1.  A modern capitalist state can not openly use coercive powers to help one class accumulate capital at the expense of others.

2.  Through mounting intervention to sustain a profitable economy, capitalist states are haphazardly establishing a wholly new arena of political confrontation.

3.  In short, capitalist states were becoming thoroughly entangled in a set of conflicts from which they could not easily extricate themselves.

4.  The capitalist state has to perform two essential but often contradictory functions.

5.  A modern capitalist state cannot openly use coercive powers to help one class accumulate capital at the expense of others.

6.  One of the most important advances in contemporary Marxist thinking about bureaucracy resulted from a debate about the significance of the social origins of bureaucrats in the capitalist state.

7.  The propertied class is overrepresented in the governing institutions of all advanced capitalist states.

8.  The relative importance of the bureaucracy of capitalist states therefore depends on the distribution of class power within society.