Foreword
Every branch of knowledge has a
central concept that expresses the fundamental feature or
function of the sector of reality it investigate and deals with.
The pivotal category of political science is the state.
The political thought of the
various social classes and groupings throughout civilization is
above all characterized by their attitude toward the state and
their definition of its essential nature. Thus the ancient Greek
aristocrat Aristotle conceived of the state – or, more
precisely, the city-state of his time – as “an association
for the good life”, based on the family and village; excluded
from the rights and benefits of citizenship, however, were
labourers and artisans, women, foreigners, and slaves.
The bourgeois philosopher
Hegel, like his idealist precursor Plato, asserted that the
nation-state was a product of the Objective Mind, best governed
by a constitutional monarchy.
Middle-class liberals nowadays
– and the reformist socialists and Stalinists who trail in
their wake and mimic their ideas – believe in the existence of
a state that stands as an impartial arbiter above the selfish
contention of classes and deals justly with the respective
claims of diverse “interest groups”. This exalted notion of
a classless state presiding over a pure democracy, based on the
consent of the people, rather than engaged in the defence of the
property, rights of the ruling class, is the core of
bourgeois-democratic ideology.
Historical materialism takes a
more realistic view of the nature of the state. The state is the
product of irreconcilable class conflict within the social
structure, which it seeks to regulate on behalf of the ruling
class. Every state is the organ of a given system of production
based upon a predominant form of property ownership, which
invests that state with a specific class bias and content. Every
state is the organized political expression, the instrument, of
the decisive class in the economy.
The principal factor in
determining the character of the state is not its prevailing
form of rule, which can vary greatly from time to time, but the
type of property and productive relations that its institutions
and prime beneficiaries protect and promote.
In antiquity, monarchical,
tyrannical, oligarchical, and democratic forms of the state rose
upon the slave mode of production. The medieval feudal state in
Western Europe passed through imperial-monarchical, clerical,
absolute monarchical, plutocratic, and republican regimes.
In the course of its evolution,
bourgeois society, rooted in the capitalist ownership of the
means of production, has been headed and governed by various
kinds of monarchical sovereignties (from the absolute to the
constitutional), republican and parliamentary regimes, and
military and fascist dictatorships.
The twelve workers’ states in
the postcapitalist societies, which have arisen from the
socialist revolutions in the half century since the founding of
the Soviet republic, have already exhibited two polar types of
rule. One is more or less democratic in character, expressing
the power, and guarding the welfare, of the workers and
peasants. The other is despotic and bonapartist, bent on
defending the privileged positions of a commanding caste of
bureaucrats who have succeeded in usurping the decision-making
powers from the masses.
At the dawn of the bourgeois
era, long before Marx, Engels, and Lenin, that astute political
scientist Machiavelli had expounded the view that the state was
the supreme, organized, and legitimate expression of force.
“Machiavelli’s theory,” wrote the German historian
Meineke, “was a sword which was plunged into the flank of the
body politic of western humanity, causing it to shriek and rear
up.”
Similarly, the teaching of the
Marxists, elaborated by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, that the state
was based upon the principle of force, has caused the whole of
bourgeois society – to shriek and rear up – at its alleged
cynicism and inhumanity. However, it would seem that the
colossal arsenals used in two world wars and the preparations
for a third, the destructiveness of the US military machine in
Vietnam, as well as the barbarous reprisals taken by the
bourgeois classes – from the Germany of 1933 to the Indonesia
of 1965 – against their own citizens, should have amply
validated that proposition by now.
Marxism added a deeper
dimension to Machiavelli’s observation by exposing and
explaining the organic bond between the existence and exercise
of state force and the property system that constituted the
fabric of the socioeconomic structure. The coercion exercised by
the state was the ultimate resort for maintaining the material
interests of the strongest section of the exploiters.
It should not take much
perspicacity to see that the industrialists and bankers, who own
and operate most of the resources of the United States and
control the major political parties, likewise direct the
employment of the military machine and other repressive agencies
of the federal government The use of police, state guards, and
federal troops to put down the ghetto uprisings testifies to the
openly repressive function of the capitalist state apparatus.
Yet liberal Americans find it difficult to generalize from these
quite flagrant facts and thus to accept the sociological
definition of state power offered by Marxism.
They are blinded or baffled by
three misconceptions: (1) that there are no clearly defined
class formations in American society; (2) that there are no
serious or irreconcilable conflicts between classes; and (3)
that the government is not “the executive committee”
administering the general affairs and furthering the aims of the
capitalist exploiters, but that it is – or can be made into
– the supreme agency for taking care of the welfare of the
whole people, rather than serving the interests of the minority
rich.
The analysis of the evolution
and essence of state power given by Ernest Mandel in these pages
should do much to dispose of such false views. He is
editor-in-chief of the Belgian weekly La Gauche
and probably the most influential and authoritative exponent of
the political economy of socialism in the West today. He has
taken the lead in bringing the Marxist teachings in this field
up to date through his masterful two-volume work entitled Marxist
Economic Theory. This book, now available in English,
has gone through three editions in France since it was first
published in 1962 and has been translated into many languages,
from German to Arabic.
Mandel has contributed many
articles on a broad range of subjects to periodicals throughout
the world and has spoken at leading universities in the United
States and Canada.
On the hundredth anniversary of
the publication of Das Kapital, Mandel’s The
Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx: 1843-1863
was brought out by the French publishing house of Maspero. His
volume analysing the Common Market and the penetration of
American capital into Western Europe, written in answer to J.J.
Servan-Schreiber’s The American Challenge,
was recently a best seller in Germany. It will soon be issued in
English translation.
Mandel’s pamphlet An
Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory is now in its
fourth English printing and is widely used by teachers and
students in courses throughout the country. The present pamphlet
on the Marxist theory of the state serves as a valuable
complement to that popular exposition of the dynamics of the
capitalist system.
George Novack
October 1, 1969
I. Origin and Development of
the State in the History of Societies
A. Primitive society and the
origins of the state
The state did not
always exist.
