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Understanding of Karl Marx
In his very un-Marxian Studien über die Bewegungsgesetze der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung, Karl Liebknecht, the heroic leader of German communism, attempts to revise the materialistic conception of history from a philosophical basis which he describes as ‘more sceptical than Hume’s scepticism, more critical than Kant’s criticism, and more solipsistic than Fichte’s solipsism’. His attempt to provide a new philosophical starting point for Marxism is more significant than his failure, for it raises the question of the degree of organic connection which exists between philosophical theory and political practice. How much of the general philosophical theory must one accept in order to be a communist? If a Marxist is committed to the philosophy of communism, does it follow that all who accept this philosophy must be Marxists? Certainly, from a conventional point of view, Karl Liebknecht, by virtue of his rejection of the Marxian theory of history and of the labour theory of value, was less of a Marxist than men like Hilferding and Kautsky; and yet while he sealed his devotion to the cause of communism with his own blood, these others launched bitter attacks against it. There have been so many other cases in which philosophical heresy has been combined with revolutionary sincerity, that there is a crying need to distinguish between the essential doctrine and the unessential interpretation.
That there is a unity between larger questions of theory and the general direction of practice is indisputable. Every major deviation from the revolutionary practice of the international working class has sought to ground itself upon new philosophical premises or upon some pre-Marxian system – properly cut and trimmed for its purposes. But it is an altogether different matter to assert that every political difference must entail a philosophical difference and vice versa. For an attitude of this kind overlooks the empirical fact that human beings are never aware of the full practical implications of their beliefs. [1] Moreover – and this is the crux of the matter – it mistakenly assumes that Marxism is a systematic theory of reality which starts out from self-evident first principles about the nature of being, and rigorously deduces all its other theories and programmes – even when the latter are specifically social. A disagreement anywhere along the line would have to express itself somewhere else as well. Such a metaphysic, however, is absolutely incompatible with any naturalistic view which regards the world as developing in time, and which views man as an active historical agent. This is a metaphysic which in the past has been associated with mechanistic rationalism or theological idealism. In either case, it involves fatalism.
Marxism is primarily a theory of social revolution. It has wider implications – logical, psychological and metaphysical – which constitute a loose body of doctrine commonly referred to as the philosophy of dialectical materialism. But although Marxism implies a general philosophical position, for example, the beliefs in the reality of time, in the objectivity of universals, in the active character of knowing, etc, its social theories cannot be deduced from its wider philosophy. For they are not logically necessitated by any one philosophy. One may accept the Marxist evolutionary metaphysic and not be forthwith committed to its theory of social revolution. At most one can say that Marxism is incompatible with, or rules out, certain philosophical doctrines. Because A presupposes B, it does not follow that B presupposes A; although it is legitimate to argue from non-B to non-A. If space permitted, it could be shown that many of the propositions of dialectical materialism are merely generalised expressions of the findings of the physical and biological sciences, and that of them, one cannot even say that they are presupposed by Marxism, but only that they are compatible with Marxism. This leaves it an open question whether the opposites of these particular propositions are incompatible with Marxism. One may, for example, with good Marxist conscience substitute relativistic conceptions of space and time for Engels’ unclear absolutistic views.
The same considerations apply in the realm of social theory. Although the social doctrines of Marxism possess a much more organic character than the body of its philosophical implications, still, not all doctrinal beliefs are equally relevant to the immediate political issues of revolutionary practice. Certainly, one may call into question Engels’ literal acceptance of Morgan’s scheme of unilateral and universal succession of family relationships and his theory of the nature and extent of private property in primitive communities – theories which modern critical anthropologists have completely discredited – without necessarily being compelled to abandon such important leading principles as the class character of the state.
