Marx views the state with cold-eyed realism. It was obviously not a politically neutral organ, scrupulously even-handed in its treatment of clashing social interests. It was not in the least dispassionate in the conflict between labour and capital. States are not in the business of launching revolutions against property. They exist among other things to defend the current social order against those who seek to transform it. If that order is inherently unjust, then in this respect the state is unjust as well. It is this that Marx wants to see an end to, not national theatres or police laboratories.
There is nothing darkly conspiratorial about the idea that the state is partisan. Anyone who thinks so has clearly not taken part in a political demonstration recently. The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they're winning. Then it moves in with its water hoses and paramilitary squads, and if these fail with its tanks. Nobody doubts that the state can be violent. It is just that Marx gives a new kind of answer to the question of who this violence ultimately serves. It is belief in the state's disinterestedness which is starry-eyed, not the proposal that we might one day get along without its knee-jerk aggression. In fact, even the state has ceased in some ways to believe in its own disinterestedness. Police who beat up striking workers or peaceful demonstrators no longer even pretend to be neutral. Governments, not least Labour ones, do not bother to conceal their hostility to the labour movement. As Jacques Rancière comments, "Marx's once scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today an obvious fact on which 'liberals' and 'socialists' agree. The absolute identification of politics with the management of capital is no longer the shameful secret hidden behind the 'forms' of democracy; it is the openly declared truth by which our governments acquire legitimacy."1
This is not to suggest that we can dispense with police, law courts, prisons or even paramilitary squads. The latter, for example, might prove necessary if a gang of terrorists armed with chemical or nuclear weapons was on the loose, and the more tender-minded species of left-winger had better acknowledge the fact. Not all state violence is in the name of protecting the status quo. Marx himself draws a distinction in volume three of Capital between the class-specific and class-neutral functions of the state. Police officers who prevent racist thugs from beating a young Asian to death are not acting as agents of capitalism. Dedicated suites for women who have been raped are not sinister examples of state repression. Detectives who cart off computers loaded with child pornography are not brutally violating human rights. As long as there is human freedom there will also be abuses of it; and some of these abuses will be horrendous enough for the perpetrators to need locking away for the safety of others. Prisons are not just places for penalizing the socially deprived, though they are certainly that as well.
There is no evidence that Marx would have rejected any of these claims. In fact, he believed that the state could be a powerful force for good. This is why he vigorously supported legislation to improve social conditions in Victorian England. There is nothing repressive about running orphanages for abandoned children, or ensuring that everyone drives on the same side of the road. What Marx rejected was the sentimental myth of the state as a source of harmony, peacefully uniting different groups and classes. In his view, it was more a source of division than of concord. It did indeed seek to hold society together, but it did so ultimately in the interests of the governing class. Beneath its apparent evenhandedness lay a robust partisanship. The institution of the state ''bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich . . . fixed forever the laws of property and inequality; converted clever usurpation into inalienable right; and for the sake of a few ambitious men, subjected all mankind to perpetual labour, servitude and misery.'' These are not Marx's words, but (as we have seen already) those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality. Marx was no lone eccentric in seeing a relation between state power and class privilege. It is true that he did not always hold these views. As a young disciple of Hegel, he spoke of the state in glowingly positive terms. But this was before he became a Marxist. And even when he became a Marxist, he insisted that he wasn't one.
Those who speak of harmony and consensus should beware of what one might call the industrial chaplain view of reality. The idea, roughly speaking, is that there are greedy bosses on one side and belligerent workers on the other, while in the middle, as the very incarnation of reason, equity and moderation, stands the decent, soft-spoken, liberal-minded chaplain who tries selflessly to bring the two warring parties together. But why should the middle always be the most sensible place to stand? Why do we tend to see ourselves as in the middle and other people as on the extremes? After all, one person's moderation is another's extremism. People don't go around calling themselves a fanatic, any more than they go around calling themselves Pimply. Would one also seek to reconcile slaves and slave masters, or persuade native peoples to complain only moderately about those who are plotting their extermination? What is the middle ground between racism and antiracism?
If Marx had no time for the state, it was partly because he viewed it as a kind of alienated power. It was as though this august entity had confiscated the abilities of men and women to determine their own existence, and was now doing so on their behalf. It also had the impudence to call this process ''democracy.'' Marx himself began his career as a radical democrat and ended up as a revolutionary one, as he came to realize just how much transformation genuine democracy would entail; and it is as a democrat that he challenges the state's sublime authority. He is too wholehearted a believer in popular sovereignty to rest content with the pale shadow of it known as parliamentary democracy. He is not in principle opposed to parliaments, any more than was Lenin. But he saw democracy as too precious to be entrusted to parliaments alone. It had to be local, popular and spread across all the institutions of civil society. It had to extend to economic as well as political life. It had to mean actual self-government, not government entrusted to a political elite. The state Marx approved of was the rule of citizens over themselves, not of a minority over a majority.
