[...] This is what Gramsci and Poulantzas, in their own ways, said too. At present, the state, within its territory and in its participation in multilaterial institutions and contracts, is the essential means by which capital's hegemony is legitimized and protected. Consequently, it is the principal institutional means by which to influence the distribution of the material means for human well-being. At least in the near term, the state's legitimacy as the mechanism of distribution is axiomatic: it is the legitimate mechanism of distribution within its territory because it is the state. Via a suite of widely accepted domains of responsibility--taxes, fiscal spending, monetary governance, social programs, labour regulation, market oversight, etc--the state is the distributional centre of gravity. If mass anticapitalist movements are to emerge in the global North, at least, then anticapitalists must work to gain control of this hegemonic distributional mechanism. [...]