Marx and Engels

In 1977, in the first (and probably still the best) systematic and comprehensive review of Marxist theories of the state, Bob Jessop noted that it was a ‘truism’ that Marx and Engels developed no consistent, single or unified theory of the state (1977: 353).

By 1982 (in his book The Capitalist State) this truism had become a ‘commonplace’ and it is now so oft-remarked upon that it is perhaps one of the few truly undisputed ‘social scientific facts’ (see for instance van den Berg 1988: 14; Bertramsen etal. 1990: 38; Carnoy 1984: 45; Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987: 203; Finegold and Skocpol 1995: 175; Miliband 1965; Poulantzas 1978: 20; Wolfe 1974: 131; cf. Draper 1977). There is no (single) Marxian, far less Marxist, theory of the state. This might be considered something of a devastating blow for a chapter on the Marxist theory of the state. Indeed, reviewing Marxist state theory might be considered not merely an exercise in flogging a dead horse, but one that first required the altogether more macabre practice of exhuming and assembling a dismembered corpse limb by limb. Moreover, given the great variety of concerns that animated Marx and Engels’ work (to say nothing of Marxism more generally), it is not at all clear that all the limbs belong to the same corpse. For, as Jessop notes, ‘Marx and Engels adopted different approaches and arguments according to the problems with which they were concerned’ (1982: 28). Nonetheless, a clear development of Marx and Engels’ ideas on the state can be traced.

The early Marx

The Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (1843a [1975]) contains Marx’s first extended reflections on the state. Though a sustained and at times polemical critique of Hegel, it is still couched within a fundamentally Hegelian framework. In Hegel’s almost mystical idealism the separation between the state and civil society - between the universal and the particular - finds its resolution in the state.

The latter is understood, not as an ideal collective capitalist but as an ideal collective citizen capable of expressing the general and communal interest of all its subjects. Marx regards this as pure mystification. Thus although he accepts Hegel’s distinction between state and civil society, sharing his understanding of the latter as ‘the sphere of economic life in which the individual’s relations with others are governed by selfish needs and individual interests’ (59), Marx denies that the state can indeed act in the universal interest. For insofar as state power is thoroughly implicated in the protection of property rights, the state actually functions to reproduce ‘the war of each against all’ in civil society. The solution lies in what Marx terms ‘true democracy’, ‘the first true unity of the particular and the universal’ (88). The interpretation of this concept in the early Marx is highly contentious. The Althusserian structuralists wish to dismiss these early formulations as unredeemably Hegelian, and as separated by a radical ‘epistemological break’ from his ‘mature’ and ‘scientific’ later writings (Althusser 1969: 32-4, 62-4, 249). In complete contrast, Shlomo Avineri detects in the concept of ‘true democracy’ what would later be termed ‘communism’. Accordingly, he argues:

the decisive transition in Marx’s intellectual development was not from radical democracy to communism, any more than it was from idealism to materialism... The Critique contains ample material to show that Marx envisages in 1843 a society based on the abolition of private property and on the disappearance of the state. Briefly, the Communist Manifesto is immanent in the Critique. (Avineri 1968: 34; see also Colletti 1975: 41-2)

This latter reading is perhaps reinforced by Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question (1843b [1975]). Here he distinguishes between political emancipation - associated with formal (and constitutionally-codified) democracy - and real human emancipation (or ‘true democracy’).

Whilst the former represents a significant advance it is but one step on the road to full human emancipation. The latter can only be realised by the transcending of bourgeois society to usher in a qualitatively new social order (Miliband 1965: 281-2). In his ‘Introduction’ (1844 [1975]) to the Critique, Marx eventually identifies the proletariat as the agents of this transformation, laying the basis for a class theory of the state in his later writings.

Marx mark two: The 'mature' works

In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels come closest to formulating a systematic theory of the state as a class state. They assert famously that the state is ‘nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeoisie necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interest’ (1845/6 [1964]: 59), a conception echoed in the Communist Manifesto (1848 [1975]: 82). This broadly instrumentalist framework (which conceives of the state as an instrument in the hands of the ruling class) is identified by Miliband as Marx and Engels’ ‘primary’ view of the state (1965: 283; see also Sanderson 1963). Yet it is not their only formulation, nor does it remain unqualified. Indeed as Marx notes in The Class Struggles in France (1850 [1978]) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852 [1979]) it is often not the ruling class so much as fractions of the ruling class which control the state apparatus. This is particularly so in the case of the most advanced capitalist societies of the time, England and France. Furthermore, the personnel of the state often belong to an entirely different class to that of the ruling class. Such comments are a reflection of a modified and qualified, but nonetheless still essentially instrumentalist, conception of the state. The state is granted a certain degree of autonomy from the ruling class, but it remains their instrument — ultimately those who pay the piper call the tune.

At times however, and particularly in their more historical writings, Marx and Engels’ qualified instrumentalism gives way to a more structuralist position.

Thus in The Eighteenth Brumaire and again in The Civil War in France (1871 [1986]), Marx grants the state a far more independent role than that previously assigned to it in, say, The German Ideology. This ‘secondary’ view of the state as Miliband describes it (1977: 284-5), is restated by Engels in The Origin of the Family. Thus although Louis Bonaparte is seen by Marx as ‘representing’ (or at least claiming to represent) the smallholding peasants, neither he nor the state is a genuine expression of their interests. As Miliband explains, ‘for Marx, the Bonapartist State, however independent it may have been politically from any given class remains, and cannot in a class society but remain, the protector of an economically and socially dominant class’ (ibid.: 285, original emphasis). The very structure and function of the (capitalist) state would appear to guarantee (or at least powerfully select for) the reproduction of capitalist social relations. This impression is confirmed in The Civil War in France. Here Marx categorically states that the apparatus of the capitalist state cannot be appropriated for progressive ends and that the revolutionary project of the proletariat must be to smash this repressive bourgeois institution. In so doing:

Marx implies that the state is a system of political domination whose effectiveness is to be found in its institutional structure as much as in the social categories, fractions or classes that control it... [T]he analysis of the inherent bias of the system of political representation and state intervention is logically prior to an examination of the social forces that manage to wield state power. (Jessop 1978: 62; see also 1982: 27)

Given the sheer scope and diversity of the positions briefly outlined above, it is not surprising that Alan Wolfe is led to conclude, ‘to study the state from a Marxist perspective means not the application of an already developed theory to existing circumstances, but the creation of that very theory, based on some all too cryptic beginnings in Marx himself. Hence the excitement of the project, but hence also its ambiguity’ (1974: 131). In the next section we embark on a roller-coaster ride through this exciting yet ambiguous world.

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Source: Hay Colin, Lister Michael, Marsh David (eds.). The State: Theories and Issues. Palgrave,2005. — 336 p.. 2005

Marx and Engels

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