penguinfoot
23rd October 2010, 19:23
This is a difficult question to answer in simple terms because I would argue that Marx's understanding of the withering away of the state is closely bound up with the analyses of the state he presents in some of his early works, above all his 1843 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. I was originally planning to try explain this in really simple terms, but I can't, so here's a long extract from an essay I wrote on the subject:
The first point of reference for the essay is Marx and Engels' writings on the origins of the state, as these writings can provide a definition of the state and demonstrate what the withering-away of the state means in concrete terms, by showing which functions and forms of decision-making the thinkers saw to be necessary for human societies in general and compatible with administration in a socialist society and which they saw to be tied to the rise of the state as a distinct institution or set of institutions. Engels argues in Anti-Duhring that the entry of men into history is accompanied by equality in the conditions of their existence and an equality of social position for the heads of family units, so that there are as yet no social classes, with a social structure of this kind also continuing according to Engels “among the primitive agricultural communities of the civilized peoples of a later period”. The author further argues that these primitive communities found it necessary to execute social functions in the interests of the community as a whole such as the adjudication of disputes between members of the community who had come into conflict with one another, the repression of abuse of authority by individual members, the management of water supplies, at least in hot countries says Engels, as well as religious functions, and Engels stresses that whilst these functions were handed over to and safeguarded by particular individuals, these individuals were subject to the control of the entire community, so that they did not as yet constitute a state apparatus or anything other than a group of individuals to whom certain tasks had been delegated. In his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels elsewhere describes how society at this stage of primitive social and political development manifested itself in Germany by stressing that members of the community had equal shares of ownership in the land and equal rights of usage, with how the land was used and partitioned being a decision made by the community as a whole, and how all members had, as a result of their equal economic status, “an equal share in the legislation, administration and jurisdiction within the mark”, such that important decisions, including the selection of officials and examination of their time in office, were made at fixed times and through assemblies consisting of the whole community. Engels also takes care to note that the long history of the mark left a significant imprint on the historical memory and ethos of the German peoples, so that at later stages of development once class divisions had emerged and the mark had ceased to be an important feature of collective life there remained an assumption that the forests of rural communities should be open to all rather than protected as private property.
In spite of what may appear in this context to be a rosy picture of primitive egalitarianism, Engels continues his analysis in Anti-Duhring by contending that those who are allocated to deal with public functions are “endowed with a certain measure of authority” despite their democratic accountability, and that when primitive societies undergo certain forms of social change that do not undermine their classless condition but nonetheless introduce new social forces and complexities, such as the gradual growth of the productive forces, the increasing density of population, and the existence of communities on a larger scale then before, these changes contribute towards the extension of the division of labour between administrators and the population at large through the setting-up of “organs to safeguard common interests and combat conflicting interests” in a way that differs from the collective forms of decision-making and delegation that are characteristic of societies where these material developments have not yet taken place. It is amongst these organs, which do not yet constitute a state as such, that Engels sees the ultimate rise of a ruling class and the state proper, in that the performance of social functions is said to become increasingly independent from society to the point where the organs constitute a source of domination over and above society as a whole, not least through the “heredity of functions”, so that the servant is able to transform himself into a lord, and, through other methods such as the use of force, and uniting with other individuals in the same position, eventually constitute the basis of the first ruling class, at which point what Draper hitherto describes only as a proto-political authority becomes a state in the full sense, because it exists in a class society. Draper stresses that what is not being provided is a simplistic picture of a class plot, whereby the state pops into existence at a specific point in time in order to cater to the interests of a class that already has its roots in the relations of production, as Engels does not say that the growing independence of the leading organs is the result of the emergence of class distinctions, but that the tendency for these organs to become independent from the society that originally created them is a spontaneous consequence and arises out of the growing complexity of the community at the social and economic level, such that, for Engels, it is precisely out of the growing independence of these organs that the ruling class emerges.
What sums up the state as a distinctive set of institutions, then, is that it is needed, in Engels' words in Origins, to “hold class antagonisms in check”, such that, as Marx puts it in the Manifesto, “political power, properly so called, is the organized power of one class for oppressing another”. In this context, Draper sees the most distinctive feature of the state as being that it embodies the creation of specialized institutions and instruments of coercion that are separated from the community as a whole, in place, according to Engels in Origins, of the “self-acting armed organization of the population”, which has been rendered impossible “since the cleavage into classes”. Draper further emphasizes the importance of officialdom for the carrying-out of the new and special functions of the state, and notes that whilst it is true that the proto-political authorities of tribal communities were and are still characterized by a division of labour that involves some individuals become functionaries who devote most of their times to public and community functions, as in the case of religious leaders and tribal chieftains, the status of these individuals was temporary and did not confer ruling power, with the number of those involved always being fairly small, whereas the state bureaucracies that are characteristic of the capitalist state if not all states throughout history are both larger and made clearly separate from the population as a whole, so that the members of the bureaucracy are, for Draper, elevated above society, and invested with an aura of privilege.