Certain sociologists and other
representatives of academic political science are in error when
they speak of the state in primitive societies. What they are
really doing is identifying the state with the community. In so
doing, they strip the state of its special characteristic, i.e.,
the exercise of certain functions is removed from the community
as a whole to become the exclusive prerogative of a tiny
fraction of the members of this community.
In other words, the emergence
of the state is a product of the social division of labour.
So long as this social division
of labour is only rudimentary, all members of the society in
turn exercise practically all its functions. There is no state.
There are no special state functions.
In connection with the Bushmen,
Father Victor Ellenberger writes that this tribe knew neither
private property nor courts, neither central authority nor
special bodies of any kind. (La fin tragique des Bushmen,
pp.70-73 [Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1953]) Another author writes of
this same tribe: “The band, and not the tribe, is the real
political body among the Bushmen. Each band is autonomous,
leading its own life independently of the others. Its affairs
are as a rule regulated by the skilled hunters and the older,
more experienced men in general.” (I. Shapera, The
Khoisan Peoples of South Africa, p.76 [London: George
Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1930])
The same holds true for the
peoples of Egypt and Mesopotamia in remote antiquity: “The
time is no more ripe for the patriarchal family with paternal
authority than it is for a really centralized political grouping
... Active and passive obligations are collective in the regime
of the totemic clan. Power and responsibility in this society
still have an indivisible character. We are here in the presence
of a communal and egalitarian society, within which
participation in the same totem, the very essence of each
individual and the basis for the cohesion of all, places all
members of the clan on an equal footing.” (A. Moret and G.
Davy, Des Clans aux Empires, p.17 [Paris: La
Renaissance du Livre, 1923])
But to the extent that social
division of labour develops and society is divided into classes,
the State appears – and its nature is defined: The members of
the collectivity as a whole are denied the exercise of a certain
number of functions; a small minority, alone, takes over the
exercise of these functions.
Two examples will illustrate
this development, which consists in taking away from a majority
of the members of the society certain functions they formerly
exercised (collectively in the beginning) in order to arrogate
these functions to a small group of individuals.
First example: Arms.
This is an important function.
Engels said that the state is, in the final analysis, nothing
other than a body of armed men.
In the primitive collectivity,
all male members of the group (and sometimes even all adults,
male and female) are armed.
In such a society the concept
that the bearing of arms is the particular prerogative of some
special institution called army, police, or constabulary, does
not exist. Every adult male has the right to bear arms. (In
certain primitive societies, the ceremony of initiation, which
marks coming of age, confers the right to bear arms.)
It is exactly the same in
societies that are still primitive but already close to the
stage of division into classes. For example, this holds true for
the Germanic peoples at about the time they attacked the Roman
Empire: all free men had the right to bear arms and they could
use them to defend their person and their rights. The equality
of rights among free men that we see in primitive Germanic
societies is in fact equality among soldiers – which the
anecdote of the Soissons vase [1]
illustrates so well.
In ancient Greece and Rome, the
struggles between patricians and plebeians often revolved about
this question of the right to bear arms.
Second example: Justice.
In general, writing is unknown
to primitive society. Thus there are no written codes of law.
Moreover, the exercise of justice is not the prerogative of
particular individuals; this right belongs to the collectivity.
Apart from quarrels decided by families or individuals
themselves, only collective assemblies are empowered to render
judgments. In primitive Germanic society, the president of the
people’s tribunal did not pass judgment: his function
consisted in seeing that certain rules, certain forms, were
observed.
The idea that there could be
certain men detached from the collectivity to whom would be
reserved the right of dispensing justice, would seem to citizens
of a society based on the collectivism of the clan or the tribe
just as nonsensical as the reverse appears to most of our
contemporaries.
To sum up: At a certain point
in the development of society, before it is divided into social
classes, certain functions such as the right to bear arms or to
administer justice are exercised collectively – by all adult
members of the community. It is only as this society develops
further, to the point where social classes appear, that these
functions are taken away from the collectivity to be reserved to
a minority who exercise these functions in a special way.
What are the
characteristics of this “special way”?
Let us examine our Western
society at the period when the feudal system begins to be the
dominant one.
The independence (not formal,
not juridical, but very real and almost total) of the great
feudal estates can be shown by the fact that the feudal lord,
and only he, exercises throughout his domain all the functions
enumerated above, functions that had devolved on the adult
collectivity in primitive societies.
This feudal lord is the
absolute master of his realm. He is the only one who has the
right to bear arms at all times; he is the only policeman, the
only constable; he is the sole judge; he is the only one who has
the right to coin money; he is the sole minister of finance. He
exercises throughout his domain all the classic functions
performed by a state as we know it today.
Later, an evolution will take
place. As long as the estate remains fairly small, its
population limited, the “state” functions of the lord
rudimentary and not very complicated, and as long as exercising
these functions takes only a little of the lord’s time, he an
handle the situation and exercise all these functions in person.
But when the domain grows and
the population increases, the functions for which the feudal
lord is responsible become more and more complex and more and
more detailed and burdensome. It becomes impossible for one man
to exercise all these functions.
What does the feudal
lord then do?
He partially delegates his
powers to others – but not to free men, since the latter
belong to a social class in opposition to the seignorial class.
The feudal lord delegates part
of his power to people completely under his control: serfs who
are part of his domestic staff. Their servile origin is
reflected in many present-day titles: “constable” comes from
comes stabuli, head serf of the stables; “minister”
is the serf ministrable, i.e., the serf assigned by the
lord to minister to his needs – to act as his attendant,
servant, assistant, agent etc.; “marshal” is the serf who
takes care of the carriages, the horses, etc. (from marah
scalc, Old High German for keeper of the horses).
To the extent that these
people, these non-free men, these domestics, are completely
under his control, does the seigneur partially delegate his
powers to them.
This example leads us to the
following conclusion – which is the very foundation of the
Marxist theory of the state:
The state is a special organ
that appears at a certain moment in the historical evolution of
mankind and that is condemned to disappear in the course of this
same evolution. It is born from the division of society into
classes and will disappear at the same time that this division
disappears. It is born as an instrument in the hands of the
possessing class for the purpose of maintaining the domination
of this class over society, and it will disappear along with
this class domination.
