Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

entirely, against the very different and less historical priorities of the
anarchists - is a Leitmotiv of Marx’s theory of the state. Marx believed,
as they did not, that the state is in modern times predicated as a false
universal on the existence of antagonistic social relations, and that it
is this predication that gives the modern state its specifically modern
meaning and role. To fail to see this, to argue from the state to society,
is to adopt an inverted perspective and, in overestimating the potency
and initiative that the modern state exhibits, to mistake cause for




effect; it is also to neglect a fundamental shift in the nature of the
state in the capitalist epoch.

The paradox that emerges if we look at what Marx has to say about
the state is that the theory of alien politics he adumbrated in response
to Hegel - and not just in his earliest writings - on the face of it seems
more substantive than, and irreducible to, the rather crude, reductionist
ruling-class theory of the state we encounter, in its most strident and
vivid form, in The Manifesto of the Communist Party. This more
simplistic, if more straightforward, theory of the state has never lacked
adherents; it passed through some of the writings of Engels, (notably
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State of 1881,
and that section of Anti-Duhring that appeared in 1887 as Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific) to those of Lenin (most notably State and
Revolution)', and from thence it became ensconced and solidified as
an official dogma of Marxism-Leninism. But the concept of the state
as an ‘engine of class despotism’ all too clearly does not exhaust what
Marx had to say on the subject; and, moreover, it raises a set of theoreti-
cal and practical problems.

In its purest form, any rigidly ruling-class theory of the state pre-
supposes the possibility of unalloyed class rule, and the existence of
an economic ruling class possessed of uniform common interests and
which is, into the bargain, capable of asserting them. The various
examples of the bourgeoisie that Marx encountered and analysed seem
not to have met so monolithic a set of requirements. The state is a
coercive instrument of a ruling class whose dominance is defined in
terms of its ownership of and control over the means of production.
Yet Marx did not invariably reduce class structure - the ultimate form
of what he called the ‘relations of production’, which are relations
among men - to the disposition of the forces of production (which are
relations among men and things). Social and technological relations
are rarely coterminous or interchangeable categories in Marx’s writings.
The picture becomes less mechanistic if we ask what a class is and
allow ourselves to be reminded that class is a relationship, not a thing.
This point has been well put by a distinguished Marxist historian.
‘The notion of class’, he reminds us,

entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other
relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt
to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure.

The finest meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen
of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or love.

The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in
a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes,
each with an independent being, and then bring them into
relationship with each other. We cannot have love without




lovers, not deference without squires and labourers. And class
happens when some men, as a result of common experiences
(inherited or shared) feel and articulate the identity of their
interests as between themselves, and as against other men
whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to)
theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the
productive relations into which men are born - or enter
involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way these experiences
are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-
systems, ideas and institutional forms. If the experience
appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can
see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups
undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any
law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different
times and places, but never in just the same way . . ⁴⁷

A class on this definition, then, is not a solid bloc existing in isolation
from other classes; on the contrary, what explains a class is other
classes, its counterparts, and its context in the overall pattern of social
relationships. These relationships-Marx’s ‘relations of production’ - are
not likely to exhibit any uniformity from country to country or from
time to time, whatever their common features may be. The social
context these relationships form will be an important part of the
meaning of any class that helps make it up. In good Marxist analysis,
classes are not treated as though they were undifferentiated units or
homologous magnitudes that are capable of being isolated for the
purposes of observation; in good Marxist analysis, classes are investi-
gated through the pattern of the relations of production in a given
society at a given time, a pattern which forms an important part of the
meaning of any particular class.

Marx against Bonapartism: The Eighteenth Brumaire and beyond

It should come as no surprise that Marx’s investigation of the chain of
events leading up to Napoleon Ill’s coup d'etat is, as it were, a case
study not only in Marx’s theory of the state, but also of Marx’s theory
of class. The ruling-class theory of the state encountered in the Manifesto
and elsewhere prepares us for the fact that in Marx’s specific historical
investigations the state, its position and placement, and the pattern of
class relationships in society are here dealt with together, in tandem;
but what it does not prepare us for is the degree of flexibility and
sophistication Marx displays throughout this extended investigation.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (which is best con-
sidered as an emendation of The Class Struggles in France, which leads