The state, Marx considered, had come adrift from civil society. There was a blatant contradiction between the two. We were, for example, abstractly equal as citizens within the state, but dramatically unequal in everyday social existence. That social existence was riven with conflicts, but the state projected an image of it as seamlessly whole. The state saw itself as shaping society from above, but was in fact a product of it. Society did not stem from the state; instead, the state was a parasite on society. The whole setup was topsy-turvy. As one commentator puts it, ''Democracy and capitalism have been turned upside down''—meaning that instead of political institutions regulating capitalism, capitalism regulated them. The speaker is Robert Reich, a former U.S. labour secretary, who is not generally suspected of being a Marxist. Marx's aim was to close this gap between state and society, politics and everyday life, by dissolving the former into the latter. And this is what he called democracy. Men and women had to reclaim in their daily lives the powers that the state had appropriated from them. Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it. It is hard to see why so many defenders of democracy should find this vision objectionable.
It is a commonplace among Marxists that real power today lies with the banks, corporations and financial institutions, whose directors had never been elected by anyone, and whose decisions can affect the lives of millions. By and large, political power is the obedient servant of the Masters of the Universe. Governments might chide them from time to time, or even slap an Anti-Social Behavior Order on them; but if they sought to put them out of business they would be in dire danger of being clapped in prison themselves by their own security forces. At most, the state can hope to mop up some of the human damage the present system wreaks. It does so partly on humanitarian grounds, and partly to restore the system's tarnished credibility. This is what we know as social democracy. The fact t
hat, generally speaking, politics is in hock to economics is the reason why the state as we know it cannot simply be hijacked for socialist ends. Marx writes in The Civil War in France that the working class cannot simply lay hands on the ready-made machinery of the state and wield it for its own purposes. This is because that machinery already has a built-in bias to the status quo. Its anaemic, woefully impoverished version of democracy suits the antidemocratic interests that currently hold sway.
Marx's main model for popular self-government was the Paris Commune of 1871, when for a few tumultuous months the working people of the French capital took command of their own destiny. The Commune, as Marx describes it in The Civil War in France, was made up of local councillors, mostly working men, who were elected by popular vote and could be recalled by their constituents. Public service had to be performed at workmen's wages, the standing army was abolished, and the police were made responsible to the Commune. The powers previously exercised by the French state were assumed instead by the Communards. Priests were banished from public life, while educational institutions were thrown open to the common people and freed of interference by both church and state. Magistrates, judges and public servants were to be elective, responsible to the people and recallable by them.
The Commune also intended to abolish private property in the name of cooperative production.
''Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament,'' Marx writes, ''universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes.'' The Commune, he goes on, ''was essentially a working-class government . . . the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.''2 Though he was by no means uncritical of this ill-fated enterprise (he pointed out, for example, that most of the Communards were not socialists), he found in it many of the elements of a socialist politics. And it was from working-class practice, not from some theoretical drawing board, that this scenario had sprung. For a brief, enthralling moment, the state had ceased to be an alienated power and had taken instead the form of popular self-government.
What took place in those few months in Paris was what Marx describes as the ''dictatorship of the proletariat.'' Few of his well-known phrases have sent more of a chill through the veins of his critics. Yet what he means by this sinister-sounding term was nothing more than popular democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat meant simply rule by the majority. In any case, the word ''dictatorship'' in Marx's time did not necessarily suggest what it does today. It meant an extralegal breach of a political constitution. Marx's political sparring partner Auguste Blanqui, a man who had the distinction of being gaoled by every French government from 1815 to 1880, coined the phrase ''dictatorship of the proletariat" to mean rule on behalf of the common people; Marx himself used it to mean government by them. Blanqui was elected president of the Paris Commune, but had to settle for the role of figurehead. As usual, he was in prison at the time.
There are times when Marx writes as though the state is simply a direct instrument of the ruling class. In his historical writings, however, he is usually a good deal more nuanced. The task of the political state is not just to serve the immediate interests of the governing class. It must also act to preserve social cohesion; and though these two goals are ultimately at one, there can be acute conflict between them in the short or middle term. Besides, the state under capitalism has more independence of class relations than it does under, say, feudalism. The feudal lord is both a political and an economic figure, whereas in capitalism these functions are usually distinguished. Your Member of Parliament is not generally your employer. This means that the capitalist state's appearance of being set above class relations is not just an appearance. How independent of material interests the state is depends on changing historical conditions. Marx seems to argue that in the so-called Asiatic mode of production, involving as it does vast irrigation works that only the state can establish, the state really is the dominant social force. So-called vulgar Marxists tend to assume a one-to-one relation between the state and the economically sovereign class, and there are occasions when this is actually the case. There are times when the possessing class directly runs the state. George Bush and his fellow oilmen were a case in point. One of Bush's most remarkable achievements, in other words, was to prove vulgar Marxism right. He also seems to have worked hard to make the capitalist system appear in the worst possible light, another fact which makes one wonder whether he was secretly working for the North Koreans.
