Miliband's State In Capitalist Society

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Not much explicit or detailed reference to earlier Marxist work does not mean that Miliband has not a great contribution to the Marxist theory of the State. Otherwise, concerning “with the historical constitution of the state in capitalist societies and the changing modalities of class struggles concerned to capture the existing state and use it to promote particular class inter” (2008, p. 147), Miliband contributed to the ‘second approach’ of Marxist state theory. What Jessop purposed as the second approach is a "State in Capitalist Society" approach. This approach is in contrast to the first approach, "capitalist type of society," but both equally rooted in the works of Marx and Engels (Jessop, 2008). For example, one of the works of Marx and Engels who became grounding of the first approach is The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; and the second approach based on The German Ideology (Jessop, 2013, p. 16-17). In “State in Capitalist Society” approach, the key method to its development focused on a historical constitution, on "how state building is …show more content…

Poulantzas concerned with the formal adequacy of the capitalist type of state, while Miliband with the functional adequacy of the state in a capitalist society. Miliband starts with the social origins of economic and political elites and their current interests, then turned to more fundamental features of existing states in a capitalist society and the constraints on their autonomy. Whereas Poulantzas firstly established the overall institutional framework of capitalist societies, defined the ideal typical capitalist type of state, then explored the typical forms of political class struggle in bourgeois democracies, and ending with an analysis of the relative autonomy of state

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