>
> Before the financial crisis I would have been inclined to endorse a
> structuralist theory, and say that of course governments don't see
> themselves as servants of capital, it just happens to work out that way for
> reasons beyond normal individual comprehension. But it's been really
> fascinating to see the public discourse among the political class, which has
> framed the question explicitly in terms of what's necessary to "save
> capitalism."
I don't think that is really incompatible with the structuralist view, e.g. of Poulantzas. The state evolves as a kind of troubleshooting element in society. That doesn't mean directly siding with capital, but attempting to resolve social contradictions so that the system reproduces itself - and it's a system in which capital is dominant. But that's overlaid (and here Miliband comes in) with the fact that because of their position and money capitalists are also politically powerful and have a lot of direct influence over the state, though not necessarily always in their long-term interests. Finally, everyone involved, the technocrat troubleshooters and the partisans, strategises based on their own ideological views of how society works. I don't think those things are logically contradictory... though they can be socially contradictory.
For me the lesson of the crisis has been how strong conservative ideology around balanced budgets etc has remained, even among the technocrats, even though it's systemically dysfunctional.
Mike Beggs