In strict logic one may go even further. The nature of the state in class society – especially in contemporary bourgeois society – may be submitted to analysis in relative independence of the cluster of problems which surround the historic origin of the state. Whether the state arose in the course of the expansion of the productive forces of society and the division of labour which this entailed, whether it resulted from the military conquest of one people by another, whether, together with the division of labour, it already existed in some primitive tribes before the existence of private property in the means of production – are questions which must be decided by examining separately the evidence for each case of transition from primitive to class society. The highly controversial disputes of contemporary anthropologists and sociologists indicate not only that the evidence is not overwhelming for one theory or another, but that the disputants are working with different conceptions of what constitutes a state. It is all the more important, then, that we know what it is we are talking about before we embark upon questions as to how and when it arose. What the state is can be discovered in the same way that Marx, long before he read Morgan, discovered it, viz., by examining its structure and function in bourgeois society and using the outcome of that analysis as an hypothesis in approaching the state organisations of the past. It can be categorically stated – despite the idealistic Hegelian logic of some Marxists – that the validity of Marx’s analysis of the nature of the state today, and the revolutionary consequences which flow from it, are completely independent of any conclusions anthropologists may reach about the origin of the state three thousand years ago. For the purposes of intelligent political action, it is much more relevant to inquire into the function and behaviour of social institutions in the present than into their presumable first origins.
A first step towards clarity may be made by distinguishing between three fundamental concepts which are often confused – society, state and government. For Marx as for Hegel, a society is any group of human beings living and working together for the satisfaction of their fundamental economic needs. Government is the administrative mechanism by which these economic needs are controlled and furthered. The more primitive the society, the more rudimentary the forms of government. Sometimes the government is nothing more than the order of succession of personal leadership enforced by the spontaneous activity of the group. In modern society, however, with its enormously specialised division of labour, the government is a complex institution with separately delegated powers. The state is a special organised public power of coercion which exists to enforce the decisions of any group or class that controls the government. Where the government represents the needs and interests of the entire community, it does not need a special and separate coercive force behind it. In that case it is no longer a specific, political mechanism but an administrative organ, coordinating the economics of production and distribution in both its material and cultural phases. It is extremely important to distinguish between the state and government even though, as in modern societies, the government serves the state, and even though some individuals combine in their very person the social functions of government and the repressive functions of the state. For example, the policeman who directs traffic and gives information, and the teacher who imparts the rudiments of knowledge to his pupils, are workers performing the administrative, governmental services necessary in any complex society. Were the state to be overthrown and another state established, were the state even to disappear, this work would still have to be performed. The same policeman, however, who clubs striking pickets, and the same teacher who inculcates the ideology of nationalism, are servants of the state. Wherever the state exists, it perverts the administrative function of government to its uses. The distinction nonetheless remains.
The actual or potential exercise of coercion is a necessary constituent element in the existence of the state. But coercion is not its differentiating character. It is the locus and form of coercion which express the characteristic feature of the state. No society is possible, least of all one in which there is a complex division of labour, without the operation of some kind of pressure to strengthen certain modes of behaviour and to prevent others. The coercion need not be physical. It may be exercised through public opinion. But so long as there is a recognised difference between conduct which is permitted and conduct which is not permitted, some coercion is being applied. For example, among the Andaman Islanders, where no special state power exists, a man who commits murder is not overtly punished by his tribesmen. He loses standing and is socially ostracised – which is regarded as a severe form of punishment. Among other primitive tribes, although there is nothing corresponding to our police force, physical punishment is meted out to offenders of public morality either by the family of their victims or by the entire community.
