Marxism and the State
The question of the state is one that has been, and remains, a central issue for revolutionary politics for centuries. This is both because the question is a vital one, perhaps unsurpassed in its importance, and because it elicits such bitter divisions and disagreements among those opposed to the status quo and the capitalist system.
Between those who reject any attempt to seize state power as counterrevolutionary and authoritarian and those who prostrate themselves before bourgeois democracy and electoralism, Marxism remains, as it always has been, the most sophisticated and holistic doctrine of political thought and action. Marxism embraces the conquest of the state as an inevitable and desirable aim of the proletarian movement, necessitated by the laws of history and the facts of the reality. It does not shy away from what must be done, nor the Terror that a revolutionary state represents. What will be will be, but the workers’ movement must triumph if we are to have any future at all.
But, before we can reach any conclusion as to the correct revolutionary outlook on the state, we must first inquire as to its nature and form — what is the state?
Bourgeois States and the State in General
The state, it must be understood, is distinct from any one government. In the 1997 general election, the British Labour Party won the largest parliamentary majority in the country’s history to date; returning to power for the first time in eighteen years, it would remain there for another thirteen. But the state did not change with the ascension of Blair’s New Labour; the British state remained the same as it did under John Major. This is because the state is not an instrument of party rule, but of class rule. Both the Conservative and Labour parties were and remain bourgeois capitalist parties, and so it was not a question of a Conservative state giving way to a Labour state, but of a Conservative administration within a bourgeois state giving way to a Labour administration within the very same bourgeois state. As ever within liberal democracy, the façade of change masks a fundamental continuance.
Another important thing to grasp when approaching the issue of the state form is that it has not existed forever; it is not synonymous with power, or authority, or central planning, or large communities, or any other such things which certainly have all thrived within state structures of their various kinds. No, rather, the state, as an instrument of class rule, arose with the development of economic classes, that is, with the division of populations into competing groups based on their different relationships to the means of production:
“The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; […] 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.”¹
One of many disputes between scientific and utopian socialism (in its anarchist expression) is clearly identified in the very first section of this excerpt: the state is “by no means a power imposed on society from without;” indeed, the state is society; it is its beating heart and soul, the very thing that stops it from being torn apart in the violent, irreconcilable struggles of the competing classes. If the state is destroyed before the classes themselves are, what one will be left with is nothing less than a brutal, savage conflict acting as the preamble to the construction of a new state before order can be reconstituted anew. This is a key issue, and one which we will return to in a later section.
Here, then, we can see that pre-class society (what Engels calls the “gentile” society, also termed the ‘clan’ society and primitive communist or primitive-communal society by various other Marxist theoreticians) did not make use of the state, for they had no need of it. Sharing one relation to the means of production, these uncivilised (meaning ‘not of civilisation,’ civilisation being that epoch of human history characterised by the development of classes, spanning from the formation of the first cities in southern Mesopotamia some nine and a half millennia ago to the present and up to the future realisation of communism) populations, while often and necessarily still stratified in terms of wealth and power, were not stratified in terms of class — in terms of their relation to the means of production — and so could exist as one body of armed persons in order to seek and achieve their aims without inherent contradiction. As such, the entire community could cooperate without the need to be forced or coerced into doing so, as it was in their mutual interests. In a phrase, the monopoly on violence both actual and potential² imbued in the state form was not required for the functioning of the population as a single socioeconomic organism.
Class society, however, shattered this state of affairs:
“[A] distinguishing characteristic [of the state] is the institution of a public force which is no longer immediately identical with the people’s own organisation of themselves as an armed power. This special public force is needed because a self-acting armed organisation of the people has become impossible since their cleavage into classes [because it would be a multi-class body and thus paralysed by its contradictions, differing parts of it striving for different things yet through the same means and via the same entity]. […] This public force exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds, of which gentile society knew nothing.”³
The clearest examples of such “special bodies of armed men” (Lenin, esp. State and Revolution) in modern capitalist states are the police and the standing army, safeguarding the state against internal class antagonisms and foreign interference (which is also in large part driven by class demands) respectively. These bodies exist to defend, expand, and above all maintain the power of the dominant class of the day over and at the expense of the other classes in the society:
“As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labour by capital.”⁴
Thus, the “special bodies of armed men” do not and in the long term can not act as independent mediators between the premier classes of the day, not least because, irrespective of the historical inevitability of the ascension of one class or alliance of classes over another following key victories in the class struggle, these “special bodies of armed men” consist of humans just like any other; humans that must needs themselves occupy some place in the class system. Nevertheless, Engels does acknowledge that a somewhat independent state can and has existed in pivotal moments of the class struggle, in those short periods between the fall from grace of one class and the rise to power of another:
“Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another; and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest achievement in this line […] is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian Krautjunker [a term for a ‘country squire’ with particularly negative connotations; the aristocracy].”⁵
Consequently, it can be seen that the idea of a state which represents ‘the people’ (that most empty and deceptive of terms) is self-evidently preposterous, for such a thing is not only an impossibility in reality, but likewise an impossibility by definition, for such a state would not be a state. This is the core of the Marxist analysis on the subject: it is, first and foremost, an instrument of class dictatorship through which one class rules, either alone or in cooperation with others (such as the fragile and temporal link between the aristocracy and the bourgeois Third Estate in the French ancien régime, or the alliance of workers and peasants in many historic and contemporary socialist states), in order to administer and regulate society and attempt to control the contradictions between the classes in their society and thus stop class conflict from erupting into open violence.
This nature of the state as being the tool of a select dominant class, and of being a dictatorship that disenfranchises, in all the ways that truly matter, those from outside the ruling class, simultaneously demonstrates not just the absurdity of the accepted liberal description of the state (à la Hobbes, Mill, et. al.) as being one where “power belong[s] not to one but to all classes”⁶ and of being a largely benign entity existing for the benefit of all, but also of the need for a revolutionary workers’ movement if we wish to see our aims realised and our interests met, for their can be no workers’ power while the capitalists rule, and no capitalist power while the workers rule.
