Making State Theory Revolutionary

State theory must move beyond questions of methodology and move into deeper political questions such as the political form of a workers regime, argues Donald Parkinson. 

Perry Anderson in his Considerations on Western Marxism makes the point that it was primarily questions of methodology and not political debate that occupied Marxist intellectuals in Western Europe during the post-war era up until the 1970s. Anderson links this focus on methodology over strategy to the general weakness of the class struggle at that time, with Marxist intellectuals focusing on arcane, although often useful, debates concerning the correct reading of Marx, whether Hegelian, structuralist, Kantian, or existentialist. The debates over state theory in Marxism since the post-war era have been no exception to this trend—they have been primarily fixated on questions of methodology in theorizing the state. But what if we moved beyond questions of methodology,  aiming to take Marxist state theory into the field of substantive political questions? In this attempt to do so I will offer a quick overview of the main debates in methodology and then point towards the kind of questions that would concern a more revolutionarily-oriented approach to state theory.

The primary trends in the debates in Marxist state theory are instrumentalism and structuralism. Other schools of thought include the form-analytic school. The instrumentalist school is regarded by Clyde W. Barrow in his Critical Theories of the State as the inheritor of “Plain Marxism,” continuing the tradition that Lenin began in State and Revolution. Instrumentalist state theory was initially conceived by Sweezy and Baran, but was perhaps most effectively articulated by Ralph Miliband, particularly in his book The State and Capitalist Society.

Put simply, instrumentalist state theory takes seriously the claim by Engels that the state is “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the ruling class.” Instrumentalist state theorists argue that not only is there a ruling class with cohesive group interests but that the state is a means through which the ruling class can express these interests. It is within state institutions that class power is organized; the ruling class is able to have control over these institutions because of its own networks of influence and policy-making through which the power of the ruling class is embedded. To quote Miliband:

“It is these institutions in which ‘state power’ lies, and is through them that this power is wielded in its different manifestations by the people who occupy the leading positions in each of these institutions.”¹

According to this theory, classes exert their power over state apparatuses through “colonizing” them. This is the process by which the ruling class keeps the state’s loyalty, maintaining dominance over state institutions so as to make the state an instrument of the class’s rule. This theory thus explains how the ruling class rules through the state and exercises a class dictatorship through the processes of class formation and colonization of the state apparatuses, institutionalizing its rule. By class formation, we mean the process through which a class becomes a consciously organized force that can act in history according to its class interests.

A typical critique of the instrumentalist approach begins by pointing out that it conceptualizes the state as merely an instrument for different classes to pick up and use. Instrumentalists, this critique continues, give undue importance to ideology and the behavior of managers, emphasizing these factors over the importance of social structures over which the managers have no control. This critique was made by Poulantzas (targeting Miliband), who would develop a structuralist theory of the state inspired by Louis Althusser’s reading of Marx.² Poulantzas’s structuralism would develop in the course from his initial critique of Miliband to his final work State, Power, Socialism. However from the beginning what was important for Poulantzas was that the state is understood in terms of social relations and structures rather than actors and that what mattered was not the class loyalties of politicians but the deeper historical logic with which the state was intertwined.

Structuralist state theory did not disagree with Miliband empirically so much as theoretically; its critique was aimed primarily at what it saw as the flawed methodology underlying instrumentalism. Structuralist Marxism itself was a project designed to rid Marxism of its “humanist” aspects, a sort of Marxism that saw the study of abstract social structures as more scientific compared to the Hegelian reading of Marx which focused on alienation and made room for what was seen as a creeping idealism. This could mean a cold and impersonal Marxism that leaves little room for human agency, but it also allows the theorist to look at certain social formations at a “macro” level of abstraction.

This can be useful in the sense of understanding the state as something that exists beyond the will of certain individual actors with unlimited power and determining which state tendencies are beyond human control. For the structuralists, one ought not to understand the state as an object but as a social relation, and in particular a class relation. The state can be understood as a set of institutions that, regardless of ideology, is set up to reproduce capitalist social relations because its aim is to reproduce classes. This has been useful for explaining why social-democratic politicians so often bowed down to the capitalist class while in power despite their rhetoric. What mattered was not the dedication of these politicians to pro-worker policies, but the greater social structure in which state actors worked, a structure inherently predisposed to reproducing capitalist relations.

