Though Marx intended to dedicate a volume of Capital to the question of 'the State', he died before he could even begin that work. We are, therefore, left to reconstruct the 'Marxist theory of the state' from scattered references littered throughout Marx and Engels' collected works. My analysis investigates the shifts and contradictions in their thought, as well as the utility these contradictions served in misrepresenting the anarchist alternative.

By Matthew Crossin

“… no state, howsoever democratic its forms, not even the reddest political republic… is capable of giving the people what they need: the free organisation of their own interests from below upward…"

- Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, p. 24

“[With the abolition of classes] the power of the State, which serves to keep the great majority of the producers under the yoke of the numerically small exploiting minority, disappears, and the functions of government are transformed into simple administrative functions. [The anarchists] put matters the other way round…”

- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Fictitious Splits in the International, p. 74

The purpose of this essay is to reassess the views of Karl Marx, his close partner Friedrich Engels, and their anarchist contemporaries on the crucial question of ‘the State’. Specifically, I contend that dominant interpretations of Marx have unsatisfactorily addressed his varied and contradictory analysis of the State; its role (if any) in the construction of a socialist society; and the ways in which this has both overlapped and come into conflict with the anarchist view. My analysis is divided into three parts: In Section I, I discuss the Marx of the Communist Manifesto and other earlier works, arguing that it is in this material that we find the clearest indication of a centralised, statist praxis. Section II concerns the Marx of the International Workingmen’s Association, responsible for The Civil War in France and various lesser known writings. I argue that this later work demonstrates contradictory shifts in his thought and document discrepancies with both the ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Libertarian’ readings of this period. Finally, in Section III, the incoherent nature of Marx’s final analysis is compared with the anarchist position. I argue that Marx and Engels developed an ever-shifting conception of the State, which – whether cynically or out of mere ignorance – both they and their followers have long used to misrepresent and discredit the major alternative to their theoretical framework and movement.

Though it remained unpublished until 1932, Engels described The German Ideology (1845) as the point of departure for understanding Marx’s theory of the State. In that text, as with many radicals before them, Marx and Engels located the State’s origins in “the emancipation of private property from the community”, which is to say, the separation of society into classes. This established the State as a concrete apparatus of government; a “separate entity, alongside and outside civil society”, serving as “nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.” The German Ideology repeatedly refers to ‘the State’ as such a governmental model of social organisation, wherein “all common institutions… are given a political form” for the purposes of maintaining existing property relations. Therefore, Marx and Engels concluded that,



[Whereas] previous revolutions within the framework of [class-society] were bound to lead to new political institutions; it likewise follows that the communist revolution, which [abolishes class-society], ultimately abolishes political institutions. Quote:

This formula, to which the word “ultimately” is crucial, set the foundations for the Marxist view of the State’s role in social revolution and continues to inform most contemporary interpretations. The approach was neatly summarised by Engels in an article for Der Sozialdemokrat (1883) following Marx’s death (initiating the cultivation of an ‘Orthodox Marxism’). Citing both The German Ideology and Communist Manifesto (1848), he identified their shared position as one which holds that the abolition of the State cannot be accomplished during the process of social revolution itself. Instead,



the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organised political force of the State and with this aid stamp out the resistance of the Capitalist class and re-organise society… without which the whole victory must end in a defeat and in a massacre of the working class like that after the Paris Commune. Quote:

This is due to the fact that,



… after the victory of the Proletariat, the only organisation the victorious working class finds ready-made for use is that of the State. It may require adaptation to the new functions. But to destroy that at such a moment, would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious working class can exert its newly conquered power… Quote:

This clear, statist analysis appears to be consistent with the program proposed in the Manifesto, specifically Section II and its policy platform of progressive taxation, universal social services, the abolition of inheritance, the formation of “industrial armies”, the ‘necessary’ development of productive forces, and the gradual centralisation of all means of production “in the hands of the State”. This is, the authors declare, merely “the first step in the revolution”, wherein “the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.”