Coming back to feudal society,
it should be noted that state functions exercised by the ruling
class do not only concern the most immediate areas of power,
such as the army, justice, finances. Also under the seigneur’s
thumb are ideology, law, philosophy, science, art. Those who
exercise these functions are poor people who, in order to live,
have to sell their talents to a feudal lord who can take care of
their needs. (Heads of the church have to be included in the
class of feudal lords, inasmuch as the church was the proprietor
of vast landed estates.) Under such conditions, at least as long
as dependence is total, the development of ideology is
controlled entirely by the ruling class: it alone orders
“ideological production”; it alone is capable of subsidising
the “ideologues”.
These are the basic
relationships that we have to keep constantly in mind, if we
don’t want to get lost in a tangle of complications and fine
distinctions. Needless to say, in the course of the evolution of
society, the function of the state becomes much more complex,
with many more nuances, than it is in a feudal regime such as we
have just very schematically described.
Nevertheless, we must start
from this transparently clear and obvious situation in order to
understand the logic of the evolution, the origin of this social
division of labour that is brought about, and the process
through which these different functions become more and more
autonomous and begin to seem more and more independent of the
ruling class.
B. The modern bourgeois
state
Bourgeois origin of the
modern state
Here, too, the situation is
fairly clear. Modern parliamentarism finds its origin in the
battle cry that the English bourgeoisie hurled at the king,
“No taxation without representation!” In plain words this
means: “Not a cent will you get from us as long as we have no
say in how you spend it”.
We can immediately see that
this is not much more subtle than the relationship between the
feudal lord and the serf assigned to the stables. And a Stuart
king, Charles I, died on the scaffold for not having respected
this principle, which became the golden rule all
representatives, direct or indirect, of the state apparatus have
had to obey since the appearance of modern bourgeois society.
The bourgeois state, a
class state
This new society is no longer
dominated by feudal lords but by capitalism, by modern
capitalists. As we know, the monetary needs of the modern state
– the new central power, more or less absolute monarchy –
become greater and greater, from the fifteenth to sixteenth
century onward. It is the money of the capitalists, of the
merchant and commercial bankers, that in large part fills the
coffers of the state. Ever since that time, to the extent that
the capitalists pay for the upkeep of the state, they will
demand that the latter place itself completely at their service.
They will make this quite clearly felt and understood by the
very nature of the laws they enact and by the institutions they
create.
Several institutions which
today appear democratic in nature, for example the parliamentary
institution, clearly reveal the class nature of the bourgeois
state. Thus, in most of the countries in which parliamentarisrn
was instituted, only the bourgeoisie had the right to vote. This
state of affairs lasted in most Western countries until the end
of the last century or even the beginning of the twentieth
century. Universal suffrage is, as we can see, of relatively
recent invention in the history of capitalism. How is this
explained?
Easily enough. In the
seventeenth century, when the English capitalists proclaimed
“No taxation without representation”. It was only,
representation for the bourgeoisie that they had in
mind; for the idea that people who owned nothing and paid no
taxes could vote, seemed absurd and ridiculous to them. Isn’t
parliament created for the very purpose of controlling
expenditures made with the taxpayers’ money?
This argument, extremely valid
from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, was taken up and
developed by our Doctrinaire [2]
bourgeoisie at the time of the demand for universal suffrage.
For this bourgeoisie, the role of parliament consisted in
controlling budgets and expenditures. And only those who pay
taxes may validly exercise this control; because those who do
not pay taxes would constantly have the tendency to increase
expenditures, since they are not footing the bill.
Later on, the bourgeoisie
regarded this problem in another way. Along with universal
suffrage was born universal taxation, which weighs more and more
heavily on the workers. In this way the bourgeoisie
reestablished the inherent “justice” of the system.
The parliamentary institution
is a typical example of the very direct very mechanical bond
that exists – even in the bourgeois state – between the
domination of the ruling class and the exercise of state power.
There are other examples. Let
us look at the jury in the judicial system. The jury
appears to be an institution eminently democratic in character,
especially when compared to the administration of justice by
irremovable judges, all members of the ruling class over whom
the people have no control.
But from what social layer were
– and still in very large measure today, are – the members
of a jury chosen? From the bourgeoisie. There were even special
qualifications, comparable to property-holding requirements for
voting, for being able to sit on a jury – a juror had to be a
homeowner, pay a certain amount of taxes, etc. To illustrate
this very direct link between the machinery of the state and the
ruling class in the bourgeois era, we can also cite the famous
Le Chapelier law, passed during the French Revolution, which,
under pretext of establishing equality among all citizens,
forbids both employers’ organizations and workers’
organisations. Thus, under pretext of banning employers’
corporations – when industrial society has gone beyond the
corporation stage – trade unions are outlawed. In this way the
workers are rendered powerless against the bosses, since only
working-class organization can, to a certain extent (a much too
limited extent), serve as a counterweight to the wealth of the
employers.
II. The Bourgeois State: the
Face of Everyday Reality
Through the struggle waged by
the labour movement certain institutions of the bourgeois state
become both more subtle and more complex. Universal suffrage was
substituted for suffrage for property-owners only; military
service has become compulsory; everybody pays taxes. The class
character of the state then becomes a little less transparent.
The nature of the state as an instrument of class domination is
less evident than at the time of the reign of the classical
bourgeoisie, when the relationships between the different groups
exercising state functions were just as transparent as in the
feudal era. The analysis of the modern state, therefore, will
also have to be a little more complex.
First, let us establish a
hierarchy among the different functions of the state.
In this day and age, nobody but
the most naive believes that parliament really does the
governing, that parliament is master of the state based on
universal suffrage. (That illusion is, however, more widespread
in those countries in which parliament is a fairly recent
institution.)
