For analytical purposes - and less savory propagandistic purposes for that matter - capital is often posited as an entity entirely distinct from the state. But for all intents and purposes, those analytically or rhetorically separated entities are one and the same. The one in its current form would not exist without the other, and the two perpetuate each other.
The odd part of it is the way in which this perpetuation is carried out. We see an unsteady continuity miraculously held firm by the clashing actions of classes positioned against each other, lurching from crisis to crisis. It could be that this antagonism partially accounts for the analytical and rhetorical separation of the sectors, but conceptually, this juncture has a complicated cultural and intellectual history, and I digress.
Capital, left to itself, continues to expand indefinitely, all the while exhausting the resources and living systems that it relies on. Upon some sector of society threatening to blow up, or the whole of society itself growing unsteady, capital finally relents to a set of regulations and controls set forth by the state, to save capital from itself, and which also serves, of course, to temporarily free the state from the hateful gaze of its constituents.
This all happens after the state has been plenty busy cultivating the environment that capital needs to flourish: markets must develop after societies have been thoroughly separated from the land, and law must be crafted and contracts and private property must be enforced and held in place through violence, for starters.
On the other side of the coin, the state, with its multi-tiered local, statewide, national, and international ambitions of governance, requires infrastructure. It requires lines of communication, transportation, data management, procurement of resources for its stewards and constituents, instruments of violence, and etc.
And so the state is very much interested in keeping capital inflated and running properly. That beast - or perhaps, that god - has an appetite and a set of desires of its own. Sometimes it fears the waves of destruction it sets forth and shrinks back, and sometimes it proceeds confidently and arrogantly, resenting any sort of outside interference.
These distinctions account for the unique dynamics of such a human system over time, but the system is still a unitary whole, no matter its pretensions to minimize a given part of itself at an expedient point in time.
