Marxism and the State: An Analytical Approach

Drawing his theoretical framework for his work from G.A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, Wetherly (politics, Leeds Metropolitan U., UK) presents a theoretical restatement of Karl Marx's functional theory of the capitalist state, in which the state, as legal and political superstructure of society, is determined by the nature of the economic structure. To counter the primary criticisms to which the theory may be seen as vulnerable, he argues in sum that a capitalist economic structure can be analyzed in terms of the functional extra-economic requirements of the system, that both instrumentalist and structuralist arguments provide plausible mechanisms of functional explanation of the state, that the inter- relationship between these mechanisms can be understood in a way that doesn't deny the role of agency, and that functional explanation as a form of economic determination is compatible with a notion of the relative autonomy of the state if economic determination is understood as merely a strong tendency. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR