The State is not the Main Issue

Anarchists of all stripes, both capitalist and “communist”, claim that the state needs to be abolished. The capitalist ones assume that capitalism means “less government” while the “communist” ones claim that abolishing the state must happen right when the proletariat revolts against the capitalist system. Both of these are incorrect conceptions of the state, class struggle, and modes of production.

Against “Anarcho-Capitalism”

For the capitalist anarchists, we say that capitalism not only requires a state, but that the capitalist state becomes stronger as class struggle intensifies. The state is a tool for class struggle; since capitalism must have the class contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it must have a state that protects the capitalist class from workers. (The state may “reconcile” class contradictions by conceding to one class and reducing the ruling class’s power, but those measures are always transient and in the interest of the ruling class.) In addition, capitalism inevitably develops into imperialism; the state paves the way for capital to expand beyond its borders by its military conquests. Even if capitalists “abolished” the de jure state, they would very quickly create a de facto state by forming armed and administrative bodies that would suppress the proletariat. In Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels explained:

As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital. Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another; and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest achievement in this line, in which ruler and ruled look equally comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian cabbage Junkers. [Source]

Lenin also responded to capitalist myths in Chapter One of The State and Revolution:

On the one hand, the bourgeois, and particularly the petty-bourgeois, ideologists, compelled under the weight of indisputable historical facts to admit that the state only exists where there are class antagonisms and a class struggle, “correct” Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the state is an organ for the reconciliation of classes. According to Marx, 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. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors. …

Like all great revolutionary thinkers, Engels tries to draw the attention of the class-conscious workers to what prevailing philistinism regards as least worthy of attention, as the most habitual thing, hallowed by prejudices that are not only deep-rooted but, one might say, petrified. A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power. But how can it be otherwise? …

Were it not for this split, the “self-acting armed organization of the population” would differ from the primitive organization of a stick-wielding herd of monkeys, or of primitive men, or of men united in clans, by its complexity, its high technical level, and so on. But such an organization would still be possible.

It is impossible because civilized society is split into antagonistic, and, moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes, whose “self-acting” arming would lead to an armed struggle between them. A state arises, a special power is created, special bodies of armed men, and every revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, shows us the naked class struggle, clearly shows us how the ruling class strives to restore the special bodies of armed men which serve it, and how the oppressed class strives to create a new organization of this kind, capable of serving the exploited instead of the exploiters. …

In a [bourgeois] democratic republic, Engels continues, “wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely”, first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange” (France and America).

At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have “developed” into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of all descriptions. Since, for instance, in the very first months of the Russian democratic republic, one might say during the honeymoon of the “socialist” S.R.s and Mensheviks joined in wedlock to the bourgeoisie, in the coalition government. Mr. Palchinsky obstructed every measure intended for curbing the capitalists and their marauding practices, their plundering of the state by means of war contracts; and since later on Mr. Palchinsky, upon resigning from the Cabinet (and being, of course, replaced by another quite similar Palchinsky), was “rewarded” by the capitalists with a lucrative job with a salary of 120,000 rubles per annum — what would you call that? Direct or indirect bribery? An alliance of the government and the syndicates, or “merely” friendly relations? What role do the Chernovs, Tseretelis, Avksentyevs and Skobelevs play? Are they the “direct” or only the indirect allies of the millionaire treasury-looters?

Another reason why the omnipotence of “wealth” is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it. [Source]

So long as capitalism exists, the state will be oppressive to the working class. It can become more oppressive as class struggle intensifies, or workers can win concessions and gain some freedoms; either way, bourgeois dictatorship remains. If capitalists abolish de jure states, the “private security forces” they would use would inevitably exercise the worst, most terrorist form of bourgeois dictatorship, namely fascism.

Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital. …

Fascism is not a form of state power “standing above both classes—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie,” as Otto Bauer, for instance, has asserted. It is not “the revolt of the petty bourgeoisie which has captured the machinery of the state,” as the British Socialist Brailsford declares. No, fascism is not a power standing above class, nor government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpen-proletariat over finance capital. Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations. [Source]

This is why “libertarian” and “anarchist” capitalists are wrong in what they think. They assume that a “small” capitalist government or even a capitalist “non-government” can exist. The former would last for a very short time since workers’ conflict with capitalists would result in the state using more force against workers; the latter would immediately be replaced by total bourgeois dictatorship, which is fascism. The only way to provide liberty for us all is socialism and communism!

We cannot forget about proletarian dictatorship in the transition to communism. Thus, we go on to refute the anarchist “socialists”.

Against “Socialist” Anarchism

Just as capitalism needs a state, socialism needs a state to transition to communism. The proletariat needs an organization to suppress the capitalist class. Friedrich Engels refuted anarchists in his essay, “On Authority”; anarchists hate when we Marxists bring this up, but it’s true!

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether — given the conditions of present-day society — we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear. …

Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? …

Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction. [Source]

Lenin also refuted anarchist “socialists” in Chapter Five of The State and Revolution:

Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then “the state… ceases to exist”, and “it becomes possible to speak of freedom”. Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.

The expression “the state withers away” is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process. Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occassions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression.

And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord. …

Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the “state”, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less. And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear. Naturally, the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple “machine”, almost without a “machine”, without a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, we would remark, running ahead).