The power of the state
is a permanent power. This power is exercised by a
certain number of institutions that are isolated from and
independent of so changeable and unstable an influence as
universal suffrage. These are the institutions that must be
analysed if we are to learn where the real power lies:
“Governments come and governments go, but the police and the
administrators remain”.
The state is, above all, these
permanent institutions: the army (the permanent part of the army
– the general staff, special troops) the police, special
police, secret police, the top administrators of government
departments (“key” civil servants), the national security
bodies, the judges, etc. – everything that is “free” of
the influence of universal suffrage.
This executive power is
constantly being reinforced. To the extent that
universal suffrage appears and a certain democratisation, albeit
completely formal, of certain representative institutions
develops, it can be shown that real power slips from those
institutions towards others that are more and more removed from
the influence of parliament.
If the king and his
functionaries lose a series of rights to parliament during the
ascending phase of parliamentarism, on the contrary, with the
decline of parliamentarism (which begins with the winning of
universal suffrage), a continuous series of rights are lost by
parliament and revert to the permanent and irremovable
administrations of the state. This phenomenon is a general one
throughout Western Europe. The present Fifth Republic in France
is presently the most striking and most complete example of this
phenomenon.
Should this turnabout, this
reversal, be seen as a diabolical plot against universal
suffrage by the wicked capitalists? A much deeper objective
reality is involved: the real powers are transferred from the
legislative to the executive; the power of the executive is
reinforced in a permanent and continuous fashion as a result of
changes that are also taking place within the capitalist class
itself.
This process began at the time
of World War I in most of the belligerent countries and has
since continued without interruption. But the phenomenon often
existed much earlier than that. Thus, in the German Empire this
priority of the executive over the legislative appeared
concomitantly with universal suffrage. Bismarck and the Junkers
granted universal suffrage in order to use the working class to
a certain extent as a lever against the liberal bourgeoisie,
thus assuring (in that already essentially capitalist society)
the relative independence of the executive power exercised by
the Prussian nobility.
This process shows full well
that political equality is more apparent than real and that the
right of the citizen-voter is nothing but the right to put a
little piece of paper in a ballot box every four years. The
right goes no farther, nor, above all, does it reach the real
centres of decision-making and power.
The monopolies take over
from parliament
The classical era of
parliamentarisin was the era of free competition. At that time
the individual bourgeois, the industrialist, the banker, was
very strong as an individual. He was very independent, very free
within the limits of bourgeois freedom, and could risk his
capital on the market in any he wished. In that atomized
bourgeois society, parliament played a very useful, and even
indispensable, objective role in the smooth functioning of
everyday affairs.
Actually, it was only in
parliament that the common denominator of the interests of the
bourgeoisie could be determined. Dozens of separate capitalist
groups could be listed, groups opposed to one another by a
multitude of sectional, regional, and corporative interests.
These groups could get together in an orderly fashion only in
parliament. (It’s true that they did meet on the market too,
but there it was with knives, not words!) It was only in
parliament that a middle line could be hammered out, a line that
would express the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.
Because that was then the
function of parliament: to serve as a common meeting place where
the collective interests of the bourgeoisie could be formulated.
Let us recall that in the heroic era of parliamentarism it was
not only with words and votes that this collective interest was
hammered out; fists and pistols were used, too. Didn’t the
Convention, that classical bourgeois parliament during the
French Revolution, send people to the guillotine by the slimmest
of majorities?
But capitalist society is not
going to remain atomized. Little by little, it call be seen
organizing itself and structuring itself in a more and more
concentrated, more and more centralized way. Free competition
fades away: it is replaced by monopolies, trusts, and other
capitalist groupings.
Capitalist power is
centralized outside parliament
Now a real centralization of
finance capital, big banks and financial groups, takes place. If
the Analytique [3]
of parliament expressed the will of the Belgian bourgeoisie a
century ago, today it is above all the annual report of the Société
Générale [4] or of Brufina
[5], prepared for their
stockholders’ meetings, that must be studied to know the real
opinions of the capitalists. These reports contain the opinions
of the capitalists who really count, the big financial groups
who dominate the life of the country.
Thus, capitalist power is
concentrated outside parliament and outside the institutions
born of universal suffrage. In the face of so high-powered a
concentration (we need only remember that in Belgium a dozen
financial groups control the economic life of the nation), the
relationships between parliament and government officials,
police commissioners and those multimillionaires is a
relationship burdened very little by theory. It is a very
immediate and practical relationship: and the connecting link is
the payoff.
The bourgeoisie’s visible
golden chains – the national debt
Parliament and, even more, the
government of a capitalist state, no matter how democratic it
may appear to be, are tied to the bourgeoisie by golden chains.
These golden chains have a name – the public debt.
No government could last more
than a month without having to knock on the door of the banks in
order to pay its current expenses. If’ the banks were to
refuse, the government would go bankrupt. The origins of this
phenomenon are twofold. Taxes don’t enter the coffers every
day; receipts are concentrated in one period of the year while
expenses are continuous. That is how the short-term public debt
arises. This problem could be solved by some technical gimmick.
But there is another problem – a much more important one. All
modern capitalist states spend more than they receive. That is
the long-term public debt for which banks and other financial
establishments can most easily advance money, at heavy interest.
Therein lies a direct and immediate connection, a daily link,
between the state and big business.
The hierarchy in the state
apparatus ...
Other golden chains, invisible
chains, make the state apparatus a tool in the hands of the
bourgeoisie.
If we examine the method of
recruiting civil service people, for example, we see that to
become a junior clerk in a ministry, it is necessary to pass an
examination. The rule seems very democratic indeed. On the other
hand, not just anyone can take any examination at all for any
level whatsoever. The examination is not the same for the
position of secretary general of a ministry or chief of the army
general staff as it is for junior clerk in a small government
bureau. At first glance, this too would seem normal.
But – a big but –
there’s a progression in these examinations that gives them a
selective character. You have to have certain degrees, you have
to have taken certain courses, to apply for certain positions,
especially important positions. Such a system excludes a huge
number of people who were not able to get a university education
or its equivalent, because equality of educational opportunity
doesn’t really exist. Even if the civil service examination
system is democratic on the surface, it is also a selective
instrument.