Reform and Revolution
Having established, then, that the state cannot be held in common by multiple classes, merely at best being utilised by an alliance of classes but nevertheless still possessing a single dominant class character, the question arises as to how best the working class should seek state power in order to further its aims, this essay subsequently taking as axiomatic the conquest of state power by the revolutionary proletariat as desirable.
The first strategy that we shall look at is the reformist programme of early twentieth-century social democracy (now also equivalently expressed by so-called ‘democratic socialism,’ a term, in effect meaningless, currently favoured by many of the liberal left).
Social democracy and reformism
“Communist theory in regard to the state and the revolution is characterised above all by the fact that it excludes all possibility of adapting the legislative and executive mechanism of the bourgeois state to the socialist transformation of the economy.”⁷
This strand of faux-socialism argues that, through the course of centuries of struggle, the disenfranchised have won their franchise. Liberal democracy, they believe, has been forced to open itself up to universal suffrage, and that, constituting the considerable majority of the population in the advanced capitalist nations of the earth (and indeed a great many of the underdeveloped nations preyed upon by international capitalism too), a workers’ party can, through electoralism, see itself put in power in the parliament, and in the executive.
This line of thinking is naïve on several fronts. First, it views universal suffrage as a victory of the workers, when, in fact, it is a crowning victory of the bourgeoisie’s political struggle. The bourgeoisie detest and have no place for archaic privileges, nobility and honour; the only condition for acceptance into the ruling class is ownership of a means of production — whatever race, gender, nationality or religion you hold, these will not bar you from the capitalist system (though reactionary social beliefs of course proliferate throughout the globe and greatly favour above all white cisgender men, this is by no means a unique quality of capitalism, though it has, true, elevated them to a scale hitherto unknown, as it has with all things). The granting of the vote and the right to own property to all, then, was a goal of the bourgeois revolutions since the very onset, determined to be so by their material interests even if individual bourgeoisie dismissed women, non-whites, etc. Not only does this allow a far greater degree of market competition and thus more ruthless exploitation, it also has the effect of pacifying a hostile movement — where the social democrats could have stormed the Reichstag with bayonets and rifles, they instead took their seats and engaged in the parliamentary scuffles of the day like good bourgeois politicians. Scheidemann’s republic was a capitalist, and not a socialist, republic. The blood of Luxemburg, Liebknecht and the untold thousands of the November Revolution speaks this truth plenty loud enough.
What the social democrats fail to accept is the simple truth that those with power will never willing surrender it — they must be forced. The bourgeois revolutions did not negotiate with the monarchy, or engage in faction in the royal court; no, they seized the persons of the nobility and forced them beneath the guillotine. The power of the patrician class in the ancient world was likewise broken not by polite debate in the Senate (as the fate of the brothers Gracchi, friends of the workers yet, like all Romans, patriots and republicans too, clearly shows) but by centuries of relentless war and violence that gradually severed the economic ties of the cities to the countryside, leaving the lords of the vast rural latifundia as independent and, after the shift in the centre of power away from the urban world, dominant economic centres of the day — and thus the dominant political units too.
Social democratic governments have held power in European countries repeatedly for over a century. They have achieved less than nothing. The great triumph of British ‘socialism,’ the National Health Service, founded with war-plunder from the colonies as the anti-imperialist struggle in Malaya was crushed under the heel of atrophying empire⁸ and with a proudly white supremacist character from the onset,⁹ is now dying, cannibalised by the neoliberal reforms of the Conservatives. Bourgeois democracy has won us symptom treatment, nothing more, and even that is seemingly too much for the ever-hungry bourgeoisie, who demand the nationalised industries be returned the the explicitly private sphere. They have already won the railways, the postal service, water, public transport, shipbuilding, steel, petrol — the list goes on.
Social democracy, then, is an enemy of the working class movement. It offers nothing but scraps from the imperialists’ table in order to placate the workers and forestall the revolutionary crisis, buying the loyalty of the labour aristocracy and continuing, without fault or hesitation, the imperialist project of the classical- and neo-liberals.
Anarchism and crisis revolution
“Communist theory in regard to the state and the revolution […] excludes the possibility of achieving by means of a brief violent crisis a destruction of the state and a transformation of the traditional economic relationships which the state defended up to the last moment.”¹⁰
In direct contradistinction to the reformist, social democratic approach to the state, is anarchism. The anarchist position holds that the state is an inherently oppressive and abusive entity, and that not only can the revolutionary proletariat achieve its ends without the state, but that it is only without the state that this can be done, one of the few unifying characteristics of the various anarchist tendencies being their viewing of the state as something which corrupts any revolution that takes hold of it — ‘power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely:’ this is the central theme. (The singular irony that this phrase was originally said by a member of the British political class — a Lord, no less — perhaps goes some way to showing the complete lack of objectivity in the idea.) Anarchism therefore, in its revolution, seeks to destroy both the capitalist state and capitalist socioeconomic relations in one fell swoop, and immediately to begin the realisation of what they consider to be communism; decentralisation, ahierarchism, municipalism, etc.
Anarchist revolutionary theory is eclectic and largely based around a reliance on spontaneous insurrection (caused by “brutal provocation by the government;” by “[t]he revolution’s enemies […] tak[ing] the initiative”¹¹) leading to the smashing of the state and the development of communal or purely individualist socioeconomic relations in the ruins of the capitalist society. Whereas Marxism adheres to certain means because they lead to identified ends, anarchism in practise and also often in theory makes no such distinction between the two. Anarchism is therefore regularly little more than lifestyleism, with the ‘lifestyle of the revolutionary’ being just as important as the revolutionary outcome itself.