In a strict sense, we may speak of a state only where a special public power of coercion exists which, in the form of an armed organisation, stands over and above the population. It is only where a separate organisation exists, ostensibly to keep peace and order by the imposition of penalties, that the distinguishing character of state coercion will be found and with it the clue to the role and function of the state in society: ‘The state presupposes the public power of coercion separated from the aggregate body of its members.’ [2]
Why is it necessary that a special coercive power exist – separate and distinct from the physical and moral force of the collectivity – to enforce peace and order? Obviously because of the presence of conflicts and struggles in society, and because the organisation of society is such that these conflicts, when not actual, are potential, and therefore must be guarded against. What kind of conflicts and struggles makes the existence of the state necessary? Sometimes it is the struggle between nations for territory. But the state power exists and functions within the national territory as well as without; its organisation is such as to make it as readily available against its own citizens as against others. What internal conflicts, then, make necessary the existence of the whole apparatus of state power? The hypothesis of Marx and Engels is that the state is an expression of the irreconcilable class antagonisms generated by the social relations of economic production. Their subsidiary hypothesis is that wars for territorial expansion are a secondary consequence of the development of the mode of economic production. Where there are no classes, there is no need for specially organised instruments of physical coercion. Where there are classes, there is always the danger that the existing property relations, which give wealth and power to one class at the cost of another, may be overthrown. ‘Political power properly so-called’, wrote Marx in the Communist Manifesto, ‘is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.’ [3]
For evidence of the class character of the state, Marx went not to the philosophical concept of the state but to history and experience. Significantly enough, he started out as a believer in the Hegelian theory of the state, but was compelled to abandon it just as soon as he sought to square what Hegel called the notion of the state with actual political practices. The abandonment of the Hegelian conception of the state marked a striking turning point in his intellectual biography. It is worth dwelling upon in some detail – all the more so because the specific historical occasion which provoked the shift in Marx’s views has striking contemporary analogues.
Like all other Young Hegelians, Marx started out with a firm belief in Hegel’s characterisation of the state as ‘the realisation of the ethical idea’, as the expression of Reason in which the real and reasonable wills of individuals – as distinct from their capricious wills – were taken up in a systematic and harmonious whole, sometimes called the ideal community. Since the state was above man, it was above classes. It expressed the universal and abiding interests, needs and ideals, not of this man or that, nor of this class or that, but of all men and all classes. Without slighting the needs of the living, it claimed to represent the ideal interests of those who had gone before as well as those who were to come after.
Hegel had said that the Prussian state was the perfect fulfilment of the ideal state. The Young Hegelians knew it was not. They asserted that in his heart, Hegel, himself, knew it was not. But they thought they could save Hegel’s theory of the state by distinguishing between the truth of the ideal and the necessary imperfection of the real or existent. The actual state uses were in their eyes abuses of the ideal; their task was to bring the actual in line with the ideal. They were confident that this could be done by agitation for a democratic, politically free state. The more daring ones called themselves republicans.
When Marx became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he was obliged to comment upon the day-by-day activities of the government. He soon realised that his views on the nature of the state were hopelessly inadequate. Even before he resigned from his post to study French socialism and English economics, he came to see that political equality – which the Young Hegelians aimed at introducing – was a condition, not a guarantee, of social equality; and that without social equality, all talk about the community of interests and the divinity of the state was empty rhetoric. Where there was on social equality, the state was an instrument used by one class in society against another. It was not an expression of the common ideals of the whole of society. For there were no common ideals. There was only a common verbal usage which obscured fundamental class differences.
The occasion upon which this was brought home to Marx was the debate held in the Rhenish Provincial Assembly on the wood-theft laws (Holzdiebstahlgesetz). The legislators were intent upon putting teeth into the law which made the appropriation of dead wood from the forest a crime. The small landed proprietor was amply protected by the fact that his holding was small. Since he himself lived on his land, he could stop trespassing. The large landed proprietor could not use his wardens to defend his woods unless wood stealing was declared a penal offence and the law enforced. A great deal of ado was made in the Landtag about protecting the large landholders as well as small since, as citizens of the community, both classes were entitled to equal rights of protection. Marx seized upon this principle and hurled it at the heads of the members of the Landtag, barbed with the following question: What protection was the state giving to the poor, the paupered wood-stealers themselves, who were also citizens of the political community? The poor were not stealing wood in order to sell it. They merely made sporadic raids on private forests in their vicinity in order to gather fuel for their cottages. The stringency of the winter and the relatively high price of wood had intensified the practice. And as a matter of fact, the poor had always enjoyed the immemorial rights (conveniently forgotten by the historical school of law) of carting off dead wood. But now on the pretext that sometimes injury was done to living trees, the poor were to be prohibited from taking any wood. The state had stepped forward to defend the property of one class of its citizens. But it did nothing to defend the welfare, indeed, the very life, of a still larger class – those that had no property. If the state was, as it claimed to be, an organisation standing above classes, beyond reach of privileged economic interests, its protecting zeal would extend to all sections of the population. Judging it, however, by the specific activity of its courts and legislatures, it appeared very far from being the incarnation of impartial reason which Marx in the first flush of his Hegelianism had regarded it.