... mirror of the hierarchy
in capitalist society
These invisible golden chains
are also found in the remuneration received by members of the
state apparatus.
All government agencies, the
army included, develop this pyramidal aspect, this hierarchical
structure, that characterizes bourgeois society. We are so
influenced by and so imbued with the ideology of the ruling
class that we tend to see nothing abnormal in the fact that a
secretary general of a ministry receives a salary ten times
higher than that of a junior clerk in the same ministry or that
of the woman who cleans its offices. The physical effort of this
charwoman is certainly greater; but the secretary general of the
ministry, he thinks! – which, as everyone knows, is
much more tiring. In the same way, the pay of the chief of the
general staff (again, someone who thinks!) is much
greater by far than that accorded to a second-class private.
This hierarchical structure of
the state apparatus leads us to emphasize: In this apparatus
there are secretaries general, generals of the army, bishops,
etc., who have the same salary level, and therefore have the
same standard of living, as the big bourgeoisie, so that they
are part of the same social and ideological climate. Then come
the middle functionaries, the middle officials, who are on the
same social level and have the same income as the petty and
middle bourgeoisie. And finally, the mass of employees without
titles, charwomen, community workers, who very often earn less
than factory workers. Their standard of living clearly
corresponds to that of the proletariat.
The state apparatus is not
a homogeneous instrument. It involves a structure that rather
closely corresponds to the structure of bourgeois society, with
a hierarchy of classes and identical differences between
them.
This pyramidal structure
corresponds to a real need of the bourgeoisie. They wish to have
at their disposal an instrument they can manipulate at will. It
is quite obvious why the bourgeoisie has been trying for a long
time, and trying very hard, to deny public service workers the
right to strike.
Is the state simply an
arbiter?
This point is important In the
very concept of the bourgeois state – regardless of whether it
may be more or less “democratic” in form – there is a
fundamental premise, linked, moreover, to the very origin of the
state: By its nature the state remains antagonistic, or rather
non-adaptive, to the needs of the collectivity. The state is, by
definition, a group of men who exercise the functions that in
the beginning were exercised by all members of the collectivity.
These men contribute no productive labour but are supported by
the other members of society.
In normal times, there is not
much need for watchdogs. Even in Moscow, for example, there is
no one in charge of collecting fares on buses: passengers
deposit their kopeck on boarding, whether or not anyone is
watching them. In societies where the level of development of
the productive forces is low, where everyone is in a constant
struggle with everyone else to get enough to live on for himself
out of a national income too small to go around, a large
supervisory apparatus becomes necessary.
Thus, during the German
occupation [of Belgium], a number of specialized supervisory
services proliferated (special police in the railway stations,
supervision of printshops, of rationing, etc.). In times like
that, the area of conflict is such that an imposing supervisory
apparatus proves indispensable.
If we think about the problem a
bit, we can see that all who exercise state functions, who are
part of the state apparatus, are – in one way or another –
watchdogs. Special police and regular police are watchdogs, but
so are tax collectors, judges, paper pushers in government
offices, fare-collectors on buses, etc. In sum, all functions of
the state apparatus are reduced to this: surveillance and
control of the life of the society in the interests of the
ruling class.
It is often said that the
contemporary state plays the role of arbiter. This statement is
quite close to what we have just said: “surveillance” and
“arbitrating” – aren’t they basically the same thing?
Two comments are called for.
First, the arbiter is not neutral. As we explained above, the
top men in the state apparatus are part and parcel of the big
bourgeoisie. Arbitration thus does not take place in a vacuum;
it takes place in the framework of maintaining existing class
society. Of course, concessions to the exploited can be made by
arbitrators; that depends essentially on the relationship of
forces. But the basic aim of arbitration is to maintain
capitalist exploitation as such, if necessary by compromising a
bit on secondary questions.
The watchdog-state,
testimony to the poverty of society
Second, the state is an entity
created by society for the surveillance of the everyday
functioning of social life; it is at the service of the ruling
class for the purpose of maintaining the domination of that
class. There is an objective necessity for this watchdog
organization, a necessity very closely linked to the degree of
poverty, to the amount of social conflict that exists in the
society.
In a more general, historical
way, the exercise of state functions is intimately connected
with the existence of social conflicts. In turn, these social
conflicts are intimately, connected with the existence of a
certain scarcity of material goods, of wealth, of resources, of
the necessary means for satisfaction of human needs. This fact
should be emphasized: As long as the state exists, it will
be proof of the fact that social conflicts (therefore the
relative scarcity of goods and services as well) remain. With
the disappearance of social conflicts, the watchdogs, rendered
useless and parasitical, will disappear – but not before!
Society, in effect, pays these men to exercise the functions of
surveillance, as long as that is in the interests of part of
society. But it is quite evident that from the moment no group
in society has a stake in the watchdog function being exercised,
the function will disappear along with its usefulness. At the
same time, the state will disappear.
The very fact that the state
survives proves that social conflicts remain, that the condition
of relative scarcity of goods remains the hallmark of that vast
period in human history between absolute poverty (the condition
during primitive communism) and plenty (the condition of the
future socialist society). As long as we are in this
transitional period that covers ten thousand years of human
history, a period that also includes the transition between
capitalism and socialism, the state will survive, social
conflicts will remain, and there will have to be people to
arbitrate these conflicts in the interest of the ruling class.
If the bourgeois state remains
fundamentally an instrument in the service of the ruling
classes, does that mean that the workers should be indifferent
to the particular form that this state takes parliamentary
democracy, military, dictatorship, fascist dictatorship? Not at
all! The more freedom the workers have to organize themselves
and defend their ideas, the more will the seeds of the future
socialist democracy grow within capitalist society, and the more
will the advent of socialism be historically facilitated. That
is why, the workers must defend their democratic rights against
any and every attempt to curtail them (anti-strike laws,
institution of a “strong state”) or to crush them (
fascism).
III. The Proletariat in
Power
The foregoing serves to answer
some questions that arise about the state and about socialism.