It is not the purpose of this essay to explain and analyse the various anarchic attitudes to revolution and revolutionary theory, so it will suffice to say that anarchism, with the acknowledged caveat that within that term there exists a great many tendencies with considerable variations between them, is characterised in its outlook on revolution as being always anti-party, anti-hierarchy and anti-state and often anti-discipline and anti-organisation of any kind. Seeing as the number of anarchist revolutionary movements that have historically reached critical mass essentially amounts to one (the Free Territory) or perhaps two (the CIA-FAI government in Catalonia, neither of these being effectually anarchist) and the number of anarchist revolutions which were actually successful being zero, analysis of revolutionary action, especially in diverse and numerous enough situations to allow the development of a universal revolutionary theory or trends of action as can be done for Marxist-Leninist movements, is largely futile.
Anarchism, both in theory and in practise, is not a serious alternative to Marxism in constituting a class ideology for the proletariat. In seeking to destroy the state before the economic causes that led to its creation and proliferation to begin with have been removed, anarchism must necessarily fail, though the degree of destruction and damage to the existing régime that it can cause before it does so can of course greatly vary.
Anarchism has always been, and must necessarily remain, an idealist approach to politics, placing abstract principles and values as the highest ends and not engaging in systemic materialist analysis of capitalism and the trends of the working class movement within it (the inescapable trend towards discipline and centralisation brought about by the upheavals and demands of the Industrial Revolution chief amongst these). It is a petite-bourgeois form of politics, valuing the individual, personal rights and freedoms, moralisations and impotent ethicism. It is in its approach to the question of the state that the insufficiency of anarchism is arguably most evidently seen, as it has failed to destroy or make obsolete the state form in any of its attempts to do so.
Marxism, however, has, for over a century, led hundreds of millions of people to a successful revolutionary conclusion against even the most extreme odds, and the socialist states governed by Marxist parties under a Marxist analytic framework have made history-defining achievements in the realms of science, peace and prosperity. The question of how Marxism attempts to attain state power is, then, a critical one.
Marxism and the vanguard party
Marxism, however, is distinct from both these strategies. Marxism-Leninism, that is, the most highly developed stage of Marxism, Marxism in the age of imperialism, argues that the workers, in order to win state power, must organise themselves in a centralised, disciplined, professional revolutionary party which will play a leading role in the organisation of the working class both before and after it has gained power. It is crucial to understand that this party is neither a Blanquist conspiracy nor a syndicalist mass union nor a spontaneous anarchist uprising: it is an organisation built around a core of dedicated party cadres — professional revolutionaries — but with members of varying levels of commitment, up to and including the ordinary proletarian in his workplace. “The class party,” however, in the final analysis “can include in its ranks only a part of the class itself, never the whole nor even perhaps the majority of it.”¹²
In order to understand this, let us now quote extensively from Bordiga, who explains the development of the party, its necessity, its relationship with the class as a whole, and the insufficiency of the anarchist, the reformist, and the syndicalist positions on the organisation of the working class thusly:
“[…] [T]he concept of class must not suggest to us a static image, but instead a dynamic one. When we detect a social tendency, or a movement oriented towards a given end, then we can recognise the existence of a class in the true sense of the word. But then the class party exists in a material if not yet in a formal way. A party lives when there is the existence of a doctrine and a method of action. A party is a school of political thought and consequently an organisation of struggle. The first characteristic is a fact of consciousness, the second is a fact of will, or more precisely of a striving towards a final end. Without those two characteristics, we do not yet have the definition of a class. As we have already said, he who coldly records facts may find affinities in the living conditions of more or less large strata, but no mark is engraved in history’s development. It is only within the class party that we can find these two characteristics condensed and concretised. The class forms itself as certain conditions and relationships brought about by the consolidation of new systems of production are developed — for instance the establishment of big factories hiring and training a large labour force; in the same way, the interests of such a collectivity gradually begin to materialise into a more precise consciousness, which begins to take shape in small groups of this collectivity. When the mass is thrust into action, only these first groups can foresee a final end, and it is they who support and lead the rest. When referring to the modern proletarian class, we must conceive of this process not in relationship to a trade category but to the class as a whole. It can then be realised how a more precise consciousness of the identity of interests gradually makes its appearance; this consciousness, however, results from such a complexity of experiences and ideas, that it can be found only in limited groups composed of elements selected from every category. Indeed only an advanced minority can have the clear vision of a collective action which is directed towards general ends that concern the whole class and which has at its core the project of changing the whole social regime. Those groups, those minorities, are nothing other than the party. When its formation (which of course never proceeds without arrests, crises and internal conflicts) has reached a certain stage, then we may say that we have a class in action. Although the party includes only a part of the class, only it can give the class its unity of action and movement, for it amalgamates those elements, beyond the limits of categories and localities, which are sensitive to the class and represent it. This casts a light on the meaning of this basic fact: the party is only a part of the class. He who considers a static and abstract image of society, and sees the class as a zone with a small nucleus, the party, within it, might easily be led to the following conclusion: since the whole section of the class remaining outside the party is almost always the majority, it might have a greater weight and a greater right. However if it is only remembered that the individuals in that great remaining mass have neither class consciousness nor class will yet and live for their own selfish ends, or for their trade, their village, their nation, then it will be realised that in order to secure the action of the class as a whole in the historical movement, it is necessary to have an organ which inspires, unites and heads it — in short which officers it; it will then be realised that the party actually is the nucleus without which there would be no reason to consider the whole remaining mass as a mobilisation of forces. The class presupposes the party, because to exist and to act in history it must possess a critical doctrine of history and an aim to attain in it.
