2 The Origins of the State and State-building

State formation is not a once-and-for-all process nor did the state develop in just one place and then spread elsewhere. It has been invented many times, had its ups and downs, and seen recurrent cycles of centralization and decentralization, territorialization and deterritorialization.

The best approach is multicausal and recognizes that states change continually, are liable to break down, and must be rebuilt in new forms, with new capacities and functions, new scales of operation, and a predisposition to new types of failure. In this context, as Mann (1986) notes, the state is polymorphous—its organization and capacities can be primarily capitalist, military, theocratic, or democratic in character and
its dominant crystallization is liable to challenge as well as conjunctural variation. There is no guarantee that the modern state will always (or ever) be primarily capitalist in character and, even where capital accumulation is deeply embedded in its organizational matrix, it typically takes account of other functional demands and civil society in order to promote institutional integration and social cohesion within its territorial boundaries. Whether it succeeds is another matter.

3 Marxist Approaches to the State

Marx's and Engels' work on the state comprises diverse philosophical, theoretical, journalistic, partisan, ad hominem¹, or purely ad hoc² comments. This is reflected in
the weaknesses of later Marxist state theories, both analytically and practically, and has prompted many attempts to complete the Marxist theory of the state based on selective interpretations of these writings. There
were two main axes around which these views moved. Epiphenomenalist accounts mainly interpreted state forms and functions as more or less
direct reflections of underlying economic structures and interests.[…] Instrumentalist accounts treated the state as a simple vehicle for political class rule, moving as directed by those in charge. […]

The relative autonomy of the state was much debated in the 1970s and 1980s. The best work in this period formulated two key insights with a far wider relevance. First, some Marxists explored how the typical form of the capitalist state actually caused problems rather than guaranteed its overall functionality for capital accumulation and political class domination. For thestate's institutional separation from the market economy, a separation that was regarded as a necessary and defining feature of capitalist societies, results in the dominance of different (and potentially contradictory) institutional logics and modes of calculation in state and economy. There is no certainty that political outcomes will serve the needs of capital—even if the state is operationally autonomous and subject to politically-mediated constraints and pressures. And, second, as noted above, Marxist theorists began to analyze state poweras a complex social relation. This involved studies of different states' structural selectivity and the factors that shaped their strategic capacities. Attention was paid to the variability of these capacities, their organization and exercise, and their differential impact on the state power and states' capacities to project power into social realms well beyond their own institutional boundaries. As with the first set of insights, this also led to more complex studies of struggles, institutions, and political capacities (see Barrow 1993; Jessop 2001).