Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Brumaire, means by ‘imperialist’ Bonapartist] form of state power.

It was a revolution against the state itself, of this supernaturalist
abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of
its own social life. It was not a revolution to transfer it from one
fraction of the ruling class to the other, but a revolution to break
down this horrid machinery of class domination itself . . . [The]
Second Empire was the final form of this state usurpation. The
Commune was its definite negation, and, therefore, the initiation
of the social revolution of the nineteenth century .. . Only the
proletarians, fired by a new social task to accomplish by them
for all society, to do away with all classes and class rule - the State,
the centralized and organized governmental power usurping to be
the master instead of the servant of society. . . It had sprung into
life against them. By them it was broken, not as a peculiar form of
governmental (centralized) power, but as its most powerful,
elaborated into seeming independence from society expression
and, therefore, its most prostitute reality, covered by infamy




from top to bottom, having centred in absolute corruption
at home and absolute powerlessness abroad.⁸¹

In contrast to this, the Communal Constitution made of every man
a working man, so that labour ceased to be a class attribute, as did
political power itself. Each delegate to the National Delegation in Paris,
Marx emphasizes, under the Communal Constitution was ‘to be at any
time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif [formal instruc-
tions] of his constituents’. Marx continues in a vein that cannot but
recall ‘On the Jewish Question’: ‘the unity of the nation’, he says,

was not to be broken but, on the contrary, to be organized by the
Communal Constitution and to become a reality by the destruction
of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that
unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which
it was but a parasitic excrescence. While the merely repressive organs
of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate
functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-
eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents
of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which
member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in
parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted
in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer
in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.⁸²

The more extensive original draft of The Civil War in France recalls
‘On the Jewish Question’ even more explicitly:

Every minor solitary interest engendered by the relations of
social groups was separated from society itself, fixed and made
independent of it and opposed to it in the form of state interest,
administered by state priests with exactly determined hierarchical
functions.

This parasitical excrescence on civil society, pretending to be
its ideal counterpart, grew to its full development under the sway
of the first Bonaparte.. . but. . . received only its last develop-
ment during the Second Empire. Apparently [it was] the final
victory of this governmental power over society. . . the final
defeat of the form of class rule pretending to be the autocracy
of society by its form pretending to be a superior power in
society. But in fact it was only the last degraded and the only
possible form of that class ruling, as humiliating to those classes
as to the working classes which they kept fettered by it.⁸³

What is brought to mind by this passage and passages like it is not




so much Marx’s rigid ruling-class theory of the state but rather Marx’s
critical discussions of the modern bureaucratic state which were adum-
brated originally in his writings of the 1840s, and which were to be
extended programmatically in The Critique of the Gotha Programme.
Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right had criticized the
bureaucracy’s tendency ‘to transform the purpose of the State into the
purpose of bureaucracy and the purpose of bureaucracy into the pur-
pose of the State’. What the bureaucracy represents is, in Avineri’s
rather Hegelian words, ‘the practical illusion of the universality of
political life’; it ‘exploits for its own ends the affairs of the community
entrusted to it’.⁸⁴ Yet over and above the fact that the bureaucracy
is favourably placed, indeed, uniquely placed to make affairs of state
its own, private patrimony, there is more to the picture than what a
bureaucracy in the modern, ‘politically emancipated’ state will tend
to do. There is also what a modern bureaucracy represents. In this
sense the bureaucratic state signifies an institutionalization of the
topsy-turvy, inverted nature of the modern state, its character as
embodiment and repository of society’s ‘general will’ and communal
potential, which it comes to express in an alienated and deceptive
manner. What is at issue is less the bureaucratic state’s character as
reflecting the structure of civil society than the way it reflects civil
society; it distorts and disfigures prevailing social relations - and, we
might add, in effect gives these social relations a new lease of life by
virtue of the wholly illusory reconciliation and commonality it repre-
sents. The claim to universality will itself distort and caricature univer-
sality wherever the chances of its genuine emergence are blocked off.

The fact that the bureaucracy is in this way the alienation of public
life involves, according to Marx, the proposition that the revolutionary
creation of a genuine public life must mean the root and branch ex-
tirpation of the bureaucracy. He saw in the elected magistracy of the
Paris Commune a device that could render bureaucracy unnecessary.
Basing itself, autonomously, on universal suffrage, the Commune
approached the stage at which the distinction between the state and
civil society began to disappear, and with it all need for the institutional-
ization of imaginary universality, or what Marx in his early Critique of
Hegel had called la republique pretre of the bureaucracy. Marx praised
the Commune’s election and dismissal of public servants and the
payment of workers’ wages because of the deinstitutionalization and
demystification of political power these measures involved, because
the emergence of such a public magistracy itself implied the disappear-
ance of the distinction between the state and civil society, and an
insurance against the possibility of a re-emergence of a new, separate
and alien sphere of political affairs. In this way government and admin-
istration are emptied of that kind of idolatrous power that makes them
into forces independent of society.




