Alexander Gallas

The Thatcherite Offensive

In The Thatcherite Offensive , Alexander Gallas shows that Thatcherism’s unity as a political project lay in the fact that the Thatcher governments profoundly shifted class relations in Britain in favour of capital and restructured the institutions underpinning class domination.

The silent treatment of class domination: ‘Critical’ comparative capitalisms scholarship and the British state

This article is a meta-critique, from an Althusserian and Poulantzasian perspective, of critical accounts of the British state. It is based on a ‘symptomatic reading’ of key texts written by Andrew Gamble, Colin Hay and Chris Howell, which demonstrates that they misconstrue the dynamics of capitalism and the effects of state interventions and class conflict. Against this backdrop, the article outlines an approach to state analysis based on the concept of ‘capitalist class domination’, which avoids the tendency of both critical political science and comparative capitalisms scholarship to substitute the study of specific aspects of capitalism for the analysis of capitalism as a structured whole.