The debates on the wood-stealing laws marked the definite abandonment on the part of Marx of the Hegelian theory of the state. The state, he now declared, was rooted in a soil other than the self-development of the logical idea. Its voice was the voice of reason, but its hands were the hands of economic privilege. ‘The organs of the state have now become the ears, eyes, arms, legs with which the interests of the forest owners, hears, spies, appraises, defends, seizes and runs.’ [4] The more closely he studied the behaviour of courts and legislatures, the stronger grew his belief that the moving force, ground and motive behind the enactment of any law which affected conflicting interests of different classes, was not an impartial theory of justice but the private privilege of a dominant class whose selfishness and greed were concealed, sometimes even from itself, by juristic rationalisations and mouth-filling phrases about personal rights and liberties. ‘Our whole exposition’, wrote Marx in concluding his discussion, ‘has shown how the Landtag has degraded [herabwürdigt] the executive power, the administrative authorities, the existence of the accused, and the very idea of the state to material instruments of private interest.’ [5]
When Marx wrote this he was not yet a Marxist. He speaks of the poor and not of the proletariat, and of private interest without linking those interests with the social relations of production. But in subsequent essays and especially in those chapters of Capital which deal with primitive accumulation, capitalist accumulation and the expropriation of the agricultural population, he deepens his analysis by showing that private property in the instruments of production must necessarily carry with it – and always has – political power over those who must live by the use of those instruments. Without the state power there can be no private property, for the legal right to hold private property is nothing but the might of the armed forces of the state to exclude others from the use of that property. The very continuance of production demands the existence of the state, since the immanent logic of the bourgeois system of production intensifies the opposition between classes. It therefore becomes necessary for the state to set itself up as a nominally impartial arbiter working through law and education to dissolve the antagonisms which threaten to wreck society. The state thus insures that the processes of exploitation proceed uninterruptedly.
The fact that the domination of the state is coextensive with that of private property in the instruments of production wrecks not only Hegel’s political philosophy but all others, notably that of Lassalle’s, which separate bourgeois society from the state, and appeal to the state, as the presumable representative of all classes, to correct the abuses of bourgeois society. Sometimes it is even expected that the existing state will gradually abolish capitalism and introduce socialism. This dangerous illusion disappears once it is realised that the existing state cannot be dissociated from the existing economic society. At any given time, the state is a natural outgrowth of the productive relations, and implicitly pervades the whole of society even when its institutional forms appear to be independent. The economic order is a political order and the political order is an economic order. Against those who asserted that these two were separate and distinct, Marx claimed that the historical record proves that the logical distinction drawn between ‘property power’ and ‘political power’ corresponded to no difference in fact, that in social life, property and political power were but different aspects of the same thing:
How ‘money-making’ is turned into ‘the conquest of power’, and ‘property’ into ‘political sovereignty’, and how, consequently, instead of the rigid distinctions drawn between these two forces by Mr Heinzen and petrified into dogma, they are interrelated to the point of unity, of all this he may quickly convince himself by observing how the serfs purchased their freedom and the communes their municipal rights; how the citizens, on the one hand, enticed money out of the pockets of the feudal lords by trade and industry, and disintegrated their estates through bills of exchange, and on the other hand, aided the absolute monarchy to victory over the undermined great feudal lords and bought off their privileges; how they later exploited the financial crises of the absolute monarchy itself, etc.; how the most absolute monarchs became dependent upon the Stock Exchange Barons through the national debt system – a product of modern history and commerce; and how in international relations, industrial monopoly is immediately transformed into political domination ... [6]
