ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the Marxist theories of the state with the view of arriving at a more dialectical understanding of the state-society relation and especially the state-labour relation. It shows that whilst the structures of repression, maintained by political power and legitimated by ideology, are real enough, there is always space for struggle within their limits. The state in non-European peripheral capitalist societies has not received the same kind of rigorous analysis as it has in developed capitalist countries. In these countries the state has always been analysed against the backdrop of the absence of an economically dominant class, "the bourgeois class", that is, the class that was characterised as the "conquering bourgeoisie", which has captured for itself in the modem representative state, "exclusive political sway". According to some Marxists in developed capitalist countries it is the state that maintains wage labour as an object of exploitation, reproduces general conditions of production and maintains legal relations.
