The State Under Contradictory Conditions

[The Vegan Marxist]

What is the State? Is it an oppressive bureaucracy in which controls & exploits those who are oppressed under said State, or does it act as a tool for the oppressed to re-oppress the bureaucracy in which threaten their very lives? In other words, is it State A or State B? Well, under these two enactions, we are only visualizing the State based on its actions, but the reasoning behind said actions remains unclear, until now. If one was to ask "the anarchist" (& please understand that, when I say "the anarchist", I am only referring to the majority of anarchists, whereas the minority of anarchists, as I have witnessed, see the State under a Marxist analysis) on what they see as the State, they clearly define it under the ideal that it "naturally" operates itself - as I have defined it - as State A. But is the State, as "the anarchist" defines it, under such a natural order?

How exactly does something act under a "natural order"? Well, if one was to look at it under religious terms, one would say the State acts under its own embodiment, in which is clearly illogical & untrue. If one puts it under a scientific perspective, then one would realize that the State acts merely based on those who control it. Meaning, if the State acted under a natural order, the natural order would have to be first created by those who control the State. All this does is create another religious fixation on the State, as "the anarchist" has defined it, for it bases itself under the belief of "human nature", instead of human conditioning. So does that mean State A acts under a religious fixation? Quite the opposite, for the State, as I have defined it under State A, is clearly different than how "the anarchist" defines State A. State A, as I have defined it, acts under a set of present conditions instead of, as "the anarchist" defines it, under a natural order.

So does that mean that State B, while under contradiction from State A, is untrue? No. And this is where things get interesting. The State enacts itself under both State A & State B. Though, because both State A & State B are in contradiction from one another, that would mean there's a contradiction between both set of conditions in which both States operate under. But what are State B's set of conditions, & why are they in contradiction from State A's set of conditions? To understand this transition from State A to State B, one must first understand how both Marx & Engels defined it. State A - or the bourgeois State as Marx defines it - must be abolished as the conclusion from violent revolution, in which the proletarian class - working class - enacts itself as rulers of the State. What both State A & State B have in common is their acts of oppressment. Where, under State A, oppressment is lead by the bureaucratic elite against the working class, oppressment, under State B, is lead by the working class against the reactionary, elitist elements who had survived after the conclusion of violent revolution. This is the contradiction between State A & State B's set of conditions. As the conclusion to the newly conditioned State of oppressment, State B does not then become abolished like State A did, but rather State B merely withers away, for it no longer has any need by those that controlled it, nor to act against those that opposed it.

So in conclusion, where "the anarchist" see's the State as their "natural" enemy, in which leads them to the ideal that the State must be abolished immediately, we can logically find ourselves to oppose such a flawed ideal. Whereas we understand the State through three things, under a scientific analysis:

the State does not act under a natural order;
there is more than one kind of State;
both States operate under a different set of conditions which contradict from one another.
Because of this understanding, we, the working class, know how to rid ourselves from the State through the proper set of conditions & proper set of actions.

"As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free people's state', both as to its justifiable use for a long time from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists' demand that the state be abolished overnight." ~Friedrich Engels

Red Love & Salutes!

[King of Frogs]

I am replying to this as a currently unaffiliated libertarian socialist. I state this firstly because I hesitate to call myself either an orthodox Marxist or an anarchist, even though I have sympathies with both camps and secondly because I wish to emphasise that I have no party line to put forward and am merely speaking off the top of my head according to my own principles.

I think you make a mistake in analysing the point of view of "the anarchist". You state that they consider the state to run itself under a "natural order", and oppose that to the Marxist idea of the state being a tool for control of the means of production, and thus has a more mercurial ethical position dependant on which class is in control.

I do not think that you are giving the anarchist position enough credit here. If we take Marxism and anarchism to be two positions which make claims about natural processes within society (which I will show below), then we can more helpfully distinguish their positions.

Marxism takes the position that there is a natural process which allows at some point in history, a small group of people to come into ownership of the means of production for all goods within society, and that there is a further natural process of the power relations which this ownership creates. Furthermore, it (or in many aspects of Marxism anyway) claims that there is a natural process between the ownership of the means of production and the general running of society, the class conflict. This natural process is normally called dialectical materialism.

Anarchists in general would not deny that the ownership of the means of production in society is a very important part of the power relationship between those who weild it and those who do not. However, anarchist thought also claims that those who own the means of production are not the only ones with self-interest who can set the agenda for society.

The natural process which anarchists subscribe to is that all the other locuses of power which come into being in society have self interest too. For example, religion has an interest in maintaining its own position in society, as, if religious leaders genuinely believe in what they are preaching (or need to appear to genuinely believe), the souls of the population need to be saved and so religious groups will act on their own as sources of influence and power relations, often hitting off against other sources of power, such as the state.

What you forget about anarchist thought here is the idea that institutions in society create their own kinds of class, the religious class, the beurocratic class, the industrial class, the landowning class etc etc, and that these power structures do not all act in the same way.

To clarify, if we were to have a revolution tomorrow and the world was somehow swept over by the Christian Socialist movement, we may get rid of the economic relations between the bourgousie and the proletariat, but the power structure of the christian church would remain in society because the church has an interest in maintaining its own power, despite what the economic relations are.

The same goes for the state (and is a very useful critisism of where the Soviet Union went wrong). The state creates its own privelage by vesting power in the hands of a beurocracy. What Engels describes as a mere "running of things" is exactly where the power interests of the beurocracy lie. And it is very much to do with human conditioning, as the people involved in these nexuses of power are conditioned, by those already present to consider the continued power of their institution to be extremely important, no matter what their class background; which is why you will find that the Bolshevik and Tsarist beurocracies worked in very similar ways. The problem wasn't that the economic relations hadn't changed enough, for they had changed considerably, it was that the power lay in a nexus, in a minority of people with an ideologically vested interest in maintaining their own positions of authority.

I hope this hasn't been too long or convoluted.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Thank you for this, & no it wasn't too long at all. I understand where you're getting at when it comes to the class-relations within separate institutions, but you fail to point out the reasoning behind why such institutions act the way they act. Though, I'm sure you knew this already & it's quite obvious, so why post it in the first place, right? Well, either way, I'll point it out.

You gave an example of a post-revolutionary power-hold by a Christian Socialist movement. Yes, the economic relations between the bourgeoisie & the proletariat could be eliminated, & yes, this still doesn't grant the independence from certain power structures, for the christian churches teachings behold such institutions in the Christian Socialist's way of thinking. But fact of the matter is that these are merely conditionings from those who rule this State, in which is the conditionings of the Christian institutional thought structure. The contradictions between that & the proletarian state is essentially the same as the contradictions between the bourgeois state & the proletarian state, for they both operate under a different set of conditionings.

So it really doesn't matter if a State is still in power. What does matter is what set of conditionings are running said State. In which, when we compare the bourgeois state with the proletarian state, under the analysis of how it is being run, we'd find a major difference between the two. Yes, both will operate under the acts of oppressing, but how it's operated determines its contradictions from other State institutions.