A.R.Amistad
21st April 2010, 16:55
I've seen a lot of comrades have been confused on the difference between a "government" and a state. I thought I'd post these definitions from MIA to help clarify for anyone who wanted to know the difference between the two, and how one can have a government in a stateless society:
MIA
State
The state is the institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/l.htm#class) of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. Thus, it is only in a society which is divided between hostile social classes that the state exists:
“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.” [Lenin, 1917, The State and Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s1)]
Since the objective of socialism (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/o.htm#socialism) is the self-emancipation of the working class and the overthrow of capitalism, the first task of the proletariat is conquest of state power:
“the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” [Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm)]
The machinery of violence that the bourgeoisie has selected, trained and appointed for the purpose of hoodwinking and crushing the workers can hardly be of much use to the working class however:
“the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. ... The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.” [Marx, Civil War in France (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm)]
While the conquest of state power is necessary to prevent the capitalists from restoring capitalism and to create the conditions for a genuinely free association of producers:
“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” [Critique of the Gotha Program, Chapter 4 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm)]
The workers’ state is however quite a different kind of thing as compared to the bourgeois state. The whole point is to do away with the exploitation of person by person and do away with class divisions, and do away, therefore, with any need for a state:
“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 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 withers away.” [Frederick Engels Anti-Dühring (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm#054), Part III, Ch. 2]
Historical Development: In Tribal Society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/t/r.htm#tribal-society), the division of labour (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm#division-labour) was organised generally around gender and age and family ties, and no special organisation of violence was required to enforce these relations. In tribal society, people produced only just enough to keep themselves and their community, and did not produce any surplus (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/u.htm#surplus-value), so there was little room for exploitation.
Increases in the productivity of labour arising from the development of agriculture opened the possibility for slavery. With the influx of outsiders into the ancient cities, or as a result of conquests, large numbers of slaves were acquired. Slaves could be made to work and a surplus extracted form their labour, and this meant that for the first time, a special organisation of violence, a state, was necessary.
Thus Slave Society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/l.htm#slave-society) created a state for the purpose of keeping the slaves in check; the slaves lay outside society and had no rights, and were counted as property in just the same way as the livestock.
“The increase of production in all branches – cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts – gave human labour-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labour forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labour, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labour was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labour arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited. [Origin of the Family, Chapter 9 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm)]
After the collapse of slave society, Feudal Society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/f/e.htm#feudal-society) grew up in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. Here an organisation of violence was needed for defence against outsiders, in just the same way as the tribe had had to defend itself against invaders. However, this organisation for self-defence grew up on the basis of agriculture and a much more developed, class-based division of labour. Feudal society was characterised by an immensely developed class structure built around kinship relations.- Kings, Princes, Barons, Bishops, Monks, Yeomen and Serfs, each had their own, though by no means equal, rights and obligations, including property (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#property) and well-defined rights of inheritance.
The important thing about feudal society is that the state did not appear to stand above society; feudal society was in a sense one big state, a hierarchy in which everyone had their place, both king and serf; the king and his yeomen were an integral part of the state. The relation of every person to the state was defined through kinship relations just as was their role in the social division of labour.
With the expansion of trade, a class of merchants, with ever increasing wealth, embryonic capital, accumulated outside the feudal system. The introduction of sheep and cattle grazing pushed millions of peasants off their land, to wander the countryside as paupers. Processes of this kind brought about a “bourgeois society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/b/o.htm#bourgeois-society)” in the midst of feudal society as a realm of economic activity lying outside feudal right, unregulated by the ethics (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/e/t.htm#ethics) and traditional relations of feudal society, and laid the basis for the Industrial Revolution.
The vast network of kinship relations characteristic of feudal society was shattered; on the one side remained the family, which still survives in the residual nuclear family household of today; on the other, was the political pinnacle of feudal society, the kingly state. This state was successively weakened and undermined by the growth of bourgeois society.
The bourgeoisie had to break the power of the feudal state in order to develop trade and industry and to protect their own class interests, and the first bourgeois revolution was Oliver Cromwell’s English Revolution of 1640; later came the French Revolution of 1789. There was of course nothing democratic or peaceful about these revolutions, by means of which the conditions for capitalist accumulation were created.
