black mold

A short reconsideration of the class-based definition of the state

By Alice Springs

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In the cripplingly sectarian world of Marxist politics, or at least, the insular world of Marxist political debate, everybody needs to have opinions on a few things.

One is a theory of what happened during the 20th century and why things turned out so poorly for all of us. This often becomes a question of who or what is to blame for the entire to-do: if only the workers had listened to this person, or if the social democrats didn’t act like social democrats, or if the socialist economies were run in a certain different way.

Another is adhering to a specific strain of value theory, though this often becomes strangely reminiscent of cults of personality. One day we should probably look into why that happens.

Finally, if you’re a good socialist, a good communist, a good anarchist, you need to, not should, need to, have an immovable opinion of Lenin. Lenin the bloodthirsty megalomaniac, Lenin the misunderstood run-of-the-mill social democrat, Lenin the great politician, bad economist.

I’ve never really been one for predetermined categories, especially when it comes to politics. I have never been part of a sect, worker’s party, provisional central committee or even a provisional tertiary committee at that. They have all seemed like detached and isolated echo chambers, and I have always had a very strong hatred for authority, whether it be party bosses, politicians, police or principals. So I have never really understood the need to treat Lenin (or Trotsky or Luxemburg or Engels or Marx) as anything other than a normal human – right about some things, wrong about others. What he was right and wrong about changed over time just like the rest of our opinions do as we develop (and regress) intellectually. 

But there is one specific theoretical contribution we can fault Lenin for, and it is something that has continued to haunt Marxist political theory to this day (due in no small part to the opinions many sects and currents require you to have of Lenin and the 1917 revolution if you want to be a part of the gang). 

Lenin, drawing upon Engels, has a conception of the state as an organ of class power – an instrument of coercion that one class uses to bludgeon another class in order to maintain their structural hegemony. But this view of the state leads to strange conclusions when we’re trying to build models for a communist society, and thus needs to be reconsidered.

THE STATE AS OPPRESSOR (bad)

Before outlining the problems with this view, it is worth regurgitating the view of the state that Lenin espouses in The State and Revolution (from here on shortened to tSaR), as this is one of the most influential theories of state that the left has.

Lenin begins tSaR with an admirable and entirely correct opening salvo against the bourgeois and opportunist political theoreticians who, admitting under duress that class is an unavoidable reality of our world, believed that the state is simply an organ that acts impartially and helps to overcome the inherent class antagonism of capitalism. But Lenin knew that this was of course not the case, stating that

…the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes. From what the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists say, with quite frequent and benevolent references to Marx, it appears that the state does reconcile classes. According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.¹

In other words, the state is not an organ that alleviates the exploitation of the working classes, but an organ that guarantees it. I will come to this point later in the essay, but there are only so many things that the base social relations of a given mode of production can achieve. In order to fully guarantee the continuing functions of a productive mode, especially one as unstable as commodity production, further social structures need to be put into place to force society’s social contradictions to maintain coherence.

But to Lenin and many (if not most) communists today, the state has a much more specific prime function: oppressor. Building from this original argument and those of Engels, Lenin defines the state as an institution that is, at its core, built simply to force the class contradictions of society together. Engels, writing in Anti-Duhring, is quoted by Lenin as saying that “…the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”²

As we have just seen, there is truth to this. Historically speaking, all we seem to have seen are states that exist to exploit the slaves of Rome, the peasants of feudalism or the proles of today. When strikes break out in the industrial centers of China, Korea, the United States or France, or when workers protest against the wholesale slaughter of their counterparts in Palestine, it is always the state that sends its black clad riot police to beat them into submission. 

This is perhaps one of the reasons this simplistic view of the state is so widespread on the left: it requires very little explanation to convince the rank and file of your average sect that this is the case. It also leads to a sort of reactionary anarchism, in which much consideration of the organization of the post-capitalist society is ignored out of fears of creating a new bloodthirsty state. Instead of the classless anarchist society being one that sets up its own institutions to coordinate production according to its needs, this society simply becomes something very similar to capitalism, just without the bosses and politicians. 