Lastly, only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed–“nobody” in the sense of a class, of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population. We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to “wither away”. We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their withering away the state will also wither away.

Without building utopias, Marx defined more fully what can be defined now regarding this future, namely, the differences between the lower and higher phases (levels, stages) of communist society. [Source]

What happens when the bourgeois state is smashed without a proletarian state being created on paper? There are only two options: Either the bourgeoisie quickly retakes the means of production and remakes a bourgeois dictatorship (the most reactionary type of bourgeois dictatorship, too, namely fascism), or the proletariat creates a de facto state to suppress capital. We saw the latter basically happen in the “Makhnovschina” during the Russian Revolution and in Catalonia during the Civil War.

The anarchist experiment in Ukraine (formerly in the Russian Empire) produced not one, but two secret police forces:

Of the Makhnovite security services the Razvedka and the Kommissiya Protivmakhnovskikh Del we know very little. Their excesses were violently arraigned by the Bolsheviks, and the Soviet historian, Kubanin, cites them as proof of Makhnovite hypocrisy in vilifying the Cheka. Makhno’s later campaigns are among the most vindictive and bloody in history, and in the circumstances one can safely assume that these services were responsible for frequent injustices and atrocities. Voline is witness to the fact that they were under no effective control. But, like their opposite number the Cheka, they seem to have been not unsuccessful in carrying out the task which they were set. [Source]

The anarchist leadership in Catalonia also had their own instruments of authority, including penal labor for enemies of the proletariat.

The Spanish Revolution, like the Russian, also had its labor camps (campos de trabajo), initiated at the end of 1936 by Juan García Oliver, the CNT Minister of Justice. The CNT recruited guards for the “concentration camps,” as they were also called, from within its own ranks. Certain militants feared that the CNT’s resignation from the government after May 1937 might delay this “very important project” of labor camps. …

According to a CNT historian, “delinquents, reactionaries, subversives, and suspects were judged by popular tribunals composed of CNT militants and, if found guilty, jailed or condemned to forced labor. Fascists, soldiers who looted, drunkards, criminals, and even syndicalists who abused their power were put behind bars or in work camps where they were forced to build roads.” …

Faced with sabotage, theft, absenteeism, lateness, false illness, and other forms of working-class resistance to work and workspace, the unions and the collectives cooperated to establish strict rules and regulations that equaled or surpassed the controls imposed by capitalist enterprises. [Source]

Still, the “anarchist” de facto state faced internal contradictions to the point that certain extreme elements among them conducted a revolt against the bourgeois-democratic state and Marxist-Leninists without the anarchist leadership’s approval (authors’ emphasis):

One of the most intensely propagandized, most powerfully misunderstood events in modern history, outside the USSR, took place within the Left-wing camp of the democratic forces of the Spanish Civil War, who opposed the fascist coup of General Franco. That May 1937 uprising, in which the Trotskyist party P.O.U.M. and its libertarian and anarchist allies instigated violence and seized Barcelona from the anti-fascist Catalan government, is now called their May Days. A title that renounces the working-class spirit of May Day.

A political perspective on this historically quintessential moment of “leftist infighting” has been dominated by those few Anarchists and Trotskyists who most closely identify with, and support, these actions. They so happen to correspond to the position of their ruling states – with a line drawn out in George Orwell’s classic propaganda travelogue Homage to Catalonia. These voices and their bourgeois publicists have firmly established a false historical image in the mind of the average person, reflecting and exacerbating a basic ignorance of events. The effect of this misinformation campaign has been to celebrate a program of unprincipled action, to resurrect an old indemnity between Left factions, and to serve the greater end of anti-Communism with a narrative that has been simplified by its basis in false pretences.

The deadliest poison pill which the opportunist partisans cannot swallow is the fact that the majority of anarchists, and of course the vast majority of those who fought in the Spanish Civil War, opposed the hollow violence of the May Days which had been instigated by politically marginal armed groups during a critical moment of the war against Franco. In fact, the CNT and FAI, which organized the greatest majority bloc of syndicalists and anarchists respectively, had joined the Catalan government on September 28th of 1936 and were themselves centrally involved in the suppression of the fighting. While some anarchists delight in being “more anarchist than anarchism”, facts like these still cannot seem to be processed into the historical narrative upon which many Left polemicists rely, and so are rarely reflected in bourgeois media depictions of these important days and the broader understanding of the role anarchists played. And the bourgeoisie aren’t the only figures who can’t digest the historical situation. [Source]

Unlike the anarchist “socialists”, we Marxists are honest about the proletarian state and its dictatorial rule over class enemies. This is very good for the proletarians among us; only the proletariat’s enemies, the parasites and exploiters in our society, have anything to fear about proletarian dictatorship and democracy. We see the need to smash the bourgeois state and immediately replace it with a worker-run state; class struggle continues until communism, and the workers must have organizations to wage that struggle. The state itself has class struggle inside it since the bourgeoisie constantly tries to infiltrate it and usurp power from within before wrecking it and replacing it with bourgeois dictatorship; this only highlights the importance of vigilance among the working people, and that requires a strong proletarian dictatorship! Only once we working people hold democratic power in society and use that power to improve our lives while eliminating classes can we have communism!