Precisely because the state arises from institutions with a common purpose, Draper contends, even in the conditions of class society one of its main roles is to perform those functions which any government must perform simply in order to keep society going, even if they are not particularly advantageous to the ruling class, such that these functions, may, for Draper, take on the appearance of non-class functions in a class-bound state, although the author is also careful to note that because the class character of a society permeates every other aspect of that society, it is unlikely that these functions will be carried out in a way that reflects no class interests at all. What defines and indicates the class nature of the state for Draper, is, therefore, not that every act is necessarily and exclusively in the interests of the ruling class as such, but that all other interests “are regularly subordinated” to the interests of the ruling class, as the needs of society are shaped and distorted as they pass through the political institutions that are central to a society based on class antagonisms. What these and other issues show and why they are so important for the essay is that Marx and Engels clearly did not believe that the state was synonymous with administration or that there would be no scope for decision-making in a communist society, that is, a society of the associated producers, and although it is questionable as to whether there would be a need to perform “functions” as such in a communist society, their comments also indicate that it is possible for there to be a body that has been charged with certain tasks and has had personnel appointed to it without it being correct to describe that body as a state in the strict sense, so long as there are no bodies and institutions of coercion, “bodies of armed men” as Lenin would put it, that are institutionally separate from the population as a whole, and so long as those forms of delegation that do take place do not involve the creation of a permanent apparatus of rulers and decision-makers.
Lest it be thought that Marx believed that the state could be abolished as a matter of decree or at a definite point in time, there is also evidence that Marx feels there is an element of transition involved in the movement from the capitalist state to the classless society of communism whereby the state is maintained for some period of time in some form. In his Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, Marx accepts the need for the working class to use “forcible means, governmental means” when faced with the continued existence of class struggle and the economic conditions on which the existence of classes rest, with Marx making this point in response the allegation by Bakunin that both he and Lasalle stand for the creation of a “people's state”, and that the existence of any state necessitates the existence of another proletariat over whom the state will dominate. The proletariat is said in the same text to “employ general means of coercion” against class enemies when it is organized as the ruling class, with the aim of abolishing itself as a class, at which points its class rule is also brought to an end, and there will no longer be a “state in the present political sense”, with the existence of the transitional state not involving, according to Marx, the whole of the proletariat standing at the head of the government, or the abolition of all division of labour or authority as such, as indicated when he asks of Bakunin whether, in a trade union, the whole union forms its executive committee (the obvious answer being no, in that if this were the case any distinction between the two would be meaningless) and yet immediately after having made this point Marx still stresses that “the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune”, so that the whole of the working class will belong to the government without being at its head as such. Marx's debate with Bakunin raises the important question of the place of coercion in a communist society.
The fact that Marx emphasizes how the use of general means of coercion is specific to the transitional state suggests that he did not hold the view that the usage of coercion in specific instances is tied up with the state or that it would be impossible for a communist society to use specific coercion without risking its status as a communist society. Draper argues along these lines that proto-political societies did embody the use of forcible coercion, as distinct from those forms of coercion that may lie in the pressures of the natural world or economic forces that get people to do things without the direct application of violence, in that, according to Draper, Engels was conscious of how the German mark system involved judgements being made by the entire community against those individuals who had had transgressed the social norms of that community and how punishments directed against those individuals generally took the form of the individual being ostracized from the society, with the most important thing being that the coercion is applied by the whole of the society, such that it is a function of the community as a whole, and there is no specific institution that is distinct from the collectivity and geared towards the utilization of coercion. The emergence of classes means, for Engels, on Draper's account, that societies are no longer single blocs of interests but encompass rival interest groups, with the different interests of these groups being structurally rooted so that they cannot be resolved or overcome through the exile of particular individuals or sets of individuals, due to the rival interest groups being social classes with their roots in the production process and the division of labour in particular. As a result, the organizing authority which was formed to manage the affairs of the whole community can no longer act as the arm of the community as a whole, even if the majority sought to make it function along these lines, because there is no longer a single set of interests that can bring the whole of the community together, and there is now a need, Draper argues, for there to be special institutions that specialize in the use of coercive force and involve the use of coercion by one organic part of society against another. Although neither of them make this argument explicitly, the implication of Marx and Engels' account of what is distinctive about the state is that neither of them would have objected to the collectivity in a communist society deciding to impose punishments on individuals, not withstanding the fact that crimes would be much less frequent in a communist society once the alienation of man from man has been eliminated, as well as Marx's consistent opposition to the death penalty independent of social and political conditions, and even if it is unlikely that these punishments would be executed through permanent instruments of coercion and detention such as prisons, due to these institutions being a central part of the state apparatus for both thinkers.
