ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some remarks on structure-agency relations, and discusses the capitalist agency and state actors agency respectively. It also discusses the conceptual implications of the agentic aspects of the capitalist class and state actors. Agency involves knowledge or consciousness which shapes the material practice of the agent under structural conditions, even if ultimately structural conditions set a limit to the nature of consciousness. Capitalists make use of their associations/institutions to exercise their agency in a society where they do have structural power by virtue of their control over the economy. Operating as non-profit entities, national and regional-scale trade organizations of the capitalist class actively connect capitalists’ interests to the bourgeois political parties and bureaucracies. Accumulation strategies must advance the immediate interests of the different fractions of capital and must secure the long-term interests of the hegemonic fraction, at least, which must, in turn, sacrifice some of its short-term economic interests.
