ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen important changes in both the social form of the capitalist state and the theorisation and analysis of capitalist state forms from within the Marxist intellectual tradition. e crisis and decomposition of Keynesian and social democratic state structures is, of course, intimately related to the crisis of the rigid and closed world of Althusserian structuralism. Recent years have seen a proliferation of ‘open’ and dialectic analyses which have made a signicant contribution to our understanding of the historical and logical development of capitalist state forms (Clarke, 1991b; Bonefeld and Holloway, 1991; Bonefeld et al., 1992a, 1992b, 1995). ese advances include a recognition that the state is a social form of the capital relation determined in and through class struggle and a recognition that the separation between political, ideological and economic aspects of the capital relation are both a precondition for and a focus of struggle in the domination of the working class by capital. ese accounts have highlighted the serious theoretical limitations and the disastrous political implications of both essentialist analyses of the state and structuralism in both its Althusserian and regulationist forms. Also, these dialectic and
‘open’ accounts have opened up an exciting opportunity to develop a nonessentialist analysis of the state as a social form of the capital relation.
