What sort of thing is the state?

You have been penned in, kettled, assaulted and arrested. You have had your protest broken up, your occupation invaded, your picket line disbanded. Now you're facing something called 'Total Policing'. Wherever you try to organise, you confront the state as the constant factor in your disorganisation. Whether 'personated', as Marx puts it, by the riot cop, the senior civil servant, or the coalition minister, you find it is always there, resourceful, organised, centralised, almost always one or two steps ahead, almost always with a monopoly on political initiative. Of course, the state represents itself as a popular, democratic institution, upholding the general will, maintaining law and order as the condition for the full participation of each in the political community. Yet your experience suggests that something else is at work, and you have to ask: what sort of thing is the state? Is it even a thing? Is it an autonomous power over and against society, or does it 'represent' sectional (class) interests within it? Is it an 'instrument' of the powerful or a venue of contestation? What are its boundaries? Where are its weaknesses? How does its power accumulate, and disintegrate?