However, through the course of his thinking, Poulantzas would eventually develop his state theory in directions that go against key aspects of Marxist state theory, in particular, the concept of class dictatorship. In State, Power, Socialism, Poulantzas mocks Balibar, himself a structuralist Marxist, for maintaining the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, apparently a “stupendous dogmatism.”³ For Poulantzas, there is no class which can hold control over the state; rather, the class struggle itself traverses the state, which serves as a locus where class antagonisms are expressed and worked out. The state is not ruled by a capitalist class that can be defined economically but is an institution that serves in the reproduction of all classes and therefore can not be said to be the specific terrain of a ruling class. Instead, there are ruling ‘power blocs’ which are composed of alliances of fractions of different classes. The political implications of this for Poulantzas were clear: the working class could build power within the capitalist state through building class alliances and shoring up hegemony within the state apparatus. This meant that a “democratic road to socialism” was possible without a rupture between the bourgeois dictatorship and the proletarian dictatorship, through a protracted struggle to gradually transform the state from the inside backed by movements from below.

In the end, despite their aim to prove that the state structurally reproduced capitalism regardless of the motives of state actors, the structuralists ended up embracing the reformist politics of Eurocommunism, Poulantzas being one of the key theorists of this attempt to revamp communism with social-democratic and liberal revisionism. Instrumentalist theorists of the state such as Erik Olin Wright have also come to similar political conclusions. Both theoretical schools, despite their methodological quibbles, ended up lending theoretical ammunition to reformists in opposition to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the aim of both schools of thought to develop Marxist theory, they instead became more like sociologies of the state removed from any kind of revolutionary politics. These debates lost the important focus of class politics, leading to theory that was a mere rationalization of the reformist turn much of the Official Communist movement was already making. Today Poulantzas is used to argue for entryism into the Democratic Party, with the Bernie Sanders campaign being an example of class struggle within the state.⁴

While both instrumentalism and structuralism can lend credence to reformism, as theories of the state we can still learn from both of them, seeing them as ways of looking at the state at different levels of abstraction. The instrumentalist theory shows how the state in action acts as a protection racket for the ruling class and how these factions of the ruling class work to reproduce their class power. On the other hand, the structuralist theorists show the social structures that these state actors are embedded in. While this methodological debate can lead to reformist conclusions on both sides, it can also be used to help us deepen our arguments for a properly Marxist theory of the state. These arguments are not useless, but we must go beyond them. This means putting Marxist state theory back onto the track of explaining the reality of class dictatorship, as Lenin did in State and Revolution.

The fact that Marxist state theory allowed itself to become focused on methodology is a product of Marxist theory becoming divorced from revolutionary politics. This doesn’t mean we cannot use the insights of the structuralist Marxist or instrumentalist state theorists in analyzing the state. However, what should be clear is that Marxist state theory needs to focus on the issue of dictatorship, which relates to a number of practical questions. The first is on the nature of smashing the state. What does it mean to smash the bourgeois state? Secondly, there is the question of the character of what comes after the bourgeois state, i.e. the proletarian state, or dictatorship of the proletariat. How do we determine whether a state is a dictatorship of the proletariat or not? What form of state best ensures the rule of the working class?

To begin answering this question, we must begin with the assertion that states are ultimately forms of class dictatorship. What this means is that in a given social formation, the state is a means through which a class ensures and reproduces its position as the ruling class. While the state is contested by multiple classes, as Poulantzas points out, it ultimately reproduces a class system with the state apparatus ensuring that one class comes out on top. To quote the “stupendous dogmatism” of Etienne Balibar: State power is always the power of a class. State power, which is produced in the class struggle, can only be the instrument of the ruling class: what Marx and Engels called the dictatorship of the ruling class.⁵

Why the term dictatorship? Balibar paraphrases Lenin defining a dictatorship as “absolute power, standing above any law, either of the bourgeois or the proletariat. State power cannot be shared.”⁶ Essentially this means that in a given state, the class’s rule over this state is non-negotiable, and is ultimately above the law. If the law becomes a barrier to the rule of the dominant class, the law is ultimately less important, and the state will break with the rule of law if necessary to ensure ‘order’. The importance of recognizing this is that legal codes are not neutral forces standing above classes, but means through which class power is expressed.