The fact that, for Marx and Engels, the state is characterized by coercive institutions being separate and specialized, and organs that were once controlled by society as a whole coming to dominate the producers, raises the important question of how their and especially Marx's account of the state links to his theory of alienation, which is prominent amongst his earlier works, in that alienation is concerned precisely with humans coming to be controlled by the products of their activity. The text in which the importance of alienation for Marx's theory of the state expresses itself most clearly is his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which marks Marx's exit from the Hegelian system of absolute idealism. In emphasizing the historical nature of Hegel's categories Marx counterpoises medieval to modern societies by arguing that the Middle Ages were characterized by the convergence of economic and political activity, in such a way that Marx feels qualified to assert that the intersection of these spheres in medieval societies marked “the identity of civil and political society”, so that the “whole existence” of classes in medieval societies is political, and activities that might otherwise be seen as constitutive of the involvement of a class or individual in political life such as the payment of taxes or legislative activity were in fact only particular dimensions of their “universal political significance”. What this means, according to Seyer, is that prior to the advent of modern society, politics is the prerogative of a small and restricted group around the sovereign, with the political power of this group being the result not of political power being gained by a class that has its roots in civil society, but rather something that is inherent in the definition of the class itself, which is what Marx is saying when he contends that “they participated in legislation because they were political classes”, rather then that these classes became political classes as soon as they began to participate in legislation, having previously been classes only in the social or economic sense. The overall effect of the coincidence of political and social power in medieval societies, Sayer argues, is to specialize general concerns as the exclusive domain of the few whilst making it impossible to distinguish between civil society and the state, and what modern bourgeois society does, in contrast, is constitute the state at least ideally as the arena of public concerns and as a set of institutions that is clearly distinguished from the spheres of civil society and the family, so that individuals become citizens of the polity and enjoy equal political and legal rights at the same time as there being a process of depoliticization in civil society in the sense that the particular circumstances and interests of individuals no longer carry with them different political and legal statuses.
The extent to which modern societies are defined in terms of the institutional separation between state and civil society for Marx and the ways in which this separation introduces problems for the inhabitants of modern societies is indicated above all in his account of the bureaucracy or executive in the Critique, which in Hegel's account of ethical life is said to represent the universal class through which the state can bring human beings back to the pursuit of genuinely universal ends. The image of the bureaucracy that emerges from Marx's account is that the bureaucracy marks the separation of the state from civil society because it exists as a “closed circle from which no-one can escape” and as a “closed corporation”, with the only guarantees against malpractice on the part of bureaucrats being their entrenchment in a formal hierarchy and the fact that they are theoretically answerable to other bureaucrats who are located at a higher point in the chain of command that stretches from the top to the bottom of the political state, as well as the envisaged education of bureaucrats “in thought and ethical conduct”, with it being precisely these features of the bureaucracy and the fact that they are positioned above a civil society in which egoism is recognized as the dominant force that prevents the bureaucracy from functioning not even as a partial means to achieve universality, but instead as a partisan group in their own right, with material interests of its own that are pursued through their command of the state. The bureaucracy then does not function as a genuine agent of universality but simply becomes one more particular interest. What is important about Marx's engagement with Hegel is that his critique is not of the particular structure or activity of bureaucrats as such, considered as an isolated problem, but with the more fundamental notion of separation, as Marx is concerned that the modern world involves a separation of life into a sphere that recognizes the pursuit of particular ends and a sphere in the form of the state that appears to offer prospects for universality, the existence of this sphere being made necessary by the fact that humans do not recognize their mutual relationships in civil society, but ultimately fails in this regard, and that an arrangement of this kind is deeply incompatible with how humans should organize their societies, in order to realize their essence as human beings. In other words, what Marx is concerned with is the bifurcation of human beings into bourgeois egoists and citizens, and it is for this reason that in the Critique he asserts that “the abolition of the bureaucracy can consist only in the universal interest becoming real”, and, in On the Jewish Question, similarly emphasizes the importance of legal gains within the conditions of bourgeois society at the same time as stressing that political emancipation is by itself insufficient for the realization of human freedom.
