The State and Everyday Struggle

Abstract

The last fifteen years or so have seen the rapid development of new forms of working class struggle around the state.1 The battlefront between the working class and the state has been extended far beyond what are sometimes thought of as the traditional areas of conflict — conflict over the regulation of wages and working conditions and conflict with the overtly repressive part of the state apparatus. The growth and especially the retrenchment of the ‘welfare state’ has brought an enormous growth in struggles over the state’s role in housing, health, transport, education etc. Many of these struggles have been fought outside the confines of the traditional forms of working-class organisation: party and trade union organisation have often seemed peripheral to the issues involved. There has been a sense of developing new forms of struggle against the state, but often considerable confusion on how to understand the state which these struggles engage.