ES 2301

Introduction

 

 

This is a highly abbreviated version of the tale of the Marxist theory of the State, and it takes us from Marx’s early ideas about public education to his later revolutionary strategy. Scholars and partisans have argued endlessly about every last detail of Marx’s ideas on the State, and very many books have been written about each stage in the development of these ideas. I will cite very few of these and limit my remarks to Marx himself, referring, where possible, to the Marx-Engels Reader edition edited by Tucker (1978).

 

In his 20’s Karl Marx imagined he might pursue a joint career as a teacher and journalist (O’Malley, 1970, p.xxi). It was through his journalism that he made his first attempt at social criticism, and in 1842 and early ’43 

 

“his approach to criticism is characterized by his apparent conviction that social reform could be achieved by educating the public, and especially the regime, about the shortcomings of the existing socio-political order by appealing to a philosophical understanding of the nature and purpose of political society.  Two experiences caused him to lose confidence in the ability of such a programme to generate reform. First, he saw official reaction in the form of censorship effectively silence the critical press, which for him represented the voice of reason in society; thus led him to conclude that efforts at public education alone could not bring about social reform; they must be combined with a programme of practical, political organization. Second, he saw the power of economic interests within political society effectively frustrate the pursuit of the common good; and this led him to conclude that a philosophical understanding of society, however valid, does not of itself constitute an adequate basis for achieving the revolutionary aims of criticism; an understanding of the economic factors in political society is also required.” (O’Malley, 1970, p.xvi)

 

As Marx himself later so famously said (in his Theses on Feuerbach) “'Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” (Marx, [1845] 1978, p.145)

 

Though for Marx and Engels the state is essentially the means by which one class dominates others, they are sometimes ambiguous about this, seeing the state as relatively autonomous institution acting, in some cases against the immediate interests of the bourgeoisie. The idea that the state can act for the general good is rejected by Marx, its appearance of universality is a sham and masks its protection of the particular economic interests which it represents. Contra Hegel, Marx argues, the state cannot overcome the tensions and contradictions – Hobbes’ battle of all against all –  in civil society, and thus had to be transcended.

 

 

Marx, K. (1978) ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx Engels Reader, London: W.W. Norton and Company. Pp. 16-18: ‘The State and Civil Society’

 

The passage you will have read from the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is all about turning established ideas ‘upside down’, or, as Marx would have it ‘right side up’. Marx applies a method he borrows from Feuerbach, ‘transformative criticism’. Feuerbach had inverted Hegel’s argument that man is an embodiment of spirit: spirit, he said, is not divided or alienated from itself, this is merely a ‘mystification’ of real social processes wherein man is alienated from himself within the material world. God is not subject, and humans are not beings predicated upon God’s divine being, and in whom God’s divine qualities are objectified. Rather, humans are the true subjects, and God is a projection and objectification of man’s qualities. As we saw last week Marx would expand on this idea to develop the theory of commodity fetishism, but he also applied the same model to the state. Where Hegelian philosophy asserts that the state is the divine will as expressed in the real form and organisation of the world, so transformative criticism makes of man the origin and essence of the state.

 

However, the political state – the state apparatuses and bureaucracy – has, for Marx become separated from civil society. The state stands opposed to the people just as religion stands opposed to the mundane; the state is

 

“developed as the universal reason in opposition to other spheres i.e., as something opposed to them…[it is] the religion of popular life, the heaven of its universality in opposition to the earthly existence of its actuality.” (Marx, [1843] 1970, pp. 31-2) 

 

There are close parallels, then, between religious and political alienation, and the alienation we saw expressed as ‘commodity fetishism’ last week.  Man, divided against himself is seen reflected in the political structures he has erected, which result in the maintenance of inequalities of wealth and power.

