Question on the State?

[Jacob Cliff]

Engels (I think) writes that the state is a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms, and that it exists to ensure that class society doesn't tear itself apart. To me, and maybe this is an incorrect interpretation, this sounds as though the state is an unbiased player: that it is serving to simply make sure society is stable rather than just enforce class rule. Is the state an "unbiased player" that can be swayed, at times in a political democracy, from capital to labor or is the state an organization of direct class rule (in this case by the bourgeoisie) to "hold down" the working class, and uphold its own class society?

On a completely unrelated note, just because I don't wanna make two posts: why does the proletariat need the state? Couldn't they destroy the reaction without using state power? It seems that every attempt at socialism without a state did pretty well until it was actually crushed by 'socialists' using the state (for an example, the black army being annihilated in Ukraine, the anarchists in Spain).

[Sewer Socialist]

Engels (I think) writes that the state is a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms, and that it exists to ensure that class society doesn't tear itself apart. To me, and maybe this is an incorrect interpretation, this sounds as though the state is an unbiased player: that it is serving to simply make sure society is stable rather than just enforce class rule. Is the state an "unbiased player" that can be swayed, at times in a political democracy, from capital to labor or is the state an organization of direct class rule (in this case by the bourgeoisie) to "hold down" the working class, and uphold its own class society?
The state isn't really a conscious entity, but as a class establishes its hegemony through a state, that state absolutely reproduces that type of class society. The state is what keeps the social contradictions in place. They flare up into conflict; the state mediates the conflict to maintain and conserve the makeup of society. It may have to grant reforms to keep an exploited underclass in its place; it may have to grant austerity at the demands of the ruling class. But the state is the armed coercive body which upholds class rule.



On a completely unrelated note, just because I don't wanna make two posts: why does the proletariat need the state? Couldn't they destroy the reaction without using state power? It seems that every attempt at socialism without a state did pretty well until it was actually crushed by 'socialists' using the state (for an example, the black army being annihilated in Ukraine, the anarchists in Spain).

The proletariat destroying reaction would itself be a state power. The Catalonians and Makhnovshchina constructed states; they simply did not identify it as such. It is easier to identify a state as such when it operates through centralized democratic means, and calls itself a state, but a united military force with coercive power, exercising the rule of a class? That is undoubtedly a state. Now, certain types of states are preferable to other types of states, sure, and you could make the argument that the anarchists' states were better (though I would heartily disagree about Makhnov's Black Army), but that doesn't mean that they weren't states, at least by a Marxist definition.

[tuwix]

Engels (I think) writes that the state is a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms, and that it exists to ensure that class society doesn't tear itself apart. To me, and maybe this is an incorrect interpretation, this sounds as though the state is an unbiased player: that it is serving to simply make sure society is stable rather than just enforce class rule. Is the state an "unbiased player" that can be swayed, at times in a political democracy, from capital to labor or is the state an organization of direct class rule (in this case by the bourgeoisie) to "hold down" the working class, and uphold its own class society?

On a completely unrelated note, just because I don't wanna make two posts: why does the proletariat need the state? Couldn't they destroy the reaction without using state power? It seems that every attempt at socialism without a state did pretty well until it was actually crushed by 'socialists' using the state (for an example, the black army being annihilated in Ukraine, the anarchists in Spain).

The conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie isn't an only class antagonism ever. State has emerged as a tool to maintain a property and invention of property allowed to emerge class differences. The first class antagonism was aristocracy (the owners) and the rest (the slaves; the property of aristocracy). And state always serves to the upper classes. It's a tool to maintain class structure through maintaining a private property.

[ComradeAllende]

Is the state an "unbiased player" that can be swayed, at times in a political democracy, from capital to labor or is the state an organization of direct class rule (in this case by the bourgeoisie) to "hold down" the working class, and uphold its own class society?

Based on the historical record, no; the state is, for all intents and purposes, the pawn of the capitalist class. That does not mean that the state doesn't occasionally deviate from rigid capitalist dogma (mercantilism, laissez-faire, etc) and pursue other interests (support shop owners, enact reformist programs, increase national prestige, etc), but it cannot break the logic of capital. Reforms require mass social movements (and isn't guaranteed), and "parliamentary socialism" is a dead-end.

