In the 1970s, amid economic stagnation and rising class conflict, the Left returned to a question that had long bedeviled it: the role of the state in capitalist society. Fred Block’s 1977 article “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” first published in Socialist Revolution, is perhaps the clearest articulation of a structuralist approach to this problem.

The essay was written at a time when social democracy was still at the height of its strength — and being radicalized by capitalist crisis. The electoral success of left-wing parties revived old debates about whether reformist governments could use state power to legislate radical policies and challenge corporate influence.

For many Marxists, the idea that the “bourgeois state” can be used for such an agenda was anathema. Since the nineteenth century, much of the socialist left has seen the state under capitalism not as a neutral body but as an aspect of capitalist rule. It’s a notion that has rested on the belief that, as the economist Paul Sweezy put it, the state is “an instrument in the hands of the ruling class for enforcing and guaranteeing the stability of the class structure.”