“In the only true revolutionary conception, the direction of class action is delegated to the party. Doctrinal analysis, together with a number of historical experiences, allow us to easily reduce to petty bourgeois and anti-revolutionary ideologies, any tendency to deny the necessity and the predominance of the party’s function. If this denial is based on a democratic point of view, it must be subjected to the same criticism that Marxism uses to disprove the favourite theorems of bourgeois liberalism. It is sufficient to recall that, if the consciousness of human beings is the result, not the cause of the characteristics of the surroundings in which they are compelled to live and act, then never as a rule will the exploited, the starved and the underfed be able to convince themselves of the necessity of overthrowing the well- fed satiated exploiter laden with every resource and capacity. This can only be the exception. Bourgeois electoral democracy seeks the consultation of the masses, for it knows that the response of the majority will always be favourable to the privileged class and will readily delegate to that class the right to govern and to perpetuate exploitation. It is not the addition or subtraction of the small minority of bourgeois voters that will alter the relationship. The bourgeoisie governs with the majority, not only of all the citizens, but also of the workers taken alone. Therefore if the party called on the whole proletarian mass to judge the actions and initiatives of which the party alone has the responsibility, it would tie itself to a verdict that would almost certainly be favourable to the bourgeoisie. That verdict would always be less enlightened, less advanced, less revolutionary, and above all less dictated by a consciousness of the really collective interest of the workers and of the final result of the revolutionary struggle, than the advice coming from the ranks of the organised party alone. The concept of the proletariat’s right to command its own class action is only on abstraction devoid of any Marxist sense. It conceals a desire to lead the revolutionary party to enlarge itself by including less mature strata, since as this progressively occurs, the resulting decisions get nearer and nearer to the bourgeois and conservative conceptions. If we looked for evidence not only through theoretical enquiry, but also in the experiences history has given us, our harvest would be abundant. Let us remember that it is a typical bourgeois cliché to oppose the good “common sense” of the masses to the “evil” of a “minority of agitators,” and to pretend to be most favourably disposed towards the exploiteds’ interests. The right-wing currents of the workers’ movement, the social-democratic school, whose reactionary tenets have been clearly shown by history, constantly oppose the masses to the party and pretend to be able to find the will of the class by consulting on a scale wider than the limited bounds of the party. When they cannot extend the party beyond all limits of doctrine and discipline in action, they try to establish that its main organs must not be those appointed by a limited number of militant members, but must be those which have been appointed for parliamentary duties by a larger body — actually, parliamentary groups always belong to the extreme right wing of the parties from which they come. The degeneration of the social-democratic parties of the Second International and the fact that they apparently became less revolutionary than the unorganised masses, are due to the fact that they gradually lost their specific party character precisely through workerist and “labourist” practices. That is, they no longer acted as the vanguard preceding the class but as its mechanical expression in an electoral and corporative system, where equal importance and influence is given to the strata that are the least conscious and the most dependent on egotistical claims of the proletarian class itself. As a reaction to this epidemic, even before the [First World] war, there developed a tendency, particularly in Italy, advocating internal party discipline, rejecting new recruits who were not yet welded to our revolutionary doctrine, opposing the autonomy of parliamentary groups and local organs, and recommending that the party should be purged of its false elements. This method has proved to be the real antidote for reformism […].
“There is also a different category of objection to the communist concept of the party’s role. These objections are linked to another form of critical and tactical reaction to the reformist degeneracy: they belong to the syndicalist school, which sees the class in the economic trade unions and pretends that these are the organs capable of leading the class in revolution. […] These too can be easily reduced to semi-bourgeois ideologies by a critique of their principles as well as by acknowledging the historical results they led to. These tendencies would like to recognise the class within an organisation of its own — certainly a characteristic and a most important one — that is, the craft or trade unions which arise before the political party, gather much larger masses and therefore better correspond to the whole of the working class. From an abstract point of view, however, the choice of such a criterion reveals an unconscious respect for that selfsame democratic lie which the bourgeoisie relies on to secure its power by the means of inviting the majority of the people to choose their government. In other theoretical viewpoints, such a method meets with bourgeois conceptions when it entrusts the trade unions with the organisation of the new society and demands the autonomy and decentralisation of the productive functions, just as reactionary economists do. […] It is sufficient to remark, considering the result of historical experience, that the extreme right wing members of the proletarian movement have always advocated the same point of view, that is, the representation of the working class by trade unions; indeed they know that by doing so, they soften and diminish the movement’s character, for the simple reasons that we have already mentioned.”¹³
That being, namely, that it gives, due to statistical circumstances, greater weight to the less and even least class conscious elements of the proletariat.
“Today the bourgeoisie itself shows a sympathy and an inclination, which are by no means illogical, towards the unionisation of the working class. Indeed, the more intelligent sections of the bourgeoisie would readily accept a reform of the state and representative apparatus in order to give a larger place to the “apolitical” unions and even to their claims to exercise control over the system of production. The bourgeoisie feels that, as long as the proletariat’s action can be limited to the immediate economic demands that are raised trade by trade, it helps to safeguard the status-quo and to avoid the formation of the perilous “political” consciousness — that is, the only consciousness which is revolutionary for it aims at the enemy’s vulnerable point, the possession of power. Past and present syndicalists, however, have always been conscious of the fact that most trade unions are controlled by right wing elements and that the dictatorship of the petty bourgeois leaders over the masses is based on the union bureaucracy even more than on the electoral mechanism of the social-democratic pseudo-parties. Therefore the syndicalists, along with very numerous elements who were merely acting in reaction to the reformist practice, devoted themselves to the study of new forms of union organisation and created new unions independent from the traditional ones. Such an expedient was theoretically wrong for it did not go beyond the fundamental criterion of the economic organisation: that is, the automatic admission of all those who are placed in given conditions by the part they play in production, without demanding special political convictions or special pledges of actions which may require even the sacrifice of their lives. Moreover, in looking for the “producer” it could not go beyond the limits of the “trade,” whereas the class party, by considering the “proletarian” in the vast range of his conditions and activities, is alone able to awaken the revolutionary spirit of the class. Therefore, that remedy which was wrong theoretically also proved inefficient in actuality. In spite of everything, such recipes are constantly being sought for even today.”¹⁴
This, of course, is still as true in 2019 as it was in 1921, at the time of writing.
