State power promotes the ruling class’s interests primarily by ensuring the reproduction of the mode of production—the economic, political, and ideological relations—of which that class is the dominant bearer. Rather than being a thing that can be "held," state power is a relationship where social power is concentrated in an institution to promote and protect specific social structures. This promotion of interests is achieved through two essential functions: representation and mediation.
1. Political Representation
State power ensures that the ruling class is represented
within the state, meaning the state's actions positively act upon the
reproduction of its dominant positions. This is facilitated through various
formats of representation, which are systems for selecting political
leaders that ensure state leadership promotes and defends the ruling class’s
positions. These formats include:
• Notables: Leaders emerge from a ruling-class
"public" of families or individuals, often relying on captive
populations (personally dependent voters) to maintain power.
• The Bourgeois Party: Large-scale organisations that
rally other classes around the interests of capital while appearing to
represent a broad national interest.
• Statism: Recruting leaders directly from the bureaucracy
or military to provide unified representation during times of economic or
political crisis.
2. Processes of Mediation
The state mediates relations between the ruling and ruled
classes to ensure the latter both submit to and contribute to the
established social order. The state uses its centralisation of resources
and its status as a totaliser of social relations to carry out several
key processes:
• Repression: The state acts as the "mailed
fist," using its repressive apparatus to strike when the reproduction of
class relations breaks down and ruled classes revolt.
• Displacement (Canalisation): The state prevents
social contradictions from exploding by canalising grievances into
institutional channels, such as formal arbitration or electoral outlets, which
do not disrupt the overall system of domination.
• Extraction: The state pulls resources (taxation)
from the population to fund the administration and defence of the ruling
class’s order, often using these funds to underwrite private capital
accumulation.
• Co-optation: Social order is maintained by securing
the loyalty of the ruled through mechanisms like nationalism, economic
growth, or bourgeois democracy, which incorporate the masses into a
"pseudo-community" under ruling-class command.
• Support: State-provided welfare and social
insurance act as mediation by ensuring the reproduction of labour-power
and enlisting popular support for the political system, often without touching
the wealth of the ruling class.
3. Ideological Interpellation
State power promotes ruling-class interests by shaping how
individuals perceive reality through ideological interpellation. The
state and its apparatuses tell individuals:
• What exists: Defining their identity and their
knowledge (or ignorance) of exploitation.
• What is possible: Structuring their levels of
ambition, self-confidence, and aspiration.
• What is right: Establishing the norms of legitimacy
and the ethics of work and interpersonal relations.
4. Structural Organisation
Finally, interests are promoted through the internal
organisation of the state apparatus, which is a materialisation of a
particular mode of class rule. The very form of the state—its technologies of
command, its hierarchies, and its bureaucratic or technocratic nature—expresses
and reproduces class relations regardless of the specific individuals who
occupy state offices. By providing specific institutionalised channels for
political expression, the state structure delimits the field of possible
politics, forcing even radical protest to contribute to the reproduction of
existing structures.
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