Since the forces of political authority serve to support the power of the dominant economic class, and since the mode of economic production determines not only the character of the state but tends to determine the form of the state as well (constitutional monarchy or democratic republic), we can understand Marx’s meaning more completely when he writes in the Communist Manifesto: ‘The modern state power is merely a committee which manages the common business of the bourgeoisie.’ [7]
Does not Marx contradict himself when he speaks, in one place, of the state as a separate public power, and in another, of the state as pervading all the institutions of society and involved in their functioning? No, for the existence of special instruments of oppression is a naked and formal expression of the material system of oppression, that is, of the mode of economic production. The history of the state – the succession of its special forms and organisation – can best be grasped as an aspect of the history of the economic system. As capitalism develops from the crude competition and duplications of laissez faire to the relatively highly organised forms of monopoly, there takes place a corresponding improvement in the organs of state power. They become more centralised and efficient. Functionally the state enters more and more into business and the armed public forces of the state become, so to speak, the private detective guard of the business plant. The growing pressure of class antagonisms compels the employers to see to it that some special public force is always at hand and that no other special force exists in the bulk of the population which can be used against the public one. At the same time and in the interests of functional efficiency, the organisation of the state machine seems to be independent of the organisation of business. The concentration of armed forces offers a deceptive plausibility to the claim that the state stands outside of business and merely exercises governmental functions of regulation on behalf of the whole community. When the state takes over whole industries like the railroads, telegraph and post office in the interests of efficient total production, it conceals this under the euphemism of ‘social service’. As a consequence, the ideology of state neutrality and supremacy is strongest just when – as under monopoly capitalism – the state is serving the bourgeoisie most efficiently.
The era of finance capital and imperialism reveals this dualism between the actual function of the state and its professed philosophy most clearly. But by the last third of the last century Marx had already discerned the tendency of the state to assume a national form in bureaucratic organisation and in official philosophy precisely at those moments when its repressive functions came most openly into play. With broad strokes he summarises the development of the state from the days of the absolute monarchy to the days of the Paris Commune:
The centralised state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature – organs wrought after the path of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seigniorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century swept away all of these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. During the subsequent regimes the government placed under parliamentary control – that is, under the direct control of the propertied classes – became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labour, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organised for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder relief. [8]
The crucial test of the validity of Marx’s theory of the state must ultimately be found by analysing the day-by-day activities of the legislatures, the courts and executive bodies of the country. The state is what it does and what it does is revealed by experience not by definition. This methodological principle must be kept firmly in mind whenever we approach any body of law as well as the reasons offered for a judicial decision. No law and no agency of the state will openly proclaim that human interests are to be sacrificed for property rights, or more accurately, that where there is a conflict of claims, the interests of the possessing classes take precedence over the interests of the non-possessing classes. Indeed an open admission that this is the case would constitute a violation of the expressed legal principle that all are equal before the law; in theory, such an admission – although truthful – would be illegal. Nonetheless, even with no more knowledge of the law than what it says of itself, one can show that its implicit end is security of property and not justice in its distribution. And as for the law’s concern with rights of persons, one need only point to the trivial but highly symbolic fact that in Anglo-American law the punishment for abstracting a small sum of money from a man’s pocket is much severer than it is for beating him to within an inch of his life, to illustrate its immeasurably greater concern for the rights of property than of personality.
