2002) has also chronicled the strong relationship between the state with the Business elites, the persistence of the Military-Industrial complex which severely restricts the democratic and public character of the state.

Miliband also examined the important question as to why the majority of the population accepts a state which acts against their interests. For him the economic power of the ruling class enabled them to partly shape the beliefs and wishes of the remainder of population. Through a process he calls ‘legitimation’ the capitalist class sought to persuade society not only to accept the policies it advocates, but also the ethos, the values and the goals which are its own (Miliband: 1969). Miliband illustrated his argument with an analysis of advertising, by means of which capitalist enterprises promote both their products and the acceptable face of capitalism. He argues that capitalism and its commodities are subtly linked via advertisements to ‘integrity, reliability, security, parental love, sociability. With these kinds of associations the exploitative and oppressive nature of capitalism is effectively disguised.

 

Talking about the role of the state in the future, Miliband argues that bourgeois democratic states are likely to move towards conservative authoritarianism as the inability to match performance with promise becomes more blatant. The expanding material capacities may bring in the promise of material liberation but society is steeped in competition, commercialism and unequal relations of production. Miliband says that faced with increasing pressures and expectations the state reacts in two ways. One, calls for reform is instituted but it remains purely symbolic as it cannot transcend the limitations of the existing structure. Then the state resorts to repression and tries to curtail the rights of the limited bourgeoisie democracy. He argues that the gradual transition of capitalism into socialism may be a myth; but the gradual transmission from bourgeois democracy into conservative authoritarianism is not (Miliband: 1969).

 

Nicholas Poulantzas: The State-class relation as an objective one

Another Marxist view of the State which became popular in the 1970’s, and which was heavily influenced by Ideas of French Theorist Louis Althusser, is the structuralist view of the state which held that the state has a distinctive functionally specific class character and was structurally constrained to advance the interests of capital. Political Sociologist Nicholas Poulantzas, who was its main articulator aimed to develop a new Marxist political science by moving from more abstract to more concrete analyses and, to a lesser extent, from the simple to the complex.

 

Poulantzas published a detail critique of Miliband in the New Left Review, called ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’ in 1969. He agreed with Miliband about the relative autonomy of capitalist state but disagreed on the basis of that autonomy. Firstly he argued that Miliband was mistaken in his belief that a Marxist approach could be based on a critique of non-Marxist approaches that focused on revealing their factual errors – this placed Miliband on their terrain and trapped him into a debate on their terms. He says that Miliband’s empiricist methodology and neglect of Marxian concepts inevitably reproduces the conceptual apparatus of social democratic ideology and that it is not enough to oppose concrete facts to concepts, but rather they must be attacked by parallel concepts situated in a different problematic.

 

Secondly Miliband had adopted a ‘problematic of the subject’, i.e. , a concern with individual agents and their motives rather than with classes and their interests, which Poulantzas argues, gives the impression that social classes or the state is reducible to inter-personal relations; thus undermining the Marxist understanding of state and class as objective structures. Poulantzas holds that state should not be viewed simply as a state in capitalist society but must be understood as a capitalist state; a state in which capitalist class relations are embodied in it its very institutional form (1969). For Poulantzas the state is defined as, ‘the instance that maintains the cohesion of a social formation and which reproduces the conditions of production of a social system’. This means that if the function of the state in a determinate social formation and the interests of the dominant class collide it is by the reason of the system itself; the direct participation of ruling class in state apparatus is not the cause but the effect. He emphasises the fact that the relation between class and state is objective and that state does not depend on the motivations of social actors.

 

Unlike Miliband who considers, the capitalist class as a unitary force, with a somewhat singular sphere of concern, so that it “negotiates” with the state in order to sustain its rule, Poulantzasargues that the relative autonomy of the state is functionally necessary to prevent capitalists’ collective failures. Poulantzas says that the capitalist state best serves the interests of the capitalist class only when the members of this class do not participate directly in the state apparatus, that is to say when the ruling class is not the politically governing class (1969). Poulantzas gave several reasons for the relative autonomy of the capitalist state. As a group, the bourgeoisie is not free from internal divisions and conflicts. The state must also have the  freedom to make concessions to the subject class, which might be opposed by the bourgeoisie. Such concessions serve to defuse radical working class protest and to contain the demands within the framework of a capitalist economy.

