ABSTRACT
From time to time a text (or a body of work) is such that it cannot be simply noticed or reviewed, it necessitates book-length response. The ‘underlying conception of the State’ (and more broadly political strategy and tactics) is not only what differentiates New Left Review it is the central political question of our time. If the English State formation and apparatuses are seen as connected in some particular way to production forms and relations (and to wider cultural agencies and categories) then some understandings rather than others follow. Two polar positions — broadly within Marxism — are possible; they were classically outlined through his life by Mao Tsetung: ‘all struggle and no unity’ would comprehend the State system as totally opaque to socialist politics, a total ‘smashing’ would be required. This system tends, but not necessarily, to see the State system as without contradictions, and as both relatively super-structural from, and yet finally almost totally determined by, production forms.