Does the working class need
a state?
When we say that the state
remains in existence up to and including the transitional
society between capitalism and socialism, the question arises
whether the working class still needs a state when it takes
power.
Could not the working class, as
soon as it takes power, abolish the state overnight? History has
already answered this question. Certainly, on paper, the working
class could do away with the state However, this would be only a
formal, juridical act to the extent that the workers had not
seized power in a society already so rich and with such an
abundance of material goods and services that social conflicts
as such, that is, centring on the distribution of these
products, could disappear; and that the necessity for arbiters,
watchdogs, police, to control all that chaos disappeared at the
same time as did the relative scarcity of goods. This has never
happened in the past and it is hardly likely that it ever will.
To the extent that the working
class takes power in a country in which there is still a partial
scarcity of goods, or in which a certain amount of poverty
exists, it takes power at a time when the society cannot as yet
function without a state. A mass of social conflicts remain.
One can always resort to a
hypocritical attitude, as do certain anarchists: Let’s abolish
the state and call the people who exercise state functions by
another name. But that’s a purely verbal operation, a paper
“abolition” of the state. As long as social conflicts
remain, there is a real need for people to regulate these
conflicts. Now, people who regulate conflicts – that’s what
the state is. It is impossible for humanity, collectively, to
regulate conflicts in a situation of real inequality and of real
incapacity to satisfy the needs of everyone.
Equality in poverty
There is an objection that can
be raised to this, although it is a little absurd and not many
people raise it anymore.
A society can be imagined in
which the abolition of the state would be linked to the
reduction of human needs; in such a society perfect equality
could be established, which, of course, would be nothing but
equality in poverty. Thus, if the working class were to take
power in Belgium tomorrow, everyone could have bread and butter
– and even a little more than that.
But it is impossible
artificially to deny human needs created by the development of
the productive forces – needs that have appeared as a result
of the fact that society has reached a certain stage of
development. When production of a whole range of goods and
services is not sufficient to cover everyone’s needs, banning
those goods and services will always be ineffective. Such a ban
would only create ideal conditions for a black market and for
the illegal production of those goods.
Thus all the communist sects
which, during the Middle Ages and modern times, sought to
organize the perfect communist society immediately, based on
perfect equality of its members, forbade production of luxury
items, of items of ordinary comfort – including printing! All
these experiments failed, because human nature is such that from
the moment a man becomes aware of certain needs, these cannot be
artificially repressed. Savonarola [6],
preaching repentance and abstinence, inveighed against luxuries
and demanded that all paintings be burned; he would not have
been able to prevent some incorrigible or other, a lover of
beauty, from painting in secret.
The problem of distribution of
such “illegal” products, which would then become even
scarcer than formerly, would still arise again – inevitably.
The proletariat’s gamble
Another reason, although less
important, should be added to what was said at the beginning of
this chapter.
When the proletariat comes to
power, it does so under very special conditions, different from
the seizure of power by any other previous social class. In the
course of history, when all other social classes seized power,
they already held the actual power of society in their hands –
economic, intellectual, and moral. There is not a single
example, before that of the proletariat, of a social class
coming to power while it was still oppressed from the economic,
intellectual, and moral standpoint. In other words, postulating
that the proletariat call seize power is almost a gamble,
because collectively, as a class in the capitalist system, this
proletariat is downtrodden and prevented from fully developing
its creative potential. For we cannot fully develop our
intellectual and moral capacities when we work eight, nine, or
ten hours a day in a workshop, a factory, an office. And that is
still the proletarian condition today.
As a result, the power of the
working class, when it comes to power, is very vulnerable. In
many areas, the power of the working class must be defended
against a minority that will continue, for the duration of an
entire historical period of transition, to enjoy enormous
advantages in the intellectual area and in their material
possessions – at least in their stock of consumer goods – in
relation to the working class.
A normal socialist revolution
expropriates the big bourgeoisie as holders of the means of
production; but it does not strip the bourgeois holders of their
accumulated possessions or diplomas. Still less can it
expropriate their brains and knowledge: during the entire period
preceding the taking of power by the working class, it was the
bourgeoisie who had an almost exclusive monopoly in education.
Thus, in a society where the
proletariat has held power for only a little while (political
power, power of armed men), many levers of real power are and
remain in the hands of the bourgeoisie – more exactly, in the
hands of a part of the bourgeoisie, which might be called the
intelligentsia or the intellectual and technological
bourgeoisie.
Workers’ power and
bourgeois technicians
Lenin had some bitter
experiences on this score. Actually, it can be proved that no
matter how you look at the problem, no matter what laws,
decrees, institutions are promulgated, if there is a need for
professors, high-level functionaries, engineers, highly trained
technical people at all levels of the social machinery, it is
very difficult to place proletarians in these positions
overnight – and even five or six years after the conquest of
power.
During the early years of
Soviet power, Lenin, armed with a theoretically correct although
slightly incomplete formula, said: Today engineers work for the
bourgeoisie; tomorrow they will work for the proletariat; for
that they will be paid and, if necessary, they will be forced to
work. The important thing is that they be controlled by the
workers. But a few years later, shortly before his death, Lenin,
drawing a balance sheet of that experience, asked himself the
question: Who controls whom? Are the experts controlled by the
communists, or is the reverse happening?
When we grapple with this
question day after day and in concrete terms in the
underdeveloped countries, when we see what it means in practice
in a country like Algeria, we realize full well that this is a
problem that can be solved easily enough on paper with a few
magical formulas, but that it is a completely different matter
when the problem has to be solved in a real country, in real
life. In a country like Algeria, for example, it means utter
control; the privilege of university education (or any kind of
education) is possessed by an infinitesimal minority of society,
while the great mass of people, who fought heroically to win
independence, find themselves, when the time comes to exercise
power, confronted with their lack of knowledge, knowledge they
must now only begin to acquire. And they find that, in the
interim, they must completely surrender to the educated few the
power they so heroically fought for and won.
The most heroic experiment in
this area, the most radical and the most revolutionary in all
human history, is the one undertaken by the Cuban revolution.
