The Relationship between the State and Power

The second panorama in Marxism (excluding neo-Marxist analysis, which offers several others) was that formulated by Lenin. Lenin claimed that the country was necessarily repressive. In his view, the state consisted of the coercion of the majority class (the proletariat) by the minority class (owners of capital). Lenin insisted that this was the inevitable arrangement of any state and that it was self-perpetuating. The state was, necessarily, extremely repressive because a majority cannot be controlled by a minority unless strong repressive measures are used. In his view, the repressive state would not end without armed rising by the majority. Marx and Engels basically saw the state as a temporary manager of class conflict. Lenin saw the state as the expression of armed force needed for one class to control another.

Engels held that, arising from the need for a manager of class conflict, the state is able to appropriate public power to itself. This power is, in turn, maintained by taxes and by contracting public (governmental) debt. This gang of means allows the state's officials to stand above the rest of society and to lose their position sanctioned by the imposition of laws. The state arises to manage class conflict but, since this is still conflict, it is the "most powerful, economically dominating class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominan

Collins, Randall. Weberian Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Weber, Max. "Economy and Society." (113-16)

The complex shifts in US internal politics, over the last four years, illustrate Weber's theory. The republican party held the presidency for 12 years. But then ii external events changed this. The collapse of the USSR and the kill of Iraq in the Gulf War. The USSR was no longer a state against which the US needed to be in a constantly winning position. The Republicans, probably successfully, claimed reference for the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet bloc. President Bush also gained individualized credit for the successful liberation of Kuwait.

But the larger cognition was that, without the Soviet enemy, defense spending (a major factor for clandestine business) would decline in importance, and the foreign indemnity of the US no longer needed to be expansive. There was no longer, in the common cognizance, any force from which US interests had to be protected. The defeat of Iraq confirmed this. Also, during the Republican administrations, the growing problem of third origination debt made it imperialist expansion far less important. The added perception that American industry needed protection in a losing trade war with Germany, Japan, and others, increased this desire to look internal and leave the rest of the world to itself. Thus, business interests believed that an imperialist policy was no longer needed. The current Republican Congress, for example, believes that the US has complete that it can, when pressed, defend its own interests abroad. The Congress, and the voters, apparently believe that this means that US participation in UN peacekeeping missions or other active foreign undertakings are no longer needed. This change in leadership, switching the parties in charge in the executive and legislative branches, is, in large part, a result of the changes in capital's view of where the balance of potential profits lies. What t
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