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Title: Marx & the State
Author: Conor McLoughlin
Date: 1995
Language: en
Topics: Karl Marx, marxism, the state, Red & Black Revolution
Source: Retrieved on 8th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/rbr/rbr1_marxstat.html
Notes: This article first appeared in Red & Black Revolution No 1.

Conor McLoughlin

Marx & the State

“Indeed how do these people propose to run a factory, operate a railway

or steer a ship without having, in the last resort, one deciding will,

without single management they do not tell us[1]

Engels

Since the Nineteenth century Marxism and anarchism have confronted each

other as the two dominant strains of revolutionary thought. Some

Marxists claim that in fact Marxism is not a statist or vanguardist

ideology. Like all Marxists they also generally dismiss anarchism as

utopian, marginal and non-scientific.

The aim of this article is to show that Marx and Engels were deeply

ambiguous on the nature of the state and the party, and that the

criticisms by anarchists of them were and remain valid.Far from being

utopian anarchism has the same materialist origins as Marxism and, far

from being marginal, has had a huge influence among workers since the

nineteenth century. As Daniel Guerin put it:

“Anarchism and Marxism at the start , drank at the same proletarian

spring” [2]

Since then many anarchists have, unfortunately, tended to demonise Marx.

The genius of Marx and Engels was in the way they were able to combine

the materialism of Hegel [sic] with various economic theories to come up

with a critique of capitalism. By Marx’s own admission Capital his major

economic work is a synthesis of ideas from right-wing economists like

Adam Smith to socialists like the Irishman William Thompson.

One of Marx’s main contributions was to popularise the labour theory of

value (though he was not the first to come up with this idea). Put

crudely this is the idea that all material goods or commodities have

another value besides their actual usefulness (or use-value). This value

is determined by the amount of labour required to produce them. The

capitalist does not pay this full value in wages (which only provide

enough to feed and maintain the worker) the rest is held back as surplus

value or profit.[3]

Thus workers have a real material interest in overthrowing capitalism.

As well as this Marx pointed to capitalism’s tendency to bring workers

together in large workplaces where they can struggle together. This

creates the social basis for labour organisation and the realisation of

collective class interests.

Before Marx socialists were aware that workers were exploited but they

had no explanation of the economic basis of this exploitation. The

mechanics of capitalism were not understood.

Bakunin and his followers fully accepted this and other ideas in Marx’s

critique of capitalism. In fact Bakunin began the translation of Capital

into Russian and the Italian anarchist Carlo Cafiero published a summary

of the same work in Italian.

With regards to materialism Bakunin begins his seminal work God and

State [4] by clearly taking sides. He asks:

Who are right, The idealists or the materialists? The question, once

stated in this way, hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the

idealists are wrong and the materialists are right

What are the divisions between anarchists and Marxists? You don’t need a

degree in political science to figure out the major one:

The State

Marx and Engels saw the State as being a product of class struggle. It

was the executive committee of the ruling class. It was an instrument by

which one class rules another. In most of their writings they seem to

see the State as a neutral tool. It can be taken and used by either

workers or capitalists.

Their classical political statement is The Communist Manifesto [5]. In

its 10 main demands it calls for the centralisation of credit, transport

and means of production under the State. This is justified (according to

Marx) because:

“political power, properly called, is merely the instrument of one class

for oppressing another”

Here we have the idea of the State as a tool to be used by either class

(capitalists or workers).

In his Comments on Bakunin [6] Marx claims that the workers:

“must employ forcible means hence governmental means”

This is a common trend in Marx and Engels thinking (see also first

quote). Kropotkin describes it well as: [7]

“the German school which insists on confusing the state with society”

Workers will probably have to use force in a revolution but why does

this imply a government?

Bakunin vigorously opposed the Marxist conception of the State. The

State was more than simply a product of class antagonism. If the

programme of the manifesto was realised then a new bureaucratic class

based on it rather than the market could arise. This for Bakunin would

have nothing to do with socialism:

“The most fatal combination that could possibly be formed , would be to

unite socialism to absolutism” [8]

Bakunin was right. Getting rid of competition and the law of value did

not stop the Leninist states from being class societies. The state

embodied the interests of the ruling class and extracted profit from

workers by brute force and ruthless exploitation. The state failed to

wither away. The prediction by Engels that the seizing and centralising

of property would be the state’s last official act[9] proved to be a

sick joke on the workers of the Stalinist countries.