 

Marx inherited from Hegel the idea of a universal class – a group within society whose interests are identical with those of society as a whole. For Hegel this class was represented by the state’s bureaucracy. For Marx , though, the bureaucracy, transforms the universal aims of the state into another form of private interest. The bureaucrats are the political counterpart of the corporations in civil society. Both the burgher (representative of the corporation) and the bureaucrat defend the ‘imaginary universality of particular interests’, maintaining, “in opposition to rational social impulse, that the bellum omnium contra omnes is the natural social condition of man”. (O’Malley, p.lii) So, if the bureaucracy cannot represent the universal interest, who can? Marx was becoming aware of a new class which were developing in the modern state which was essential to its economic working, yet excluded from all its benefits, a class whose chief characteristic is socio-economic deprivation and powerlessness, a

 

“class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil society, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetrated on it;… a sphere, finally that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, thereby emancipating them; a sphere, in short that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society existing as a particular class is the proletariat.” (emphasis added) (Marx, [1843] 1970, pp, 141-2. A slightly different translation can be found in your Marx Engels Reader, on page 64)

 

Francis Wheen writes: “That last word resounds like a clap of thunder over a parched landscape. Never mind that neither France nor Germany yet had a proletariat worth the name: a storm was coming” (Wheen, 1999, p.59)…

 

Theory 1: The state as an instrument of class rule

 

For Marx it is not possible for the state to bring lasting peace in the apparent war of each against all and achieve the common interest of all its citizens. Just because the state assumes an independent material form that does not mean it can transcend the general particularism of civil society. From his very earliest attempts at social critique in 1842, Marx identified the state with the promotion of particular economic interests: “private interest seeks to degrade, and is bound to degrade, the state into a means acting for the benefit of private interest” (Marx, [1842] 1975a, p. 243)

 

As bureaucrats and officials tend to appropriate state power as their own private property, and use it to further both their own and corporate interests, state power becomes a means to protect the rights of property, especially of the landowning class, whilst reproducing the war of each against all in civil society: “The political constitution at its highest point is therefore the constitution of private property.” (Marx, [1843] 1975b, p.98). Citizens of the modern state are alienated or estranged from public life because its domination by private interest ensures that the universal interest remains entirely theoretical and illusory: “The bureaucracy must therefore protect the imaginary generality of the particular interest, the spirit of the corporations, in order to protect the imaginary particularity of the general interest – its own spirit.” (Marx, [1843] 1975b, p. 46)  

 

Marx, K. (1978) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx Engels Reader, London: W.W. Norton and Company. Pp. 283-92: ‘Proletarians and Communists’

 

By the time that Marx and Engels worked together on the Manifesto in 1847, they were ready to assert that the governments of the modern capitalist states act as a ‘committee’ for promoting the interests of the new ruling class, the bourgeoisie: “[t]he executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx & Engels, [1848] 1978, p.475). These new rulers ‘burst asunder’ the fetters to growth represented by feudalism, and “[i]nto their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political sway of the bourgeois class.” (Marx & Engels, [1848] 1978, p.478) The state and constitution, then, is now re-cast by Marx and Engels, not merely as constructed in the defence of private property, but as a means by which the new dominant class can continue to strengthen its control and appropriate more wealth.

 

In the manifesto Marx and Engels offer an account of the polarisation of class forces as the capitalist mode of production is consolidated. Localised economic struggles coalesce into the broad political class struggle which will ultimately wrest the control of the state from the ruling bourgeoisie. The group within the proletariat whose interests are identical with the proletariat as a whole are the Communists, and it is thus the Communist party who lead the struggle to overthrow the bourgeois state. At the ‘vanguard’ of the ‘universal class’, the Communists thus represent the common interest of all of society. Furthermore Marx makes it clear that they do so internationally, without regard for borders or nationality:

 

“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into class, overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, conquest of politically power by the proletariat.” (Marx  & Engels,[1848] 1978, p.484)

 

However, whilst the working class is international, it must proceed first within the boundaries of the nation states,

 

“The working men [sic.] have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” (Marx  & Engels, [1848] 1978, p.488)

 

The transformation of social and political relations depends upon the placing of the main sectors of the economy under state control. As the proletariat gain control over the state, indeed constitute the state, they can begin to transform the economy. State control itself is not socialism, what matters is that in this temporary phase on the way to communism, the state is a democratic workers’ state, not a bourgeois state:

 

“We have seen …that 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.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. “(Marx & Engels, [1848] 1978, p.490)

 

The proletariat will, in the transitional period between capitalist and communist society, exercise its political power through the transformed instrumentality of the state. Under these conditions the coercive power of the state can be used to sweep away the conditions of the old bourgeois society. Because the ‘transitional state’ is in the hands of the proletariat – the universal class – it now acts for the benefit of society as a whole. It is no longer a partial bourgeois state, but a universal state. Marx identifies this period of transition as the dictatorship of the proletariat:

 

“In this sense, it is possible to speak of the "present-day state" in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.