Bourgeois theory of the State: The bourgeois theory of the state was developed by Thomas Hobbes (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/h/o.htm#hobbes-thomas), who saw the state as necessary to prevent society descending into “a war of all against all (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/decive1.htm#115)”. For John Locke (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/l/o.htm#locke-john), the role of the state was to preserve property and personal freedom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/r/o.htm#rousseau-jean-jacques) held that the state was based on a social contract (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/o.htm#social-contract) binding all members of a society, while Hegel (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/h/e.htm#hegel) saw the state as an expression of the Universal Will and opposed the idea of the state as a guardian of property, which he saw as the role of Civil Society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/i.htm#civil-society). Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prconten.htm), pointed out that the state expressed the conflicts in “civil society”, and its separation from the family and civil society was characteristic of the emergence of modern (i.e. bourgeois) society. For Hegel, the State was the “March of Reason in the World”.
In his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch05.htm#050), the young Marx criticised Hegel’s conception as the “society of mutual reconciliation” and insisted that the conflict between labour and capital could not be reconciled and that the state was therefore necessarily an expression of the dominant forces within bourgeois society – capital (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/a.htm#capital).
So under capitalism, a special organisation of violence is required to maintain the conditions of legalised theft on which capitalism is based. This state must give the appearance of standing above the conflicts of bourgeois society.
“In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now present themselves as organs of society standing above society. The free, willing respect accorded to the organs of the gentile constitution is not enough for them, even if they could have it. Representatives of a power which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability. The lowest police officer of the civilised state has more “authority” than all the organs of gentile society put together; but the mightiest prince and the greatest statesman or general of civilisation might envy the humblest of the gentile chiefs the unforced and unquestioned respect accorded to him. For the one stands in the midst of society; the other is forced to pose as something outside and above it.” [Frederick Engels Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3.1)]
The state therefore develops into what appears to be genuinely an expression of the will of the whole people:
“political recognition of property differences is, however, by no means essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage in the development of the state. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out – the democratic republic no longer officially recognises differences of property. Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, and themselves have their own center in the stock exchange. ... And lastly the possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage. As long as the oppressed class – in our case, therefore, the proletariat – is not yet ripe for its self-liberation, so long will it, in its majority, recognise the existing order of society as the only possible one and remain politically the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing.” [Origins of the Family (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3.1)]
The meaning of the working class “winning the battle of democracy” [Communist Manifesto (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm)] is clear then. The working class must be ready for its self-liberation when it overthrows the capitalist state. Once the working class is ready and able to take the power, the parliamentary façade with which the state has surrounded itself will be thrown aside, and workers will face the institution of organised violence which the state has always been from its beginning.
“On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand.” [Origins of the Family (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3.1)]
Postmodern (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/o.htm#postmodernism) theorists, on the other hand, minimise the significance of the State, generally holding that power has been so decentred by the complexity and freedom of postmodern capitalism that an authoritarian and repressive state is an impossibility. Instead they look to interpersonal relations as the mechanism for oppression (sexism for example, is not enforced so much by a patriarchal state and sexist laws, but by the interpersonal coercion of millions of women by millions of men). This conception is however an illusion possible only for people living in relatively privileged conditions in imperialist countries. The power of the state is obvious to workers having their picket lines busted by police, or Palestinians having their homes blown up by Israeli soldiers.
Marxists refer to this “bourgeois democracy (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/b/o.htm#bourgeois-democracy)”, in which people vote once every four or five years in huge geographical electorates to elect representatives to sit in a legislature which never has a chance of legislating socialism, as dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm#dictatorship-bourgeois). Every one has equal rights (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/r/i.htm#right), but everyone does not have equal power. Bourgeois democracy is a façade masking class dictatorship.
“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.
“The state has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organises production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong – into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” [Origins of the Family (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3.1)]
The State and Socialism: When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm) in 1848, they could only sketch the idea of how the working class could achieve public political power and abolish capital in the most general terms:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class”.
When the Parisian workers actually took power in 1871, Marx could give this conception a more concrete form:
“Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.
“The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. ... the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. ...
“The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.
“The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.” [Civil War in France, Chapter 5 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm)]
Thus Marx saw that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat was to be in fact the most thoroughgoing proletarian democracy. Proletarian democracy (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#proletarian-democracy) differed from bourgeois democracy in a number of crucial ways: all positions of authority were elected, and all elected officials were subject to recall at any time, and were paid at the same level of wages as ordinary workers, and above all it was a participatory democracy, that is to say, those who were responsible for carrying out a particular task, at whatever level, were responsible for deciding how it should be done. Free education and free health care would create conditions for all to participate equally.