That all law is a direct expression of economic class interests no one can plausibly maintain. Much of it treats of technical commercial matters which are of interest only to private groups who own real property, play the market, etc. Some of it, especially in Anglo-American law, reflects the weight of tradition as in many features of the law of evidence. Some of it expresses the interests of the lawyers as a professional group – often in opposition to the interests of their clients – as in the laws of procedure. Some of it has the character of purely administrative ordinance as in the case of traffic regulation. Nonetheless, the fundamental class character of the law becomes as clear as daylight both in the manner in which it is interpreted and on the occasions in which it is enforced. Just as soon as there is a struggle between capital and labour, the court steps in to protect the interests of the status quo. Whether it is the use of injunctions and martial law in labour disputes, the blanket charge of conspiracy against labour organisers, the use of the undefined charge of disorderly conduct to break up a picket line, the arrest of those distributing radical hand-bills on the grounds that they are ‘littering the streets’, the thousand ways in which the phrases ‘inciting to riot’ and ‘constituting a public nuisance’ can be stretched to jail strike leaders – one underlying aim runs through court practice, that is, the preservation of the existing property relations. In fact, the courts do not hesitate to suspend the constitutional guarantees, which they are sworn to defend, just as soon as the exercise of the freedom of speech, press and assemblage threatens to be effective in organising militant labour.
The economic class divisions of society exercise a profound even if indirect influence upon the whole of criminal law. Paradoxical as it may appear, criminal law, although not so immediately concerned with economic interests and activities, is more overtly repressive and discriminatory than civil law. The purpose of civil law in the main is to regulate business transactions within the sphere of exchange and to make possible redress of business grievances by compelling guilty parties either to carry out their contracts or to make restitution in the form of services or money. That civil law can be turned in case of emergency into an instrument of class repression, is clearly illustrated by the use of damage suits against labour unions, eviction proceedings against the unemployed, etc. But the bulk of civil law has, as its objective, the private detail of the entrepreneur and the conflicts which arise with other entrepreneurs in the common quest for profit. The primary purpose of criminal law is punishment – punishment of any individual whose acts threaten to disrupt the ‘peace, order and security’ of the social system. These terms are undefined variables; but whatever meaning they have is determined by the interests which control those who make the laws as well as those who interpret and enforce them. Formally, the criminal law is laid down as binding upon the members of all classes. Actually its enforcement is selective wherever class conflict flares up.
Even where there is no selective bias in the enforcement of criminal law, punishment for the same criminal offence falls with unequal severity upon members of different economic classes. Where there is social inequality, the enforcement of any law – no matter how impartially administered – automatically reflects, in the degree and nature of the punishment, different class divisions. In other words, there can be no strict equality before the law where there is social inequality. Assume, for example, that in an ideal bourgeois society the law is impartially carried out according to its letter – that political favour and financial corruption have no influence upon the integrity of the court. A, a worker, and B, a banker, are separately arrested on charges of manslaughter. Since they are both formally equal before the law, bail is fixed at the same amount. A, who cannot raise the bail or even pay the premium on a bail bond, is confined in jail until his day in court comes; B, by virtue of his economic status, is at large twenty-four hours after he is booked. Both are brought to trial. A faces a jury, not of his peers, but of men hostile or indifferent to him and his entire class; B must meet only the mixed feelings of resentment and admiration which fill the breasts of the less well-to-do among the middle classes at the sight of those who have climbed higher. A is dependent for his exoneration upon the skill of an unknown and uninfluential lawyer often appointed by the court; B can hire the most eminent counsel in the country and enormously increase the probability of acquittal. At every step in the legal process, no matter how impartially administered, the worker is punished not merely for his crime but for his poverty. No exercise of judicial discretion can alter this fact, for it flows from the class nature of the social system of which the law is the expression not the cause. Indeed, wherever judicial discretion is introduced, the worker fares even worse, since the training and class origins of judges – not to speak of the mechanics of their selection – lead them, as a whole, to mistake their traditional prejudices and class passion for order and security into first principles of justice.
Ultimately, the sanctions behind criminal law are the sanctions behind all law. The sanctions behind all law – the whole array of repressive state forces – is an integral part of the process of production. The habit-patterns of complacency and tradition are not sufficient to keep production running in class society, and the methods of educational indoctrination have their limits. Sooner or later the conflicting needs and interests of different classes become focalised in consciousness and translated into action. No matter how our philosophy may try to escape it, where there are inarbitrable conflicts of interests, force decides which claim will prevail.