[Rudolf]

Engels (I think) writes that the state is a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms, and that it exists to ensure that class society doesn't tear itself apart. To me, and maybe this is an incorrect interpretation, this sounds as though the state is an unbiased player: that it is serving to simply make sure society is stable rather than just enforce class rule.
It was Engels and it's in Origin of the Family...

I don't think that paragraph gives the impression of being unbiased...note the emphasis

The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the moral idea,” “the image and the reality of reason,” as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a particular stage of development; it is the admission that this society has involved itself in insoluble self-contradiction and is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.


Shall not consume themselves and society... To me that implies what i'd identify as a fundamental function of the state: actively maintaining the social conditions that give rise to its existence.




Is the state an "unbiased player" that can be swayed, at times in a political democracy, from capital to labor or is the state an organization of direct class rule (in this case by the bourgeoisie) to "hold down" the working class, and uphold its own class society?


I don't think it accurate to talk of bias with regards to the state. It's not a conscious entity but a particular social phenomenon that emerges due to particular conditions (i.e. the development of class antagonisms). It's like saying a plant has bias towards sunlight. You might be able to get away with saying it but it offers nothing to understanding plant physiology and photosynthesis.

Likewise to talk of the state as being biased towards the ruling class completely misses the point of its formation, its continued existence and its role in society.





On a completely unrelated note, just because I don't wanna make two posts: why does the proletariat need the state? Couldn't they destroy the reaction without using state power? It seems that every attempt at socialism without a state did pretty well until it was actually crushed by 'socialists' using the state (for an example, the black army being annihilated in Ukraine, the anarchists in Spain).

Problem is that you'll have to define a state. It seems alot of marxists define the state simply as one class organised to supress another which would mean the proletariat must develop a state in order to emancipate itself. However, if we consider the reproduction of the conditions of class society as being integral to the state then the proletariat cannot utilise nor form a state for its emancipation as the proletariat needs to change the conditions in society.

[Tim Cornelis]

I think you mean "neutral arbiter between players". But if it were neutral in the sense that it simply seeks to facilitate social peace in class society, then this social peace necessarily benefits those at the top. It cements the asymmetry of power. But it isn't neutral. It is structurally bend to the interests of capital, and therefore personified capital. I will have to write a bit about this in the Marxist FAQ so I don't need to rewrite it a lot.

As for your question on anarchism and the state:

http://marxistpedia.mwzip.com/wiki/A_Marxist_FAQ#Doesn.27t_the_Spanish_Revolution_pro ve_anarchism.27s_superiority_in_relation_to_Marxis m.3F

"Doesn't the Spanish Revolution prove anarchism's superiority in relation to Marxism?
Far from it. It proves anarchist principles are removed from material reality and are abandoned when faced with a revolutionary crisis. In rural areas, collectives used 'unanarchistic' tactics of pressure, force, and sometimes coercion to effect socialisation. While Marxists support this, it is contrary to the principles of anarchism. In urban industrial areas, the lack of subservience to a central political organ lead to the perpetuation of market mechanisms. 'Trade union capitalism' as a POUM militant called it.

Thus, while the anarchist movement was partially successful, particularly in rural areas, it was so only because it relied on a de facto 'semi-state' of the proletariat, a Marxian concept."

[Rudolf]

"Doesn't the Spanish Revolution prove anarchism's superiority in relation to Marxism?
Far from it. It proves anarchist principles are removed from material reality and are abandoned when faced with a revolutionary crisis. In rural areas, collectives used 'unanarchistic' tactics of pressure, force, and sometimes coercion to effect socialisation. While Marxists support this, it is contrary to the principles of anarchism..."


I find this quite an interesting claim. Whoever wrote that obviously hasn't spent much time at all analysing the CNT of the period. The events in Spain don't prove the abandonment of anarchist principles when faced with a revolutionary crisis as the CNT was well on its way to bureaucratisation, and thus the abandonment of anarchist principles, well before 1936. The conclusion doesn't fit the premise.

[Tim Cornelis]

That comment strikes me almost as comical because of how knee-jerking it seems. It comes across as an automatic, one size fits all reaction to any and all criticisms of the anarchists and the CNT in the Spanish civil war -- without having to really grasp the criticism at all. Any and all failures can be ignored because the CNT was "bureaucratised". This, because it's a piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit, but you seem to want to jam it in anyway. This may be because of your short reply, but let me try to explain why it seems an ill fitted argument to me.