This thoroughgoing democracy constituted a dictatorship of the proletariat (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm#dictatorship-proletariat) precisely because, stripped of their power to use their money to control parliament and forced to submit to majority vote, not just in elections every few years, but in the workplaces and schools, everywhere, under such conditions the rule of the majority would be not a farce but a reality. The small minority of wealthy capitalists would be prevented, against their will, from exercising the power of money, they would be denied the right that they enjoy under capitalism, to rule the roost.
The Paris Commune (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm) only lasted a few months before it was drowned in blood by the counter-revolution. Marx criticised the Commune for allowing the reactionaries to escape from Paris and organise the bloodbath, but the world would have to wait till 1917 before we would witness the next occasion when the working class would seize political power – in the Russian Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/revolution/index.htm).
The Soviet State was confined within it’s own borders and cut off from trade with the rest of the world – blockaded, invaded and starved. Under these conditions, Stalinism (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/t.htm#stalinism) grew up, and destroyed the revolution from within.
The Marxist idea of a state which – having no counter-revolutionary forces and capitalists to suppress, because the power of capital has been eradicated from the face of the Earth – slowly fades away, opening the way to communist society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#communism), has yet to be seen, but remains an ideal which inspires millions.
“Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialised, into state property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state.
“Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an organisation of the particular class, which was pro tempore [for the time being] the exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The state was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie.” [Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part III, Ch. 2 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm#054)]
Further Reading: Communist Manifesto (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm), Anti-Dühring (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm), Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm), Lenin's The State and Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm), Hegel's Philosophy of Right (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prstate.htm#PR257), Critique of the Gotha Program (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm).
Government
Government is the institution which exercises public political power in society. Government is a fairly vague term, and should be distinguished from the state (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/t.htm#state), as understood by Marxists, being the social entity which survives many “changes of government” and includes not only the elected officials of the legislature, but particularly includes the unelected police-military machine, which from time to time throws the parliamentarians into prison.
In the modern era, governments have legitimate legal authority for a finite period of time over a finite geograhical domain. Developments in telecommunications and particularly the internet have made this geographical delimitation of government problematic. States on the other hand recognise no such boundaries and frequently act outside the borders of their home country.
MIA
State
The state is the institution of organised violence which is used by the ruling class (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/l.htm#class) of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule. Thus, it is only in a society which is divided between hostile social classes that the state exists:
“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.” [Lenin, 1917, The State and Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s1)]
Since the objective of socialism (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/o.htm#socialism) is the self-emancipation of the working class and the overthrow of capitalism, the first task of the proletariat is conquest of state power:
“the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” [Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm)]
The machinery of violence that the bourgeoisie has selected, trained and appointed for the purpose of hoodwinking and crushing the workers can hardly be of much use to the working class however:
“the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. ... The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.” [Marx, Civil War in France (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm)]
While the conquest of state power is necessary to prevent the capitalists from restoring capitalism and to create the conditions for a genuinely free association of producers:
“Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” [Critique of the Gotha Program, Chapter 4 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm)]
The workers’ state is however quite a different kind of thing as compared to the bourgeois state. The whole point is to do away with the exploitation of person by person and do away with class divisions, and do away, therefore, with any need for a state:
“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 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 withers away.” [Frederick Engels Anti-Dühring (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm#054), Part III, Ch. 2]
Historical Development: In Tribal Society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/t/r.htm#tribal-society), the division of labour (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm#division-labour) was organised generally around gender and age and family ties, and no special organisation of violence was required to enforce these relations. In tribal society, people produced only just enough to keep themselves and their community, and did not produce any surplus (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/u.htm#surplus-value), so there was little room for exploitation.
Increases in the productivity of labour arising from the development of agriculture opened the possibility for slavery. With the influx of outsiders into the ancient cities, or as a result of conquests, large numbers of slaves were acquired. Slaves could be made to work and a surplus extracted form their labour, and this meant that for the first time, a special organisation of violence, a state, was necessary.
Thus Slave Society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/l.htm#slave-society) created a state for the purpose of keeping the slaves in check; the slaves lay outside society and had no rights, and were counted as property in just the same way as the livestock.