However, with this call by the Manifesto to ‘win the battle of democracy’ a key contradiction begins to emerge more clearly. Having in The German Ideology also referred to ‘the State’ as “the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests”, Marx and Engels now define their ‘revolutionary state’ as a condition (i.e., a ‘state’ of affairs) in which the proletariat has succeeded in reconstituting itself as ‘the new ruling class’. This seemingly conflicts with the nature of the reforms proposed in Section II, as well as other rather vague and confused attempts to describe the ‘transitional form’ taken by the working class as it carries out this process. For instance, we are told that the proletariat ‘raised to the position of the ruling class’ is simultaneously both “a vast association of the whole nation” and a “public power”, which – until the final abolition of class distinctions – maintains its “political character”. Similar contradictions can be seen in Marx’s description of the ‘state machinery’ in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Here the State is an alienated, centralising apparatus of “governmental power”, defined by the development of infrastructure and public institutions, as well as the expropriation and management of property relations. Notably, however, Marx laments that all previous revolutions had “perfected this machine instead of breaking it”, with the respective parties having “contended in turn for domination regarded[ing] the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.”

Further complicating this already convoluted picture is the fact that, following the experience of the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels essentially disowned the prescriptions outlined in Section II of the Manifesto. In a Preface to the 1872 German Edition, they claim that these passages “would, in many respects, be very differently worded today” given the lessons provided by successive revolutionary experiments and the further development of productive forces. Though this joint declaration begs the question as to why Engels would continue to cite Section II’s analysis of the State, it, nevertheless, appears to constitute an important break by Marx with those who continue to draw from the Manifesto’s program and underlying theoretical logic.

What, then, were the lessons of the Paris Commune - and how did they influence the development of Marxism? The Manifesto’s reflective 1872 Preface has Marx reiterate one of his most famous lines from The Civil War in France (1871), stating that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." Not only is this distinct from previous appeals to the pursuit of political power (whether it be via electoral or insurrectionary means), it explicitly contradicts Engels’ post-Commune assertion regarding the necessity of wielding the State as “ready-made” machinery, given it is the ‘only instrument available to workers.’

Marx’s analysis of the Paris insurrection exalts the worker’s substitution of both the standing army and police with “the armed people”, as well as the replacement of traditional constitutional government (legislatures, executives, judiciaries, etc.) with a single democratic assembly, comprised of working-class representatives’ subject to immediate recall. He similarly praises the implementation of a “workman’s wage” for all elected officials (now to include those carrying out judicial functions), the elimination of church authority, the creation of an autonomous educational system, the seizing of means of production by various workers associations, and a proposed vision of the revolutions future development, wherein,



common affairs [would be administered] by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents. Quote:

Given that Marx had not rebuked his call to seize state power, his admiration for the Paris Commune and apparent condemnation of those features typically understood to define the State implies a mere problem of semantics. ‘The State’ now seemingly referred exclusively to ‘the proletariat raising itself to the position of the ruling class’ - i.e., the act of revolution itself. Those making the case for Marx’s libertarian credentials cite such passages as indicative of a general theoretical shift which would define the philosopher’s final years, particularly in material which remained hidden away in notebooks, if not actively suppressed by the leading figures of the Marxist movement.

However, as with the Manifesto, other comments appear to contradict this reading. In fact, private letters from the period clarify that Marx and Engels had not abandoned their preference for centralism or view of its necessity in social revolution. As Robert Graham notes in his history of the First International, while Marx’s language in The Civil War repeatedly indicates a belief in the need to smash the ‘ready-made state machinery’, it also suggests that the workers replace it with a new (albeit, democratic) state - in the sense of a governmental apparatus existing above society. To Marx, it was the Communal administration (which, decentralized as it initially was, remained a governmental apparatus) that would “serve as a lever” in the abolition of class society. No such responsibility is given to the workers themselves, who in Paris were beginning to engage in direct action at the point of production and combine into free associations. Furthermore, Marx directly states that the “few important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed… but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents.” We, therefore, appear to have a contradictory picture of Marx’s view of the State, both over time and within specific works. Indeed, a year later Marx and Engels would circulate a scathing attack on Bakunin and the anarchists, accusing them of engaging in either ludicrous fantasies or dishonest semantics. Marx and Engels asserted that they were no more ‘statist’ than the anarchists and that, so far as the anarchists believed in the forceful overthrow of capitalism, they were likewise ‘authoritarian’ (rendering it a meaningless slur when used in the derogatory sense). It is worth comparing Marx’s widely read ode to the Paris Commune with their derisive summary of the anarchist vision:



