The Life and Work of Friedrich Engels/Chapter 19
The State
Engels traces the effect of the overthrow of the gens institutions in Greece, and shows how, unknown to its members, they lost control of their products, for when the producers no longer produce for their own consumption, but for exchange, the products become commodities and their producers lose all control of them. The result of all this is production for exchange without any direct relation to the needs of society and the enslavement of the producers of the commodities by the owners of the means of production. With this came the tilling of the soil by individuals on their own account, and this was necessarily followed by the private ownership of land, and there arose a great landless class. With the production of commodities came money, the general commodity for which all others could be exchanged, and this, in its turn, facilitated the growth of commodity production, circulation and exchange. This necessitated again new social and political forms; the gens had outgrown the new methods of production. It was no longer capable of maintaining order within society or of allowing the new productive forces to expand. Nor was it capable of regulating the new relations between debtor, creditor, and all the intricacies of social organisation within a society based on commodity production and class domination. Hence arose the State. In view of the fact, however, that the State as such is still so largely deified and looked upon as something quite permanent which we can at most only modify here and there to suit our purposes, it will be well to dwell a little longer on what Engels has to say on the subject of the State. Discussing the influence which was undermining gentil society in the Greece of heroic times, Engels shows how the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the paternal family, and the consequent laws of inheritance, raised the power of the family as against the gens and formed the rudiments of a hereditary nobility and monarchy. With the growth of the possibility of accumulating wealth came slavery, first only applying to prisoners of war, but soon embracing the poorer members of one's own tribe. "In short," says Engels, "wealth is praised and respected as the highest treasure, and the old gentil institutions are abused in order to justify the forcible robbery of wealth. Only one thing was missing: an institution that not only secured the newly acquired property of private individuals against the communistic traditions of the gens, that not only declared as sacred the formerly-despised private property and represented the protection of this sacred property as the highest purpose of human society, but that also stamped the gradually developing new forms of acquiring property, of constantly increasing wealth with the universal sanction of society. An institution that lent the character of perpetuity not only to the newly rising division into classes, but also to the right of the possessing classes to exploit and rule the non-possessing classes. And this institution was found. The State arose."
Thus, in place of the free armed nation, spontaneously acknowledging its Elder as their military and civic chief, armed only for their defence against external foes, there arises the State which is a "product of society at a certain stage of its development. The State is tantamount to an acknowledgement that the given society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has broken up into irreconcilable antagonisms, of which it cannot rid itself." To keep the conflict of these antagonisms or classes within certain limits some force standing seemingly above society, but really expressing the will and power of the governing class, becomes necessary. "And this force, arising from society, but placing itself above it—this force is the State." The State is distinguished first by "the grouping of the subjects of the State according to territorial divisions" (the tribal or clan organisation was independent of territory), secondly, by the existence of "a public power no longer identical with the whole population and which is organised as an armed force," consisting "not only of armed men, but also of material additions in the shape of prisons and repressive institutions of all kinds which were unknown in the gentilic (clan) form of society."
Engels traces the various forms through which the State has passed, and shows that in "most historical States the rights of the citizens are differentiated according to their wealth. This is a direct confirmation of the fact that the State is organised for the protection of the possessing against the non-possessing classes." Engels further shows how class morality and class ideals permeate the whole of our modern State institutions, and how, with the emancipation of the working class the whole of the modern State machinery will have to be scrapped. "The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purpose," says Engels, in his preface to the 1888 edition of the Communist manifesto. No, they must break it up, for the triumph of the working class means the end of class rule and the class State. This, of course, does not mean the abolition of representative institutions. On the contrary, it means their real establishment and the abolition of institutions which misrepresent the workers. It means the abolition of bureaucracy. It means the setting up of bodies composed of direct representatives of the workers elected for very short periods and subject to recall at any time should they act contrary to the wishes of their electors; these representative bodies not forming a privileged section of the community, their members receiving moderate salaries, placing them on the same footing as any other citizen of the country, and whilst making the laws at the instruction of their electors, they are themselves to carry out these laws, thus doing away with all bureaucracy and gradually with the incubus of permanent officialdom.
Finally, Engels sums up his teaching on the State and our attitude towards it thus: "The State has not always existed. There have been societies without it that had no idea of the State or of State power. At a given stage of economic development which was, of necessity, bound up with the division of society into classes, the State became the inevitable result of this division. We are now rapidly approaching a stage of development in production, in which the existence of classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but is becoming a positive fetter on production. Hence these classes must fall as inevitably as they once inevitably arose. With the disappearance of classes, the State, too, must inevitably disappear. The society that will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers will banish the whole State machine to the most suitable place for it: into the museum of antiquities by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
We shall give but one more passage dealing with this subject to illustrate Engels' views as to how the proletariat must deal with the State, namely, from the anti-Dühring we promised above:—
"The proletariat takes control of the State authority, and, first of all, converts the means of production into State property. But by this very act it destroys itself, as a proletariat, destroying a§ it does all class differences and class antagonisms and with this also the State. Past and present society, which moved amidst class antagonisms, had need of the State to enforce the will of the possessing classes on the exploited. … In ancient times it was the State of the slave-owners—the only citizens of the State; in the Middle Ages it was the State of the feudal nobility; in our own times it is the State of the capitalists. When, ultimately, the State really becomes the representative of the whole of society it will make itself superfluous. From the time when, together with class domination and the struggle for individual existence, resulting from the present anarchy in production, those conflicts and excesses which arise from this struggle will all disappear, from that time there will be nobody to be oppressed; there will, therefore, be no need for any special form of oppression—no need for the State. The first act of the State, in which it really acts as the representative of the whole of Society—namely, the assumption of control over the means of production on behalf of society—is also its last independent act as a State. The interference of the authority of the State with social relations will then become superfluous in one field after another, and finally will cease of itself. The authority of the government over persons will be replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The State will not be 'abolished,' it will wither away."
Thus, in gaining power, the working class, organising itself as a ruling class by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat, breaks up and scraps the present State machinery, setting up in its place a sort of State which is no longer a State in the present sense of the word, for by the very assumption of power the working class does away with all classes in society. This sort of State continues to function throughout the transition period towards complete Communism, using at the same time every means at its disposal, armed forces where necessary, etc., to do away with the remnants of class antagonisms and the resistance of the overthrown classes. As, however, the working class—or rather, it would be more correct now to say the workers' Republic—becomes consolidated and the remnants of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy disappear, as the Republic becomes more and more a purely workers' Republic with no exploited or oppressed classes, so this sort of transition State withers away, and its place is taken by an elected executive body organising the affairs of the whole society; and for the first time, since primitive Communism, and in a far more perfect form, carrying out the will and representing the whole of society and not one particular group or class.
And how far this analysis and prognostication of Engels is correct and to the point has been shown particularly by the experience in the Russian Revolution. Before it could become effective, before the working class could gain control, they had to break up, to scrap the whole capitalist form of the State. Even this cannot be done overnight, of course, but it is useless to try and simply modify it as Kerensky tried. And the Revolution in Germany and Austria is still ineffective, and will remain so until the workers finally leave off tinkering with the capitalist State and set up their own sort of transition State in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
How the opportunists of the Second International have distorted this teaching of Marx and Engels will be found excellently explained in Lenin's The State and Revolution.