We can now return to the question which served as our point of departure. What doctrine is essential to Marxism in the sense that it can be used as a touchstone of allegiance to his thought? If the above analysis is valid, it can be categorically stated that it is Marx’s theory of the state which distinguishes the true Marxist from the false. For it is the theory of the state which is ultimately linked up with immediate political practice. The attempt made by ‘liberal’ Marxists throughout the world – even when they call themselves orthodox – to separate the existing economic order from the existing state, as well as their belief that the existing state can be used as an instrument by which the economic system can be ‘gradually revolutionised’ into state capitalism or state socialism, must be regarded as a fundamental distortion of Marxism. ‘Liberal Marxism’ and ‘gradual revolution’ are contradictions in terms. For Marx, every social revolution must be a political revolution, and every political revolution must be directed against the state. That is why it is more accurate to regard the German Social-Democracy as Lassallean rather than Marxian.
Nowhere does Marx state the relation between social and political revolution more clearly than on the final page of his Poverty of Philosophy, a work which contains the classic criticism of petty-bourgeois socialism with its theory of public works, fiat money, cooperative workshops, free credit, and a classless theory of the state:
... after the fall of the old society, will there be a new class domination, comprised in a new political power? No. The essential condition of the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes, as the condition of the emancipation of the third estate of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates, all orders.
The working class will substitute, in the course of its development, for the old order of civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be political power, properly speaking, since political power is simply the official form of the antagonism in civil society.
In the meantime, the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle between class and class, a struggle which, carried to its highest expression, is a complete revolution. Would it, moreover, be matter for astonishment if a society, based upon the antagonism of classes, should lead ultimately to a brutal conflict, to a hand-to-hand struggle as its final denouement?
Do not say that the social movement excludes the political movement. There has never been a political movement which was not at the same time social.
It is only in an order of things in which there will be no longer classes or class antagonism that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Until then, on the eve of each general reconstruction of society, the last word of social science will ever be: ‘Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le néant. C’est ainsi que la question est invinciblement posée.’ – George Sand [9]
The belief in the class character of the state is obviously not a theoretical postulate. It demands that forms of concrete activity be worked out in the struggle against the state power. The chief question to be decided in this connection is what methods and institutions are efficacious in the struggle for the conquest of political power. This introduces for discussion the meaning and function of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the philosophy of Karl Marx.
1. Despite his fierce polemics against all types of philosophical revisionism, Lenin had a lively appreciation of the fact that variant theoretical beliefs, although potentially a source of different political practice, were not always expressed as such. Even on such a burning question as the conditions of membership in a revolutionary party, he wrote: ‘A political party cannot examine its members to see if there are any contradictions between their philosophy and the party programme.’ (Lenin on Religion, English translation, p. 22. [V.I. Lenin, The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion, Collected Works, Volume 15. – MIA]
2. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884, English translation, Chicago 1902), pp. 115–16. [available here. – MIA
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. – MIA
4. Karl Marx, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band I, p 287. [Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly, October 1842, available here. – MIA]
5. Karl Marx, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band I, p. 287 [Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly, October 1842, available here. – MIA]
6. Karl Marx, Gesamtausgabe, Abteilung I, Band VI, pp. 306–07 [Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, October 1847, available here. – MIA]
7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. – MIA
8. Karl Marx, The Paris Commune (New York Labour News Co, 1920), pp. 70–71. [The Civil War in France, available here. – MIA]
9. Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy (Charles H. Kerr, Chicago 1920, English translation by H. Quelch), pp. 190–91 [available at here; the quotation is from George Sand’s Jean Siska: ‘Combat or Death: bloody struggle or extinction. It is thus that the question is inexorably put.’ – MIA
Last updated: 26 February 2020