Theoretical

How do we understand and analyze this? What concepts and frameworks help us see what is happening?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

What is the state? A neutral referee that could serve anyone, a tool of the ruling class, a set of dispersed techniques of discipline, or the one body that claims the right to use force? The traditions here answer differently. Marxists see an instrument of class rule; Weber sees the monopoly on legitimate violence; Gramsci sees rule through consent as much as force; anarchists see an institution that corrupts whoever holds it; Foucault sees power everywhere, not only at the center. The point is to give the group the tools to see how power actually works.

Anchor questions

• What is the state? A neutral referee, a tool of the ruling class, or something else?
• Why does Weber say the state is whoever holds the monopoly on legitimate violence?
• What did Gramsci mean by hegemony, and why does rule need consent as well as force?
• Can the capitalist state be used for socialist ends, or is it built to prevent that?
• Where does power actually live? Only in government, or everywhere?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. The short videos are good on-ramps; the Miliband-Poulantzas exchange is best read as a pair.

The Marxist theory of the state

• Friedrich Engels (1820 to 1895), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880). A compact statement of the Marxist view that the state is an organ of class domination which the proletariat seizes and eventually renders superfluous. The short on-ramp to the theory before Lenin’s The State and Revolution (in the liberatory lens). Free: marxists.org
• Nicos Poulantzas (1936 to 1979), The Problem of the Capitalist State (1969). Opens the famous Miliband debate by arguing the state serves capital through its objective structural role, not merely through the class backgrounds of the people who staff it. Free PDF: sscc.wisc.edu
• Ralph Miliband (1924 to 1994), The Capitalist State: Reply to Nicos Poulantzas (1970). The other side of the debate, defending an analysis rooted in the personnel, ties, and instruments through which the ruling class dominates the state. Read the two together. Free PDF: ssc.wisc.edu

Hegemony, violence, and power beyond the state

• Antonio Gramsci (1891 to 1937), The Modern Prince (Prison Notebooks, 1929 to 1935). Develops hegemony, civil society, and the war of position, showing how ruling classes govern through consent as well as coercion. Central to any modern strategy discussion. Free: marxists.org
• Max Weber (1864 to 1920), Politics as a Vocation (1919). The source of the definition of the state as the human community that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a territory. A non-Marxist definition worth taking seriously and arguing with. The text circulating free is the Gerth and Mills 1946 translation, whose copyright was renewed in 1973, and there is no public domain English translation at all: the lecture was not put into English until after the war. Paywalled: hackettpublishing.com, and see the note on access for how to get it. The German original is genuinely public domain and complete: de.wikisource.org
• Michel Foucault (1926 to 1984), Discipline and Punish (1975). Reframes power as discipline and surveillance dispersed through prisons, schools, and factories rather than held only at the center. Denser, best with the video companion below. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org

Feminist theories of the state

The theories above argue about whether the state serves capital or is captured by capitalists. They mostly do not ask what the state does to women, or notice that its founding story has a prior chapter. These do.

• Carole Pateman (b. 1940), The Sexual Contract (1988). The social contract story, free men consenting to political authority, conceals an earlier contract in which men’s access to women was settled first. The state’s founding myth is not incidentally patriarchal; it is patriarchal in its structure. Paywalled: sup.org (this publisher blocks automated checks, but the page is live)
• Wendy Brown (b. 1955), States of Injury (1995). Refuses the idea that the state is one masculine thing, and takes it apart into liberal, capitalist, prerogative, and bureaucratic powers, each gendered differently. Her warning is the sharpest thing here for organizers: turning to the state for protection can convert an injury into a permanent identity. Paywalled: press.princeton.edu. Free, and enough to run a session on: her 2024 interview revisiting the book, with a transcript, at sfu.ca
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore (b. 1950), Golden Gulag (2007). California built the largest prison system on earth not because crime rose but because the state was holding surplus land, surplus labor, surplus capital, and surplus capacity, and prisons absorbed all four. Any theory of the state that stops at the ballot box has to answer this. Paywalled: ucpress.edu. Her free interview carries the argument: versobooks.com

Anti-colonial theories of the state

Most of the theory in this lens was written in Europe about European states. For most of the world the state arrived as someone else’s, and the question was never how to reform it but what to do with the thing after the flag came down.

