The State as a site of class struggle
I personally believe in the idea, best theorized by Poulantzas in his later work, that the State, while not a neutral tool, is a social relation, and thus a site of class struggle.
It is first not self-evident just by looking at it that the bourgeoise, acting out of (by what is assumed to be) purely economic interest, would choose this specific formation of the state. What does the bourgeoise have to gain from a national-popular system, in where people’s relationship to the state is through citizenship, whether that be formal, ethnic or civil, rather than the class based relationships we see in previous systems. What do the bourgoise gain from impelemting genuine democratic institutions, where all citizens get one vote.
Univeral citizenship as the primary relation to the state is a genuinely strange thing for a class-conscious bourgeoise to have produced out of pure economic interest. What citizenship does is create a political subject that is defined explicitly not by their position in production.
In fact, universal citizen was historically produced by class struggle. It was brought into existence on terrain the brourgeoise didnt fully control.
We also must touch on social benefits and labor protections. The instrumentalist position cannot explain social security, redistributive systems, universal healthcare etc etc. Most Marxists would agree that social benefits are expressions of class struggle. Marx himself stated that a subsistence wage is socially and morally detirmed and a direct expression of class struggle.
If states were political dominons of one clsss over another, by what mechanisms is class struggle able to express itself at the level of politics, producing what we today experience as social benefits? You *could* argue that they are consessions of the ruling class to maintain legitimacy and control, and in many specifc cases you wouldn’t be wrong per se. But that proves my point none the less. The ruling class conceeding to the struggle of the subordinate classes assumes there was territory to be conceded in the first place. That its a site of class struggle.
And even if they were just consessions to maintain legitimacy, at some point mateiral conditions have their own consequences, regardless of intent. But also, if social benefits were purley functional concessions by a class that retained full contol, there would be no reason for neoliberal rollback. You’d expect them to be stable and adjusted only as needed for legitimacy.
Now, of course, this doesn’t mean the state is neutral or captured, as I mentioned in the beginning. But we cannot ignore the fact that the state takes a form that is, often times, frustrating for a class conscious owning class.