“A totally wrong interpretation of Marxist determinism and a limited conception of the part played by facts of consciousness and will in the formation, under the original influence of economic factors, of the revolutionary forces, lead a great number of people to look for a “mechanical” system of organisation that would almost automatically organise the masses according to each individual’s part in production. According to these illusions, such a device by itself would be enough to make the mass ready to move towards revolution with the maximum revolutionary efficiency. Thus the illusory solution reappears, which consists of thinking that the everyday satisfaction of economic needs can be reconciled with the final result of the overthrow of the social system by relying on an organisational form to solve the old antithesis between limited and gradual conquests and the maximum revolutionary program. […] Revolution requires an organisation of active and positive forces united by a doctrine and a final aim. Important strata and innumerable individuals will remain outside this organisation even though they materially belong to the class in whose interest the revolution will triumph. But the class lives, struggles, progresses and wins thanks to the action of the forces it has engendered from its womb in the pains of history. The class originates from an immediate homogeneity of economic conditions which appear to us as the primary motive force of the tendency to destroy and go beyond the present mode of production. But in order to assume this great task, the class must have its own thought, its own critical method, its own will bent on the precise ends defined by research and criticism, and its own organisation of struggle channelling and utilising with the utmost efficiency its collective efforts and sacrifices. All this constitutes the Party.”¹⁵
Let us briefly recapitulate, hopefully in more succinct terms, what has been explained above.
The vanguard party consists of only the most class conscious elements of the proletariat. This is because the working class, as is also true of society at large, is consistently reactionary. This is especially true in the imperialist states as a whole, where large sections of the working class have grown fat off the spoils of imperial plunder and thus begun to work not against capital but for it, and especially in settler colonial states such as the USA, where the white working class in its entirety arguably constitutes a kind of labour aristocracy which flocks, due to the racial character of the national proletariat as a whole, to the white supremacist, fascistic, capitalist state and its ruling class. Beyond actively counterrevolutionary sentiment, however, lies simple naïveté, and however hard the party may work to raise the consciousness of the wider class (which it absolutely should) it will never be able to raise, to a sufficient degree, this consciousness in all the members of the working class or even, it must be said, in a majority of it in such countries as those of western and northern Europe and north America until after the revolutionary crisis has arisen and been met in open, physical struggle by the class party.
Because of these above mentioned things, the vanguard party directs class action, it does not follow it, for if it did, not only would it be, as Bordiga wrote, committed to “a verdict that would almost certainly be favourable to the bourgeoisie,” a verdict “less enlightened, less advanced, less revolutionary, and above all less dictated by a consciousness of the really collective interest of the workers,” but it would also be effectually pointless, simply echoing the calls and actions already made by the unorganised class as a whole. It would be, in effect, a bourgeois parliamentary party.
One key aspect of the organisation and nature of the vanguard party which is not covered in the excerpt above is that the party organises itself as a centralist party, what is far more commonly yet regrettably called democratic centralism (for the ‘democratic’ element of the system is not inherent to it and we must be careful not to elevate it to the level of principle where it is in fact merely effective within specific material conditions in which the vanguard parties have formed and operated historically; it is only the centralism that is inherent, inseparable from the party structure and class character¹⁶). Centralism can be surmised as “freedom of discussion, unity of action.”¹⁷ What does this mean? It means that the party membership engages in thorough discussion and criticism but, once a motion has been passed and a decision taken at the party level, all party members and all party organs are bound to its resolution and to actively work towards it. If genuine concern still exists over the issue then instead of splitting the party or forming a dissenting faction, a motion to discuss the issue again should be tabled. Centralism also, on a less individual level, commits lower bodies within the party or state system to decisions made by higher bodies.
The vanguard party, therefore, is a militant, revolutionary party consisting of the most class conscious sections of the national proletariat as professional revolutionary cadres, holding close links and constantly working alongside the working class as a whole in all things of importance as well as agitating and educating among them in order to raise the class consciousness of the collective, operating under a centralist principle, and working towards the violent seizure of state power through any means available. Unity, discipline and ideological integrity are the hallmarks of the revolutionary Marxist party.
The party, having won power, applies centralism to the state as a whole¹⁸ and enforces a dictatorship of the proletariat: the working class becomes the ruling class, disenfranchising all previously dominant classes and laying the groundwork for the withering away of the state itself and the establishment of post-class society.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Dictatorship and the withering away of the state
The dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing less than the final, ultimate evolution of class society, of civilisation. It is characterised by its thoroughly democratic character, which is exercised in all parts and throughout all strata of the society, and the withering away of the state as the executive organs of the society gradually lose their status as “special bodies of armed men,” simply being relegated to administrative functions serving and run by the masses of the people.
Following the immediate victory of socialist revolution, the bourgeoisie, both individually and collectively, are stripped of their material possessions, by far the most critical of these being the means of production that they own. The means of production, having been taken out of private hands, are put under the administration of the state, the workers’ state. Nationalised, industries are then progressively socialised and fully integrated into a system of public decision making and increasing degrees of worker self-management (never sacrificing regional and national cooperation and central planning, however, which will remain a feature of communism just as it is of socialism). All such progressions towards communist society are taken only so far as the material circumstances of the day will allow it, however; capitalist encirclement, war, revolution and counterrevolution all sap the resources and energy of the proletarian dictatorship, prolonging the transition away from a class society.
Many people have questioned the use of the term ‘dictatorship’ in the Marxist theory, preferring terms such as ‘proletarian democracy,’ ‘workers’ democracy,’ ‘people’s democracy,’ and so on, but this is a dangerous mistake, obfuscating the nature of this period of history as being one of open class rule. Proletarian dictatorship is precisely that: dictatorship; the ruling working class does not ask kindly for cooperation from the bourgeoisie, does not consult the mass of the people as for its opinion (as opposed to certain classes specifically), does not beg and plead before national and international capital alike, does not offer even one centimetre in concessions to our class enemies that they do not force us to give. No, it takes what it will, acts how it will, strives how it will in accordance with its class interest having thrown aside the bourgeois constructs of liberté, égalité, fraternité, of ‘human rights,’ of the endlessly vaunted ideal of democratic legitimacy; the proletariat dictates both to itself and to all others as the sole ruling class. The working class “openly asserts that its future state will be a class state, i.e. a tool wielded by one class as long as classes exist. The other classes will be excluded from the state and outlawed in fact as well as in principle.” Having taken power, the workers “will share it with no one.”¹⁹ All previous ruling classes have done the same, simply opted not to admit it in the interest of their own self-preservation as the dominant class of the day. To deny the true state of affairs, however, is to do damage to our class rule. Only when ideas of ‘freedom of speech,’ ‘freedom of the press,’ ‘freedom of expression,’ etcetera — bourgeois ideas — become introduced, clouding the political reality behind a veil of fancy words and phrases, do the material interests of the mass of humanity begin to take second place to constructed narratives of ‘workers’ democracy,’ ‘people’s democracy’ and inalienable, ‘natural’ rights. Power is best manifested naked, and the proletariat, constituting as it does the vast majority of the population in the developed nations of the world, has nothing to fear from naked truths — the truth of their own dictatorship least of all.