[The anarchistic commune] invites [others] to reorganise themselves in a revolutionary way and then to send their responsible and recallable deputies, vested with their imperative mandates, to an agreed place where they will set up a federation of insurgent associations… a revolutionary force capable of triumphing over reaction… Thus in this anarchistic organisation… we have first the Council of the Commune, then the executive committees which, to be able to do anything at all, must be vested with some power and supported by a police force; this is to be followed by nothing short of a federal parliament … Like the Commune Council, this parliament will have to assign executive power to one or more committees which by this act alone will be given an authoritarian character that the demands of the struggle will increasingly accentuate. Quote:

As a result, they assert that the anarchist alternative to state-socialism constitutes,



a perfect reconstruction of all the elements of the “authoritarian State”; and the fact that we call this machine a “revolutionary Commune organised from bottom to top”, makes little difference. Quote:

Thus, The Civil War in France’s appraisal of the Commune as an alternative to the ‘political state’ appears to be almost entirely negated. At the same time, Marx and Engels suggest that the anarchist’s ‘statism’ was evident in the fact that any proposed federation of free associations would require force to achieve its ends and that their combination would inevitably lead to the exercise of power by a central ‘authority’.

A close reading of the material thus far reviewed demonstrates a fluid, threefold use of the word ‘state’:

a) As a mere synonym for ‘society’; a ‘state’ of affairs. (e.g. a capitalist state or society as opposed to a communist state or society).

b) Referring to the organisation of class rule. In a socialist context this amounts to the act of revolution itself; an armed populace actively carrying out a transformation of social relations by expropriating the means of production, supposedly establishing the proletariat as ‘the new ruling class’.

c) To indicate the specific governmental apparatus situated above society which maintains class relations through its various instruments of coercion: the legislature, executive, judiciary, army, police, prisons, channels of information, schools, etc.

Applying the same term to three wildly different concepts became extremely useful, even central, to combating accusations of ‘authoritarianism’ (i.e., utilising ‘top-down’, statist methods) whilst simultaneously discrediting anarchism as either dishonest or counter-revolutionary in the eyes of the workers movement. One of the most concise articulations of this incoherent analysis can be found in Marx’s Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1874), a series of private notes written in response to Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy (1873). In that work Bakunin considered Marx and Engels' argument that the revolutionary state “[would] be nothing other than ‘the proletariat raised to the level of a ruling class.’” In response he asked, “If the proletariat is to be the ruling class… then whom will it rule?”:



There must be yet a new proletariat which will be subject to this new rule, this new state… What does it mean, “the proletariat raised to a governing class?” Will the entire proletariat head the government? The Germans number about 40 million. Will all 40 million be members of the government? The entire nation will rule, but no one will be ruled. Then there will be no government; there will be no state… Quote:

Marx dismissed Bakunin’s anarchist critique with considerable contempt, declaring it to be filled with “Schoolboy nonsense!” In expanding upon his conception of ‘the proletariat as the ruling class’ he first claims that this refers solely to the collective ‘use of force’ (the ‘employment of coercive, meaning governmental, measures’) against “enemies and the old organisation of society”, which would “not vanish as a result of [the proletariat] coming to power”. Simply put, the ‘proletarian state’ is manifested in any instance where the proletariat “has gained sufficient strength and is sufficiently well organised to employ general means of compulsion” in the suppression of their former masters. It is this, rather than any specific form of social organisation, which would naturally ‘wither away’ following the disappearance of class struggle (i.e., the victory of that revolution). Furthermore, in responding to Bakunin’s question about ‘all 40 million Germans being members of the government’, Marx replies that this is “Certainly” the case, “for the thing begins with the self-government of the commune.” As for the ‘head of government’, Marx retorts:



And will everybody be at the top in Bakunin’s construction built from the bottom upwards? There will in fact be no below then. Quote:

This notion of the State – though unhelpfully referred to as such – appears to be entirely in line with the anarchist conception of revolution, though we are once again faced with complications when Marx introduces references to elected managers and trade union executive committees. Nevertheless, if we are to take Marx at his word, this raises the question as to what the Marxist critique of anarchism actually is. If the commune is a self-managed assembly, in which no one is governed by anyone else and ‘the State’ merely refers to the coordinated (or ‘centralised’) efforts of the communes to expropriate the means of production and defend this transformation of social relations, we are forced to conclude that Marx and Bakunin were simultaneously both anarchists and statists. The accuracy of either description simply depends on which definition of ‘the State’ is applied. It is only in projecting his own chosen definition of the State on to anarchist theory that Marx is able to assert that,