Marx’s position entails some theoretical implications that are worth
discussing. One is that the Weberian critique - an implied critique,
perhaps, but a critique none the less-of Marx for not having perceived
any parallelism between bureaucracy and capitalism needs to be modi-
fied. Marx, it is true, discussed bureaucracy not in connection with the
administration of industrial production but in connection with the
state; at this level he may have missed or overlooked an important
parallelism. It is also true that Marx approached the subject of modern
bureaucracy indirectly - at least, from a Weberian point of view - and
even obliquely. The explanation for the possibly oblique directionality
of Marx’s discussions of bureaucracy is, in a word, Hegel; for it is by
no means fanciful to suppose that Marx, whenever he treated of bureau-
cracy, had at the back of his mind Hegel’s powerful depiction of the
modern bureaucratic state. Nineteenth-century European history was
not short of examples that would bring Hegel’s original presentation -
and the necessity for meeting its points - to the fore. While there is
little discussion of bureaucracy in The Manifesto of the Communist
Party and The German Ideology (where Marx notes that because of
the ‘abnormal importance’ acquired by German bureaucrats ‘during
the epoch of absolute monarchy’, ‘the state built itself up into an
apparently independent force’⁸⁵ which proved to be not as ‘transitory’
in Germany as elsewhere), in this particular sense these works prove to
be aberrations. French developments reminded Marx all over again that
bureaucracy was no passing, ‘transitory’ political phase.

In dealing with its emergence, Marx’s argument proceeds to some
extent by indirection but is nevertheless an important and substantive
one. What makes the emergence and irruption of capitalism and the
bureaucratization of the state cognate in Marx’s thinking is his notion
of alien politics; the bureaucrat, the real homme machine, is the per-
sonification of alien politics - the same notion of alien politics that
Marx, originally, adumbrated prior to the more famous notion of
alienation in the labour process. Such ‘priority’ does not entail, how-
ever, that the two types of alienation can or should be considered
separately. On the contrary, they overlap significantly and substantively.
Not only do they arise in tandem and, once arisen, reinforce and
supplement each other; not only is a process of apparently irreversible
usurpation and subsequent mystification common to both; but there
is a still more fundamental parallelism between these two types - or
levels - of alienation. Just as capital, which is congealed labour, signifies
and represents the collective character of labour in an alien and fetish-
istic form, the modern state - particularly in its bureaucratic manifes-
tation - is a fetishistic and oppressive personification of the citizens’
general will. Both capital and the state represent, in parallel and cognate
ways, the real force of the members of society which opposes itself to
them and is out of their control - even though it is their product, brought




into being and sustained as the result of human (not naturalistic)
agency. Both capital and the state represent the ‘unintended conse-
quence’ of the human actions that create and sustain them; and they
represent this unintended consequence with a vengeance. Before the
capitalist - whose power is that of his capital - the individual worker
(who produces this capital) is powerless, and lacks substance; before
the alien state and its parasitic bureaucracy, society itself is powerless.
It abdicates all will of its'own and submits to the order of an alien
will - that of political authority in general, and that of the bureaucracy
in particular. This, indeed, is what Marx means in saying in The Eight-
eenth Brumaire that the executive power of the modem state expresses
the heteronomy of the nation, in opposition to its autonomy; it repre-
sents what divides men one against another. Autonomy is precisely
what is lost, and must be regained, by men in society.

But how can it be regained? Marx believed that workers’ associations
could provide the means; workers, by associating among themselves,
could not only emerge from the fragmentation, the atomization,
isolation and homogenization imposed upon them by capitalist society,
but also, more positively, create new social bonds, and new social needs,
among themselves. These new needs supply the cognitive basis for
revolution; counterposed to capitalist society and its atomizing pre-
requisites, a new kind of social organization, according to Marx, was
emerging. Its emergence is a kind of revolutionary act in and of itself,
since it necessarily challenges the prevailing structure of rewards and
expectations. It changes both external social reality and the workers
themselves; association creates ‘other-directedness’, mutuality and
community; Gemeinschaft (community) in this way emerges from and
challenges the nature of Gesellschaft (association in the sense of mere
external organization for the sake of accomplishing a task - the principle
of capitalist society).