During the period of socialist society, the state is governed exclusively by the communist party. The proletarian state “can only be ‘animated’ by a single party and it would be senseless to require that this party organise in its ranks a statistical majority and be supported by such a majority in ‘popular elections’ — that old bourgeois trap.” Counterrevolutionary elements and threats to the revolutionary state “cannot be resolved through the recognition of formal rights nor through the process of voting within the framework of an abstract ‘class democracy’. This too will be a crisis to be liquidated in terms of relationships of force. There is no statistical contrivance which can ensure a satisfactory revolutionary solution; this will depend solely upon the degree of solidity and clarity reached by the revolutionary communist movement throughout the world.”²⁰
But this state of affairs, this tyranny of the workers upon the capitalists, this final evolution of the state, is not to last forever. Just as the state has not always existed, neither will it always exist. The state, as we have seen, arose with the development of economic classes, and so, having understood this, the obvious question then must be posed: what becomes of the state if there are no classes, if there is no disunity in the population’s relations to the means of production? In short, it “withers away” until it has disappeared entirely:
“When at last [the state] 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 our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out 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 dies out [alternatively and more famously translated as “it withers away”].”²¹
The working class, then, in laying their hands on the machinery of the state in fact lay the groundwork for its final dissolution, as, by doing away with private property (the means of production) and substituting the prior “special armed bodies” with that of the populace as a whole, it does away with the need for the state as a special apparatus of repression, leaving only its governing, administrative functions, with can be carried out by the workers without need of force and compulsion. This, then, alongside the transition to a post-scarcity, post-monetary, post-familial society and so on (things beyond the scope of this essay), marks the realisation of communism and the vanishing of the socialist epoch. It would perhaps be apt, though certainly an act of great hubris and one which begs its inevitable disproving, to call such a society ‘the end of history’. Regardless, it is the ultimate aim of the proletariat as a class, a class that must needs be liquidated by its own strivings.
Anarchism and proletarian dictatorship
Yet the anarchists, always opposed to Marxism in both theory and practise, vehemently denounce proletarian dictatorship, just as they do the vanguard party that wins and leads it. In order to understand and so refute the anarchist position, it will be useful to quote at length a section from Bakunin, still one of the landmark anarchist thinkers well over a century after his death, which captures the kernel of the anarchist criticism of Marxist theory regarding the state and the socialist state especially:
“What does it mean that the proletariat will be elevated to a ruling class [under the dictatorship of the proletariat]? Is it possible for the whole proletariat to stand at the head of the government? There are nearly forty million Germans. Can all forty million be members of the government? In such a case, there will be no government, no state, but, if there is to be a state there will be those who are ruled and those who are slaves.
“The Marxist theory solves this dilemma very simply. By the people’s rule, they mean the rule of a small number of representatives elected by the people. The general, and every man’s, right to elect the representatives of the people and the rulers of the State is the latest word of the Marxists, as well as of the democrats. This is a lie, behind which lurks the despotism of the ruling minority, a lie all the more dangerous in that it appears to express the so-called will of the people. Ultimately, from whatever point of view we look at this question, we come always to the same sad conclusion, the rule of the great masses of the people by a privileged minority. The Marxists say that this minority will consist of workers. Yes, possibly of former workers, who, as soon as they become the rulers of the representatives of the people, will cease to be workers and will look down at the plain working masses from the governing heights of the State; they will no longer represent the people, but only themselves and their claims to rulership over the people. Those who doubt this know very little about human nature.”²²
The flaws and failures of analysis in this view are many-fold and should be readily apparent to anyone who genuinely wishes the look. Bakunin is holding the inclusion of the entire proletariat within the state (something he rightly points out would represent the liquidation of the state itself) as a requisite for workers’ state power, for if otherwise, a small cabal of governing once-proletarians will become a “ruling minority” over “the great masses of the people.” But is all the bourgeois class contained within the bourgeois state? No, of course not, such an idea is preposterous; only a very small section of the bourgeoisie actually work within the state, and of these, a great many of them are petite-bourgeois, that is, of the lesser bourgeoisie who do not actually control society. But does Bakunin think that capitalist states are not bourgeois states — that the massive monopoly capitalists, the industrialists, the weapons manufacturers and their ilk, that these people are not “ruling,” are not a “privileged minority” set apart from “the great masses of the people”? He, of course, does not, yet he draws such an absurd conclusion with regard to a proletarian state. The double standards of the anarchists are here in clear view: they hold the workers’ movement to different, abstract and moralising — utopian — standards than they do the capitalist class and its organs of power, and in doing so decry any attempt to genuinely stop, abolish, and supersede the power of the capitalists by the workers as ‘authoritarian,’ as ‘tyrannical,’ as ‘dictatorial’ and all the other age-old sophisms that, lest we forget, the bourgeoisie too flung at the moribund aristocracy of the ancien régime with all their strength and polemical vitriol those centuries ago. This is why Engels rightly and famously remarked that “either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.”²³ This last point is key; irrespective of their intentions, by propagandising and even organising against socialist governments, anarchism has, in this current historical epoch, had an almost wholly reactionary character, irrespective of the dress it dons to do so.
