The state refers to the sum total of all the legislative, judicial and executive organs: the parliament and state legislatures, the courts and prisons, the civil administration including the police, the military and paramilitary forces and so on. The basic principles and policies of a modern state are enshrined in its constitution, which makes it another constituent — the ideological-political embodiment — of the state. The latter is run by governments, which are liable to change every few years even as the state remains unchanged for much longer periods of time. The difference (and the relation) between the state and the governments (central and provincial) is thus akin to that between a machine and its operators. Bourgeois and Social-democratic parties clamour for changing only the operators, revolutionary communists work for changing both the operators and the machine.