To fully understand why this definition of states is not correct, we should put it to the test. If all states are simply organs for the oppression of one class at the expense of the other, what are the political implications of such a view? Well, to spoil it, they are very grim.

THE STATE AS OPPRESSOR (good!)

Let me preface this by once again making the plea I make to all those with serious emancipatory politics: if you read one political document and truly make an effort to understand it, let it be the Critique of the Gotha Program (from here abbreviated to CotGP).

We all struggle with the idea of a transition to a classless society. Some, following in the footsteps of Auguste Blanqui, proclaim that things are bad, as in very bad and only going to get worse, so what we need to do is get a few of the lads together and do a coup to hasten this whole socialism thing along (workers, am I right? They’re just too slow to be relied on to do revolution in a timely manner). Others, just say hey, revolutions and class wars are bad, violent and incredibly disruptive events that should be avoided at all costs. Let’s just see if we can do some reform and see what happens, maybe one day that organ that exists to guarantee the exploitation of the working class will just give in and give us socialism.

Lenin, to his credit and in the era that tSaR was written, was very much not the latter of these types. He remained, in the face of many of his comrades bowing out of the revolution game for a nice, cushy seat in the Russian government, a revolutionary Marxist. Someone who trusted the working class to revolt, and knew that this was the only way we could begin the process of building a communist world. But he had some wacky ideas about what would happen next, namely, regarding the role of the state in the transition to communism. 

To Lenin, the state remained necessary for two reasons (really one reason, namely oppression): to destroy the last elements of bourgeois resistance and to maintain society’s coherence in the lower phase of communism. To understand this latter reason, we must turn to Marx and the CotGP.

In the CotGP, Marx outlined what he saw as two distinct phases of communist society, namely lower and higher stage communism. Many sect-brained communists today will see this as proof that Marx said that immediately following the revolution there will be a long, drawn out process of transition where we go from “socialism” to “communism” (eventually). But Marx was doing something much more nuanced than making a point about the transition being long. He was grappling with the specific, political phrase so common in socialist circles of his time: “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”

This phrase had long been the demand of egalitarian movements, from proto-anarchist movements like the Diggers to the Bible to the socialists Marx was critiquing in his day. All Marx meant by lower and higher stage communism was that even though communist social relations are implemented immediately following the revolution, the mode of production takes time to develop, and it isn’t until a number of things happen in that society that it reaches the high stage of “work as much as you want and take as much as you want.” But crucially, Marx was smart enough to recognize that these criteria (work becoming life’s prime want, an overcoming of mental and physical labor, a massive increase in productivity and an end to the “enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor”) come naturally as a development of communist social relations. 

The lower stage, meanwhile, is defined by the retention of a type of bourgeois right. Marx’s conception of labor certificates in communist society³ meant that for every hour of labor a worker labored, they could then withdraw “…from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost.” In other words, “the same amount of labor which they have given to society in one form, they receive back in another.”⁴ So if I work an hour, I get a certificate that entitles me to a product that contains an hour of social labor within it.

Hopefully you can see the flaw here. What about people that can’t work? What about people like your humble author that are simply weaker and lazier than most other workers and so work less? Well, in the first phase of communist society, they do consume less (though one would imagine a massively increased welfare system would be present that would set up safety nets for even the weakest and laziest of us). It isn’t until all of the aforementioned criteria are met that this element of bourgeois right is overcome. In higher stage communism, which is built as a matter of course given communist social relations, it doesn’t matter how much you are able to work. You get just as much as the next schlub.

Returning to tSaR, Lenin accepted that there was a distinction between early and later stage communist society, but refused to accept that, given communist social relations, it would be an easy transition. Lenin believed that the lower stage, what he calls socialism, is defined not by its social relations, but by this “contradiction” of bourgeois right. 