The necessity of “order” and the maintenance of the rule of law is the normal operation of the bourgeois state. Yet when “order” is threatened, often through the convulsions of class struggle, the state will use extra-legal methods to maintain order. The class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is mediated through parliaments and courts, yet also will throw such forms of mediation out the window if the establishment of order is threatened. Thus there is a tension in the bourgeois state between its own forms of democracy and the necessity of maintaining a bourgeois dictatorship.

The other important aspect of the theory of class dictatorship is that the state does not share power between classes; the proletariat and bourgeoisie do not have a compromised state where both rule halfway, but rather one class rules over all others. This has clear implications for political practice, in that there must be a rupture in the form of the state in the proletarian revolution, where the bourgeois form of the state is smashed and is replaced by a state of a fundamentally different form that puts power into the hands of the working class. The question remains, however: what form does this state take? Rather than simply assuming the ‘class character’ of a state as given due to the ideology of the ruling party, we must understand what institutions can actually allow the working class to rule as a class. Here Charles Bettelheim is useful:

“The basic difference between a proletarian state apparatus and a bourgeois state apparatus is the non-separation of the proletarian state apparatus from the masses, its subordination to the masses, i.e. the disappearance of what Lenin called a “state in the proper sense and its replacement by the proletariat organized as a ruling class.”⁷

Key to the proletarian state in this conception is the non-separation of the masses from the state, the state being subordinated to the masses. This entails that there must be a form of democracy that is based in mass collective participation from the proletariat that would allow for the masses to subordinate the state to their interests. This must be a democracy based on collective decision-making in public association rather than the atomized democracy found in the bourgeois state that reduces mass politics to the individuated casting of a vote. The form of the proletarian state is, therefore, a form of the state that in all meaningful ways is more democratic than any capitalist state—democracy is a means through which the masses can take political decision-making into their collective hands. The alternative is the rule of experts, of bureaucracy, unhindered in their rule and increasingly graced with arbitrary power by their social status.

One element of democracy is that it operates through a sort of “political culture,” or set of political norms in collective decision making that empower the collective to the greatest possible extent. Therefore a proletarian state must promote certain civic virtues, essentially an ideological apparatus that promotes certain forms of socialization over others, forms that promote collective decision-making in a solidaristic fashion overseeing politics as an instrument for personal success. In fact, one of the key aspects of proletarian democracy is that it is not possible to use politics as a form of career. As in the Paris Commune, the workers representative should be not only recallable but also paid the average working person’s wage. Public officials should be elected and transparency should become the norm, as well as freedom of the press and freedom of association. Democracy must not be understood as merely majoritarian decision-making, but rather collective decision-making where everyone has a say. One could call this political culture “workers’ republicanism,” and the state a “workers’ republic.” Such a state would not overcome the principle of representation—this is not a call for direct democracy—yet it would maximize the means through which representation is truly derived from the “people’s will” or, more accurately, the will of the propertyless class.

Another key aspect of the proletarian state is the arming of the people. The smashing of the state at its core is the dissolution of the existing bourgeois state apparatus, the military, national guard, and police. What replaces these institutions is the people’s militia, which is run through municipal committees that all citizens can join. The universal arming of the people through such a system is an acid test of whether a state can be said to have a proletarian “class character,” whether the working class truly holds power or if power is being taken into the hands of a petty-bourgeois bureaucracy. The working class must become the state itself and absorb all arbitrary and alienated bureaucratic powers to the fullest extent while putting those that do exist under democratic control.

This approach toward defining a “workers’ state” differs from the Trotskyist method, which judges a workers’ state by the dominant property relations. For example, if a state has a nationalized economy but is run by a bureaucracy caste that politically disempowers the working class, it is still a workers’ state, albeit a degenerated one. This way of using property relations alone as a metric is ultimately economically reductive to the point where the working class does not have to actually hold power in its own state but merely exist in a nationalized economy compatible with any kind of arbitrary despotism. The workers’ state may be degenerated and need a political revolution, but the implicit assumption is that property-form defines a workers’ state. Yet would one say that the USSR ceased to be a workers’ state during the NEP, where private property was tolerated, and then returned to being one after the collectivization of agriculture under Stalin? Rather than focusing on the property form dominating the economy, the focus should be on the political form of the state.

