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There are two distinct conceptions of the relation between society and the state as a function of politics. The first is the liberal-progressive view, the second is the Marxist view.

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The Liberal Progressive Conception of the State

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The Liberal Progressive Conception of the State

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In the liberal-progressive view, the state is a positive force to be used by democratic society in order to address problems that emerge in society. This kind of politics is exemplified by FDR's New Deal.

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There have been many interpretations and versions of Marxism throughout history. Marxism is most often understood as a socioeonomic theory which privileges class relations and economic factors for understanding history. This popular understanding reduces Marxism to sociology, and on the Left it is currently considered by most to be bad sociology because it does not recognize the importance of social structures beyond economic ones in shaping the modern world. Thus, its import is basically reduced to economics and Marxism is viewed as a theory which gives an inadequate explanation of how the capitalist economic system works which must be supplemented by other theories which illuminate other aspects of society. The truth is, however, that Marxism is neither sociology nor economics, but rather a method for grasping social reality in order to change it. It is a method intended to act as a guide to action for a particular historical social group, the proletariat. Furthermore, it is a historically specific method, i.e. a method whose formulation and practice was made possible by specific historical circumstances, and whose validity is limited to those circumstances. To the extent that society remains unchanged since the time of Marx and Engels, however, and even after the disaster for Marxism that was the 20th century, it is still worth examining the Marxist conception of the state.

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The Marxist view of the state was propounded by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884):

The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the moral idea,” “the image and the reality of reason,” as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.

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The state emerges from society in order to manage a contradiction in society that society itself can no longer manage. With the advent of the industrial revolution, wage labor became inadequate to the social appropriation of industrial production. In other words, the potential that industrial forces of production held out for maximum human freedom and self-development could not be realized through the outdated social relations of bourgeois society. Rather than lightening the day's toil (as John Stuart Mill expected), the industrial revolution brought with it a pernicious combination of over-work and unemployment. Capitalism is the permanent crisis of bourgeois society: the contradiction of bourgeois social relations (i.e. wage labor, private ownership of the means of production) and industrial forces of production.

The effect of this self-contradiction of bourgeois society in industrial production is the division of capital and labor. It is from this division that the classes of workers and capitalists derive. The class struggle between workers and capitalists is a phenomenal expression of the self-contradiction of capitalism. For Marxists, the division of modern socioeconomic classes is not the cause of the problem of capitalism but rather its effect.

Writing in the 19th century, Marx recognized that the state took on an executive character far above the self-contradiction of society through industry not to overcome that contradiction, but to manage its effects. In the Marxist view then, the state is not a positive force for democratic good but the negative expression of bourgeois society’s self-contradiction. The state is a negative index of the inability of bourgeois society to regulate itself: this is because the value of labor as a measure of social wealth was rendered historically obsolete by the industrial forces of production it unleashed.

Note: Bourgeois society is analogous to Adam Smith's commercial society.

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But for Marx, if bourgeois society overcame its industrial self-contradiction, then the need for a state would wither away. Engels continues:

"The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong - into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax."

The advent of a truly classless society would make the state, a force dominating society, superfluous. The governing of people and the special bodies of armed men (police, prisons, standing army, border patrol) which characterize the modern state could be replaced by the administration of things and the self-acting armed organization of the population. In this way, Marx stands in continuity with the deeper roots of liberalism. His difference with progressive liberalism was in the way he saw the social question posed through the state as society was revolutionized by industrialization. For progressive liberals, the state would reconcile society’s various antagonisms; for Marx, the state is an index of the inability to reconcile them and therefore an index of the continued need to overcome the problem of capitalism. Of course, this would be possible only through the self-organziation and self-education of the working class through its party (independent of the state and existing political parties) into a self-conscious social-political force capable of leading society as a whole on an international scale.

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Cutrone, The End of the Gilded Age:
platypus1917.org/2017/12/02/end-gilded-age-discontents-second-industrial-revolution-today/

Engels, On the Orgin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm

Montgomery, The New Deal and Progressive Liberalism: platypus1917.org/2020/02/01/the-new-deal-and-progressive-liberalism/