In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right”. Of course, bourgeois right in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for right is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law. It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!⁵

Lenin misunderstood the social relations of communism because “fully mature” or not, communism simply will not require a shadow version of the bourgeois state to maintain order and force this “contradiction” into place. It shows a distinct lack of creative imagination (and scientific understanding) on Lenin’s part to put forward the idea of a state of this type as being necessary to the functioning of communist society. Marx clearly did not mean for this element of bourgeois right to take such primacy in the study of the transition to communism. The social relations put into place after the revolution are communism, and the social relations of high stage communism are communism too. Communal property relations do not change in this time. What changes is the level of material abundance and philosophical outlook of society.

It is almost morbidly funny to see how whole strands of modern communist thought have blossomed that can go no further in their utopias than imagining a strong state that kills capitalists and treats workers like sheep draw their lineage from this one specific misunderstanding of Marx’s ideas on the transition to communism. It is impossible for these “thinkers” to see that communism itself is self-perpetuating, and that it does not require a strong state to command and control workers using force in this early phase.

THE STATE AS REGULATOR

All systems have regulators. When a dog gets too hot, its brain sends commands to the rest of its body that commences a pattern of behavior we know as panting, cooling them down by evaporating excess moisture in their bodies. When the sun comes up, many plants will track its motion across the sky to regulate the amount of sunlight they’re exposed to. 

So it should be no surprise that modes of production have regulators too. The most important of these regulators exist within the base social relations of these societies. For capitalism these would be:

1. the law of value that regulates relationships between commodity producers, 
2. the functions of capital that regulates the relationship between worker and capitalist, and
3. the properties of production price which regulates the relationship between capitalists and different branches of production.

But these are not enough to actually maintain capitalist society in reality. In real life capitalists start wars, bail out failed firms, imprison rogue workers, set up welfare structures that (in theory) protect some of the luckier members of the working class from the worst depravities of capitalist society, and so forth and so forth. These regulatory functions are not performed by the base social relations, but rather by the epiphenomena of these relations we know as the bourgeois state.

The bourgeois state, like all other states, fills in the gaps where the base social relations can’t. It is from this understanding that I feel a better definition of the state can be ascertained as opposed to that of the state simply as oppressor. Sure it’s an oppressor now in the form it takes under capitalism, but that isn’t all it does, and is not what its equivalent would do under communism.

The idea of content and form are quite important as we make this point. Your underlying content is (presumably) that of a human being. Wherever you go, you are a human. But the form your behavior takes changes depending on your circumstances. You aren’t the same person at work that you are with your friend or your family or your partner. You, and your human being essence, remain the same in these situations, despite the form of your behavior changing in such a way that could be unrecognizable to some of your acquaintances. It would be very strange if you spoke to your boss the same way you spoke to your dog.

So it is with the idea of the state. Perhaps the content of the state is simply the sum of those organizational formations we attribute to the superstructure of society that contribute to the reproduction of its base social relations. In capitalism, of course, these structures are violent, coercive formations that ensure the exploitation of the working class, but in communism they would simply be structures that reproduce communal property relations. The form that this “state” would take would be wholly unrecognizable to us today, most likely consisting simply of democratic planning bodies or the general ledger that would keep track of labor-time.⁶ But to pretend that this wouldn’t be a “state” because there’s nobody to exploit and coerce leads to some very odd ideas.

Lenin and his followers assume that we can only call something a state if it’s smashing the contradictions of a given class society together. They then assume, out of a lack of understanding of communist social relations, that such a coercive structure would be necessary in what they call “socialism”. But, given a realistic reading of the development of communal property relations, we can see that such a coercive state would only be necessary up until the point that the revolution is won. After that, we are communists, and have no need of an institution that looms over us in such a violent fashion, bourgeois right or no bourgeois right.

The sooner this idea of the state as oppressor goes away, the better. It is one of the major theoretical hangovers of the 20th century, and leads to decidedly reactionary views on our emancipation, whether from paternalistic Leninists or organization-averse anarchists (the latter of which is obviously the preferable of the two). At the same time, we should not let our ideas of social organization be poisoned by bourgeois conceptions of what the state currently is, as opposed to what it could be. Its content will remain the same, but its form will differ so much as to be unrecognizable. 

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