Capital and state influence each other multidirectionally, not one-way in the last instance.

Evidence

Where Marxists like Poulantzas theorize the state as “relatively autonomous” from infrastructural material production, then, they still maintain the primacy of the mode of production in setting the limits of social conception and comprehension. State derivation theorists, for instance, insist that the political and its expressions are derivable from the forms that capital and the economic assume at any historical moment (Holloway and Picciotto, 1977). This is preferable perhaps to liberal political theorists such as Habermas, Offe, Rawls, or Kymlicka who claim to theorize the political in almost complete absence of discussion regarding capital formation and accumulation. Yet in shaking social theory loose of these moorings, in undoing the hold of the base-superstructure metaphor on thinking the social, “relative autonomy” should not give way to thinking of material production, politics, and economics as totally autonomous or independent of each other. Rather, the shift makes the causal connections multidirectional and historically specific. Thus it no longer is necessary to maintain determination of the state by the interests of capital “in the last instance.” There are historical moments when the forces and resources of capital have been deployed by design to reproduce the conditions of sustaining the racial state - the racial conditions of the state - either generally or in a historically specific form like apartheid even to the detriment, shortor long-term, of capital’s interests. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1671

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that capital can be deployed to sustain a racial state even to capital’s own detriment breaks the tidy Marxist instrumentalism and liberal omission alike, sitting at the difficult intersection of base-superstructure critique and the racial state.
• XREF: connects to: Opposing capital on its own moral-rational terms serves it. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 57; Private and official decisions mutually constitute each other in a non-linear loop. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 953; The Welfare State functions as capital’s flexible adjustment mechanism, not labor’s victory — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 205 (+1 more)