1. "Capital owners" want to use the state to ensure the smooth functioning of capitalist markets and to protect the power and property of those whose income derives primarily from profits and dividends.
2. Those who don't own capital look to the state to serve other purposes, such as "protection, production of public goods, income distribution, etc."
3. It is "power relations" which decide "to what extent each of these purposes is served at the expense of others".
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Cox: Marv's whole post is substantially correct. I think these formulations are worth quibbling about a bit.
Working-class interests are sometimes served, usually in response to strong mass actions of workers -- but I don't think this is ever, really, "at the expense of others [i.e.capital].
For example. Social Security does, to some extent, serve the interests of workers, but it does _not_ do so at the expense of capital, as can be seen by comparing the present system to the Townsend Plan, which (perhaps) _would_ have been, to some extent, at the "expense" of capital.
And sometimes what _seems_ to serve w-c interests actually contradicts those interests: The Wagner Act was a disaster for the American Working Class. The IWW had it right: No contracts, but we strike until management responds to our demands. And we go on strike again a day later if Management doesn't come across. Stanley Aronowitz is good on this.
Actual history is always messy & contradictory, but allowing for that messiness, it is accurate to say that the State exists for the sake of capital and capitalists interests. W's unempirical empiricism is merely a fog, as Marv indicates in his last paragraph:
Marv: You [WS] are reluctant to conclude the obvious, however: that it is the "capital owners", by virtue of their power, whose interests are served as the expense of of those who hve little or no capital. At the same time, despite what you atttribute to myself and others, historical materialists have always understood the capitalist state to have a more general interest in protecting the population the from physical harm and crisis-inducing economic deprivation. "The claim that the state serves a singular purpose" is yet another example of your manufacturing bogus differences in order to knock them down.
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Cox: One more quibble. "Purpose" (and most alternative terms -- e.g. "function") carries undesirable teleological implications. I think that is what allows the manufacture of bogus differences. I have no suggestion for a better term however.
Carrol