However true in principle it may be, however, the notion that the
emergence of Gemeinwesen (communal being) and ‘other-directedness’
follows from the very nature of proletarian association can, and could,
lapse into a dangerous romanticism - or even a purely categorical
solution to the dissociative tendencies of capitalist production. Marx,
by refusing to look to the past for corporative models of the future,
guarded against this danger to some extent.

Marx’s theory of the state: a recapitulation

The claim that this chapter has advanced is that while Marx’s theory
of the state in its most rigid and iron-clad manifestation - the theory
that tells us that the modern state is no more than the handmaiden
or surrogate of the economic ruling class - is not borne out to the




letter by Marx’s more detailed historical investigations, reconciliation
of the two positions this difference implies is possible. It should pro-
ceed, not according to the ahistorical assumption that Marx was a
social scientist investigating social reality to bear out his initial hypo-
theses - an assumption that seems not to square with what Marx him-
self thought he was doing - but according to the very factor this assump-
tion neglects: the theory of alien politics that pre-dates Marx’s ruling-
class theory of the state and which informs (with a remarkable constancy)
almost all of what Marx wrote subsequently on the subject of the state.

The point here is not simply that what I am calling ‘alien politics’ is
an integral part of Marx’s theory of the state; it is also that there are
connections - connections important to an understanding of Marx’s
enterprise in general - between Marx’s theory of the state and Marx’s
theory of alienation, a theory which is not, and was not intended to
be, restricted to factory production in the machine age. Marx’s theory
of alienation, that is, has a resonance beyond the assembly-line; and
much of this resonance is political as well as economic and social.

To see this mote clearly we must take our bearings. Even though
it was Hegel who in many respects posed the problem of alienation for
Marx, as we have seen, Ludwig Feuerbach’s concept of religious alienation
had an important part to play in the evolution of Marx’s response to
Hegel. Feuerbach’s influence can be discerned, readily enough, in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and in ‘On the Jewish
Question’ (1843) alike. Yet, once Feuerbach’s importance to Marx’s
self-emancipation from Hegel’s influence is admitted, certain reservations
need to be noted. In the first place, Hegel’s discussion of religion - at
least in The Philosophy of Right - has much more of a social bearing
than Feuerbach’s points about religious alienation displayed. It was
Hegel, after all, who had indicated - to Marx, among others - that
‘religion is principally resorted to in times of distress’ (as Feuerbach
had reiterated), and that ‘man must venerate the state as a secular
deity’,⁸⁶ thereby setting up - and, in effect, cueing-the argument of
‘On the Jewish Question’. This leads to a second reservation about
Feuerbach’s argument. Even though he perceived that what man
lacks in fact he achieves in fancy, or fantasy, and that an opulent
God is related to an indigent humanity, these points are in no way
politically programmatic. Feuerbach even falls behind Hegel in the
sense of not having penetrated beyond abstract categories like ‘man’
and ‘humanity’ - which means that Feuerbach’s much-vaunted ‘material-
ism’ is itself abstract, as Marx pointedly made clear in his Theses on
Feuerbach. The human essence (Gattungswesen) whose alienation
accounts for religion can be reclaimed by men according to Feuerbach
at the level of conceptualization. This solution to the problem of
alienation is, in other words, a purely categorical solution of the kind
Marx was to criticize trenchantly - as we shall see - in The German


Ideology. Marx, by contrast, regarded alienation as a social (and political)
problem demanding a social (and political) solution. Whereas Feuerbach
had presented the alienation of human essence as a fait accompli, and
had not proffered any historical or social explanation for its incidence
or persistence, Marx offered a very different kind of analysis. Marx
set out to show that alienation is derived from a basic inadequacy in
the structure of society and that it can be explained, accordingly, only
by means of an investigation of people’s (not ‘man’s’) real, non-alienated,
non-religious life.

One of Marx’s earliest speculations, arrived at in the course of this
investigation (an investigation best regarded as his life’s work), can be
found in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where Marx
indicates the historical nature of his categories by contrasting medieval
and modern relationships between the political and the social. In the
Middle Ages, says Marx, all economic activity was simultaneously and
by the same token political in character. ‘In the Middle Ages property,
commerce, society, man, are all political; the material content of the
state was posited by its form. The life of the state and the life of the
people are identical’; that this life is nevertheless unfree life is under-
scored by Marx’s denigration of the Middle Ages as ‘the democracy of
unfreedom’ and as ‘the animal history of mankind’.⁸⁷