• Frantz Fanon (1925 to 1961), The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Read the chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness for this theme: the colonized take the state, and the national bourgeoisie installs itself as the new intermediary, a caretaker for the old metropole. The anti-colonial answer to what happens after you win state power, and the reason “seize the state” is not the end of the argument. Shared with the imperialism theme. Free: libcom.org
• Mahmood Mamdani (b. 1946), Citizen and Subject (1996). Colonial rule made citizens in the towns under civil law and subjects in the countryside under a customary law administered by chiefs. Independence inherited that split rather than ending it, which Mamdani calls decentralized despotism. The best structural account of why the postcolonial state reproduces the colonial one. Paywalled: press.princeton.edu
• Achille Mbembe (b. 1957), Necropolitics (2003). Sovereignty is the power to decide who may live and who must die. Mbembe’s move is to say that the plantation, the colony, and the occupation, not the European parliament, are where state power shows its real face, which extends Foucault by looking at the places Foucault did not. Thirty free pages, dense but short enough to read together: monoskop.org
• Timothy Mitchell (b. 1955), The Limits of the State (1991). Why is the state so hard to define? Because the line between state and society is not a boundary between two things but an effect produced by the practices of rule themselves. Useful to pour over Miliband and Poulantzas both, after the room has spent a session assuming the state is an object. Free: eppam.weebly.com

The anarchist theory of the state

• Mikhail Bakunin (1814 to 1876), God and the State (1882). The anarchist case that all authority, whether of church or state, corrupts and enslaves, and that liberty cannot be built through state power. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Peter Kropotkin (1842 to 1921), The State: Its Historic Role (1896). Argues the centralized state is a specific historical formation that crushed the self-governing communes and federations of the medieval period, so what was made can also be undone. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org

Films, lectures, and audio

• “Foucault: WTF?” (Tom Nicholas, 2019). Roughly 26 minutes, about 418,000 views. A clear walkthrough of Foucault on power and knowledge, and how power operates beyond the state. The best companion to Discipline and Punish. youtube.com/watch?v=9045I_p45XU
• “Hegemony: WTF?” (Tom Nicholas, 2017). Roughly 6 minutes, about 256,000 views. A short introduction to Gramsci’s cultural hegemony, a compact opener on how consent is manufactured. youtube.com/watch?v=-LI_2-qsovo
• “Lenin in Five Minutes: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the State” (The Marxist Project, 2019). Roughly 5 minutes, about 72,000 views. A concise account of the Marxist-Leninist theory of the state, a tight counterpoint to the anarchist readings. youtube.com/watch?v=4KDdIzkDcLw

A note on method

These theories genuinely conflict, and the conflict is the curriculum. The Miliband-Poulantzas debate is about whether the state is captured by the ruling class or built to serve capital no matter who staffs it. The Marxist and anarchist traditions disagree about whether the state can ever be a tool of liberation. Let the room hold these open. The aim is a shared vocabulary, hegemony, the monopoly on violence, the capitalist state, discipline, that lets people analyze the power they actually live under.

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989). The strongest statement that the liberal state is male in form, and that its claim to neutrality is precisely how male power is enforced as law. Radical feminist, and contested within feminism over sex work, pornography law, and whether to use state power at all. Read against Brown, who treats the state as plural rather than singular. Not free: hup.harvard.edu
• INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (2007). How foundation money and 501(c)(3) status absorb radical movements into the state’s outer ring, turning organizers into grant writers and demands into services. The practical companion to any theory of the state for people who actually organize. Women of color feminist and abolitionist. Not free: dukeupress.edu

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially contemporary work on surveillance and the security state, and free companions for the feminist and anti-colonial theory added here: Pateman, Mamdani, and MacKinnon are all currently library requests with no free route in, which is its own comment on whose theory of the state is easy to get hold of.