It is in order to stress the above that Sayer argues that the communist revolution is necessarily a revolution against the state because the state as such is a form of alienation which enshrines social powers in specialized apparatuses, and undermines those social powers in the process, and that communism is about recovering those powers and exercising them directly in the material praxis of concrete individuals. For Marx, according to Sayer, the state/economy distinction is one internal to capitalism, such that the state proper is inherently and intrinsically a bourgeois form of social relationship, and an index and facet of the division of labour on which capitalism rests. Draper argues along similar lines that Marx is concerned above all in the Critique with defending democracy against Hegel's vision of ethical life. The meaning of the term democracy in the context of the nineteenth century and the intellectual circles of left-Hegelianism, according to Draper, was different from current usage insofar as it would not have been commonly preceded by the term “liberal” or associated with discussions around freedom of speech and the press, with the most radical usage of the term involving a tendency to “overlay its political content with a social one” so that it was used above all to describe the social content of a regime and not just the particular system of government. The argument around democracy that is presented by Marx in the Critique is that democracy remains the “truth” of monarchy even though monarchy may not be the truth of democracy because monarchical governments involve the whole of the people being subsumed under only one mode of existence, that is, the political state, with this being true of all other forms of state that exist alongside civil society in that they are, for Marx, “certain, determined, particular forms of the state”, in which universality is restricted, in much the same way that, for Weber, all forms of politics in the modern era are mass politics regardless of institutions, so that the novelty of democracy, understood not as the institutions that comprise the liberal-democratic state but rather as the elimination of the division between civil society and the state, is that “the abstract state has ceased to be the governing moment” and “the first true unity of the universal and the particular” is achieved. Draper argues that, whilst Marx did develop away from an analysis of the state that remained within a Hegelian problematic, it is still these concerns that remain central to his theorization of the state, in that communism is, according to Draper, best defined as the radical and complete democratization of all areas of social life.
Whilst these are intriguing issues, there is the important question of what place they have in Marx's vision of the state withering away and his theorization of the state more generally. Jessop has argued that the ideas presented by Marx in the Critique and other early texts up to The German Ideology do not deserve to be considered a near-definitive theory of the state or state power precisely because they take the form only of critiques and preliminary analyses and because they, according to Jessop, reproduce the anti-statist ideas that were widespread at the time of writing, especially in Marx's observations on the nature of bureaucracy and political representation, with these texts operating firmly within a Hegelian rather than a Rousseauian problematic, and Marx's emphasis on the role of the proletariat, whilst original when compared to Hegel's understanding of the bureaucracy, still remaining very much within the Hegelian approach, in that Marx had not yet developed the concepts of historical materialism, and was therefore unable to specify how the transition to a classless society would come about, such was his reliance on philosophical categories. It is only with The German Ideology, that, according to Jessop, we find the first general formulation of a class theory of the state, which Jessop deems central to Marx's most penetrating theoretical insights.
In order to evaluate how the theme of alienation should be related to Marx's vision of a stateless society it is necessary to look at the text where he comes closest, towards the end of his intellectual development, to presenting an analysis of how the overthrow of bourgeois political structures might come about and how these structures could be replaced, namely, The Civil War in France, in which Marx seeks to understand the events surrounding the Paris Commune. The Commune is described by Marx as the positive form of the slogan of the social republic, which had been raised in 1848, and Marx reports that the first decree of the Commune was to abolish the standing army in favour of “the armed people”, with the Commune itself being comprised of municipal councillors, elected through universal suffrage, subject to recall, and being drawn from the ranks of the working class, the same being true of the judges and magistrates, such that the Commune was able to function as “a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time”. Marx further emphasizes that the police were transformed into revocable agents of the Commune and that the officials and elected delegates of the Commune were also paid a workers' wage and deprived of the privileges that had hitherto been associated with members of the state apparatus, with the Commune effectively supplementing the elimination of the physical forces of the old government with the destruction of the spiritual apparatus on which the old government had relied for its strength, through the separation of church and state.
