Capitalist states are sites of struggle, not simple tools of capital.

Evidence

A state can be called capitalist, then, primarily in the structural sense of enabling the reproduction of capital overall, of mediating in some general and contingent sense the contradictions that capital and its fractious factions almost inevitably generate. So states are not in any narrow sense functional for capital’s reproduction, or for the extension and expansion of accumulation. Rather, capitalist states constitute at most the terrain of struggle over the range of selected strategies (what Jessop calls “strategic selectivity”) for capital’s reproduction and accumulability locally and globally, short and long term. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1668

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Jessop’s ‘strategic selectivity’ and clarifies what it means to call a state ‘capitalist’ in a structural rather than functional sense.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalism’s governing order rests on fragile political balances, not inevitability. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 140