The state in a capitalist society ensures that society makes profit for the few, it protects private property relations, administers a capitalist economy and represses dissent. Youth workers help create beautiful things in young people. While the core purposes of the two are incompatible, in periods of active class struggle the state is forced to concede many beneficial public arrangements like healthcare, social protection, welfare and education. Through taxation it creates publicly available revenue that can then be fought over in terms of political priorities for expenditure. It is a paradoxical beast. The state stands over and above governments whose powers, especially under the Lisbon Treaty of the EU, are actually quite limited. And as we have seen recently, governments are also helpless in the face of the power of the financiers.

Youth workers experience the best and worst aspects of the state every day. It is both an organism over and above society, and an instrument of obvious forms of coercion and less obvious forms of consent making (Mandel, 1978; Negri, 1999). It has dominant coercive forms of management and integrative, ideological ones in which the range of ideas that benefit the rulers are promoted and reduplicated. Its integrative functions are achieved through instruction, education, culture and control over promotion into leading civil service, military, media and administrative positions. At its pinnacle are a relatively small group of finance capitalists, media moguls, key state officials and armed service personnel (Aaronowitch, 1961; Paxman, 1990).

The elite

A relatively small but elaborate breeding ground of public schools and universities grow their own for the upper echelons of this state machine (Hartmann, 2007). In Britain’s case the state functions according to a particularly strange set of unwritten constitutional conventions. These are somehow glued together by a peculiar compromise with a dysfunctional family that owns more land throughout the world than anyone else put together (Gray and Tomkins, 2005; Temple, 2008; Bogdanor, 2009). It arises from a closed circle of close acquaintances sharing similar outlooks.