The most intriguing parts of Marx's account are those where he describes what the Commune might have become, had it been able to exist for a longer period of time, as the Commune form of administration would, according to Marx, have been extended to the countryside and the whole of France, even to “the smallest country hamlet”, with the affairs of the whole of France being managed through a federal system whereby the communities of each district would control their own affairs through an assembly in the central town and these assemblies would in turn send deputies to a national delegation, situated at the centre, and those responsible for the carrying out of the small number of functions that would still have to be carried out at the central level all being subject to the same basic principles of selection through universal suffrage, instant recall, and payment according to the standards of the working class. In this way, Marx stresses, the Commune form of administration would not have promoted the breaking-up of France into smaller states but would have given expression to the unity of the French nation in a way that the governments of bourgeois society were never able to do, whose relation to the nation is described as a parasitic one, so that, in sum, had it been established on a larger scale, the Commune would have “restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society”, and, insofar as the Commune form was established if only in Paris, the “great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence”, that is, its attacks on the institutional framework of the bourgeois state and its moves towards the emancipation of the working class.
So as to avoid over-simplifying Marx's understanding of the Commune, it deserves to be noted that The Civil War in France went through a number of revisions, with the first drafts having a substantially more critical orientation. As Avineri notes, Marx himself was aware when writing the first drafts that much of the social background of the Commune was not working-class, as the unwillingness of the Thiers government to extend the moratorium on rents that had been put in place towards the end of 1870 meant that the Commune was at least partly a product of the lower middle classes and it was largely because of this social composition that Marx was not surprised that many of the concrete measures that were carried out by the Commune were to the advantage of the middle classes rather than the working class, as apart from the ban on night baking as well as laws on prostitution and the abolition of certain payments, which were themselves remnants of feudal legislation, Marx could not, according to Avineri, show much in terms of laws that were passed, with it being this dimension of the Commune that led Marx to comment in the unpublished draft that “the principal measures taken by the Commune are taken for the advantage of the middle class”. Moreover, in his subsequent 1881 letter to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, Marx makes it explicit, in order to stress the role of historical conditions in shaping political possibilities, that “the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it be”, and that the best the Communards could have done was to reach a compromise with Versailles in order to benefit “the whole mass of the people”, with it also being only Engels, contrary to popular myth, who cited the Commune as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is, in any case, a highly contested and ambiguous category within Marx's writings.
In this context, Avineri seems right to argue that the reason Marx emphasized the historic importance of the Commune was that he wanted to draw out the elements that pointed towards the abolition of the state, which, for Avineri, can only be understood in terms of the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung, with its dialectical overtones of transcendence, abolition, and preservation, whereby the abolition of the state takes place through the extension of the universality that is implicit within it, with it being for this reason above all others that Marx stresses innovations such as the dissolution of the standing army and the integration of the community and the delegates it elects, as the existence of separate bodies of coercion and inadequate forms of representation are seen as central to politics in the conditions of capitalist society. Thomas similarly argues that The Civil War in France lacks the philosophical language of Marx's early writings, but that Marx is still concerned with the destructive distinction between the social and the political, so that the overcoming of the state means man coming to be the subject of his own existence instead of an object who experiences a divided form of existence and is worked on by political and economic forces that are alien to him, and coming to exercise rational control over the whole of the social totality. In sum, then, the withering-away of the state is rooted in Marx's conception of alienation in that it is concerned with re-integrating man's activities and modes of existence, through a system of administration that dispenses with separate bodies and institutions of general coercion, whilst not ruling out coercion as such when it is applied by the community as a whole, along with a system of delegation that allows functions to be performed by elected officials who are directly tied and in no way separate from the population at large, so that the allocation of these functions is not a source of domination, whilst still rooting decision-making in the whole community. It is Meszaros who best pulls these diverse strands of Marx's thought together when he contends that there is nothing mysterious about the concept of the withering away of the state, as it centrally means “the progressive reacquisition of the alienated powers of political decision-making”, and with it, the superseding of adversariality.
Apologies for the length. The bolded section just about sums it up but in this case I really think the philosophical basis is important. Here are the references:
Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1968)
Draper, Hal, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 1977), vol.1: State and Bureaucracy
Meszaros, Istvan, Historical Actuality of the the Socialist Offensive (2010)
Jessop, Bob, The Capitalist State (1982)
Sayer, Derek, “The Critique of Politics and Political Economy”, Sociological Review 33 (1985)
Thomas, Paul, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (1990)
The Draper and Sayer are especially good.
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