The State: What is it, and What is its Role?

Whenever we challenge the multimillionaire corporations that rule the world, against every march, every protest, every picket, boycott, strike, and action…there is an organized force trained, prepared, and waiting to block, smother, and stop us.  What is this force?  Revolutionaries call it, the State.

Who is the State?

• The police – who threaten, move, caution, harass, arrest, and imprison us.

• The judges – who try to condemn us, even though they know nothing about how we live, and never will

• The faceless civil servants, bureaucrats, and lawyers – who pore over documents, drafting complicated laws designed to isolate, stifle, and stamp on any resistance to the power of big money.

Moreover, there is the last deadly line of defense for the system: the Army – a killing machine waiting to spring unthinkingly into action when their paymasters’ dirty work needs doing.

So, how did the state come into being?  What makes it tick?  Is its abolition possible?  If we want to be free and to break the power of the corporations and the billionaires, we need to try to answer these questions.

Let’s start with the origins of the state.  The earliest human societies did not have and could not have had a state.  This was because their society was not divided into separate and hostile classes.  In the first tribes of hunter-gatherers, human beings did not yet possess sufficient skills, knowledge, and technology (tools) to produce a surplus.  After a day’s work, every individual produced only what it took to keep roughly him or her alive; there was next to nothing left over.  In this situation, there is no point in forcing another human being to work for you – there could be no benefit from it.

It was only when societies advanced far enough for each person to be able to produce a little bit extra that a surplus arose – and it is at this stage that a part of society struggles to control that surplus.  Suddenly, it is worthwhile forcing other people to work for you.  It is possible to get rich – but only by oppressing others.  At this stage, one or another class seizes control.  It makes the surplus of the group its own private property, and it can only do this by holding the rest of the people down – by using force.  In other words, by establishing a state – kings to rule, priests to lie to the people about the king being “holy,” and soldiers to take action if the people saw through the lies and demanded an equitable share.

Liberals believe that the state is a neutral force that exists to ensure fair play between different interest groups in society.  To them, the state mediates between the classes.  The ecologist and anti-globalization journalist George Monbiot is an example of this way of thinking.  He says that the way to control global capitalism is to strengthen the powers of the state.  The state will then be able to take steps to limit the abuses of the big corporations, cutting them down to size and restricting the extent of their control of the world’s resources.  It sounds nice – but it completely misunderstands what the state is, and what it exists to do.

As we have seen, the state comes into being once society becomes divided into classes with different relationships to the wealth its members produce.  It is not some wonderful power that descends on society from above to keep the warring people apart and impose a sense of fair play.  It is, in the words of one of the first revolutionary communists, Frederick Engels, the product of the division of society into “irreconcilable” classes, groups of people whose interests directly clash and collide.

In short, the state is not an official in a football game who blows the whistle when either team commits a penalty.  It is a weapon that fights for one class against another.

This means there is no point imagining that the state that exists today will help the people do away with capitalism.  It exists to defend the property of the capitalist minority from the working-class majority.

Nevertheless, it also means it is ridiculous to imagine that the state must always be with us – which we must always have a special armed force ready for use against the people.  We have not always had a state, and we will not always have one.  Once we get rid of the division of society into classes and all human beings have a common set of interests, the whole need for the state will pass away.

As Engels explained:

“The state … has not always existed from all eternity.  There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power.  At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split.  We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production.  They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage.  Along with them the state will inevitably fall.  Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers, will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.”

Today we have reached this stage.  The division of society into a tiny capitalist class and a huge majority of working-class people is an obstacle to progress.  At every step, the capitalists increase the threat of global warming, destroy public services in favor of private corporations, tighten the hold of the banks on third-world countries through debt, and build up ever-greater nuclear arsenals.  Production has reached the stage where we can feed, clothe, and house the whole population of the world a hundred times over – but still millions starve in shantytowns.

To overthrow the rule of the capitalist minority, we will first have to overcome their resistance, which means we have to overcome their state power.

Reformists and liberals believe that this can be done peacefully through parliamentary and constitutional action.  All history proves otherwise.

In Chile in 1973, the working class won a parliamentary majority for the socialist party and tried to take steps against the capitalists in order to redistribute wealth and power in favor of the poor.  However, real power does not rest in parliament – it rests in the hands of the unelected state: the army and police.  These forces – working hand in hand with the CIA – moved violently against the government and overthrew it.  General Pinochet came to power, torturing and executing thousands of socialists; this is just one example.

That is why the most determined part of the working class, throughout the history of modern capitalism, has always argued that the state cannot be reformed; it has to be forcibly overthrown.  While such an overthrow will require the support of the majority of the working class, it will also have to break up the forces of the state, using ruthless methods to overcome their resistance.

The only way this can be done is by forming mass councils of delegates from amongst the working population as alternative centers of power and by organizing a popular militia from among the armed people to take action against the capitalists, their allies, and protectors.

In short, it will take a revolution to smash the capitalist state.  However, does this mean we can move overnight towards a stateless society?

The capitalists will use every means at their disposal to get their property and power back.  Until a planned socialist economy can redistribute wealth and do away with class division altogether, the old ruling class will continue the fight.  While classes exist, there will be a need for a state.  Nevertheless, after a socialist revolution, a completely different type of state will be needed – a working-class state.

The capitalist state exists to defend the power and property of a tiny minority.  A working-class state would exist to do the very opposite – defend the property of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population from a former tiny elite.

Instead of a standing army and police force, the people themselves would be organized democratically to defend their communities.  Instead of sporadic elections stuffed full of careerists – who can break their promises and get away with it – delegates elected from popular councils of working-class people could govern.  They would be subject to instant recall if they broke their promises and would be paid the same as the people they represented.  Bureaucratic positions would be rotated so no one could concentrate too much power in their hands.

As classes disappeared, there would be less and less need for even this special state machine.  The functions of the working-class state could be taken more and more over by society as a whole.  The state would then wither away as government and authority, even of the most democratic sort, would be replaced by the simple administration of society by the people.  As Engels put it, “the government of persons would be replaced by the administration of things.”

The future lies in a society without classes and states – a society based on real freedom, fairness, and personal fulfillment.  Nevertheless, there is only one road to freedom: the revolutionary break-up of the capitalist state and the establishment of a democratic, working-class state.