The Workers International League FAQ
Marxism and the StateMarx explained that the executive branch of the modern state is but a committee for managing the affairs of the ruling class. In other words, the modern state is a tool of the ruling class, which it uses to defend its interests as against the interests of the vast majority of society. An understanding of the Marxist conception of the state, how it arose, what it represents, how the bourgeois state is to be replaced by a workers state, and ultimately how the state will disappear altogether is of vital importance for Marxists. Lenin's classic work The State and Revolution summarizes the past experience of the working class and the writings of Marx and Engels on this topic. It should be the starting point for all Marxists studying this important aspect of Marxism. The following brief excerpts should give the reader a basic understanding of the Marxist conception of the state, but only by exploring this subject in full can it really be understood in full. "The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state." (From The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, By Frederick Engels) This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable. Engels continues: "As distinct from the old gentile [tribal or clan] order, the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory...." This division seems "natural" to us, but it costs a prolonged struggle against the old organization according to generations or tribes. "The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes.... This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing...." Engels explains the concept of the "power" which is called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command. We are justified in speaking of special bodies of armed men, because the public power which is an attribute of every state "does not directly coincide" with the armed population, with its "self-acting armed organization". The maintenance of the special public power standing above society requires taxes and state loans. "Having pubic power and the right to levy taxes," Engels writes, "the officials now stand, as organs of society, above society. The free, voluntary respect that was accorded to the organs of the gentile [clan] constitution does not satisfy them, even if they could gain it...." Special laws are enacted proclaiming the sanctity and immunity of the officials. "The shabbiest police servant" has more "authority" than the representative of the clan, but even the head of the military power of a civilized state may well envy the elder of a clan the "unrestrained respect" of society. "Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class...." The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, "the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both...." Such were the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in Germany. "The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe." Since the explosion of World War I, which resulted in the deaths of millions of young workers in uniform, the nation state has been an absolute hindrance to the development of the productive forces and the betterment of humanity on a world scale. It must be done away with through the seizure of political and economic power by the working class. "The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation. But it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for its own time, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our own time, of the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free people's state', both as to its justifiable use for a long time from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists' demand that the state be abolished overnight." (From Anti-Duhring, By Frederick Engels) The workers' state from its inception begins to wither away. Despite the wishes of the anarchists, the state, money and the bourgeois family cannot be abolished overnight. Only when the material conditions are sufficiently developed can they be relegated to the "Museum of Antiquities" as Engels put it. They have to exhaust their historic mission. They cannot be administratively abolished. Prior to that, the task of the state is to bring about these conditions. In the first instance, the workers' state cannot allow everyone to work "according to their abilities", as much as he or she wishes, nor can it reward everyone "according to their needs", regardless of the work they do. To begin with, the workers' state acts as a powerful lever for stimulating the growth of production. This can only mean the application of the methods of wage labour developed by capitalism. As all wants cannot be immediate satisfied, and scarcities will remain for a period, people will be allocated their share of production on the basis of the wages they earn. In other words, the workers' state will initially be forced to defend the inequalities of wage labour, i.e., bourgeois norms of distribution. After allocating a proportion to investment and the social services, the remainder will be shared out by society in the form of wages. On this point, Marx corrected Lassalle's mistake that the new society would guarantee straight away "equal right of all to an equal product of labour". Marx said that "equal right" is in reality a violation of equality and an injustice left over from a situation of scarcity, of class society: "As far as the distribution of the latter [means of consumption] among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity-equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form. Hence, equal right here is still in principle - bourgeois right." (MESW, Critique of the Gotha Programme, by Marx, Vol. 3, p. 18.) This first phase of the new society cannot yet provide complete equality: differences in income will still continue to exist, although the gap between the highest and lowest paid will be drastically reduced. "One man is superior to another physically or mentally," states Marx, "and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard" (Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 18, emphasis in original.) In other words the effort of workers is rewarded by the wages they earn. This does not take into consideration their different needs. As Marx goes on to explain the differences between one worker and another: "One worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal. "But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby." (Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 18-9, my emphasis.) In other words, the first stage of communism (socialism), cannot yet provide complete justice and equality: differences, and unjust differences, in wealth and income will still exist for a period, although general living standards will be massively raised. Society cannot at this moment permit everyone to work "according to their abilities", nor can it reward everyone "according to their needs", regardless of the work they do. The workers' state will oversee the relation between these two antagonistic features, ensuring the final domination of the socialist tendencies and the liquidation of the state. Thus this new state assumes a dual character: socialist in as far as it defends nationalised property relations, and bourgeois in so far as the distribution of goods and services is carried out by capitalist methods of wage labour. However, by using bourgeois norms of distribution, the productive forces will be propelled forward and will serve socialist objectives in the last analysis. Nevertheless, as Lenin points out, the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because the means of production will remain social property. This fact alone cannot remove the defects of distribution and the inequality of bourgeois law. The immediate abolition of capitalism does not provide the material basis for an immediate classless society. It is a means to an end. The state itself - although a semi-state - sees its role as to safeguard this bourgeois law, which still sanctifies a certain inequality in society. With the further development of the productive forces and the attainment of communism, the state and the other vestiges of capitalism disappear. "So long as the state exists there is no freedom," says Lenin. "When there is freedom, there will be no state." (LCW, Vol. 25, p. 473.) Basing himself on the experience of the Paris Commune, Engels had written: "In order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment." To ensure that the state will not be transformed "from servants of society into masters of society - an inevitable transformation in all previous states - the Commune made use of two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all posts - administrative, judicial and educational - by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added besides". (MESW, The Civil War in France, by Marx, Vol. 2, pp. 187-8.) Taking as his point of departure Marx and Engels' analysis of the Paris Commune, Lenin put forward four key points to fight bureaucracy in a workers' state in 1917: 1) Free and democratic elections to all positions in the Soviet state, "We shall reduce the role of state officials," wrote Lenin, "to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modest paid 'foremen and accountants' (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution." (LCW, Vol. 25, p. 431.) Marx went on to explain how bourgeois law disappears in the higher stage of communism: "After the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" (MESW, Critique of the Gotha Programme, by Marx, Vol. 3, p. 19.) It is clear from the above excerpts that the Marxist theory of the state is extremely complex. Only a thorough study of these ideas can give us the theoretical grounding we need in order to develop a correct strategy, tactics, slogans, and methods in relation to the revolutionary transformation of society. Recommended further reading:
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