Why the state is less a progressive force these days

From where I stand, I don’t think that the progressive counterpart to the market is the state. I think it should be culture, very broadly defined – culture where it encompasses the knowledge and practices of communities.

Amy Kapczynski in https://www.the-syllabus.com/ts-spotlight/post-neoliberal-moment/conversation/amy-kapczynski

And what’s wrong with the state as a progressive counterpart? Here’s one answer consistent with “communities” as an alternative:

Liberal forms of planning involve both the extension and the conscious self-limitation of the state’s responsibilities. Liberal planning redraws the boundary between the realm of political authority and the realm of free market activity without ever abolishing it. . . .The current tensions in the governance of capitalism may be best captured, not in terms of a struggle between competing hegemonic projects, but as a struggle internal to the state. This struggle consists of the political difficulties in managing the state’s impulse to mitigate the various crises of contemporary capitalism while affirming its liberal form. . .Capitalist states across the world are called to manage the consequences of the global economy’s entrenched tendency towards economic stagnation, financial instability, persistent underemployment and the accelerating climate crisis. . .Yet neither planning nor market-making offer a durable solution. The sources of crisis emanate from the mode of social interaction in civil society, not the administrative measures of the state. As long as commodity exchange constitutes the mode of socialisation in the economic realm, the state can at best palliate the socially destabilising tendencies of capitalist growth, not arrest them, no matter the scale of intervention.

Alexis Moraitis in https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08969205241303445 (my bolding)