At the end of the day no state can encapsulate the interests of the

masses better than the masses themselves. As Bakunin says in ‘The Paris

Commune and the Idea of the State’ [10]:

“where are those brains powerful enough and wide ranging enough to

embrace the infinite multiplicity and diversity of the real interests,

aspirations, wishes and needs whose sum constitutes the collective will

of the people?”

Marx the Libertarian?

Of course many libertarian Marxists will point out that Marx and Engels

did sometimes move beyond the position of the Manifesto on the State.

After the 1848 uprising in Berlin and the Paris Commune of 1871, for

example. In The Civil War in France (1871) Marx says that the State has:

“assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital

over labour...of an engine of class despotism...”

Therefore:

“the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made State

machinery and weld it for its own purposes”

and the liberation of the working class cannot come about without the

destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the

ruling class

He also calls for self-government of the producers and delegation from

communes to higher organs of power by recallable delegates. However even

here he fails to outline with any precision the forms of workers

self-rule which might emerge: the ideas of worker’s councils, militias,

collectives on the land etc. (all of which are taken up by Bakunin in

Letters to a Frenchman (1871)

In his 1850 Address to the Communist League (again a comparatively

libertarian and revolutionary speech) Marx comes closest to outlining

this by saying that workers must:

“immediately establish their own revolutionary governments, whether in

the form of municipal committees and municipal councils or in the form

of worker’s clubs or worker’s committees”

Marx the Democrat

However if you were to pick up the 1895 edition of this address you

would be confronted by a new introduction by Engels. In it he informs

us:

“The mode of struggle of 1848[11] is today obsolete in every respect”

Why? Simple:

“They [the German workers] rendered a second great service to their

cause...they supplied their comrades in all countries with a new weapon,

and one of the sharpest, when they showed them how to make use of

universal suffrage”

He quotes Marx[12] on how voting had been:

“transformed by them from a means of deception, which it was, into an

instrument of emancipation”

“We are not so crazy as to let ourselves be driven to street fighting in

order to please them (the bourgeois) ”

says Engels in 1895

However in Marx’s 1869 Critique of the Gotha Programme and in an 1879

letter by the two to Bebel, the German Social Democratic Party is

savagely attacked for supporting parliamentary elections:

“We cannot therefore co-operate with people who openly state that the

workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves”

Confused? You should be. Marx and Engels are about as consistent (in

their writings on the state) as a Labour Party manifesto and at many

stages actually sound like such a manifesto. We are treated to Marx the

democrat, the communist, the partisan of workers control and Marx the

fan of representative democracy. The state, to Marx and Engels was just

the executive committee of a particular class. Once capitalism went so

would the State.

“Do away with Capitalism and the State will fall by it-self ”

says Engels (On Authority 1872).

Tragically he was wrong. As we shall see Marx’s and Engels ambiguity on

this springs from deeper problems. In fact, there are major problems in

their whole conception of socialism.

What is socialism?

The anarchist answer to this question is that socialism, at base, must

be about freedom. A society run collectively to maximise the amount of

choice available to the individual. A society based on satisfying the

needs and wants of many and not on the profit of the few, with full

participation at all levels.

A revolution is a conscious act by workers to liberate themselves from

the constraints of class society. It is a subjective act.

There is a fundamental contradiction in Marxism between subjective and

objective.[13] Humanity according to Marx goes through a series of

distinct historical stages based on ever increasing levels of

production. Certainly it is true that the level of production in a given

society does determine the range of possibilities open to those trying

to change it. However Marx tends to reduce all human development to this

single cause. Just as feudalism gives way to capitalism, so capitalism

gives way to socialism. He leaves out or minimises the importance of

other variables like the role of political institutions, culture,

ideology and individuals. To Marx all these ‘subjective’ things are

totally conditioned by the ‘objective conditions’ of economic

development.