Poulantzas also pointed out the epistemological and theoretical errors seen as evident in Miliband’s critique of the managerial revolution thesis and the alleged neutrality of the state bureaucracy. He says that miliband creates a false problem of Managerialism by trying to show that managers are pursuing profits for companies, whereas the real contradiction is between the socialisation of productive forces and their private appropriation not the mere pursuit of profit. And finally Poulantzasargues that Miliband had neglected the key role of the ideological state apparatuses’ (ISAs) in securing social cohesion in a class-divided society (1969). He agreed with Miliband about the importance of the process of ‘legitimation’ in maintaining the capitalist system; however he went much further in seeing this process as being directly related to the state. Following Louis Althusser (1971) he divided the state into repressive apparatus-the army, government, administration, police- which relies on the use of coercion and the ideological state apparatus-the church, political parties, trade unions-which is concerned with the manipulation of values and beliefs, rather than the use of force. The ideological apparatus are crucial for survival of capitalism as they inhibit the growth of class consciousness.

 

The views of Poulantzason the nature and function of state in advanced capitalist societies has undergone certain shifts;while at the same time retaining the primacy of the autonomy of the political sphere. In his first major contribution to Marxist state theory, ‘Political Power and Social Classes’, which came out in 1968, Poulantzas introduced the notion of the capitalist type of state, which is formally adequate to capitalism. He described it as a hierarchically organized, centrally-coordinated, sovereign territorial state based on the rule of law and, in its ideal typical normal form, combined with a bourgeois democratic form of government. This state form facilitates capital accumulation and political class domination but obscures this fact by disguising this economic exploitation and the exercise of class power. He implicitly distinguished this normal type of state from states in capitalist societies, which are formally inadequate and therefore depend far more on constant political improvisation and on force-fraud-corruption to secure such domination. Poulantzas drew on Gramsci to argue that, in such a capitalist state, political class domination could not rest on a legal monopoly of class power but would depend on the dominant class’s capacity to promote a hegemonic project that identified the national-popular interest with the long-term interests of the capitalist class and its allies in the power bloc. For only when the state’s narrow economic, political-administrative, and ideological functions are subordinated to its global political function (i. e.,  securing social cohesion in a class-divided society) can they contribute effectively to creating and maintaining capital’s long-term Domination (Poulantzas: 1968). Hegemony thus becomes important to understand how it was possible for an institutionally separate, relatively autonomous state to secure the long-term political interests of capital.

 

In his later writings on state like ‘Classes in Contemporary Capitalism,’ which came out in 1973, Poulantzas tries to emphasise more on the role of the classes in explaining the relative autonomy of the state. Poulantzas, having initially focused on the pure form of the capitalist type of state at a high level of abstraction, took more account of forms of state, varieties in political regime, changes in class composition and forms of struggle, the crucial distinction between normal and exceptional forms of state, and the value of democratic institutions in the struggle for democratic socialism. He views the state as a social relation to emphasize even more the role of class struggle in the constitution of state power. Poulantzas cautions against an institutional analysis of power and state; the idea that it is thestructures/institutions which hold/wield power; with the relations of power between ‘social groups’ flowing from this institutional power. Poulantzas says that to attribute specific power to the State, or to designate structures/ institutions as the field of application of the concept of power, would be to fall into structuralism, by attributing the principal role in the transformation of social formations to these organs. He says we need to break with a certain positivist, or even psycho-sociological conception of power (‘A brings pressure to bear on B to make the latter do something he would not have done without pressure from A’). He says we have to comprehend the relations of power as class relations and explain the relative autonomy of the state by looking at the constitution of classes and their relations between them.

 

He agrees with other scholars that the separation of the economic and the political provides the general framework, depending upon the different stages and phases of capitalism (this separation is itself liable to transformation), for an examination of the relative autonomy of the capitalist State. However unlike others Poulantzas holds that the concrete form taken by this autonomy depends upon the precise conjuncture of the class struggle at any one time. As he says, ‘For this separation of the economic and the political is itself nothing more than the form taken by the constitution of the classes, and hence it too is a consequence of their struggles under capitalism’ (Poulantzas: 1973). The degree, the extent, the forms, etc. (how relative, and how is it relative) of the relative autonomy of the State can only be examined with reference to the precise conjuncture of the corresponding class struggle (the specific configuration of the power bloc, the degree of hegemony within this bloc, the relations between the bourgeoisie and its different fractions on the one hand and the working classes and supporting classes on the other, etc.). He says that one cannot, therefore, answer this question in its general form precisely on account of the conjuncture of the class struggle. All this means is that the relative autonomy of the capitalist State stems precisely from the contradictory relations of power between the different social classes. He says that conceiving of the capitalist State as a relation, as being structurally shot through and constituted with and by class contradictions, means firmly grasping the fact that an institution (the State) that is destined to reproduce class divisions cannot really be a monolithic, fissure less bloc, but is itself, by virtue of its very structure (the State is a relation), divided.