The relations in question, however, are usually more complex than the Bush administration might suggest. (In fact, almost everything in human existence is more complex than it tended to suggest.) There are periods, for example, when one class rules on behalf of another. In nineteenth-century England, as Marx himself pointed out, the Whig aristocracy was still the governing political class, while the industrial middle class was increasingly the dominant economic one; and the former, generally speaking, represented the interests of the latter. Marx also argued that Louis Bonaparte ruled France in the interests of finance capitalism while presenting himself as a representative of the smallholding peasantry. Rather similarly, the Nazis ruled in the interests of high capitalism, but did so through an ideology which was distinctively lower-middle class in outlook. They could thus fulminate against upper-class parasites and the idle rich in ways which could be mistaken by the politically unwary as genuinely radical. Nor were the politically unwary wholly mistaken in this view. Fascism is indeed a form of radicalism. It has no time for liberal middle-class civilisation. It is just that it is a radicalism of the right rather than the left.
Unlike a great many liberals, Marx was not allergic to power as such. It is scarcely in the interests of the powerless to be told that all power is distasteful, not least by those who already have enough of the stuff to spare. Those to whom the word "power" always has a derogatory ring are fortunate indeed. Power in the cause of human emancipation is not to be confused with tyranny. The slogan "Black Power!'' is a lot less feeble than the cry ''Down with Power!'' We would only know that such power was truly emancipatory, however, if it managed to transform not only the present political setup, but the very meaning of power itself. Socialism does not involve replacing one set of rulers with another. Speaking of the Paris Commune, Marx observes that ''it was not a revolution to transfer [the state] from one fraction of the ruling class to another but a Revolution to break down this horrid machinery of Classdomination [sic] itself.''3
Socialism involves a change in the very notion of sovereignty. There is only a dim resemblance between what the word ''power'' means in London today and what it meant in Paris in 1871. The most fruitful form of power is power over oneself, and democracy means the collective exercise of this capacity. It was the Enlightenment that insisted that the only form of sovereignty worth submitting to is one we have fashioned ourselves. Such self-determination is the most precious meaning of freedom. And though human beings may abuse their freedom, they are not fully human without it. They are bound to make rash or brainless decisions from time to time —decisions that a shrewd autocrat might well not have taken. But unless these decisions are their decisions, there is likely to be something hollow and inauthentic about them, however sagacious they may be.
So power survives from the capitalist present to the socialist future—but not in the same form. The idea of power itself undergoes a revolution. The same is true of the state. In one sense of the word ''state,'' ''state socialism'' is as much a contradiction in terms as ''the epistemological theories of Tiger Woods.'' In another sense, however, the term has some force. For Marx, there is still a state under socialism; only beyond socialism, under communism, will the coercive state give way to an administrative body. But it is not a state we ourselves would easily recognize as such. It is as though someone were to point to a decentralised network of self-governing communities, flexibly regulated by a democratically elected central administration,
and announce "There is the state!,'' when we were expecting something altogether more imposing and monumental—something, for example, along the lines of Westminster, Whitehall and the mysteriously enigmatic Prince Andrew.
Part of Marx's quarrel with the anarchists was over the question of how fundamental power is in any case. Is it what ultimately matters? Not in Marx's opinion. For him, political power had to be set in a broader historical context. One had to ask what material interests it served, and it was these that in his view lay at the root of it. If he was critical of conservatives who idealized the state, he was also impatient with anarchists who overrated its importance. Marx refuses to ''reify'' power, severing it from its social surroundings and treating it as a thing in itself. And this is undoubtedly one of the strengths of his work. Yet it is accompanied, as strengths often are, by a certain blind spot. What Marx overlooks about power is what his compatriots Nietzsche and Freud both recognized in strikingly different ways. Power may not be a thing in itself; but there is an element within it which luxuriates in dominion simply for its own sake—which delights in flexing its muscles with no particular end in view, and which is always in excess of the practical goals to which it is harnessed. Shakespeare acknowledged this when he wrote of the relationship between Prospero and Ariel in The Tempest. Ariel is the obedient agent of Prospero's power, but he is restless to escape this sovereignty and simply do his own thing. In puckish, sportive spirit, he wants simply to relish his magical powers as ends in themselves, not have them tied down to his master's strategic purposes. To see power simply as instrumental is to pass over this vital feature of it; and to do so may be to misunderstand why power should be as formidably coercive as it is.
Why Marx Was Right Page 16
