The State as a Claim

“Absolute” conveys the wrong tone, the one of course kings hoped to convey. Absolutism was a rhetorical injunction, not a serious assertion. It might be perhaps wise to de-emphasize the concentration on the person of the king and simply talk of a strengthened state, or more “stateness.” We might better call the ideology ‘statism’. Statism is a claim for increased power in the hands of the state machinery. In the sixteenth century this meant power in the hands of the absolute monarch. It was a claim to power, the claim being part of the attempt to achieve it. Nobody, then or now, took it or should take it as a description of the real world of the time.

The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century by Immanuel Wallerstein

Social Reproduction and Struggle

To organize at the workplace alone leaves out half the worker‘s own experience of exploitation–speaking as it does of the cash wage but not of prices or of the social wage. More important, it excludes all wageless people from organization. Pensioners, women doing unpaid domestic work, students at school and college, the unemployed and the invalid collecting state benefit–such people are a political resource, needed in struggle and needing it too. Reproduction, whether it be the practical reproduction of labour power or the ideological reproduction of our class system, our relationship to capital, is something in which everyone is involved.

The Local State: Management of Cities and People by Cynthia Cockburn