The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? …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.” (Marx, [1875], 1978, pp.537-8)

 

Because there is no longer such thing as social classes, there can be no political class domination, indeed there is no longer such thing as political power at all. Because political domination is an expression of class domination, once classes have been abolished and class domination ended, and political ‘power over’ becomes a thing of the past, the state will become unnecessary and will ‘wither away’ (in the translation below, the famous phrase is rendered as “it dies out”):

 

“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 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. 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 dies out.” (Engels, [1877] 1987, pp. 267-8)

 

 

 

Education and the state as an instrument of class rule

 

In the lengthy passages quoted above, you will have noticed several references to education. We must infer from what Marx says that education provided by the bourgeois state is bourgeois education. Bourgeois education will serve the interests of the ruling class in a variety of ways. The subtleties of how this might occur have been argued over by generations of subsequent Marxist educational theorists. Marx understood that education provided by the state is never neutral – it always contains the potential for subtle or less subtle indoctrination, for instance via prescribed and hidden curricula. In response to the charge that the Communist approach to education is biased, he replies

 

“[a]nd your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.” (Marx & Engels [1848] 1978, p.487)

 

At this stage in his theoretical development, Marx imagines that as part of the wresting of the communist revolution, education will be socialised, that is, education in the home, will be replaced by public education – free and provided by the democratic workers’ state. However, in the years which followed the manifesto, Switzerland and the United States introduced free public education without a hint of proletarian revolution, so such a demand ceased to be distinctively Communist. He thus developed a more complex attempt to sketch out a transitional programme for a system of education which could exist, given certain social and political reforms, prior to the revolution and which would be ‘national without being governmental’, decentralised enough to prevent ruling class indoctrination, but with enough control to eliminate great variation among schools (see Small, 2005, pp.145-8 for an interesting account of Marx’s programme for state education), and which would make the most of the advances gained by the working class in their struggles for democracy .

 

 

Theory 2: The relatively autonomous state

 

However, this is not the end of the story. Whereas this instrumentalist thesis would tend to suggest that the dominant class is generally in immediate and overall control of the state system, it is evident from the many political studies of Marx and Engels that the bourgeoisie rarely occupies such a position in any capitalist society and that it is so vulnerable to disunity and fractionalising that it lacks the political capacity to rule in its own name. This leads to a second, perhaps more nuanced theory of the state which takes into account Marx and Engels’ close historical analysis of political developments in the years after the Manifesto was first published. Here we see the state as an independent force ‘standing outside and above society’: the ‘relatively autonomous state’.

 

Marx, K. (1978) ‘The Civil War in France’, in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx Engels Reader, London: W.W. Norton and Company. Pp. 629-33 [‘The Paris Commune’ - extract]

 

Marx stresses that the ruling classes and their different rival fractions can simply lay hold of the existing state apparatus and wield it as a ready made agent for their own political purposes, and Lenin then builds on this in to say that the bourgeois democratic republic is the best vehicle for capital, and that once it has gained control of that formation capital establishes its power in such a way that no change of persons or parties can shake it: thus it is essential for the working class to smash its oppressive machinery and to reorganise the ways in which its socially necessary functions are secured (see Lenin, [1917] 1964, pp.390-418):

 

“[t]he working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature — organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor — originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism.”(Marx, [1877] 1978, p. 629)

 

A revolution aimed at the state itself can only be carried out by the proletariat since only they have the incentive and power to do away with all classes and all forms of class rule. In its place, working class self-emancipation requires a revolutionary new form of political organisation which ensures that the people control their own social life through direct and continuous involvement in all facets of government. For example, the oppressive military apparatuses of the old state had to be replaced by a people’s militia, “the first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people” (Marx [1877]1978, p.632) and the old educational apparatuses too could not be simply appropriated and used in their bourgeois form:

 

“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.” (Marx, [1877] 1978, p.632)

 

Just as the structural features of the bourgeois state are intimately interrelated to the mode of production, so its instrument, the education system must similarly reflect bourgeois social relations and structures. Thus, for Marx, “the question of state education has no general answer; it depends on the development of the particular state in question.” (Small, 2005, pp. 152-3) The implication is that the educational systems in different states will need to be restructured and replaced to different degrees depending on the nature of the state which is overthrown in the Communist revolution: indeed, they may have to be wholly smashed.