An argument against this interpretation of the state is that a workers’ state could simply be an extremely democratic state with a capitalist economy. But this opens up another avenue of Marxist state theory that could be more vigorously examined: the contradiction between the market and democracy. One could theoretically make an argument that the rule of the market as an impersonal force and authentic democratic rule of the people and their interests over all of society are incompatible; thus the tendency for the capitalist class to limit democracy when necessary and the tendency for the proletariat to fight for democracy more than other classes. One sees this contradiction historically play out in the bourgeois revolutions, where the most militant and radical mobilizations against the old regime came from the small proprietor masses who were in the process of proletarianization. On the other hand, the actual merchant class tended to play a more conservative role in the revolutions, seeing the extreme democracy of the masses as a threat to their property. One sees this dynamic in the history of the United States itself, one famous example being the Constitution itself as being framed for the purposes of curbing excess democracy.⁸ A sufficiently empowered proletariat that amasses enough control over society organized as a universal class would simply not be compatible with the rule of the bourgeoisie, as it would be compelled to make “despotic inroads” on property, to use to the words of Marx. To quote Jacques Ranciere, referencing a report from the Trilateral Commission on the problems of democracy:

“Democracy, said the report writers, signifies the irresistible growth of demands that put pressure on governments, lead to a decline in authority, and cause individuals and groups to become refractory to the discipline and sacrifices for the common good.”⁹

We must understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat for Marx is merely a stage in the class struggle, one where the proletariat becomes the most powerful class in society, but still nonetheless within a capitalist society. The point of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that the proletariat is in control of the “general means of coercion” and can now make concrete steps towards the abolition of class society itself. Radical political democracy serves the purposes of allowing the masses to take these concrete steps.

On this occasion, Poulantzas does give us a useful frame of reference, despite his conclusion of class dictatorship not being a viable concept. If we see the form of the state as something which is determined by the concrete class struggle, then it is possible that the strength of the proletariat as a class would impact the form of the state. Yet whether a strong proletariat would mean a more democratic or despotic state is not something that can be predetermined. While a strongly organized proletariat may be able to win significant concessions from the state such as democratic rights, the state could also react to an empowered proletariat by becoming more authoritarian and clamping down on democratic rights. However, even if the proletariat is strongly organized enough within a capitalist state to win certain rights, these rights are mere legalities in the eyes of the bourgeoisie and can be suspended if necessary—hence why even the most democratic state is not a state where the proletariat and bourgeois share power somehow, but rather is always a dictatorship of the bourgeois. In fact, where the proletariat has gained significant democratic rights, one can see the bourgeois state compensate through forms of corruption and voter manipulation. One can say there is essentially a contradiction between political democracy and the market, where political democracy being extended gives more power to the plebian classes and therefore can lead to policies that clash with the market.

In conventional Leninist political terminology, where the Comintern or at least its first four congresses are used as a key reference point for politics, democracy is contrasted to Democratic Centralism. It is my opinion that Democratic Centralism is essentially a redundant term, and is more often than not simply used as a cudgel against democracy in the name of centralism. Any democratic decision made by a collective, by a majority, has to be enforced on the whole. The part must be subsumed to the whole, and so some form of central authority is needed so that the needs of the whole can be met. Decentralization of power, where autonomy and localism are emphasized over the rule of any central authority and subjugation to authority is a matter of contractual agreements worked out between functionally autonomous communes, pretends to be an ultra-democratic alternative to democratic systems that rely on some level of centralism. Yet if a locality is truly autonomous and not accountable to a center, then it is not accountable for the needs of the rest of society, a situation which is fundamentally anti-democratic.

The neo-republican theories of Skinner and Pettit, while tainted by social-democratic politics, are a valuable asset to state theory despite coming from a non-Marxist background. For Pettit, freedom can be defined as the absence of domination.¹⁰ We are essentially unfree when we are subject to the will of another. However, when we enter a political community, we essentially subject ourselves to the rule of a state and are subject to the will of the authority of this state. This provides us with a conundrum: how are humans supposed to be free if we live in a society where we are forced to live under the control of generalized political authority? The argument of the neo-republicans is that said political authority is not a form of domination if it is an authority that is derived from the said political community through open and collective deliberation. Furthermore, this political authority must be exercised in a way which is not arbitrary. The issue of arbitrary authority is a major one for the neo-republicans, as they see republican democracy as a means to limit and perhaps eliminate arbitrary authority, which is an authority that is not legitimated by the norms of the political community and there is a form of domination in operation.