I/we credit anarchists with quite successfully socialising land ownership and control, albeit by abandoning anarchist principles, to which you essentially reply with "the CNT was already bureaucratised, so the blame does not lie with anarchism", but what blame? This was a good thing. So either way, whether anarchist principles were abandoned before the civil war, or crumbled in the face of revolutionary crisis, it was, apparently, their abandonment that enabled the relatively successful socialisation of land and the formation of collectives in rural areas.

And the critique of the CNT was focussed on its "bureaucratised" nature (imo a usually meaningless phrase) and its "centralism", but the problem with urban areas was the lack of centralism, as POUM executive Juan Andrade explained:
"The anarcho-syndicalist workers had made themselves the owners of everything they collectivized; the collectives were treated as private, not social, property. Socialization, as practised by CNT unions, was no more than trade union capitalism. 'Although it wasn't immediately apparent, the economy as run by the CNT was disaster. Had it gone on like that, there would have been enormous problems later, with great disparities of wages and new social classes being formed. We also wanted to collectivize, but quite differently, so that the country's resources were administered socially, not as individual property. The sort of mentality which believes that the revolution is for the immediate benefit of a particular sector of the working class, and not for the proletariat as a whole, always surfaces in a revolution, as I realized in the first days of the war in Madrid.'"

And Daniel Guérin: "it appeared … that workers' self-management might lead to a kind of egotistical particularlism, each enterprise being concerned solely with its own interests. This was remedied [in Barcelona] by the creation of a cenralized equalization fund … As a result, the excess revenues of the bus company were used to support the street cars, which were less profitable."

This lack of centralism is the opposite of what you would expect of an (overly) bureaucratised and centralised trade union to do, at least suggesting the problem lies elsewhere.

So just claiming that "bureaucratisation" was the problem to any criticism without regard for the details of the criticisms seems misplaced. It's kinda like some people answer every question with "international isolation" as to why the Bolshevik revolution failed/degenerated.

Finally, how would a genuine anarchist organisation have been more successful at making the particularist, sectional interests subservient to a central organ of some type? And perhaps you will reply "the point is to not do that" in which case the premise you identified is not the premise I'm concerned with, which is the whole point. Anarchism, if it holds true to its principles, cannot overcome capitalism.

[Speaks for the people]

To me the European concept of the central state came about as explicitly as a tool to further promote wealth after the strongest thug had beat down his immediate rivals. I am thinking of course of the formation of the French state under Philip Augustus, and the English state through the Normal conquest in particular, or even of the American state to serve the needs of a landed gentry of wealthy slave holders. As it is a tool of the wealthy and a means to centralize political power much like how capitalism itself centralizes economic power, the idea of working class "capture" of the state I tend to think is a bad idea; I believe instead the state needs to be abolished too.


Engels (I think) writes that the state is a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms, and that it exists to ensure that class society doesn't tear itself apart. To me, and maybe this is an incorrect interpretation, this sounds as though the state is an unbiased player: that it is serving to simply make sure society is stable rather than just enforce class rule. Is the state an "unbiased player" that can be swayed, at times in a political democracy, from capital to labor or is the state an organization of direct class rule (in this case by the bourgeoisie) to "hold down" the working class, and uphold its own class society?

On a completely unrelated note, just because I don't wanna make two posts: why does the proletariat need the state? Couldn't they destroy the reaction without using state power? It seems that every attempt at socialism without a state did pretty well until it was actually crushed by 'socialists' using the state (for an example, the black army being annihilated in Ukraine, the anarchists in Spain).

[Hatshepsut]

V. Gordon Childe (Man Makes Himself, 1936), taking a Marxist orientation to archaeology, introduced the concept of the "Urban Revolution" to explain the first emergence of class systems. In southwest Asia this happened between five and eight thousand years ago. The general idea was that settled assets such as farms require military protection. But once there are armed groups providing this protection, whoever commands their loyalty is in a position to extract economic surpluses from the farms, leading to emergence of an elite who lived off the production of farmers without having to farm themselves.

Thus the state is not only necessary for a class system; it is inseparable from it.

Although my knowledge of Marx and Engel's takes on subsequent history is limited, I suspect both men realized that a non-state actor usually cannot defeat a state because this task requires a high level of organization. Of course they did not attempt to trace social evolution back to prehistory as archaeology was not yet a developed science in the 19th century. However, those guerrilla groups that have enjoyed success against modern governments have done so by virtue of effectively creating themselves as states, down to the element of having a territorial base of support, even if this is discontinuous in a tactical condition where they blend into the population.

