> Maybe I wasn't clear. I wasn't asking how the state enforces its capitalist
> writ. Yeah, obviously - police, army, etc. I was asking what ensures that
> the state must always be seeking to enforce a capitalist writ?
The so-called ‘structuralists’ have given a lot of thought to this question, which is really important. You might like Bob Jessop; he’s very influenced by Poulantzas (and wrote his intellectual biography) and has adapted and extended his framework in a lot of ways, dropping a lot of Poulantzas’s arch abstractionism. (He’s a great writer of papers and a terrible organiser of books, by the way – his “State Power”, which came out last year, is meant to be a summary of his approach – it works great as an annotated bibliography of his and others’ papers but is pretty scattered as a whole.)
The structuralist explanation for the forms and processes of the state is akin to ecological/evolutionary explanations, in that they focus on selection mechanisms. But things are complicated by the presence of self-aware, strategising subjects. I tried to write a brief summary here but I realised it would take too long and I have to get back to work. But there’s a chapter in my thesis that summarises the approach, focusing on macroeconomic policy, which you can read here if you have the time and inclination:
http://scandalum.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/1-1-explaining-policy/
Cheers, Mike