“The increase of production in all branches – cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts – gave human labour-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labour forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labour, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labour was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labour arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited. [Origin of the Family, Chapter 9 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm)]
After the collapse of slave society, Feudal Society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/f/e.htm#feudal-society) grew up in Europe, Asia and elsewhere. Here an organisation of violence was needed for defence against outsiders, in just the same way as the tribe had had to defend itself against invaders. However, this organisation for self-defence grew up on the basis of agriculture and a much more developed, class-based division of labour. Feudal society was characterised by an immensely developed class structure built around kinship relations.- Kings, Princes, Barons, Bishops, Monks, Yeomen and Serfs, each had their own, though by no means equal, rights and obligations, including property (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#property) and well-defined rights of inheritance.
The important thing about feudal society is that the state did not appear to stand above society; feudal society was in a sense one big state, a hierarchy in which everyone had their place, both king and serf; the king and his yeomen were an integral part of the state. The relation of every person to the state was defined through kinship relations just as was their role in the social division of labour.
With the expansion of trade, a class of merchants, with ever increasing wealth, embryonic capital, accumulated outside the feudal system. The introduction of sheep and cattle grazing pushed millions of peasants off their land, to wander the countryside as paupers. Processes of this kind brought about a “bourgeois society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/b/o.htm#bourgeois-society)” in the midst of feudal society as a realm of economic activity lying outside feudal right, unregulated by the ethics (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/e/t.htm#ethics) and traditional relations of feudal society, and laid the basis for the Industrial Revolution.
The vast network of kinship relations characteristic of feudal society was shattered; on the one side remained the family, which still survives in the residual nuclear family household of today; on the other, was the political pinnacle of feudal society, the kingly state. This state was successively weakened and undermined by the growth of bourgeois society.
The bourgeoisie had to break the power of the feudal state in order to develop trade and industry and to protect their own class interests, and the first bourgeois revolution was Oliver Cromwell’s English Revolution of 1640; later came the French Revolution of 1789. There was of course nothing democratic or peaceful about these revolutions, by means of which the conditions for capitalist accumulation were created.
Bourgeois theory of the State: The bourgeois theory of the state was developed by Thomas Hobbes (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/h/o.htm#hobbes-thomas), who saw the state as necessary to prevent society descending into “a war of all against all (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/decive1.htm#115)”. For John Locke (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/l/o.htm#locke-john), the role of the state was to preserve property and personal freedom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/r/o.htm#rousseau-jean-jacques) held that the state was based on a social contract (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/o.htm#social-contract) binding all members of a society, while Hegel (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/h/e.htm#hegel) saw the state as an expression of the Universal Will and opposed the idea of the state as a guardian of property, which he saw as the role of Civil Society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/i.htm#civil-society). Hegel, in his Philosophy of Right (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prconten.htm), pointed out that the state expressed the conflicts in “civil society”, and its separation from the family and civil society was characteristic of the emergence of modern (i.e. bourgeois) society. For Hegel, the State was the “March of Reason in the World”.
In his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/ch05.htm#050), the young Marx criticised Hegel’s conception as the “society of mutual reconciliation” and insisted that the conflict between labour and capital could not be reconciled and that the state was therefore necessarily an expression of the dominant forces within bourgeois society – capital (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/a.htm#capital).
So under capitalism, a special organisation of violence is required to maintain the conditions of legalised theft on which capitalism is based. This state must give the appearance of standing above the conflicts of bourgeois society.
“In possession of the public power and the right of taxation, the officials now present themselves as organs of society standing above society. The free, willing respect accorded to the organs of the gentile constitution is not enough for them, even if they could have it. Representatives of a power which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability. The lowest police officer of the civilised state has more “authority” than all the organs of gentile society put together; but the mightiest prince and the greatest statesman or general of civilisation might envy the humblest of the gentile chiefs the unforced and unquestioned respect accorded to him. For the one stands in the midst of society; the other is forced to pose as something outside and above it.” [Frederick Engels Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3.1)]
The state therefore develops into what appears to be genuinely an expression of the will of the whole people:
“political recognition of property differences is, however, by no means essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage in the development of the state. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out – the democratic republic no longer officially recognises differences of property. Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, and themselves have their own center in the stock exchange. ... And lastly the possessing class rules directly by means of universal suffrage. As long as the oppressed class – in our case, therefore, the proletariat – is not yet ripe for its self-liberation, so long will it, in its majority, recognise the existing order of society as the only possible one and remain politically the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing.” [Origins of the Family (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3.1)]
The meaning of the working class “winning the battle of democracy” [Communist Manifesto (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm)] is clear then. The working class must be ready for its self-liberation when it overthrows the capitalist state. Once the working class is ready and able to take the power, the parliamentary façade with which the state has surrounded itself will be thrown aside, and workers will face the institution of organised violence which the state has always been from its beginning.
