请将“From the analytical Marxist standpoint (like that of Erik Wright), Przewor- ski and Wallerstein say that a government can increase the workers’ share of national income by taxing capitalist income and transferring these revenues to the working class. By coordinating wage demands with taxation policy, the state can achieve virtually any income distribution desired — including driving capitalist consumption to near zero — without reducing the rate of investment (Mayer, 1994: 191). Przeworski and Wallerstein conclude that the state in a capitalist society is not structurally dependent upon capital in any static sense. A government sympathetic to the working class is not powerless in the face of capital. There exist policies by which it can redistribute income without wrecking the capitalist economy (p. 192). This refutation of structural dependence theory vindicates the claim of social democrats and Keynesian liberals that a pro-worker government can manage a capitalist economy to give workers as much as they would get under socialism. Hence, socialism becomes ethically unnecessary and politically unlikely in democratic capitalist societies (Mayer, 1994: 192).
From a Polanyian-Marxist perspective, Block (2019), extending his approach to state autonomy in capitalist societies, points to ‘the variability in the power exercised by owners in such societies’ that can only be explained by factors that ‘lie outside of the system of property and production’ (ibid.; italics added). It is ‘the legal and political system’ that ‘determines which profit-making strategy’, whether productive/efficient or predatory, ‘will dominate in a particular society’ (ibid.). He says, ‘[M]ultiple forms of dependence of business groups . . . on state action provides a critical resource or lever for those seeking political change'' (Block, 2003: 300; italics added). He also says that the economic rules of the game that ‘often serve to reinforce the power of business interests . . . can also be changed . . . to make resistance, at least within developed countries, to egalitarian reforms more difficult’, so he concludes that therefore ‘there are no inherent obstacles to restructuring market societies along democratic and egalitarian lines’(Block, 2003: 300—1).
Using Weber, and echoing Erik Wright, Block (2019: 1171) argues that ‘the power exercised by an ownership class is a variable, not a constant as is suggested by property-based essentialism’ and the actual amount of power exercised depends on, and is limited by, deep economic and non-economic divisions within that class and by the organization of its opponents (e.g. workers) who can have ‘considerable influence over the state’. These views are echoed by Bittle (2015: 147): laws of the state are ‘a site for struggling against the dominant ideology of corporate capitalism’ and that ‘the state is the only countervailing force capable of holding corporations to account’, so ‘efforts should continue for the state to enact and adequately enforce laws that hold corporations to account for their harmful acts’.
The state autonomy approach of post-modernist Marxists also imputes much power to the ability of the state to improve the conditions of the common people. They argue against ‘the etatism that pervaded Marxian politics in the twentieth century’ which ‘had been dominated by the figure of the state as the ultimate instrument in the hands of the ruling class’ (Bhattacharya and Seda-Irizarry, 2015: 676). In place of the Marxist view of the state, the post-modernist Marxist view is that ‘the state is pulled and pushed in different contradictory directions’, so ‘intervening in individual social processes cumulatively could have as much, if not more, of a transformative effect on the state as any political practice targeted at the state’ (ibid.; italics added). This sort of ideas is a part of broader approach according to which the popular pressure on the state, including through elections, will produce some kind of socialism through the so-called democratic road. This echoes Kautsky (1892) when he says that ‘the working class must strive to influence the state authorities, to bend them to its purposes . . . Great capitalists can influence rulers and legislators directly, but the workers can do so only through parliamentary activity’.
6	Structural-strategic approach
Jessop has been a major state theorist over the last three decades or so. He calls himself a plain or non-dogmatic Marxist (Jessop, 2016: 97—8). He has been seeking to build a theory of the state by finding a common ground between the approaches that are more structural and those that are more agency-oriented, where agency is seen in terms of strategies. To quote from a recent writing of Jessop:
[S]tructure consists in differential constraints and opportunities that vary by agent; agency in turn depends on strategic capacities that vary by structure as well as according to the actors involved	 [The] biased composi
tion of constraints and opportunities can only be understood in relation to specific strategies pursued by specific forces in order to advance specific interests over a given time horizon in terms of a specific set of other forces, each advancing its interests through specific strategies.
