Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Marx’s theory of the state reconsidered

Marx’s basic belief has been paraphrased quite accurately by Ralph
Miliband: ‘the state has only the illusion of being determinant, whereas
in fact it is determined’.³⁴ The state in modern society may be instru-
mental to those who hold power in society, but it is none the less
secondary and derivative, being determined in its operations and in
its very existence by forces that are extrinsic to it - forces whose
source is civil society. Marx, as we have seen, came to revolutionary
maturity by disputing Hegelian and Young Hegelian claims that the
state is autonomous, primary and formative; and he continued to
denounce all attempts to argue from the state to society, whether
these proceeded from Hegelians like Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer,
from anarchists like Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin, or from socialist
politicians like Lassalle. Although these various figures would have
agreed about very little, it is a point of the utmost importance that
from Marx’s point of view the heterogeneity of any list of them was
more apparent than real; all of these figures, in their different ways,
were inclined to consider the state as ‘an independent entity, possessed
of its own intellectual, ethical and libertarian bases’.³⁵ Marx, who
considered any apparent independence of the state from society to be
at best transitory and ultimately precarious - as we shall see - regarded




it as an error of the first magnitude for anyone - particularly a revol-
utionist - to suppose that the state could be dealt with as an ‘indepen-
dent entity’.

In Marx’s view, the modern state - as opposed to anarchist over-
estimations of what Proudhon called its powerfulness (puissance), as
well as to Lassallean insistances on its character as ‘free state’ - was
constrained by social forces and circumscribed by the balance of power
in civil society. It can do, and may do, only what the prevailing mode
of production, capitalism, permits. This provision permits it some free
scope - from time to time, and from place to place - but any freedom
it might enjoy is in the nature of a concession which might be revoked
once the balance of forces in civil society alters, as it generally does,
to the benefit of the capitalist class. In particular, the modern state is
not free to establish or initiate social institutions or practices. It may -
and commonly will - uphold them, but even if it does so, such action
will not normally be independent action but action at the behest or
instigation of powerful social forces. The state may pronounce and
enunciate laws, but it cannot dictate or promulgate them to society in
its own right. The state’s role, even as lawgiver, is declaratory and
expressive; legislation ‘never does more than proclaim, express in
words, the will of economic relations’.³⁶ The range of free play or
autonomous activity any state may enjoy in modern society is, normally,
severely circumscribed. ‘Political conditions’, Marx emphasized, ‘are
only the official expression of civil society’.³⁷

Marx’s acceptance of the Hegelian distinction between the state and
civil society may immediately distinguish Marxism from anarchism; but
Marx’s sustained denial that the state and civil society can relate in the
Hegelian manner nevertheless has the effect of making state action not
so much second-hand as third-hand. Marx presents us, as it were, with
three layers. There is economic activity, the root and foundation of
civil society; there is civil society itself - the specific form taken by
economic activity in the capitalist epoch, which has, and operates
according to, its own rules, most importantly those relating to private
property; and there is the state, which upholds and confirms these
rules, which are established by the prevailing economic system. The
priorities are clear: economic conditions do not vary according to the
state’s rules. The opposite is more likely. Law develops after economics,
and the priority in question is logical as well as temporal.

The role of specifically political forces, then, is relegated; politics
is no master science - it cannot even account for itself -and the crucial
explanatory techniques about society are to be sought elsewhere.
Politics is neither the moving force nor the binding force of history;
and only specifically political illusions would have it otherwise. The
notion - which might be termed a Hobbesian notion - that state action
provides, and provides for, a predictable setting in which economic




action is made possible (whereas in fact, according to Marx, the opposite
might almost be said to obtain) is an illusion based upon an over-
estimation of the power of the will. In opposition to consent theory,
or to Hobbesian voluntarism, Marx - following Hegel - holds that
society does not rest on the will or the consent of its constituents;
individuals, rather, are said to be caught up in a system - a system
that with remarkable frequency is in turn said to operate ‘independently
of their will’. If we overestimate the power of will-for example, if we
overestimate the constitutive power of law - then the state will appear
dominant; it may even be necessary for those who man the state’s
apparatus to believe that this apparent dominance is genuine. But, by
the same token, it is necessary for those seeking its overthrow not to
subscribe to this specifically political illusion; a proletariat that sees
politics as an act of will, says Marx in an article written in 1844, because
of its corresponding lack of social insight ‘wastes its forces on foolish
and futile uprisings that are drowned in blood’.³⁸ Marx amplified this
warning in The German Ideology.