up to it both chronologically and analytically) we find that the degree
of internal cohesion, the type and extent of unity within a class - and
with it the possibility of collective self-assertion-is not at all a categori-
cal postulate, but something that varies, and varies considerably, from
one class to another. The various degrees of articulation of the interests
of any particular class affect the opportunities of others; and there are,
moreover, many and varied subdivisions within each class, subdivisions
that make alliances across class lines possible and likely. The pattern
is a complex one - being both articulated and reflexive - and the question
(a loaded question) of the political representation of these various
forces among and within classes makes the pattern more complicated
still. The degree and kind of independence that may be exhibited by
the political representatives - or by the institutional representatives - of
social forces is outlined and investigated by Marx according to the
structure and history of class relationships in French society; and we
find something for which the ruling-class theory of the state does little
to prepare us - the phenomenon of political powers’ being exercised
not by an autonomous, internally united bourgeois class, but on behalf
of factions of a bourgeois class that is characterized by a severe lack of
internal unity and autonomy.

The composite picture may be summarized as follows: there are, in
French society in the middle of the nineteenth century, landowners;
large landowners whose political representatives are the legitimists;
these shade off, by degrees, into the small-holding peasants. These in
turn shade off into the artisan class, and this artisanat in its turn shades
off into an as yet undeveloped and not very numerous proletariat.
Peasants, artisans and proletarians are also usually linked by virtue of
their lack of political representation. As for the capitalists, these are
divided into two factions, the finance capitalists and the industrialists,
whose interests converge all too rarely. Different factions are politically
dominant at different periods. The July Monarchy was a political
expression of the interests of finance capital, ‘a joint-stock company
for the exploitation of France’s national wealth ... [of which] Louis-
Philippe was the director . . . Trade, industry, agriculture, shipping, the
interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, were bound to be continually
endangered and prejudiced under this system’. As Marx goes on to put it,

The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions, which,
alternately, the big landed proprietors under the restored
monarchy and the finance aristocracy and the industrial ,
bourgeoisie under the July Monarchy, had maintained a mon-
opoly of power . . . the nameless realm of the Republic was
the only one in which both factions could maintain with equal
power the common class interest without giving up their
mutual rivalry. If the bourgeois republic could not be anything




but the perfected and clearly expressed rule of the whole
bourgeois class, could it be anything but the rule of the
Orleanists supplemented by the Legitimists, and of the
Legitimists supplemented by the Orleanists, the synthesis
of the restoration and the July Monarchy? The bourgeois
republicans of the National did not represent any large faction
of their class resting on economic foundations. They possessed
only the importance and the historical claim of having asserted,
under the monarchy, as against the two bourgeois factions that
only understood their particular regime, the general regime of
the bourgeois class.⁴⁸

The coalescence of interest between these two factions, moreover,
proves to be precarious; it may be ‘the perfected and clearly expressed
rule of the whole bourgeois class’, but the internal divisions within this
class are such that ‘the nameless realm of the republic’⁴⁹ is the very
thing that did not, and according to Marx could not, last. No sooner
was the republic ‘perfected’ than it summarily collapsed.

Although Marx was concerned that his ruling-class theory of the
state should not collapse with it, the theory certainly seems dented.
Yet Marx succeeds - at least to his own satisfaction - in extricating
himself and salvaging his theory. ‘The parliamentary republic’, he
tells us, had been

no more than the neutral territory on which the two factions
of the French bourgeoisie, Legitimists and Orleanists, could
dwell side by side with equality of rights. It was the unavoidable
condition of their common rule, the sole form of state in which
their general class interest subjected to itself at the same time
both the claims of their particular functions and all the remaining
classes of society.⁵⁰

In France Marx analysed what was not the united rule of an autonomous,
internally united, well-defined and class-conscious bourgeoisie but
rather a factional politics that played itself out to the extent of enabling
the ‘grotesque mediocrity’ of Louis Napoleon ‘to play a hero’s part’;⁵¹
a factional politics as a result of which Bonapartists and bureaucrats
were enabled - momentarily but decisively - to hold the balance of
power, even though (or precisely because) they represented in the last
analysis none but themselves.