Structures are constraining but not absolutely so, nor are agents unitary or aware of their conditions:
Because structures are only strategically selective rather than absolutely constraining, scope exists for actions to overwhelm, circumvent, or subvert structural constraints. Likewise, because subjects are never unitary, never fully aware of the conditions that affect (their) strategic action, never fully equipped to engage in strategic reflection and learning, there are no guar-antees that they will largely realize their strategic goals.
(Jessop, 2016: 55)15
This ontological view of structure and agency is applied by Jessop to the state. His ‘strategic-relational’ state theory, which is to be contrasted to capital- and class-theoretical theories, has the following main components (Jessop, 2008: 35-9).
Firstly, the state is
[a] system of strategic selectivity, i.e. as a system whose structure and modus operandi are more open to some types of political strategy than others. Thus a given type of state . . . will be more accessible to some forces than others according to the strategies they adopt to gain state power; and it will be more suited to the pursuit of some types of economic or political strategy than others because of the modes of intervention and resources which characterize that system.16
Secondly, the state has no essential institutional and/or class unity. It is the state managers’ different strategies that impose a measure of coherence on the activities of the state, so the state becomes ‘a site where strategies are elaborated’. The state is indeed ‘the site, the generator, and the product of strategies’ (Jessop, 2008: 35).
Thirdly,
the current strategic selectivity of the state is in part the emergent effect of the interaction between its past patterns of strategic selectivity and the strategies adopted for its transformation. . . . In turn the calculating subjects that operate on the strategic terrain constituted by the state are in part constituted by the strategic selectivity of the state system and its past interventions.
(ibid.: 37)
I will return to Jessop in the following.
7	Existing state theory: a critique of its intellectual context and political implications
The existing literature does unpack multiple aspects of the state. Yet, taken together, it has some serious problems. There are four in particular.
The focus is more on the how, less on the why: or obsession with ‘autonomism’
The instrumentalist idea ignores/under-emphasizes the constraints imposed on the state structure or on the state actors by the structure of capitalism itself. The structure of capitalism is to be differentiated from the constraining action of individual capitalists or groups of capitalists as bearers of the capitalist structural relations: even if there are no ties between the state actors and capitalists, the state will, more or less, create conditions for accumulation. In fact, empirically, there are cases where that is the case.17 For there to be instrumental (agentic) ties, there has to be the state as a structure of relations in the first place. The focus on agentic ties fails to answer the question of why there is the state. The theory, like much state theory as such, does not also consider the coercive power of the state as signifying the fundamental class character of the state. The state can and does, of course, favour specific capitalists in part based on their ties with specific actors/institutions of the state, but that is not an essential aspect of the state. It is said that the state acts in the interests of capitalists because it is directly influenced by capitalists, but what is it about the state that allows capitalists to control the state? Why does it not allow socialists to control it?
The political structuralist view as advanced by Poulantzas and the like has problems. If the instrumental control by members of the ruling class is ruled out, then it is not clear what actual mechanisms shape — constrain — state actions. Why is it that a state that is relatively autonomous must meet the dominant class interests, that is, organizing the dominant classes/class fractions and disorganizing the dominated classes. And if the state is as autonomous as the theory says it is, then what stops it from meeting the needs of the masses in significant ways: if the state can give concessions to win their consent in the political interest of the capitalist class, why do masses suffer so much? And what stops state actors themselves, many of whom are from the non-bourgeois back-ground, from making use of their positions within the state to meet their own needs? And, once again, what about the coercive functions of the state? If it is the case that ‘the state is not a class instrument, but rather the state of a society divided into classes’ (Poulantzas, 1968: 285), then is there inherently nothing capitalist about the state? Is the state merely an entity that maintains cohesion of society which then benefits capitalists?”翻译为中文