the 1960s western, neo-Marxist theory of the state has developed two distinct schools of thought on the subject: the instrumentalist approach as characterized by Ralph Millibrand, and the structuralist position defined by N. Poulantzas.*
Both instrumentalist and structuralist theories of state share an important starting point: they argue against the discipline of political science and its pluralist position that the state is an essentially neutral participant in the political process. Pluralism implies that modern society has so many overlapping, competing interests that no one group can dominate the state. Marxist theory in general must reject that implication, for two main reasons: first, Marxism is based upon the belief that class divisions exist and one class will always seek to dominate the other; and, second, Marxists argue that the political sphere cannot be divorced from the economic sphere. In Marxist theory, as opposed to the pluralism advocated by political scientists, an elite class controls capital and dominates the state (at the expense of labor). In this scenario the state is not neutral; rather, the state is capitalist (when or because) it operates within a capitalist mode of production. The "when or because" is the crux of the difference between instrumentalists and structuralists.
The instrumentalist approach to analyzing this situation was laid down in the 1969 book The State in Capitalist Society, wherein Millibrand collected empirical data to prove that, while the aristocracy that Marx originally railed against was no more, a relatively small class of economic elite dominate the modern state. Moreover, his research
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