The histories we choose to tell are not neutral, and it’s important not to sell them as such. These histories reflect our values, beliefs, desires, and positions. This is also true for the histories told and retold by the State.
Even though no theory of reality can claim neutrality, the State presents itself as a neutral arbiter, capable of expressing the will of the people. In its neutrality, supposedly the State still has the people’s interests at heart. But justice based on neutrality is a false promise that has little relevance when someone is being evicted, incarcerated, or deported.
The State isn’t “above” classes, in a top-down sense. But liberal democracy does propose a single arena for making decisions where it acts as mediator from outside of the debate itself. When it says that it’s neutral, the State claims that it has no ideology and no biases. When it says that it’s amorphous, the State claims that it can be reformed and remodeled by whoever controls its mechanisms of power. This falsely implies that the State can be used by anyone who has the reins of power.
The State fakes that it’s playing the neutral middleman, but there are always cuts to schools and hospitals before cops and soldiers. This is the how and the why the ruling class always wins at the State’s game. It’s part of a whole system coordinating the maintenance of the current social order. Power grows in the context of social order, so capitalist power grows in the context of the order promoted by the State.
Even when the State moderates between the different factions of the ruling class, the working class is only allowed to participate as a spectator. But the State isn’t the kind of machine that someone can grab the wheel of and start steering where they want it to go. Unlike a car, it has a bourgeois heart and bourgeois conscience. It can’t be driven by just anyone, only by the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy.
Since the ruling classes can use the State to arbitrate their interests, the system continues to grow in the form of capitalist institutions that can’t be controlled or “run” by everyone. The State grows in the context of capitalist power and vice versa because it’s not neutral, like it claims to be; instead, it’s an integral part of the system as a whole.