Drawing lessons from all the varied experiences of the past, the
Cuban revolution undertook to resolve this problem on a broad
scale and in a minimum of time by conducting an extraordinary
educational campaign* to transform tens of thousands of
illiterate workers and peasants into that many teachers,
professors and university students – and in a minimum of time.
At the end of five or six years work, the results obtained are
considerable.
Nevertheless, a single engineer
or a single agronomist in a district containing tens of
thousands of workers can in practice become, despite the
revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people, master of the
district, if he has a monopoly on the technical knowledge vital
to the district. Here again, the false solution would be to
revert to so simple a level that technicians would not be
needed. That is a reactionary utopia.
The state, guardian of
workers’ power
All these difficulties indicate
the necessity for the proletariat, the new ruling class, to
exercise state power against all those who might wrest power
from it, whether bit by bit or all at once. The proletariat must
exercise state power in this new and transitional society in
which it possesses political power and the principal levers of
economic power, but in which it is held in check by a whole
constellation of weaknesses and newly made enemies. This is the
situation that makes it necessary for the working class to
maintain a state after its conquest of power and that makes it
impossible to abolish the state overnight. But this
working-class state must be of a very special kind.
Nature and characteristics
of the proletarian state
The working class, by its
special position in society (which has just been described), is
obliged to maintain a state. But in order to preserve the power
of that state, the latter has to be radically different from the
state which in the past upheld the power of the bourgeoisie, or
the feudal or slaveholding class. The proletarian state is, at
one and the same time, a state and not a state. It becomes less
and less a state. It is a state that begins to wither away at
the very moment it is born, as Marx and Lenin correctly said.
Marx, developing the theory of the proletarian state, of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, as he called it, the state that
withers away, gave it several characteristics, examples of which
were found in the Paris Commune of 1871. There are three
essential characteristics:
(1) No distinct
separation between the executive and legislative powers.
Bodies are needed which enact laws and at the same time enforce
them, In short, it is necessary to revert to the state that was
born of the primitive communism of the clan and the tribe and
that can still be found in the ancient Athenian popular
assembly.
This is important. It is the,
best way of reducing as much as possible the cleavage between
real power, more and more concentrated in the hands of permanent
bodies, and the increasingly fictitious power that is left to
deliberative assemblies. This cleavage is the characteristic of
bourgeois parliamentarism. It is not enough to replace one
deliberative assembly with another, if nothing is essentially
changed regarding this cleavage. The deliberative assemblies
must have real executive power at their disposal.
(2) Public offices to
be elective, to the greatest extent. It is not only
members of the deliberative assemblies who should be elected.
Judges, high-level functionaries, officers of the militia,
supervisors of education, managers of public works, should also
be elected. This may be a bit of a shock to countries with an
ultra-reactionary Napoleonic tradition. But certain specifically
bourgeois democracies, the United States, Switzerland, Canada,
or Australia for example, have conserved the elective character
of a certain number of public functions. Thus, in the United
States the sheriff is elected by his fellow citizens.
In the proletarian state, this
electing of public officials must be accompanied in all cases by
the right of recall, i.e., voting unsatisfactory officials out
of office at any time.
Thus, permanent and extensive
control by the people over those exercising state functions must
be made possible, and the separation between those who exercise
state power and those in whose name it is exercised must be as
small as possible. That is why it is necessary to assure a
constant changing of elected officials, to prevent people from
remaining in office permanently. The functions of the state
must, on an ever wider scale, be exercised in turn by the masses
as a whole.
(3) No excessive
salaries. No official, no member of representative and
legislative bodies, no individual exercising a state power,
should receive a salary higher than that of a skilled worker.
That is the only valid method of preventing people from seeking
public office as a way of feathering their nests and sponging on
society, the only valid way to get rid of the career-hunters and
parasites known to all previous societies.
Together these three rules well
express the thinking of Marx and Lenin concerning the
proletarian state. This state no longer resembles any of its
predecessors, because it is the first state that begins to
wither away at the very moment of its appearance; because it is
a state whose apparatus is composed of people no longer
privileged in relation to the mass of society; because it is a
state whose functions are more and more exercised by members of
the society as a whole who keep taking each other’s place;
because it is a state that is no longer identical with a group
of people who are detached from the masses and exercise
functions separate and apart from the masses, but which, on the
contrary, is indistinguishable from the people, from the
labouring masses; because it is a state that withers away with
the withering away of social classes, social conflicts, money
economy, market production, commodities, money, etc. This
withering away of the state should be conceived of as
self-management and self-government of producers and citizens
which expands more and more until, under conditions of material
abundance and a high cultural level of the entire society, the
latter becomes structured into self-governing producer-consumer
communities.
What about the Soviet Union?
When we look at the history of
the USSR in the past thirty years, the conclusion to be drawn
concerning the state is simple: a state with a permanent army; a
state in which can be found marshals, managers of trusts, and
even playwrights and ballerinas who earn fifty times as much its
a manual labourer or a domestic worker; where tremendous
selectivity for certain public functions has been established,
making access to these functions practically impossible for the
vast majority of the population: where real power is exercised
by small committees of people whose tenure is renewed in
mysterious ways and whose power remains fixed and permanent for
long historical periods – such a state, obviously, is not in
the process of withering away.
Why?
The explanation for this is
simple. In the Soviet Union the state has not withered away
because social conflicts have not withered away. Social
conflicts have not withered away because the degree of
development of the productive forces has not permitted this
withering away – because the situation of semi-scarcity that
characterises even the most advanced capitalist countries
continues to characterise the situation in the Soviet state. And
as long as these conditions of semi-scarcity exist, controllers,
watchdogs, special police are necessary. Of course, in a
proletarian state, these people would be serving a better cause,
at least to the extent to which they defend the socialist
economy. But it must also be recognized that they are detached
front the body of society, that they are in large measure
parasites. Their disappearance is directly linked to the level
of development of the productive forces, which alone can permit
the withering away of social conflicts and the abolition of
functions linked to these conflicts.
