The state refers to the sum total of all the legislative, judicial and executive organs: the parliament and state legislatures, the courts and prisons, the civil administration including the police, the military and paramilitary forces and so on. The basic principles and policies of a modern state are enshrined in its constitution, which makes it another constituent — the ideological-political embodiment — of the state. The latter is run by governments, which are liable to change every few years even as the state remains unchanged for much longer periods of time. The difference (and the relation) between the state and the governments (central and provincial) is thus akin to that between a machine and its operators. Bourgeois and Social-democratic parties clamour for changing only the operators, revolutionary communists work for changing both the operators and the machine.
The State: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Here we reproduce excerpts from Lenin’s The State, (LCW, Vol. 29), supplemented with some additional observations by Marx and Engels.
The state has not always existed. There was a time when there was no state. It appears wherever and whenever a division of society into classes appears, whenever exploiters and exploited appear.
Before the first form of exploitation of man by man arose, the first form of division into classes — slave-owners and slaves — there existed the patriarchal family, or, as it is sometimes called, the clan family. (Clan – tribe, at the time people of one kin lived together.)
There was no state and general ties, the community itself, discipline and the ordering of work were maintained by force of custom and tradition, by the authority or the respect enjoyed by the elders of the clan or by women — who in those times not only frequently enjoyed a status equal to that of men, but not infrequently enjoyed an even higher status — and when there was no special category of persons who were specialists in ruling. History shows that the state as a special apparatus for coercing people arose wherever and whenever there appeared a division of society into classes, that is, a division into groups of people some of which were permanently in a position to appropriate the labour of others, where some people exploited others.
The division into slave-owners and slaves was the first important class division. The former group not only owned all the means of production — the land and the implements, however poor and primitive they may have been in those times — but also owned people. This group was known as slave-owners, while those who laboured and supplied labour for others were known as slaves.
This form was followed in history by another: feudalism. In the great majority of countries slavery in the course of its development evolved into serfdom. The fundamental division of society was now into feudal lords and peasant serfs. The form of relations between people changed. The slave-owners had regarded the slaves as their property; the law had confirmed this view and regarded the slave as chattel completely owned by the slave-owner. As far as the peasant serf was concerned, class oppression and dependence remained, but it was not considered that the feudal lord owned the peasants as chattels, but that he was only entitled to their labour, to the obligatory performance of certain services. In practice, as you know, serfdom, especially in Russia where it survived longest of all and assumed the crudest forms, differed little from slavery.
Further, with the development of trade, the appearance of the world market and the development of money circulation, a new class arose within feudal society — the capitalist class. From the commodity, the exchange of commodities and the rise of the power of money, there grew the power of capital. During the eighteenth century, or rather, from the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, revolutions took place all over the world. Feudalism was abolished in all the countries of Western Europe. Russia was the last country in which this took place. In 1861 a radical change took place in Russia as well; as a consequence of this one form of society was replaced by another — feudalism was replaced by capitalism, under which division into classes remained, as well as various traces and remnants of serfdom, but fundamentally the division into classes assumed a different form.
The owners of capital, the owners of the land and the owners of the factories in all capitalist countries constituted and still constitute an insignificant minority of the population who have complete command of the labour of the whole people, and consequently, command, oppress and exploit the whole mass of labourers, the majority of whom are proletarians, wage-workers, who procure their livelihood in the process of production only by the sale of their labour-power. With the transition to capitalism, the peasants, who had been disunited and downtrodden in feudal times, were converted partly (the majority) into proletarians, and partly (the minority) into wealthy peasants who themselves hired labourers and who constituted a rural bourgeoisie.
Before the division of society into classes no state existed. But as class society arose, the state also arose and took firm root. It has always been a certain apparatus which stood outside society and consisted of a group of people engaged solely, or almost solely, or mainly, in ruling. People are divided into the ruled, and into specialists in ruling, those who rise above society and are called rulers, statesmen.
But it is impossible to compel the greater part of society to work systematically for the other part of society without a permanent apparatus of coercion, i.e., the state. In other words, the state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another, a machine for holding in obedience to one class other, subordinated classes. There are various forms of this machine. The slave-owning state could be a monarchy, an aristocratic republic or even a democratic republic (where the electorate consisted of slave-owners only). In fact the forms of government varied extremely, but their essence was always the same; the slaves enjoyed no rights and constituted an oppressed class; they were not regarded as human beings. We find the same thing in the feudal state.
The change in the form of exploitation transformed the slave-owning state into the feudal state. This was of immense importance. In slave-owning society the slave enjoyed no rights whatever and was not regarded as a human being; in feudal society the peasant was bound to the soil. The chief distinguishing feature of serfdom was that the peasants (and at that time the peasants constituted the majority; the urban population was still very small) were considered bound to the land — this is the very basis of “serfdom”. The peasant might work a definite number of days for himself on the plot assigned to him by the landlord; on the other days the peasant serf worked for his lord. The essence of class society remained — society was based on class exploitation. Only the owners of the land could enjoy full rights; the peasants had no rights at all. In practice their condition differed very little from the condition of slaves in the slave-owning state. Nevertheless, a wider road was opened for their emancipation, since the peasant serf was not regarded as the direct property of the lord. He could work part of his time on his own plot, could, so to speak, belong to himself to some extent.