But this is far from the only flaw in the analysis quoted above. Bakunin also posits that, instead of being a workers’ state, the socialist state will consist of “former workers,” former workers that, once they begin to rule, “will cease to be workers and will look down at the plain working masses from the governing heights of the State.” Again, do all those that work within capitalist states own capital? Do they play the stock market, run a factory, or sit on the governing board of a transnational corporation? Many do, for sure, but many more also do not. Does this stop them from working in the capitalist state, from serving the capitalists’ interests? It, of course, does not. One’s class is not simply a matter of your relationship to the means of production, though this is indeed the foundation and core of it. It is also to do with your position within the social organism — your ‘social class’ as opposed to your ‘economic class.’ Just as how the bourgeoisie, bereft under socialism of the economic ties that made them bourgeois in the first place, remain bourgeois in culture, practise, ideology and aims, so too does the worker, even if he does not work, still remain a worker in that other sense, in the sense of his loyalties, of the socialisation he underwent and continues to undergo, of his worldview and his values, his loves and his hates, his hopes and dreams and fears too. If the bourgeoisie can, having been liquidated as an economic class in the USSR by the 1930s, work towards and eventually even achieve total capitalist restoration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then the proletariat can similarly function according to their material, class interests even if they are not directly working at any one time. Again, anarchism treats capitalists and workers according to evidently different standards and demands. Even here though, we are ignoring the fact that, even if a woman may not be working as she works (the paradox of that phrase should, incidentally, be telling) in the proletarian state, it does not mean she stops being a proletarian — can she now sustain herself by any means other than selling her labour-power? Does she now control a part of the means of production? Does she have a waged workforce working under her? No, to all of these things, so in what way has she ceased to be a proletarian? Only in the immaterialist, idealist and workerist sense that anarchism demands of her.
The workers’ state is one in which, it must not be forgotten, the considerable majority of the population, for the first time in history, constitutes the ruling class. The ramifications of this are enormous, one of which being that those who rule — who administrate the society — must also work, must also build it; apparatchiki and a nomenklatura will and do exist, they must if higher state functions are to be done, but they represent only a small section of those involved in the state, and are by no means the primary way in which the state interacts with the population it governs. Does, for example, a police force in a socialist state represent a “special body of armed men”? Only in the very lowest stages of communism, as while the function of policing in capitalist states is to suppress the workers and protect private property, in a socialist state it is to protect the workers and suppress private property — there is no distinction between policeman and steelworker, either in terms of their class, their aims, their backgrounds, or any other such sense. Even when a state does certainly exist, then, that the ‘special’ bodies of it are made up of and organised by and for the statistical majority of the people makes them wholly different to those that came before.
Here, perhaps, is a manifestation of one of the foundational flaws in anarchist theory: its veneration of human nature (as it understands it, at least). Bakunin claims that “human nature” makes corruption and counterrevolutionary, anti-proletarian actions inevitable once a section of the working class seizes power. Why does he say this? What proof does he have? In a word, none. ‘Human nature’ as it is predominantly understood is nothing more than our proclivity towards certain actions within specific material contexts, which are subject to change — and thus so are the proclivities. Even if it could be established that capitalist society generates some kind of fundamental proclivity among the working class and even humanity as a whole to act out of greed, selfishness and short-termism (which is practically speaking impossible to prove anyway), it does not follow that this is inherent and unavoidable in the human animal itself as some kind of abstract template for our actions. By elevating the human creature itself to the level of pseudoreligious ideology, anarchism practises exactly the same form of ideologising that the bourgeoisie and the feudal and even patrician classes before them have long done. Marxism rightfully does not concern itself with such sophistry, with such meaningless protestations against placing power in the hands of the working class and its party. “During its lifetime the working class state will continually evolve up to the point that it finally withers away: the nature of social organisation, of human association, will radically change according to the development of technology and the forces of production, and man’s nature will be equally subject to deep alterations always moving away more and more from the beast of burden and slave which he was.”²⁴
This links closely with the final problem with Bakunin and the anarchists’ position on the state that we shall address here. Bakunin describes his fictitious once-proletarians as “look[ing] down” on the workers from the “governing heights of the State.” What does this mean? It means, in one clear sense, that Bakunin sees the state as something distinct from society, something separate from and alien to it, something parasitical and detached from the productive elements of society. But never has or will the state be something “imposed on society from without,”²⁵ something that stands above class distinctions, or gendered divisions in labour, or religious and secular ideology alike, or indeed anything else. The state is not separate from society; it is society, it is the inevitable and necessary product of a society as it exists at certain stages of historical-economic development, and without it, the society would be reduced to utter barbarism, open, ubiquitous kinetic violence, a marked decline in living standards for all, both relative and actual, a severe degradation in the quality of goods, and so on. In a word, you would have social and even civilisational collapse. This is because ‘society’ is not one harmonious thing; rather, it is the aggregate of all human social and economic relations, and these humans and their socioeconomic situations are anything but uniform. Without the state, with its monopoly on violence and its often dominant role in the cultural narrative, these contradictions — irreconcilable contradictions — would be acted out through direct, physical struggle. There are but two outcomes to such a thing: either a state will be formed anew, but only after an extended period of acute crisis dealing devastating damage to all, and so the destruction of the state (and more precisely the failure to build a new state to replace it) was not only pointless but entirely undesirable to the society, or, worse still, the construction of a new state, for whatever reason, fails, and the population collapses into a regressed state of primitive-communism. History would have been reset. There does not exist some dichotomy of society and state, only the existence of a society with a state, and if a society has a state, it needs a state, and simply seeking its destruction is entirely misguided and naïve, springing from a fundamental misconstruing of what the state is, what society is, and what one’s own material interests are. In a word, it is idealism — it is utopianism. It should be evident from the rest of this essay that the state is not something that can be simply dismantled and destroyed by force and violence; it can only “wither away” when the material conditions are right. To attempt to act outside of history as anarchism does is dangerous to all, never mind arrogant and individualist. It is a position in absolute opposition to the interests of the workers.