And to the extent that these
watchdogs, these controllers, more and more monopolize the
exercise of political power, to that extent obviously can they
be assured of increasing material privileges, the choice morsels
in the relative scarcity that dominates distribution. They thus
constitute a privileged bureaucracy, beyond the reach of control
by the workers and prone to defend first and foremost their own
privileges.
The argument of the “cordon
sanitaire” [7]
The dangers resulting from
being surrounded by capitalism are always cited by those who
object to the above criticisms. The argument goes: As long as an
external danger exists, a state will be necessary, as Stalin
said, if only to defend the country against the hostility that
surrounds it.
This argument is based on a
misunderstanding. The only thing that the existence of a
threatening capitalist encirclement can prove is the necessity
for armament and for a military institution, but that does not
justify the existence of military institutions separate and
apart from the body of society. The existence of such
military institutions, separate from society as a whole,
indicates that within this society there remains a substantial
amount of the social tension which prevents governments from
permitting themselves the luxury of arming the people, which
makes the leaders afraid to trust the people to solve the
military problems of self-defence in their own way. This the
people would be able to do if the collectivity really had that
degree of extraordinary superiority that a truly socialist
society would have in relation to capitalist society.
In reality, the problem of
external environment is only a secondary aspect of a much more
general phenomenon: The level of development of the productive
forces, the economic maturity of the country, is far from the
level that would have to exist for a society to be a socialist
society. The Soviet Union has remained a transitional society
whose level of development of productive forces is comparable to
that of an advanced capitalist society. It must, therefore,
fight with comparable weapons. Not having eliminated social
conflicts, the USSR must maintain all organs of control and
surveillance of the population and, because of this, must
maintain and even reinforce the state instead of allowing it to
wither away. For numerous specific reasons, this has fostered
bureaucratic deformations and degenerations in this transitional
society, which have clone the cause of socialism grave injury,
especially to the extent that the label “socialist” has been
attached to Soviet society for fear of telling the truth: We are
still too poor and too backward to be able to create a true
socialist society. And to the extent that they wanted to use the
label “socialist” at all costs for propaganda reasons, they
now have to explain the existence of such things as
“socialist” purges, “socialist” concentration camps,
“socialist” unemployment, “socialist” violations of the
rights of national minorities, etc., etc.
Guarantees against
bureaucracy
What guarantees can be
introduced in the future to avoid the abnormal growth of the
bureaucracy that appeared in the USSR?
- Scrupulously respect the
three rules enumerated above concerning the beginning of the
withering away of the workers’ state (and especially the
rule limiting salaries of all administrators – economic
and political).
- Scrupulously respect the
democratic character of management of the economy:
workers’ self-management committees elected in the
enterprises; a congress of producers (“economic senate”)
elected by these committees, etc. In the last analysis those
who control the surplus social product control the entire
society.
- Scrupulously respect the
principle that if the workers’ state must of necessity
restrict the political liberties of all class enemies who
are opposed to the advent of socialism (a restriction that
should be in proportion to the violence of their
resistance), it should at the same time extend these same
liberties for all workers: freedom for all parties that
respect socialist legality; freedom of the press for all
newspapers that do the same; freedom of assembly,
association, demonstration for the workers – without any
restrictions; real independence of the trade unions from the
state, with recognized right to strike.
- Respect the democratic and
public character of all deliberative assemblies and their
full freedom of debate.
- Respect the principle of a
written law.
Theory and practice
Marxist theory concerning the
withering away of the state has now been fully developed for
more than a half-century. In Belgium there is only one little
detail missing, one little thing we still have to do – put
this theory into practice.
Notes
1.
Anecdote of the Soissons vase. Legendary account of an
incident during the reign of King Clovis of the Franks, in the
fifth century AD. (Clovis was the first Frankish king to embrace
Christianity, and it was during his reign that most of what is
now Belgium and France was united into a kingdom.) After a
victorious battle at Soissons (486 AD), when the booty was to be
divided equally among all the soldiers, Clovis wanted to keep a
certain vase for himself. A soldier thereupon strode out of the
ranks and smashed the vase with his sword, to indicate that no
fighter had the right to any special privilege in sharing the
booty.
2.
Doctrinaire. Members of the conservative wing of the
Liberal Party in nineteenth century Belgium were called
Doctrinaires. They were violently opposed to universal suffrage,
whereas the so-called Progressives in the Liberal Party were
ready to accept it.
3.
Analytique. The equivalent in Belgium
of the US Congressional Record.
4.
Société Générale. Belgium’s most important
capitalist grouping since its independence in 1830. Originally
organized in the form of a merchant bank, the Société Générale
was a forerunner of “finance capital”, which became general
in other capitalist countries only in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. This resulted from the Société’s
early possession of controlling interests in many joint stock
companies, especially in coal and steel. Later it controlled the
famous Union Minière du Haut Katanga, as well as other
companies in the Congo.
Today it has reorganised in the
form of a central holding company that controls stock in many
apparently independent companies, among them Belgium’s main
savings bank.
5.
Brufina. Belgium’s second largest capitalist
grouping, Brufina grew out of the Banque de Bruxelles,
the second largest Belgian bank.
6.
Savonarola (1452-1498). Italian religious reformer and
mass leader who attacked corruption and vice in fiery oratory.
Incurred the enmity of Pope Alexander VI as a result of scandals
he uncovered, and publicised, in the pope’s court. Accused of
heresy, he was burned to death at the stake in Florence.
7.
“Cordon sanitaire”. Literally, the “sanitary
cordon” or quarantine placed around the young Soviet republic
by the United States and its World War I allies. The Soviet
Union was isolated or cordoned off from diplomatic, commercial
and ideological intercourse with the rest of the world by the
belt of countries encircling it and allied navies patrolling the
sea-lanes. This policy, which caused tremendous hardships in the
Soviet Union but which ultimately failed, was an earlier version
of Washington’s current attempt to destroy the Cuban
revolution by economic blockade and to quarantine the
revolutionary “infection” by forbidding travel there.
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