“On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand.” [Origins of the Family (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3.1)]
Postmodern (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/o.htm#postmodernism) theorists, on the other hand, minimise the significance of the State, generally holding that power has been so decentred by the complexity and freedom of postmodern capitalism that an authoritarian and repressive state is an impossibility. Instead they look to interpersonal relations as the mechanism for oppression (sexism for example, is not enforced so much by a patriarchal state and sexist laws, but by the interpersonal coercion of millions of women by millions of men). This conception is however an illusion possible only for people living in relatively privileged conditions in imperialist countries. The power of the state is obvious to workers having their picket lines busted by police, or Palestinians having their homes blown up by Israeli soldiers.
Marxists refer to this “bourgeois democracy (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/b/o.htm#bourgeois-democracy)”, in which people vote once every four or five years in huge geographical electorates to elect representatives to sit in a legislature which never has a chance of legislating socialism, as dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm#dictatorship-bourgeois). Every one has equal rights (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/r/i.htm#right), but everyone does not have equal power. Bourgeois democracy is a façade masking class dictatorship.
“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.
“The state has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organises production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong – into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.” [Origins of the Family (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm#3.1)]
The State and Socialism: When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm) in 1848, they could only sketch the idea of how the working class could achieve public political power and abolish capital in the most general terms:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class”.
When the Parisian workers actually took power in 1871, Marx could give this conception a more concrete form:
“Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.
“The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. ... the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. ...
“The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.
“The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.” [Civil War in France, Chapter 5 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm)]
Thus Marx saw that the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat was to be in fact the most thoroughgoing proletarian democracy. Proletarian democracy (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#proletarian-democracy) differed from bourgeois democracy in a number of crucial ways: all positions of authority were elected, and all elected officials were subject to recall at any time, and were paid at the same level of wages as ordinary workers, and above all it was a participatory democracy, that is to say, those who were responsible for carrying out a particular task, at whatever level, were responsible for deciding how it should be done. Free education and free health care would create conditions for all to participate equally.
This thoroughgoing democracy constituted a dictatorship of the proletariat (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm#dictatorship-proletariat) precisely because, stripped of their power to use their money to control parliament and forced to submit to majority vote, not just in elections every few years, but in the workplaces and schools, everywhere, under such conditions the rule of the majority would be not a farce but a reality. The small minority of wealthy capitalists would be prevented, against their will, from exercising the power of money, they would be denied the right that they enjoy under capitalism, to rule the roost.
The Paris Commune (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm) only lasted a few months before it was drowned in blood by the counter-revolution. Marx criticised the Commune for allowing the reactionaries to escape from Paris and organise the bloodbath, but the world would have to wait till 1917 before we would witness the next occasion when the working class would seize political power – in the Russian Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/revolution/index.htm).
The Soviet State was confined within it’s own borders and cut off from trade with the rest of the world – blockaded, invaded and starved. Under these conditions, Stalinism (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/t.htm#stalinism) grew up, and destroyed the revolution from within.
The Marxist idea of a state which – having no counter-revolutionary forces and capitalists to suppress, because the power of capital has been eradicated from the face of the Earth – slowly fades away, opening the way to communist society (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#communism), has yet to be seen, but remains an ideal which inspires millions.
“Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialised, into state property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state.
“Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an organisation of the particular class, which was pro tempore [for the time being] the exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The state was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie.” [Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, Part III, Ch. 2 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm#054)]
Further Reading: Communist Manifesto (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm), Anti-Dühring (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm), Origin of the Family, Private Property & the State (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm), Lenin's The State and Revolution (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm), Hegel's Philosophy of Right (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prstate.htm#PR257), Critique of the Gotha Program (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm).
Government
Government is the institution which exercises public political power in society. Government is a fairly vague term, and should be distinguished from the state (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/t.htm#state), as understood by Marxists, being the social entity which survives many “changes of government” and includes not only the elected officials of the legislature, but particularly includes the unelected police-military machine, which from time to time throws the parliamentarians into prison.
In the modern era, governments have legitimate legal authority for a finite period of time over a finite geograhical domain. Developments in telecommunications and particularly the internet have made this geographical delimitation of government problematic. States on the other hand recognise no such boundaries and frequently act outside the borders of their home country.