Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/Theories of the State (Erik Olin Wright)/Course description

Course description
This seminar is motivated by a moral and political concern: to what extent is it possible to achieve a more egalitarian, humane and democratic society within a capitalist society? Even if in many of the discussions we will not explicitly address this issue, ultimately a crucial political stake in understanding the nature of the state in capitalist society is the problem of emancipatory social change.

It is a fundamental tenet of Marxist theories of the state that the state in capitalist society is deeply shaped and constrained by the class relations of capitalism, but this leaves quite open the extent to which progressive change can be achieved within those constraints. At one extreme is classical Leninism, which sees the capitalist state as so profoundly imbued with a capitalist character that even where nominally democratic institutions exist, there is little prospect for progressive change. The state is fundamentally a “superstructure”: its form and structures functionally reproduce the basic class relations of capitalism. As a result the state must be smashed and radically reconstructed on a new basis; serious reforms in an egalitarian direction using the capitalist state will inevitably fail or be reversed. At the other extreme is classical social democracy which views state apparatuses as basically class neutral and regarded class structure as simply one among a variety of obstacles to be overcome. Popular mobilization, particularly when organized through a coordination of the labor movement and socialist parties, had the potential to gradually reform capitalism in a radically egalitarian direction through social democratic state policies. Between these extremes are a variety of theoretical and political positions which see the constraints on radical change imposed by the capitalist state as variable, both in terms of the kinds of changes they permit and the extent to which struggles can transform the constraints themselves. The “contradictory functionality” of the state creates a complex, variable political space within which egalitarian, democratic, and even emancipatory politics can be pursued.

The central task of this seminar, then, is to explore a range of theoretical and empirical issues that bear on the problem of understanding such possibilities for radical, egalitarian politics in capitalist societies. Above all we will focus on the problem of the complex interconnections between class, the economy, and the state in capitalist societies. To develop the theoretical tools to approach these issues we will have to grapple with some fairly abstract of conceptual questions: what does it mean to say that the state has a “class character”? What is the difference between an external constraint on state actions imposed by class relations and an internal institutionalization of class constraints within the state itself? What does it mean to describe the state as having “autonomy” -- relative, potential, limited or absolute?

In more practical terms, this seminar has two primary objectives: First, to deepen students’ understanding of alternative theoretical approaches to studying the state and politics within broadly Marxist and critical traditions of state theory, and second, to examine a range of interesting empirical/historical studies that embody, in different ways, these approaches in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between abstract theoretical ideas and concrete empirical investigation.

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