What Marx presents us with in his analysis of French politics is not
so much the state as a reflection of the forces in society, but, finally,
an instance of disjuncture of the state from society. Louis Bonaparte’s
coup d’etat was ‘the victory of the executive. . . [the French nation] re-
nounces all will of its own and submits to the power of an alien will, to




authority’; ‘the struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all
classes, equally impotent and equally mute, fall on their knees before
the rifle butt’. Even more unexpectedly, Marx goes on to say that
‘under the second Bonaparte . . . the state seem[s] to have made itself
completely independent’;⁵² ‘bourgeois society, freed from political
cares, attained a development unexpected even by itself’.⁵³

Marx speaks of the ‘executive power with its enormous bureau-
cratic and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery
embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million’;
he refers to it as an ‘appalling parasitic body which enmeshes the body
of French society like a net and chokes all its pores’.⁵⁴ But how does
the state attain such an independent and powerful position? Situations
of balance, of unstable equilibrium, Marx explains, can occur among
classes (and factions of classes) in civil society, and, in such a stale-
mate, no single class, whatever its social predominance, can gain political
dominance. To resolve this stalemate, the state itself steps in to redress
the balance. Acting in its own right, the executive power plays the part
of umpire or moderator, and classes (or factions) might then see the
state itself, and its administrative apparatus, as their ally or protector.
This development is facilitated - though it is not exactly caused - by
the growing strength and organization of the state apparatus. Every
successive ruling group has an interest in improving the power of this
apparatus, in increasing the coercive potential at the disposal of the
state, with the result that the personnel manning the administrative
apparatus itself becomes a powerfully placed faction having a vested
interest in preserving and extending the scope of state action. Marx, in
words that cannot avoid recalling what he had said about the Prussian
bureaucracy, here speaks of a French political system

where the executive power commands an army of officials
numbering more than half a million individuals and which
therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests
and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where the
state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends, and tutors
civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of
life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most
general modes of being to the private existence of individuals;
where through the most extraordinary centralization this
parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity
for accelerated mobility and an elasticity which finds a
counterpart only in the helpless dependence, in the loose
shapelessness of the actual body politic. . .⁵⁵

It is evident that Marx’s depiction of the state in this passage - of
a state power that is ‘apparently soaring high above society’⁵⁶ - is one


that recalls not the class-dominated instrumentality outlined in the
Manifesto (and met with, apparently, nowhere in real life) but the alien
universality and power described in ‘On the Jewish Question’, a univer-
sality that is ‘parasitic’ on society in much the same way. Only in the
latter, and not at all in the former, view could the state be expected to
‘enmesh, control, regulate, superintend and tutor’ civil society. Marx
proceeds to outline an unexpected paradox. He asks why the French
National Assembly did not ‘simplify the administration of the state,
reduce the army of officials and . . .let civil society and public opinion
create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power’.
His answer to his own question betrays the fact that there is more
than one way for the state to operate as the ‘instrumentality’ of the
ruling class.

... it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state
machine in its numerous ramifications that the material interests
of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion.

Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the
form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of
profit, interests, rents and honorariums. On the other hand, its
political interests compelled it to increase daily the repressive
measures and therefore the resources and the personnel of the
state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted
war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate, cripple, the
independent organs of the social movement where it did not succeed
in amputating them entirely. Thus the French bourgeoisie was
compelled by its class position to annihilate, on the one hand, the
vital conditions of all parliamentary power, and therefore, likewise,
of its own, and to render irresistible, on the other hand, the
executive power hostile to it.⁵⁷

The paradox is a monstrous one. On the one hand, ‘never did the
bourgeoisie rule more absolutely’;⁵⁸ on the other hand, we have to ask
in what does this purportedly absolute rule consist? Over and above the
basic belief held by Marx that capitalism in general constrains conscious
social power over the conditions of existence, in this particular instance
bourgeois ‘rule’ expresses itself in what is nothing but a double bind
having effects that are to prove fatal to its interests.

The bourgeoisie confesses that its own interests dictate that it
should be delivered from the consequences of its own rule; that,
in order to restore tranquillity in the country, its bourgeois
parliament must, first of all, be given its quietus; that, in order
to preserve its own social power intact, its political power must
be broken; that the individual bourgeois can continue to exploit