The Capitalist State: Structural Variation and Its Implications for Radical Change

Abstract

T HE HISTORY of the United States and other modern capitalist societies makes it evident that radical change is more likely to occur in some periods than in others.1 Why? The existing literature on modern industrialized societies is not very useful in answering that question. The prevailing pluralistic perspective offers little help because it treats all radical change as an aberration.2 Some scholars working within a pluralistic framework have attempted to fill this void by arguing that when radical movements are successful in capitalist societies, pluralistic conditions have been eroded and replaced by the conditions of mass society.3 Unfortunately the mass society theories have been found to be seriously flawed.4 On the other hand, Marxist theory which is explicitly aimed at producing radical change in advanced capitalist societies is, surprisingly, also not very useful for understanding the potential for current radical change. It is focused almost exclusively on the question of whether a proletarian revolution is near at hand. That type of radical change is, however, extremely unlikely to occur in the lifetime of any person living today.5 What we need to know, therefore, is the current potential in capitalist societies for radical change which falls short of a full-blown proletarian revolution. While none of the existing literature on modern industrialized societies is directly helpful in that quest, the growing Marxist literature on the capitalist state does have potential usefulness, but not in its current form. Conventional Marxist definitions of the capitalist state identify it as a state which is either (1) controlled by the capitalist class and/or (2) ruled in the interest of the capitalist class.6 This type of definition has invited pluralistic attacks and has led to an unsolvable debate in the form of conflicting research focusing on static descriptions of the power structure. In order to make the Marxist literature on the capitalist state useful for the analysis of radical change it is necessary to break away from the conventional static Marxist definition of the capitalist state which arbitrarily freezes the relationship between the state and the capitalist class. Why should the state in