If power is taken as the basis of right, as Hobbes, etc., do, then
right, law, etc. are merely the symptom, the expression of
other relations on which the state power rests. The material life
of individuals, which by no means depends upon their ‘will’,
their mode of production and form of intercourse, which
mutually determine each other - this is the real basis of the
state and remains so at all the stages at which division of labour
and private property are still necessary, quite independently
of the will of individuals. These actual relations are in no way
created by the state power; on the contrary they are the power
creating it. The individuals who rule in these conditions, besides
having to constitute their power in the form of the State, have
to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions,
a universal expression as the will of the state, as law - an
expression whose content is always determined by the relations
of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the
clearest possible way. Just as the weight of their bodies does
not depend upon their idealistic will or on their arbitrary
decision, so also the fact that they enforce their will in the form
of law, and at the same time make it independent of the personal
arbitrariness of each individual among them, does not depend on
their idealistic will ... so long as the productive forces are still
insufficiently developed to make competition superfluous, and
therefore would give rise to competition over and over again, for
so long the classes which are ruled would be wanting the impossible
if they had the ‘will’ to abolish competition and with it the State
and the law ... it is only in the will of the ideologist that this




‘will’ arises before conditions have developed far enough to
make its production possible. After conditions have developed
sufficiently to produce it, the ideologist is able to imagine this
will as being purely arbitrary and therefore as conceivable at all
times and under all circumstances.³⁹

That the power of those who man the state apparatus is severely
limited in practice can be seen, according to Marx, only if we step
outside the specifically political domain. From a non-political vantage
point, Marx tells us, we can see that political thinking is inherently
misleading and mistaken, because it contains a built-in bias in its own
favour. As Marx put it in 1844:

The more powerful the state, and therefore the more political
a country is, the less likely it is to seek the basis of social evils
and to grasp the general explanation of them in the principle of
the state itself, that is, in the structure of society, of which the
state is the active, conscious and official expression. Political
thought is really political thought in the sense that the thinking
takes place within the framework of politics. The clearer and
more vigorous political thought is, the less it is able to grasp the
nature of social evils. The classical period of political thought is
the French Revolution. Far from recognizing the source of social
defects in the principle of the state, the heroes of the French
Revolution looked for the sources of political evils in the
defective social organization. Thus, for example, Robespierre
saw in the coexistence of great poverty and great wealth only
an obstacle to genuine democracy. He wished therefore to
establish a universal Spartan austerity. The principle of politics
is the will. The more partial, and the more perfected, political
thought becomes, the more it believes in the omnipotence of the
will, the less able it is to see the natural and mental limitations
on the will, the less capable it is of discovering the source of
social evils.⁴⁰

The French Revolution, indeed, provided Marx with a storehouse
of examples of the way in which purely political consciousness, or a
state-centred perspective, inevitably distorts the view we might have of
social realities. Discussing, in the same article, the limitations on what
the state - what any modern state - can do to rectify the problem of
pauperism, Marx points out that, during the French Revolution, even
the Convention, which ‘represented a maximum of political energy,
power and understanding’, could do nothing about pauperism. ‘What’,
Marx asks, rhetorically, ‘was the result of the Convention’s ordinance?
Only that there was one more ordinance in the world, and that one


year later the Convention was besieged by starving weavers.’⁴¹ (Marx
was writing in the wake of the Silesian weavers’ uprising in 1844.) To
shore up his point that state action against pressing social evils is
foredoomed to failure, Marx asks:

Can the state act in any other way? The state will never look for
the cause of social imperfections ‘in the state and social insti-
tutions . ..’ Where there are political parties, each party finds
the source of such evils in the fact that the opposing party,
instead of itself, is at the helm of the state. Even the radical
and revolutionary politicians look for the source of the evil, not
in the nature of the state, but in a particular form of the state,
which they want to replace by another form . . . The state and
the structure of society are not, from the standpoint of politics,
two different things. The state [from this standpoint] is the
structure of society ... In the last resort, every state seeks the
cause [of pauperism] in adventitious or intentional defects in
the administration, and therefore looks to a reform in the
administration for a redress of these evils. Why? Simply
because the administration is the organizing activity of the
state itself.

The contradiction between the aims and good intentions
of the administration on the one hand, and its means and
resources on the other, cannot be removed by the state without
abolishing itself, for it rests upon this contradiction. The state
is founded on the contradiction between public and private life,
between general and particular interests. The administration
must, therefore, limit itself to a formal and negative sphere of
activity, because its power ceases at the point where civil life
and its work begin. In face of the consequences which spring
from the unsocial character of the life of civil society, of
private property, trade, industry, of the mutual plundering of
the different groups in civil society, impotence is the natural
law of the administration. These divisions, this debasement and
slavery within civil society, are the natural foundations on which
the modern state rests ... If the modern state wishes to end the
impotence of its administration it would be obliged to abolish the
present conditions of private life. And if the state wishes to abolish
these conditions of private life it would have also to put an end to
its own conditions, for it exists only in relation to them.⁴²