 

Miliband’s response to Poulantzas’ Critique

 

Miliband responded back to Poulantzas in the New Left Review in 1970 accusing him of relying on structural super determinism (an exaggerated concern with the structural constraints on state autonomy) and ignoring the role of empirical materiel in developing a critique of the state. He says that Poulantzas goes much too far in dismissing the nature of the state elite as of altogether no account. The structural constraints of the system are so absolutely compelling as to turn those who run the state into the merest functionaries and executants of policies imposed upon them by ‘the system’. Miliband points out that Poulantzas claim that the capitalist type of state tends to be ‘Bonapartist’, i. e. , to acquire a certain independence from the social forces in the wider society, leads to a failure to distinguish between fascism and democracy and therefore one could not appreciate the virtues of a democratic regime for democratic struggle. Finally Miliband says that Poulantzas was mistaken in treating ISAs as part of the state in its narrow sense as opposed to the political system more generally. Miliband says that economism re-enters Poulantzas’s analysis through the backdoor in the guise of the inevitable class character of state power. Miliband concludes that the structuralism of Poulantzasprevents us from understanding and analysing the relative autonomy of the State.

 

Ernesto Laclau and the importance of the analytic of hegemony

 

The Miliband-Poulantzas debate generated a lot of scholarship on the nature of State. Laclau, an Argentinian social theorist who was familiar with Althusserian structuralism and aware of the complexities of political struggles attacked both writers on the grounds that they had made complementary methodological errors. While Miliband was seen as erring in not constructing his own theory and testing it against other theories, Poulantzas had erredas he constructed his own theory but neglected to demonstrate its superiority on empirical grounds (Laclau: 1975). Laclaufurther criticised Poulantzas for his overtly formalistic approach to studying the state. Poulantzas conception of ‘instances’ (economic, political, ideological) whose interaction produces the mode of production, was questioned. The Althusserian inspired conception of ‘instances’ (economic, political, ideological) are seen as both specific and autonomous with respect to each other, and whose interaction produces the mode of production—determined by the economic in the last resort, but in which another instance may play the dominant role. Laclau says that this position inevitably leads to formalism and taxinomism in establishing the relations between the various instances, the content of their concepts and the construction of their object. Laclau says that as a result we treat the economic instance as unequivocal, in other words as having the same meaning and the same content in all modes of production. Borrowing from Gramsci’s studies on Hegemony, Laclau attacks the implicit economic determinism in both Althusser and Poulantzas and instead posits the autonomy of the political.

 

Laclau along with Chantal Mouffein their landmark work ‘Hegemony and Socialist Strategy’ which came out in 1976 attempted to radicalise the Marxist understanding of the political by deconstructing many of the traditional categories of Marxism. They argued that the  conceptual and methodological foundations of Marxism are inadequate to comprehend contemporary social reality and accused Marxist structuralists as ignoring the rise of new social movements which challenged many of the given ideas of Marxism on power, agency, class and state. Drawing on the work of Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, their work heralded a post-structuralist turn within Marxism and advocated the use of tools of Discourse Analysis in order to articulate innovative analyses of concrete political phenomena. They stressed the idea that political identities were not immediately given and as always constructed on the basis of complex discursive practices. Politics is not the expression of pre-given interests or the will of a certain group, but politics is to be understood as the very process by which a group assumes its name. Stressing the contingency of the political field, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the identity of a given social group cannot be derived from a stable ground within the social (the position within the relations of production, for instance), it can only be the result of a process of hegemonic signification/articulation. Working to extend Gramsci’s elaboration of the concept of hegemony, Laclau sees hegemony not as the imposition of a pre-given set of ideas but as “something that emerges from the political interaction of groups”; it is not simply the domination by an elite, but instead is a process of on-going struggle that constitutes the social (2001).

 

Revisiting the Miliband-Poulantzas debate

 

Revisiting the debates on the relative autonomy of the state between Miliband and Poulantzas in contemporary times, Bob Jessop argues that it was mostly anon-debate as it involved a different theoretical object and different lines of argument. He says that there were fundamental differences in their approaches to the philosophy of social science and the methodology of theory construction, with Poulantzas more concerned with abstract questions and theoretical coherence and Miliband more concerned with political relevance and empirical evidence (Jessop: 2007). This misunderstanding is also rooted in part in the different political contexts of their work, with Poulantzas writing in a context marked by relatively abstract theoretical debates and Marxist polemics on state monopoly capitalism and Miliband writing in a context dominated by Anglo-American empiricism and debates on pluralism.