Social and political systems rise and fall because of their ability or

inability to materially improve the life of their populations. Each new

order arises because it does a better job at improving production than

the old one. The transition from socialism to capitalism is seen by him

as coming about as inevitably as the change from slavery to feudalism.

Here Marx is wrong. For the first time in history a transition from one

social system to another requires mass participation. Capitalism, like

feudalism and the systems that went before, already contains the seeds

of its own destruction in that it creates its grave-diggers: the working

class. But Marx in much of his later work went way beyond this and

implied that the death of capitalism was inevitable:

“Capitalist production begets with the inexorability of a law of nature

its own negation ... ”

(Capital Vol. I, p 837)

Further on, in the same chapter he even goes so far as to describe

capitalism as:

“already practically resting on socialised production”

Or, as he puts it in Grundrisse (notes for Capital) :

“beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production

becomes a barrier for capital “ Its “violent destruction” must come

about “as a condition of its own preservation”

This is pure determinism. It takes away the central role of people in

changing their own destiny. It removes workers, as thinking and acting

individuals, from the centre stage. It ignores the very seeds which

might blossom into revolution: the workers. If the destruction of

capitalism is inherent in its own evolution then there is no reason to

fight against it. If maximising production is the key then why not work

harder to help it along?

In fact, historically, capitalism,with increasing productivity, has been

very slow to disappear. Instead it has become more centralised and

bureaucratic, with the state playing an increasing role. So the leopard

has changed its spots a little. But the monopoly capitalism of today has

no more resemblance to socialism than the free enterprise capitalism of

Marx’s time.

This idea was to be taken up and expanded on by Lenin who believed that:

“Socialism is merely a state capitalist monopoly which is made to serve

the interests of the whole people and to this extent has ceased to be a

state capitalist monopoly” [14]

As I have said already this is the exact opposite of socialism.

Socialism is about freedom and collective participation, not some

bureaucratic dictatorship or state capitalism.

Bakunin is particularly good on the topic of ‘scientific’ socialism:

“History is made, not by abstract individuals but by acting, living and

passing individuals” [15]

He opposed the idea of the political scientists leading humanity by the

nose to an enlightened dictatorship:

“What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life against

science, or rather against the government of science, not to destroy

science, that would be high treason to humanity, but to remand it to its

place so it cannot leave it again”

It is worth noting, to be fair, that the young Marx did consider the

subjective element especially in works like his 1844 Economic and

Philosophical Manuscripts where he declares that the political form of

the destruction of private property will be “Universal human

emancipation”

However the later writings of Marx and Engels concentrate more and more

on the outcome of capitalist development and less and less on how to win

workers to revolution. This combined with a blind respect for authority

(see starting quote) leads Marxism to be a great recipe for incipient

dictatorship even assuming the best intentions of the two authors.

The political ideas of Marx and Engels (despite their excellent economic

analysis of capitalism) are ambiguous and contradictory. Even at their

best they in no way approach the clarity and depth of Bakunin’s

conception of socialism.

[1] Engels On Authority (1872).

[2] in Anarchism and Marxism (1973).

[3] This is only a very simple picture. In reality there are a host of

other factors such as competition that reduces prices, mechanisation

that reduces the amount of labour, costs of raw materials and energy

etc, but further explanation is outside the scope of this article.

[4] Written in 1872.

[5] First published in 1847 and continually reprinted in unaltered form.

(If you disagree with an original position you usually change it in your

next version!)

[6]

1874.

[7] The State, its Historical Role (1897).

[8] Bakunin on Anarchy (edited by Sam Dolgoff) p.4

[9] Anti Duhring (1878).

[10] Written just after the commune in 1871 and published in 1878.

[11] Revolution, workers self government and all that

[12] Preamble to the Constitution of the French Workers Party (1880).

[13] Objective conditions are those over which the individual has no

control. For example whether it rains or not tomorrow. One could,

however, take the subjective decision to bring an umbrella.

[14] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 25 p358

[15] Both quotes from God and State (1872)