Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Przeworski, Adam
• Wallerstein, Michael

Titel

Structural Dependence of the State on Capital

Ist Teil von

• The American political science review, 1988-03, Vol.82 (1), p.11-29

Ort / Verlag

New York, USA: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

1988

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A central claim of both Marxist and neoclassical political theory is that under capitalism all governments must respect and protect the essential claims of those who own the productive wealth of society. This is the theory of “structural dependence of the state on capital.” Using a formal model, the internal logic and the robustness of the theory is examined. We conclude that in a static sense the theory is false: virtually any distribution of consumption between wage earners and owners of capital is compatible with continual private investment once an appropriate set of taxes and transfers is in place. Yet the state may be structurally dependent in a dynamic sense. Policies that, once in place, redistribute income without reducing investment do reduce investment during the period in which they are anticipated but not yet implemented.