Skinner argues against the notion of freedom as “non-interference,” as we can only exist as “free” beings in a community with others, and therefore cannot be free from some interference from the needs of others without being atomized, anti-social beings.¹¹ Humans are social animals, and so we have no choice but to be subject to the interference of others in a political community. However, what we can be free from is dependence, where we are subjected to the arbitrary will of a social force in order to survive. This can be extended to the dependence of a woman on her husband for financial support, dependence on competition in the free market to survive, and dependence on a state which is free from any kind of democratic control.¹² Therefore freedom is not freedom from the interference and input of others, but freedom from arbitrary forms of domination and dependence.

By looking at modern thinkers of republican theory like Pettit and Skinner, as well as the general ideals of radical republicanism that were common parlance in circles frequented by Marx and Engels, we can learn to develop what was mentioned earlier as a “political culture,” a culture not in the sense of an aesthetic but in the sense of a complex of social and institutional norms. Through developing such a culture in the masses, we can develop through concrete struggle the forms of workers’ democracy that will define the proletarian state of the future, training the working class to become a class capable of self-governance. Marxist state theory should shift focus from purely methodological issues and instead begin to venture into the practical questions of the proletarian state.

One can ask how one can reconcile the notion of a dictatorship of the proletariat with mass republican democracy. The answer to this is that Marx did not see dictatorship and democracy as mutually exclusive, but instead in a mutually reinforcing relation with one another. For example, in applying the lessons of 1848 in his 1850 Address to the Communist League, Marx calls for the use of terrorist methods in order to attain democratic demands. Marx sees class dictatorship as a means through which one class suppresses of the former ruling class, which in turn allows for the development of new democratic forms that come from undermining the power of this class. For Marx, the Jacobin dictatorship of the French Revolution was inspiring: in order for the bourgeoisie and its allies in the plebeian classes to win a republic that totally undermined the aristocracy’s power and put democracy in the hands of the masses, it was necessary to violently suppress the aristocratic class whose interests were contrary to the rise of mass democratic politics. One can understand proletarian dictatorship in a similar way: the capitalist class must be put out of power and politically disenfranchised in order to construct sovereignty based on the power of the workers and organized through democratic association. For Marx, class dictatorship is a means of securing democracy against the power of the former ruling class and is thus not contrary to democratic principles.  

Marxist state theory must move beyond mere questions of methodology and into questions of political importance, such as what actually demarcates proletarian states from bourgeois states, the question of what denotes the “class character” of a state beyond mere proclamations, and so on. It means asking what kinds of polities we aim to create, and what kind of political cultures will need to accompany them. Structuralism, instrumentalism, or other approaches from the form-analytic, systems theory, or organizational realist schools can only tell us so much about these questions and have mostly related to best theorizing the capitalist state. In analyzing the state we may use elements of all of these methodologies, but what matters is that our understanding of the state is based in concrete historical analysis and not simply left in the realm of abstraction. Marxist state theory gives us important tools for understanding the capitalist state and its development, providing us with a set of methodologies that look at the state with different levels of abstraction. Yet a theory of the state must also be able to understand the state beyond the capitalist state. This means developing a theory of the state that can understand pre-capitalist states and their continuities with the modern state. Yet more importantly, as partisans of communism, we must also theorize the proletarian state, a question which relates to how we now try to organize a polity of the working class for its historical interests. It is my suggestion that the democratic-republican principles of the milieu that created Marxism carry much to offer us in addressing this question.

1. Ralph Miliband, The State and Capitalist Society, pg. 54.
2. Poulantzas, ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’, 1969
3. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, pg. 20
4. Adherents to this argument include Nora Belrose and Adam Proctor.
5. Etienne Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, pg. 66
6. Ibid.
7. Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Social Classes, and Proletarian Ideology, Charles Bettleheim
8. For an in-depth look into this, see Woody Holton’s Unruly American’s and the Origins of the Constitution.
9. Jacques Ranciere, Hatred of Democracy, pg. 7
10. Pettit, On the People’s Terms, page 26.
11. See this lecture by Skinner on this issue.
12. See Marx’s Inferno by William Clare Roberts, which puts Capital in a radical republican context.