Marx on the Role of the State

Robert asks about something that comes from the Communist Manifesto from the works of Karl Marx and his associate Frederick Engels, but it has an enormous pertinence right now in the world of today, and that’s why I chose it as one of the really important questions to come this week from many of you. I want to remind you all that we cannot possibly answer all of them. We choose. We do the best we can, bear with us, it’s an important function we believe in, but it requires some selectivity on our part.

Here’s Robert’s question, the Communist Manifesto, particularly, at a key moment, lays out a set of proposals and those proposals involve a lot of things to be done by the government. By the state. And this is important, because a large part of the socialist, communist traditions of the last 150 years has been focused on the state making the state more powerful relative to the private sector of the economy. Having the state take more initiative, intervene more in the economy, to make it work better, or at least better for the mass of people, and therefore the idea has been widely distributed by the friends of Marx and Marxism and socialism but also by its enemies, that what socialism is about, what Marxism is about is the state. Making the state more powerful, making the state more controlling in the economy and all of that.

To the enemies of Marxism this has been a way to denounce it and to destroy it. To the friends of Marxism this has been a way to offset the injustices and the sufferings of capitalism, but Robert notices quite correctly, that in Marx’s mature work of his later years, and the basic volumes of Das Capital, which is his most famous and most important work, there’s almost nothing about the state. Marx is not very interested in the state. It seems to be we have two Marxes.

One in favor and focused on the state becoming ever more important in the economy and the other one not at all. In fact, if you read Capital, it’s mostly a critique of capitalism not particularly of the state and an advocacy of a very different way of organizing the production and distribution of goods. Not about the state being more or less important but really about an alternative system how do we work out these two kinds of differences in perspective.

Well, let me respond by saying, i don’t see the difference the way that Robert does. I see it differently, and I want to answer by showing you how and why I see it differently. First of all, as Robert himself understands, the Communist Manifesto is a short pamphlet written around the time of the great revolutions in Europe of 1848 and intended to be what it calls itself. A manifesto of the communists in terms of what they think is going on and what they think needs to be done. Whereas Das Capital is a multi-volume work written over many years researched over even more years a comprehensive systematic analysis that runs hundreds and hundreds of pages so we wouldn’t expect these two radically different documents to be the same or anything like the same.

They really have different purposes, different functions, and are differently organized. I think the solution lies here: that Marx understood as many of his followers don’t seem to have or at least not yet that the basic issue in his mind was the organization of the workplace that what made capitalism unique. Was that it organized the workplace not as a community of equals producing things not even as the very different masters telling slaves what to do to produce, things or lords telling serfs what to do in feudalism.

No. Capitalism had that knock community, it’s a few people telling a lot of people what to do but the few are employers, and the mass are employees and that’s different from lord’s surf masters slave or anything else human history displays and for Marx that was the problem. He wanted and thought we can do better than a system of master-slave, lord-serf or employer-employee that we could really have democratic communities. The way we organize our workplaces in capitalism for him failed to achieve a kind of generalized democracy, equality, fraternity, and all of these values espoused in the American and French revolutions but never really realized because the system you built them on, employer-employee was undemocratic, unjust, unequal and you couldn’t work out that contradiction.

And out of that Marx came with the idea let’s move beyond that, let’s transform the workplace from a employer-employee structure to a democratic community and in that process he understood that the working class had the desire for its own benefit to do that that it was in the interest of the majority of people the overwhelming majority who are employees to move further to become themselves the masters of their own destiny. No more master-slave, no more lord-serf and no more employer-employee. We are a democratic self-governing workplace community and, in the struggle, to get that here’s what the workers had to do in Marx’s mind. Capture the government, because in capitalism the government serves the reproduction of the capitalist system and you’re going to have to stop that if you’re going to make a move to a better different system you have to capture the state and then use the fact that the state now really represents the majority, the employees to move society into this new configuration.

For all people, everybody, the old masters, the old lords, and the old employers included will become part of the democratic community. This idea of a transition whose first step was to grab hold of the state using democracy so that the majority the employees could become dominant in the state was the idea that the state had always been in every society an agency to reproduce that system that was in place and therefore that only if the workers could capture it either by revolution or by voting or any other means would they be able to make the state play a role, a positive role in a transition to a better society.

That was the idea and that’s why for Marx advocating the state does a bunch of things is incidental to its role as a transitional moment to a better society. I think that’s the way to organize if you want the difference in tone of the manifesto and of the whole work of Marx as a mature thinker. If discussions like this strike you as useful additions to puzzling through where we are in the world today what the role of the state is, let me remind you also that one of the greatest students of Marx, Lenin in Russia made the famous remark that if the state can play the role Marx assigns to it then that will mean that the state having gotten rid of opposing classes we’re all now a democratic community that that state then destroys the reason for itself and Lenin then spoke about the “withering away of the state”.

It was a nod by a Marxist towards the anarchist that we, in the end, have a similar program to get beyond capitalism, but also to get beyond governments that constantly reproduce the systems that created them we’re breaking from that just like we’re breaking from the capitalism that saw the state play that role in its.