What is immediately striking about this quotation is not simply that
the state, by its very nature, according to Marx, lacks the facility to
‘put an end to its own conditions’; it is also that, by the same token,
the state’s wherewithal to undertake any positive action at all is severely




limited - despite the dubious advantages of modern bureaucracy it
might enjoy. Faced with so immediate and pressing a problem as that
of pauperism, ‘impotence is the natural law of the administration’;
‘its power ceases at the point where civil life and work begin’. That
Marx insisted on the state’s impotence in this fashion - a point to which
we shall return - indicates a difficulty with the ruling-class theory of
the state that passed down into vulgar Marxism: in what sense, and to
what extent, we must ask, can the purported ruling class be said to
really rule? The notion that it does, and can, really rule or exercise
power - let alone authority - would seem to stem only from a political
perspective, a state-centred vantage point which can only distort, or
even invert our view of social realities. Certainly, the rules that keep
modern society in operation, while they might be enforced and upheld
by the state, are in no way formulated or initiated by the state. On this
point Marx is adamant. ‘By the mere fact that it is a class and not an
estate (Stand)’, he says, ‘the bourgeoisie is forced to organize itself no
longer locally but nationally and to give a general form to its mean,
average interest.’ This, ‘the form of organization the bourgeoisie necess-
arily adopts... for the mutual guarantee of [its] property and interest’,⁴³
is the state. Such passages, from The German Ideology (1846), provide
the background and set the tone for Marx’s most celebrated - and
strident - depictions of the state, whose home is The Manifesto of the
Communist Party (1848). Here, ‘political power is but the organized
power of one class for oppressing another’ and ‘the executive of the
modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie’.⁴⁴

This straightforward view of the state - whatever its crudity - is the
one that passed into Marxism-Leninism. It is already clear, however,
that Marx’s theory of the state was at no stage of its elaboration as
clear-cut and simplistic as the Manifesto’s succinct formulations, taken
in themselves, might imply. (It might be added, indeed, that the con-
ditional ‘might imply’ is used advisedly, as opposed to the definitive
‘clearly state’; why is it that the executive - as opposed to some other
branch - of the modern state manages the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie? How likely is it that these common affairs will find ex-
pression?) We know that the Manifesto was a call to arms written
under commission with a deadline - the supposedly revolutionary
annus mirabilis of 1848 - in mind; the document was explicitly - indeed
blatantly - a clarion-call in which overdrawn, pithy phrases might be
expected. The point here is not to deny the effectiveness of the phrases
at issue; such a denial would be ridiculous if we consider their power
at the level of much later revolutionary propaganda. It is simply to
indicate their character as distillations of the results of other, rather
more searching, analyses of the role of the state. As such, the main
drawback of the Manifesto’s dramatic and sweeping characterizations




of the state is that, provocative though they may be, they tell us
nothing about the way in which bourgeois revolution and the emerg-
ence of modern civil society had changed - decisively and irreversibly
- the nature of the state and of political power, a shift that Marx
discussed elsewhere (even within the Manifesto) at some length.

Over and above this shortcoming, the danger with Marx’s more
notorious slogans about the state is that if they are wrested out of
context - and it is in the nature of a political slogan to be wrested out
of context - they might suggest a rather crude conspiracy theory.
There is a vulgar Marxist tendency to simply read, for ‘the state’, ‘the
bourgeoisie’ as though these concerned themselves with providing
palimpsests for each and every political proclamation. It is worth
indicating that Marx himself (who could be as capable of vulgarity
as anyone else) recognized this shortcoming for what it was. In his
more considered passages Marx advanced views that did not express
but actually precluded any such crude and reductive conspiracy theory.

... if the bourgeoisie politically, that is, through the agency of its
state power, maintains ‘the injustice in the property relations’, it
does not create the latter which, conditioned by the modern
division of labour, the modern form of exchange, competition,
concentration, etc., does not proceed from the political rule of
the bourgeoisie but, contrariwise, the political rule of the
bourgeoisie proceeds from these modern relations of production,
which are proclaimed by the bourgeois economists to be
necessary and eternal laws.⁴⁵

With bourgeois society, as we have seen, economic and political life
are freed from feudal restraints and encumbrances in an altogether
unprecedented way. The state’s consequent withdrawal from inter-
ference within the market mechanism - a withdrawal urged by the
classical economists - permitted the market mechanism freely to con-
strain its human objects; and, as part of the same process, state and
society become separate and exclusive spheres of activity. Marx insisted
that given this separation the state ‘is based on the unhampered develop-
ment of civil society [biirgerliche Gesellschaft], on the free movement
of private interest’.⁴⁶ The assertion of these priorities - largely, if not