#capitalist state

"What are the causes of such large increases in crime? In What Is To Be Done? we gave great emphasis to the role of relative deprivation. We argued that crime is not caused by levels of absolute poverty or unemployment but by people’s perception of unjustified inequalities, and of being excluded from the ‘glittering prizes’ of capitalist society — be they material wealth or individual status and prestige — and marginalization from legitimate channels for redressing the balance. This emphasis on the centrality of relative deprivation as a cause of crime was important to our argument on two counts. First of all, it provided an explanation of the continually rising crime rates during the post-war boom when income levels and employment generally were rising. With the welfare state and mass education spreading a mythology of ‘equality of opportunity’ and the mass media broadcasting a message of generalized wealth and lifestyles to match, the sense of frustration and failure on the part of those sizeable numbers of people left behind could only increase. In this sense relative deprivation is endemic in modern capitalist society. The development of the consumer culture and at the same time the relentless breaking down of older community values, which to some extent shielded traditional working-class communities from relative deprivation, are a result not of deviations but of the core dynamics of capitalism.

The coal lumpers’ strike and the rapid growth of revolutionary socialism

"The everyday life of politics suggests forcibly that the conception of the state offered in marxism and political sociology is – whatever the difficulties of operationalising it – well-founded. Commonsense impels us to the inference that there is a hidden reality in political life and that reality is the state. Either way, the search for the state and the presumption of its real, hidden existence are highly plausible ways of ‘reading’ the way the public aspects of politics are conducted. The naive research experience of sociologists who have attempted to study what they regard as the workings of the state or any of its presumed agencies is our most immediate store of commonsense in this respect. Anyone who has tried to negotiate a research contract with the Home Office or the Department of Health will be aware of the extreme jealousy with which such agencies instinctively protect information about themselves. The presumption, and its effective implementation, that the ‘public sector’ is in fact a private sector about which knowledge must not be made public is all too obviously the principal immediate obstacle to any serious study of the state. ... It is a nicely disabling technique of knowledge control to claim that it is the procedural defects of the proposed investigation rather than its object that justifies the refusal of access. . . . And if one approaches the more serious levels of the functioning of political, judicial and administrative institutions the control or denial of knowledge becomes at once simpler and more absolute of course: one encounters the world of official secrets. ... ...the experience if not the findings of both academic and practical political research tends towards the conclusion that there is a hidden reality of politics, a backstage institutionalisation of political power behind the onstage agencies of government; that power effectively resists discovery; and that it may plausibly be identified as ‘the state’. In other words it remains reasonable to assume that the state as a special separate and autonomous entity is really there and really powerful and that one aspect of its powerfulness is its ability to prevent the adequate study of the state. We seem to have evidence that the state itself is the source of the state’s ability to defy our efforts to unmask it."

"In the same postwar period, the decision to manage the national economy at a consistently high rate of unemployment, compared with other capitalist countries, has never been seen for what it is a political decision taken in defiance of the general welfare in Canada. Even in the prosperous 1960s, Canada's unemployment rate averaged out at 5.2 per cent of the work force, five times the rate in France, West Germany and Japan or two-and-a-half times the rate in the United Kingdom and Sweden (cf. Adams et al., 1971, pp. 83-84). To insist that welfarism was in place in the 1960s or 1970s (an assumption of nearly all liberal commentators) is to ignore the reality of inequality in Canada as popularly experienced, especially with respect to welfare allowances obtainable from the state (as payouts and tax relief) and with respect to the job opportunities available at the highpoint of welfare state achievement. This was not a "welfare state" experienced by the people as their state, committed to their welfare: it was a state that provided some small financial benefits to unemployed and working people who knew how to work the bureaucratic procedures, whilst still having to rely on the economic market of capitalism for the bulk of their needs."

“We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.”

Today, if the people's movement forces the racist capitalist state

"The French nationalizations supply an example [of a nursery of the New Class]: the heads of the nationalized enterprises, many of whom hold a party card, behave like the old bosses: same attitudes, same reactions. Perhaps there is a difference: the new bosses claim to be of the proletariat! So, the Socialist Party has not colonized the bourgeois state; the other way round is nearer the truth."