General remarks on the nature of class dictatorship
Mao Zedong famously taught that “[p]olitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”²⁶ Truly there is no more succinct and accurate description of politics — which is, at its core, the systematised control and regulation of violence — than this. Anything that suggests otherwise is an obfuscation; such obfuscations serve an agenda, and all but always one of the ruling class.
The class destined to vanquish class society itself has no need of the propaganda and sophistry of traditional class rule; we can, and should, state in no uncertain terms that the only rational expression of our political interests is a class dictatorship won and maintained by force of arms for the exclusive benefit of our economic class at the expense of all others. The proletarian state represents, for the first time in history, the material and thus socio-political interests of the vast majority of the people. From this simple fact an equally simple conclusion can be drawn: namely, that both when the working class is barred from power and when it holds it, it is only benefited by a frank and open understanding of the thoroughly class- and violence-based nature of state power. In the former situation, the proletarian is aware that society is organised upon his exploitation and that he has no material interest whatsoever in the preservation of the status quo, while in the latter, he sees that he should not be afraid of ‘tyranny,’ that the bourgeoisie are justly and necessarily without power and rights, and that should they be granted them, they will use them to undermine and overthrow the régime and institute terror of a previously unprecedented scale and harshness. In short, the stripping away of the pretensions and illusions of the state represent, and reinforce, heightened class consciousness.
In terms of our interests, power is best manifested naked, and as proletarians, we have, unequivocally, a side on which to fall in the class struggle. As such, our political goals must include as a matter of necessity the seizure of state power. The lessons of the Paris Commune and of all revolutionary ventures throughout history is that the revolution that does not seize state power is thwarted. Never, in all human history, has this truth been countered. What’s more, the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that it is exactly that: a dictatorship. All true communists know this to be so, and do not fear, but relish the opportunities that lie in controlling the state.
The state is a tool — a weapon, and no weapon has morals in and of itself. Only when the sword is taken up and brandished in anger does it become an instrument of war and not simply a sliver of metal. The state is much the same. The anarchic view of the state is one of an enemy of ‘the people,’ one that is inherently undesirable and wretched, whoever straddles it. Marxism is not so naïve, not so utopian: the state serves her masters, and serves them well; when the working class reigns, the state delivers its Terror upon the counterrevolution and with it the socialist society can progress, in time, to a communist one. Without it, the working class movement is simply destroyed the instance the bourgeois reaction can organise itself anew.
Marxism is scientific socialism; it is not utopianism. It would be false and misleading to claim that Marxism has ends; rather, it merely has analyses and observations. In their scientific study of the march of history and the intricacies of the capitalistic mode of production, the Marxists have discovered and laid out the series of progressions and laws that, hopefully, this essay has allowed the reader to understand, if only in brief: that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,”²⁷ that the working class must smash the existing bourgeois state, that the working class must create its own state to serve its own needs, and that this state must inevitably be the last stage of the state in all history. Marxism does not talk of that which is impossible; only that which is possible. The triumphs of the working class movement during the twentieth century prove this to be so, but much that was won has since been lost. As the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene deepens, the need to place power in the hands of the workers intensifies with every passing week towards a singularly apocalyptic zenith. In the past, Marxists have rightly given the slogan socialism or barbarism?, but today, that is no longer sufficient: today, it it must be socialism or extinction?
In matters of war and revolution, liberalism’s façades are quick to fall from the eyes of the class conscious worker. The premier and central issue of working class politics must be the conquest of state power. Only then can we change the world.
Citations:
¹ Engels, Friedrich. “Barbarism and Civilisation.” The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. 1884.
² See: Bordiga, Amadeo. “Actual and Potential Violence.” Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle. 1946.
³ (See note 1)
⁴ (See note 1)
⁵ (See note 1)
⁶ Bordiga, Amadeo. § IV, ¶ XII. Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party. 1951.
⁷ Ibid. § III, ¶ II
⁸ See: Curtis, Mark. “Malaya: War in Defence of the Rubber Industry.” Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World. 2003.
⁹ See: Cohen, Steve. “Social services, community care and immigration status.” Immigration Controls, the Family and the Welfare State. 2001.
¹⁰ Bordiga, Amadeo. § III, ¶ II. Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party. 1951.
¹¹ Luxemburg, Rosa. ¶ VIII, IX. Order Prevails in Berlin. 1919.
¹² Bordiga, Amadeo. Party and Class. 1921.
¹³ (See note 12, italics my own)
¹⁴ (See note 13)
¹⁵ (See note 13)
¹⁶ See: Bordiga, Amadeo. § V. The Democratic Principle. 1922. Bordiga himself argued for the term ‘organic centralism,’ but I find this to be simply confusing and unnecessary; ‘centralism,’ without any prefixes or qualifications, surely serves best to describe and capture the essence of all proletarian organisation.
¹⁷ Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. “The Congress Summed Up.” Report on the Unity Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. 1906.
¹⁸ See: Article 3 of the Constitution and Fundamental Law of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (“The Soviet state is organised and functions on the principle of democratic centralism, namely the electiveness of all bodies of state authority from the lowest to the highest, their accountability to the people, and the obligation of lower bodies to observe the decisions of higher ones.”), 1977, and Article 3 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (“The State organs of the People’s Republic of China apply the principle of democratic centralism.”), 1982.
¹⁹ Bordiga, Amadeo. § IV, ¶ III. Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party. 1951.
²⁰ Ibid. § IV, ¶ XII
²¹ Engels, Friedrich. “Socialism,” ch. II, Theoretical. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. 1878.
²² Bakunin, Mikhail Alexandrovich. “Critique of the Marxist Theory of the State.” Statism and Anarchy. 1873.
²³ Engels, Friedrich. On Authority. 1872.
²⁴ Bordiga, Amadeo. § III, ¶ III. Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party. 1951.
²⁵ (See note 1)
²⁶ Mao Zedong. “The War History of the Kuomintang.” Problems of War and Strategy. 1938.
²⁷ Marx, Karl Heinrich and Friedrich Engels. “Bourgeois and Proletarians.” Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.