 

On this account of the state, it is a system of political domination whose effectiveness can be found as much in its structures as in the classes or fractions which control it. Thus different forms of state have different effects on the balance of class forces and the course and outcome of political class struggle. The analysis of the inherent bias of the institutional systems of political representation and the apparatuses of control such as the education system is logically prior to an examination of the social forces that manage to wield state power at any given time, and this represents a fundamental shift in theoretical focus from that which we saw in the Communist Manifesto. Marx reiterates this point in his preface to the 1872 edition of the Manifesto,

 

“In view of the gigantic strides of modern industry in the last twenty-five years, and of the accompanying improved and extended party organisation of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”” (Marx & Engels, [1872], 1988, p. 175)

 

By the 1870’s, then, the ideas first outlined in the Critique are still present but have been radically transformed.

 

“[t]he ‘abstract state’ is now seen as an organ of political class domination rather than an expression of the political self-estrangement of private individuals; the ‘universal class’ is no longer seen as a poverty-stricken mass precipitated through the social disintegration of modern society during the process of primitive accumulation and is now recognised as a wage-labouring class economically exploited through determinate relations of production by capital; and ‘real democracy’ is no longer premised of the reintegration of the schizoid ‘public’ and ‘private’ lives of modern man but on the class dictatorship (in the sense of a specific form of state as well as a specific social basis) of the proletariat in alliance with the urban petit bourgeoisie and rural peasantry.” (Jessop, 1982, p.28)

 

Conclusion

 

So, we can say that the state remains essentially, class domination. While the state is not simply the political instrument of the bourgeoisie, and does not always do what the bourgeoisie tells it, it is still the instrument that allows the most economically powerful class – the class which owns the means of production – to exploit other classes. By maintaining capitalist conditions of production in the name of the common good, the state serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. The state is thus derivative of, or a reflection of class forces in society.

 

Marx’s plans for a programme of state education in the transitional phase on the way to communism – the dictatorship of the proletariat – became more complex and elaborate than a transient phase of social history would require (Small, 2005, pp. 150-152) suggesting that Marx may have recognised that this ‘last form’ of the state before its withering away under Communist relations might not be as short-lived as earlier writings had predicted. In the future workers’ state, the distinction between state support and state control is crucial, but, “we know from the experience of a century of public education how difficult it is to draw any such distinction” (Small, 2005, p.152), and how much harder in a revolutionary dictatorship seeking ruthlessly to sweep away the remnants of the old bourgeois order, morals and learning? Robin Small comments “[i]t is, of course, easy to use hindsight in criticizing Marx. Yet even in his own writings it is not hard to detect some uncertainty and the presence of unanswered questions about the role of the state in education.” (Ibid.)

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Engels, [1877] (1987) ‘Anti-Dühring, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science’ in Marx, K. & Engels, F. Collected Works, Volume 25, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Jessop, B. (1982) The Capitalsit State, Oxford; Martin Robertson

Lenin, [1917] (1964) ‘The State and Revolution’ in Lenin, V. Collected Works, Volume 25, London: Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, [1842] (1975a) ‘Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood’ in Marx, K. & Engels, F. Collected Works, Volume 1, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Marx, K. [1943] (1970) Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Marx, K. [1843](1978) ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx Engels Reader, London: W.W. Norton and Company.

Marx, [1843] (1975b) ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in Marx, K. & Engels, F. Collected Works, Volume 3, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Marx, [1845] (1978) Theses on Feuerbach in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx Engels Reader, London: W.W. Norton and Company.

Marx, K. & Engels, F.[1848](1978) ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx Engels Reader, London: W.W. Norton and Company.

Marx & Engels, [1872], (1988) ‘Preface to the 1872 German Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party’ in Marx, K. & Engels, F. Collected Works, Volume 23, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Marx, [1875], (1978) ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx Engels Reader, London: W.W. Norton and Company.

Marx, K. [1877] (1978) ‘The Civil War in France’, in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx Engels Reader, London: W.W. Norton and Company.

O’Malley, J. (1970) ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in Marx, K. Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Small, R. (2005) Marx and Education, Aldershot: Ashgate

Wheen, F. (1999) Karl Marx, London: Fourth Estate