It appears my recent article in this magazine has ruffled the feathers of those who wish to, on the one hand, vulgarize and flatten the work of Lenin, and on the other, pretend (perhaps out of ignorance) that state theory has not evolved since his death. Kat's recent letter, I must admit, is decent agitprop: it's confident, well-organized, and has a clean rhetorical structure. Unfortunately, her letter substitutes text-quoting for counterargument in several places, misreads or elides my framework's own qualifications, and never engages the theoretical apparatus my piece builds upon. She accuses my article of abandoning “Marxist analysis of the political-economic situation in contemporary China,” in favour of a "bourgeois revision" that casts the state as an organ of class reconciliation and concludes that I am "putting forward that we should stand in solidarity with the ruling class of China." This is nonsense.

Her letter is an exercise in bad logic. She arrives at "solidarity with the ruling class" in three steps, none of which work. First, she redefines "critical solidarity without illusions" as simply "solidarity," on the grounds that "real solidarity neither precludes criticism nor requires the maintenance of illusions" which is not a refutation of the distinction I draw, it is a stipulation that erases it and then arguing against that strawman. Second, she supplies the missing premise from Engels — the state is the instrument of the economically dominant class — which is precisely the instrumentalist position my article spends a full section arguing against! She is not catching me in a contradiction; she is importing the position I argue against, planting it in my mouth, and then acting scandalized at what "I" conclude. Third, even if you hand her both of those moves, the inference still doesn't go through: "critical solidarity toward a state formation" is not "solidarity with the class that dominates it," and no argument bridges the two — she just asserts the bridge exists. This is not analysis.

My article's conclusion is that a Marxist state theory of the SME "means resisting the temptation to read geopolitical alignment as a proxy for socialist character, while equally resisting the temptation to read the presence of exploitation and market competition as settling the question of China's class character." That is not solidarity with a ruling class. It is a refusal of both campist ‘solidarity,’ and state-capitalist dismissal. If Kat wants to argue that refusing her conclusion amounts to endorsing the opposite one, she should make that argument rather than assert it as a paraphrase of what I wrote. It is worth noting, too, what Kat's letter does not do. She tallies which recent Cosmonaut pieces on China fail to cite State and Revolution, as though a single citation were the measure of Marxist seriousness, but she does not engage a single one of the state theorists my article actually builds its argument from — not Clarke, not Jessop, not Das, not the form/function distinction, which is the theoretical core of the piece she is supposedly refuting. You cannot refute a state theory by refusing to read the state theory. Counting absent citations to one text is not a substitute for engaging the argument that is on the page. She doesn’t even engage with Ollman, whose own verdict on China is considerably closer to her position than mine, despite him sitting in my endnotes.

The same carelessness appears later, when she calls my framework one that "papers over class contradictions altogether" — a strange claim to make about an article whose second pillar is an explicit category, state-capital relations, defined as the state's entanglement with surplus extraction and accumulation imperatives, and whose stated political conclusion names the costs the SME imposes specifically on Chinese workers under market discipline.

The larger charge is that describing the SME as "structural tension" between socialist state form and capitalist market relations is incompatible with Lenin's definition of the state as arising from irreconcilable class antagonism and is therefore a "positive" theory of the state as social bond. This does not follow. To say two forces are in structural tension is not to say they are reconciled. It is closer to the opposite: A tension that could be resolved by institutional design or political will, which is precisely what my article denies, would be reconcilable. A tension that cannot be resolved that way, and that the party-state must continually manage, contain, and fail to fully contain, is what irreconcilability looks like in some concrete, historically specific case rather than as an abstract definition of the state-form-as-such. Kat's own preferred authority on this point, somewhat eclectically I might add, Badiou, defines the state by its relation to "un-binding, which it prohibits" which is itself a structural, formal characterization of what the state does, not merely a restatement that antagonism exists. If that formulation is acceptable Marxist state theory, then form-level analysis of a specific state's specific structural situation is not the crime Kat says it is.

Ironically, Lenin did not restrict himself to the genetic-definitional claim that the state arises from irreconcilable class antagonism and stop there; he also gave, repeatedly, an account of how a constant class content persists across variable institutional forms — and he clearly regarded the specific form as worth distinguishing, even while insisting it never changes the underlying class verdict. That is already a version of the distinction between state form and content my article develops. In the 1919 Sverdlov University lecture "The State," Lenin argues slave-owning states could be monarchies, aristocratic republics, or democratic republics, and "despite these differences, the state of the slave-owning epoch was a slave-owning state, irrespective of whether it was a monarchy or a republic, aristocratic or democratic." The class content is invariant; the form is not, and the form is precisely what a Marxist must investigate rather than read off from the class content directly. That is the distinction between state form and state function my article draws on from Clarke, Jessop, and Das, and it is not a rupture with Leninist state theory — it is a development of a method Lenin himself uses. Kat's letter treats any attention to institutional configuration as ipso facto a "bourgeois revision" that dissolves class antagonism into reconciliation. But Lenin thought you could hold both at once: the state is always and everywhere a machine of class rule, arising from antagonisms that cannot be reconciled, and the specific form that machine takes in a given historical situation is not deducible from that fact alone and has to be analyzed structurally. My article tries to do the second thing without abandoning the first. Kat's letter, by contrast, treats the two as mutually exclusive — which is a much narrower (see: vulgar) reading of Marxist state theory than Lenin's own!

Since the article, many have asked me what I think of the question of China and socialism: is the SME a transitional form or a settled formation, is market discipline of the party-state being contained or is it deepening? — Kat says I "avoid dealing with" the claim that qualitatively different outcomes can remain "entirely within the regime of capitalism." In fact, I don't avoid it — I decline to settle it in advance, and I say so directly, because I think that's an empirical and historical question rather than one to be answered from Engels's 1880 remarks on trusts, as quoted by Lenin. Kat is welcome to think the answer is already obvious. Asserting that it's obvious is not the same as showing my framework can't ask the question — and on Kat's own account, my framework is the one being faulted for structural precision, which is an odd complaint to make against an article whose stated purpose is to avoid answering the class-character question by fiat, from either direction.

Theryn Arnold