The role of the state

[Randy Stone]

>Brett Knowlton wrote:
>
>>This got me wondering - what do you think is the ideal role of the 
state?
>>Where do you think it should be involved, etc.?  Maybe this is too 
much of
>>an open question, but I'll ask it anyway.
>
>Heavens. You know, to expropriate the expropriators and all. The rest 
is
>beyond me now.
>
>Doug
>
>
Far from having an ideal role, the state has a very practical role 
according to Marx in the Germany Ideology:  "With the division of 
labor...is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal 
distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, or labor and its 
products, hence property...Further, the division of labor implies the 
contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the 
individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have 
[dealings] with one another...And out of the this very contradiction 
between the interest of the individual and that of the community the 
latter takes an independent form as the State, divorced from the real 
interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an 
illusory communal life...all struggles within the State...are merely the 
illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are 
fought out among one another...On the other hand, too, the practical 
struggle of these particular interests, which constantly really run 
counter to the communal and illusory communal interests, makes practical 
intervention and control necessary through the illusory general interest 
in the form of the State."

The practical role of the state is to "serve and protect" private 
property.  This is done through the various civil, criminal, and 
administrative codes produced through legislative and executive bodies.  
When push to comes to shove among the "ideals" of "individual interest", 
"special interests", and "general interest", the state, in the form of 
armed bodies of men, steps between the combatants, and "force decides."

Randy Stone

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