[In refusing to] employ means which will be discarded after the liberation [Mr. Bakunin] concludes that the proletariat should rather do nothing at all and wait for the day of universal liquidation. Quote:

It is left to the reader to determine if intellectuals as serious as Marx and Engels could have genuinely misinterpreted the anarchist literature so severely. A key comment within the Conspectus, it should be noted, indicates no misunderstanding, suggesting other motives. Since Proudhon, the first to call himself an anarchist, the movement’s major theorists and political organisations were clear in accepting only the third of Marx and Engels' definitions. Lacking in a sufficiently materialist analysis of the state-form, Marx interprets Bakunin’s rejection of all States as the rejection of an ‘abstraction’. However, for anarchists, the State has never been understood in such terms. Instead, the movement has merely taken the common, socialist understanding of the State’s origin and historical function seriously and, as a result, reasoned that it cannot be the vehicle through which capitalist social relations are overthrown. For Marx and Engels, class distinctions would have to be abolished before their vaguely defined state could be disposed of. However, at the same time, they also appear to agree that the State exists to regulate the social relations and process of accumulation produced by class society, and that its continued existence presupposes the perpetuation of class distinctions within the mode of production. This analysis led Bakunin to note that any revolutionary state purporting to consist of ‘workmen’ will instead consist of “former workmen”. This, in turn, prompted Marx’s reply that a worker-turned-representative no more ceases to be a workman than “a manufacturer cease[s] to be a capitalist on becoming a town-councillor”.

Here, and throughout their collected works, Marx and Engels appear to forget that the proletariat is defined by its class position in the existing mode of production and that the State is not a neutral instrument within that arrangement. In taking hold of any part of the State machinery the manufacturer, indeed, continues to occupy a structural position within the management of capital. This is, however, a position that the proletariat, by definition, lacks. It is clear, then, that Bakunin’s observation logically follows; that a worker is tasked with the management and perpetuation of class society upon entering an apparatus designed for that purpose. As such, Proudhon concluded in System of Economic Contradictions (1846) that the modern state, “[created] to serve as a mediator between labor and privilege, finds itself inevitably enchained to capital and directed against the proletariat”, the recognition of which led Bakunin to declare that,



by its very nature and under the threat of self-destruction [the State] must inexorably and at all costs strive for the realization of its objectives regardless of or even against the will of [those] wielding it. Quote:

Though Marx intended to dedicate an entire volume of Capital to developing his analysis of the State, only the first volume was completed in his lifetime, with the remaining two being posthumously assembled by Engels from various notebooks. We are, as a result, left with scattered references to the subject which reveal a contradictory and shifting conception of its definition, function within capitalism, and role within the process of social revolution. In this essay I have argued that the early Marx’s conception of revolution was fundamentally statist. However, this was later complicated by more radical statements, many of which appear to have a more libertarian character, either reframing the State as an abstract concept or advocating for the construction of a new kind of ‘State’. Though the description of this ‘transitional’ form was often vague and contradictory, the democratic statism of Marx and Engels remained fundamentally different to the distortions most ‘Marxists’ across the world would come to advocate. The statism of even this later period has also been transcended entirely by various anti-authoritarian currents within the Marxist tradition, who drew upon Marx’s more ‘anarchistic’ writings.

Libertarian developments aside, Marx and Engels remained hostile to anarchism throughout their lives and organised the International in a hierarchical fashion to combat its influence within the movement. Marx and Engels alternated between dismissing anarchist accusations of ‘authoritarianism’ as unfounded and misrepresenting anarchist theory in such a way as to obscure the differences between the two movements. The utility of such an approach is clear, as an accurate representation of the anarchist position clarifies the central contradiction within Marx’s ever-evolving (and ultimately unrefined) theory of the State: In the final analysis, the Marxist position either becomes virtually identical in substance to the very ideology being denounced, or the anarchist critique must be accepted as legitimate - and the seizure of the government apparatus defended on its merits.

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