 

Bob Jessop argues that that Miliband and Poulantzas conceived the capitalist state in such radically different and fundamentally incommensurable terms that they were actually discussing two different types of theoretical object. Poulantzas was concerned with the capitalist type of state, Miliband with the state in capitalist societies. Jessop says that this misunderstanding was reinforced because the two men also adopted different strategies for presenting their respective objects. While Poulantzas tends to move from the most abstract determinations of the capitalist state to its more concrete form and dynamics, Miliband tends to move from more ‘visible’ aspects of capitalist societies to some of their more hidden (‘behind the scenes’ or ‘behind the backs’) aspects and/or to some fundamental structural constraints on the exercise of state power in a capitalist society, whatever the state’s specific institutional form. Poulantzas was essentially concerned with the formal adequacy of the capitalist type of state and Miliband with the functional adequacy of the state in a capitalist society. This debate thus reproduces the failure to distinguish between an abstract theoretical concern with the capitalist type of state and an empirical analysis of the state in capitalist society as a real-concrete phenomenon (Jessop: 2007). However Jessop says that Poulantzas and Miliband did converge on some issues; a positive evaluation of democratic socialism, pluripartisme, the valuable role of new social movements, the importance of human rights, and the critique of authoritarian statism. Bob Jessop concludes that the state is such a complex theoretical object and so complicated an empirical one that no single theoretical approach can fully capture and explain its complexities.

Conclusion

 

We have seen how the crisis of social democracies in the 1970’s generated an intense debate on the nature of state and its relation with social classes within Marxism. Some like Ralf Miliband took an instrumentalist view of the state arguing that the state had been captured by the forces of capital and hence was bound to forward its interests. On the other hand structural Marxists like Nicholas Poulantzas argued that the state-capital relation was an objective one and that it did not depend on the motivations of social actors.

 

The main state theory agenda has now turned to other methodological issues, such as the benefits of a society- rather than state-centred approach to the state, and towards substantive topics, such as the future of the capitalist state in an era of globalization, the nature of the European Union, and ‘empire’ as a new form of political domination. Interest in state theory was also weakened by fascination with the apparently anti-state-theoretical (or, at least, anti-Marxist) implications of Foucault’s work on the micro-physics of power and on governmentality. The fall of Soviet Union and the rise of the neo-liberal ideology in the 1990’s also have generated fresh debate on the state, with many scholars predicting the death of nation states and rise of city states.

 

Though the observations of Miliband and Poulantzas on modern state need to be reinterpreted in light of these new developments, nonetheless the debate is important for three reasons. Firstly it led to the development of a systematic theorising on the state and power which was absent in earlier Marxist traditions. Secondly it established the primacy and autonomy of the political sphere which earlier was relegated as epiphenomenon. And finally it led to a focus on importance of methodological issues for studying the state.

 

Further Reading

  • Althusser, Louis, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, 1971
  • Barrow Clyde, Critical Theories of the State, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993
  • Carnoy Martin, The State and Political Theory, Princeton University Press, 1984
  • Chomsky Noam, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002
  • Evans Peter, Embedded Autonomy: states and Industrial Transformation, Princeton University Press, 1995
  • Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation, Random House, 1961.
  • Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” Socialist Review No.33, 1977.
  • Gramsci Antonio Prison Notebooks volume one, Columbia University press, 2011
  • Jessop Bob, The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, NYU Press, 1982
  • — State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place, Penn State Press, 1990
  • —‘Dialogue of the deaf: reflections on the Poulantzas-Miliband debate’, in P. Wetherly, C.W.
  • Barrow, and P. Burnham, eds, Class, Power and the State in Capitalist Society: Essays on Ralph
  • Miliband, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 132-157, 2007
  • Offe Claus, ‘Theses on the theory of the State’, in Contradictions of the Welfare State, MIT Press 1984
  • Laclau, Ernesto, ‘The specificity of the political: the Poulantzas – Miliband debate’, in Economy
  • and Society, 4, 1: 87 – 111, 1975
  • Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics, Verso 2001
  • Marx, K., Engels, F, The Communist manifesto, Oxford University Press, 1992
  • Michael Mann,The Autonomous power of the state: its origins Mechanisms and results’
  • European Journal Of Sociology 25 (2): 185-213
  • Miliband Ralf, The State in Capitalist society, Weidenfeld& Nicolson, 1966
  • —Marxism and Politics Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977
  • — New Left Review I/59, January-February, 1970  Mills Wright, The Power elite, Oxford University Press, 1999 Poulantzas Nicholas, Political Power and social classes, Verso, 1975 — ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’ in New Left Review, 58, 1969–Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (translated by David Fernbach),
  • New Left Books, 1975Przeworski Adam, State and the economy under capitalism, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990
  • Robert Alford and Roger Friedland, The Powers of Theory , Cambridge University Press, 1985
  • Rudolf Llyod and Susanne Rudolf, The Pursuit of Lakshmi: the political economy of the Indian state ,University of Chicago press, 1987
  • Therborn Goran, What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules?, Verso publishers, 1978 Varga Eugen, The Economic Transformation of Capitalism, 1946 Wright Erik Olin, “Class and Politics”, chapter 5 in Interrogating Inequality, Verso: 1994

 

 

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