[Patchd]

Thus the state is not only necessary for a class system; it is inseparable from it.

Although my knowledge of Marx and Engel's takes on subsequent history is limited, I suspect both men realized that a non-state actor usually cannot defeat a state because this task requires a high level of organization. Of course they did not attempt to trace social evolution back to prehistory as archaeology was not yet a developed science in the 19th century. However, those guerrilla groups that have enjoyed success against modern governments have done so by virtue of effectively creating themselves as states, down to the element of having a territorial base of support, even if this is discontinuous in a tactical condition where they blend into the population.

Utilisation of the state has, so far, not been historically nor conceptually successful at overthrowing the state either, so I guess that's where the "usually cannot" bit comes in regarding non-state actors' inability to defeat states. I do identify with Hatshepsut's and Rudolf's comments on the state in this thread so far though.

Sewer Socialist's comment was somewhat vague though;


"The proletariat destroying reaction would itself be a state power. The Catalonians and Makhnovshchina constructed states; they simply did not identify it as such....

I assume your position is that the state is primarily, or maybe even solely a centralised authority with the ability to utilise a "united military force", some sort of take on the "legitimate use of violence" definition. An entity to be exercised by one class over the other, and able to exist as a duality (a "proletarian state" fighting for proletarian interests in antagonism to a "bourgeois state" fighting for capitalist interests).

But then historically even the capitalist state hasn't always seemingly sided with the capitalist class, but rather has acted to maintain the social relationship from which the capitalist class is the main social, political and economic benefactor by virtue of the conditions of the class society of the given context. Just as an example, during the 1937 Flint sit-down strike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_sit-down_strike), the Governor of Michigan actually sent the National Guard in, to "protect strikers from police and corporate strike-breakers", in essence to ensure a peaceful negotiation and the non-escalation of this antagonism between opposing groups with different class interests.

Now, we can make the argument that the continuation of capitalism is not in the material interest of the proletariat, but only insofar as it isn't for the bourgeoisie as well, as is the case for humanity as a generalisation.

To continue, historically *proletarian* states whilst acting against individual capitalists did not act against capitalism. Rather, they maintained the social relationship that forms the basis of capitalism, and instead the *proletarian* states managed capital in absence of the capitalists, for their eventual return (as I said in another thread, willingly or not). In fact these *proletarian* states allowed for the easing of the transition back to a capitalist mode of production, the cosmetics of which we are all too familiar with, suppressing whatever little disorder that took place in opposition to such a cosmetic change (by "cosmetic" I guess I mean "political" - from centralised state managers, to greater market capitalist autonomy).

So, I think this is where the Engels' statement from Origins as quoted by Rudolf comes in again;


But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state


On a completely unrelated note, just because I don't wanna make two posts: why does the proletariat need the state? Couldn't they destroy the reaction without using state power? It seems that every attempt at socialism without a state did pretty well until it was actually crushed by 'socialists' using the state (for an example, the black army being annihilated in Ukraine, the anarchists in Spain).

I like the example of the factory committees in urban centres in the territories of what was the Russian Empire 1917, co-opted into state institutions, first into the trade union congress structure and later the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy along with the soldier and militia organisations later co-opted into the Red Army ... this is a good historical example of where the *proletarian* state was used in opposition to worker self-management.

The Bolsheviks and Workers Control: The State and Counter-revolution, Maurice Brinton (https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/)

Along with the examples of the Ukraine and Spain (although to remain critical of the anarchists also), you have the period of heightened class struggle in Chile before and during Allende. Similarly the *proletarian* state was used to suppress working class self-organisation during a conflict originating from the opposition between state forces ~ Kiev Rada vs Kharkov Ukrainian People's Republic, Spanish Republic vs Spanish nationalist-militarists, & in Chile's case; Chilean Republic vs nationalist-militarists.

The workers were actually disarmed and denied weapons by Allende even after their movement saved him economically from a boss' strike and an abortive coup in late June 1973, the same year Pinochet successfully carried out his coup against Allende in September.

Strange Defeat: The Chilean revolution, 1973, Pointblank! (https://libcom.org/library/strange-defeat-chilean-revolution-1973-pointblank)