Neither under slavery nor under the feudal system could a small minority of people dominate over the vast majority without coercion. History is replete with records of constant attempts of the oppressed classes to throw off oppression. The history of slavery contains records of wars of emancipation from slavery which lasted for decades. Incidentally, the name “Spartacist” adopted by the German Communists is inspired by Spartacus, who was one of the most prominent heroes of one of the greatest revolts of slaves, which took place about two thousand years ago. For many years the seemingly omnipotent Roman Empire, which rested entirely on slavery, experienced the shocks and blows of a widespread uprising of slaves who armed and united to form a vast army under the leadership of Spartacus. In the end they were defeated, captured and put to torture by the slave-owners. Such civil wars mark the whole history of the existence of class society. The whole epoch of feudalism is likewise marked by constant uprisings of the peasants.
The development of trade, the development of commodity exchange, led to the emergence of a new class – the capitalists. Capital took shape as such at the close of the Middle Ages, when, after the discovery of America, world trade developed enormously, when the quantity of precious metals increased, when silver and gold became the medium of exchange, when money circulation made it possible for individuals to possess tremendous wealth. Silver and gold were recognised as wealth all over the world. The economic power of the landowning class declined and the power of the new class — the representatives of capital — developed. The reconstruction of society was such that all citizens seemed to be equal, the old division into slave-owners and slaves disappeared, all were regarded as equal before the law irrespective of what capital each owned; whether he owned land as private property, or was a poor man who owned nothing but his labour-power — all were equal before the law. The law protects everybody ‘equally’; it protects the property of those who have it from attack by the masses who, possessing no property, possessing nothing but their labour-power, grow steadily impoverished and become converted into proletarians. Such is capitalist society.
Under capitalism the state continued to be a machine which helped the capitalists to hold the poor peasants and the working class in subjection. But in outward appearance it was free. It proclaimed universal suffrage, and declared through its champions, preachers, scholars and philosophers, that it was not a class state. To this day the capitalists continue to reinforce this fraud by all means — to claim that in a bourgeois state all are equal. It is the task of the proletarian party to explain to the masses that as long as there is exploitation, there cannot be true equality. The bourgeois cannot be the equal of the worker, or the hungry man the equal of the wealthy man.
This is not to deny that the democratic republic and universal suffrage were an immense progressive advance as compared with feudalism: they have enabled the proletariat to achieve its present unity and solidarity, to form those firm and disciplined ranks which are waging a systematic struggle against capital. There was nothing even remotely resembling this among the peasant serfs, not to speak of the slaves. The slaves, as we know, revolted, rioted, started civil wars, but they could never create a class-conscious majority and parties to lead the struggle, they could not clearly realise what their aims were, and even in the most revolutionary moments of history they were always pawns in the hands of the ruling classes. The bourgeois republic, parliament, universal suffrage — all these represent great progress from the standpoint of the world development of society. Mankind moved towards capitalism, and it was capitalism alone which, thanks to urban culture, enabled the oppressed proletarian class to become conscious of itself and to create the world working-class movement, the millions of workers organised all over the world in parties — the socialist parties which are consciously leading the struggle of the masses. Without parliamentarism, without an electoral system, this development of the working class would have been impossible. That is why all these things have acquired such great importance in the eyes of the broad masses of people. That is why a radical change seems to be so difficult. It is on this commonsense perception that social democrats everywhere base their theory and practice of limited reforms within the confines of parliamentary democracy. By contrast, revolutionary communists from the time of Marx and Engels have always insisted on total revolutionary transformation of capitalist society and destruction of the bourgeois state as a precondition for building a higher social order.
This is the gist of what Lenin wrote. Now the question arises: when the bourgeois state is smashed, what will take its place? The victorious proletarian state — (a) to hold down its adversary, the disempowered bourgeoisie, and (b) to ensure genuine equality and democracy for all the working people. In other words, the proletariat seizes state power and makes itself the ruling class. In the first stage of post-revolutionary society, i.e., in the first stage of communism or socialism, it has to exercise class dictatorship over the bourgeoisie which has been overthrown but not yet annihilated, to crush by force the latter’s violent attempts at counter-revolution.
Regarding this stage Marx had commented :
“Between capitalist society and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this there is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (From Critique of the Gotha Programme)
This dictatorship does not necessarily mean one-party rule. That form was practised in Russia which had no tradition of parliamentarism, but there may be many other forms — just as bourgeois dictatorship is exercised in so many state forms. As Lenin had clarified, proletarian power means “not the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of representative institutions from talking shops into ‘working’ bodies.” In our country, for example, the multi-party system may, or may not, continue after revolution, but in any case people’s power is to be exercised by elected bodies at all levels down to the grassroots, non-elected posts like governors are to be abolished and a whole set of democratic reforms, including the right to recall, introduced. For along with dictatorship over the counter-revolutionaries, the new state also has to ensure genuine democracy for all the working people so that they can give full expression to their enormous creative energy for the construction and self-management of a new society.
This transition period is likely to be fairly long and full of reverses and zigzags. As the new society develops materially and spiritually, as the remnant forces, habits and cultures of the overthrown ruling class are finally eliminated in course of class struggle by the proletariat, now organised as the state, as socialism reorganises production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers, the first stage of socialism grows into the second, into mature communism. The whole scenario now changes, and the state is rendered superfluous:
“As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself … The state is not ‘abolished’. It withers away.” (From Anti-Duhring)
The difference is thus clear. The capitalist state is the exploiting minority’s organ for suppressing the toiling majority, the socialist state — just the reverse. The bourgeoisie perfects the state machine to perpetuate its class dictatorship behind the facade of democracy. The proletariat proclaims and exercises dictatorship over the vested interests to extend democracy for the masses and to pave the way for the final dissolution of all classes, all state forms, all dictatorship.
