Gordon:
>> a rather Hobbesian
>> view, I think, you'd at least refer me to Hobbes. I wonder
>> what you would think of this guy Marx who talked about the
>> withering-away of the State.
Justin Schwartz:
> I think Marx was wrong (the term is actually Engels'). But then I am a
> liberal democrat. Be that as it may, Marx didn't mean anarchism, he meant
> that the government wouldn't be an instrument of class oppression.
I think the idea of the State withering away, that is, becoming non-existent, is pretty explicit in Marx, who wrote the notes for Engels's book. This is the way Lenin took it, if Lenin is any evidence of proper Marxist thought.
- -- Gordon
From: THE STATE AND REVOLUTION CHAPTER V THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE
Marx explains this question most thoroughly in his Critique of the Gotha Program (letter to Bracke, May 5, 1875, which was not published until 1891 when it was printed in Neue Zeit, Vol. IX, 1, and which has appeared in Russian in a special edition). The polemical part of this remarkable work, which contains a criticism of Lassalleanism, has, so to speak, overshadowed its positive part, namely, the analysis of the connection between the development of Communism and the withering away of the state.
1. PRESENTATION OF THE QUESTION BY MARX
From a superficial comparison of Marx's letter to Bracke of May 5, 1875, with Engels' letter to Bebel of March 28,1875, which we examined above, it might appear that Marx was much more of a "champion of the state" than Engels, and that the difference of opinion between the two writers on the question of the state was very considerable.
Engels suggested to Bebel that all the chatter about the state be dropped altogether; that the word "state" be eliminated from the program altogether and the word "community" substituted for it. Engels even declared that the Commune was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. Yet Marx even spoke of the "future nature of the state of communist society," i.e., as though he recognized the need for the state even under Communism.
But such a view would be fundamentally wrong. A closer examination shows that Marx's and Engels' views on the state and its withering away were completely identical, and that Marx's expression quoted above refers precisely to this state in the process of withering away.
Clearly there can be no question of defining the exact moment of the future "withering away" -- the more so since it will obviously be a lengthy process. The apparent difference between Marx and Engels is due to the fact that they dealt with different subjects and pursued different aims. Engels set out to show Bebel graphically, sharply and in broad outline the utter absurdity of the current prejudices concerning the state (shared to no small degree by Lassalle). Marx only touched upon t h i s question in passing, being interested in another subject, viz., the development of communist society.
The whole theory of Marx is the application of the theory of development -- in its most consistent, complete, considered and pithy form -- to modern capitalism. Naturally, Marx was faced with the problem of applying this theory both to the forthcoming collapse of capitalism and to the future development of future Communism.
On the basis of what data, then, can the question of the future development of future Communism be dealt with?
On the basis of the fact that it has its origin in capitalism, that it develops historically from capitalism, that it is the result of the action of a social force to which capitalism gave birth. There is no trace of an attempt on Marx's part to conjure up a utopia, to make idle guesses about what cannot be known. Marx treats the question of Communism in the same way as a naturalist would treat the question of the development, say, of a new biological variety, once he knew that such and such was its origin and such and such the exact direction in which it was changing.
Marx, first of all, brushes aside the confusion the Gotha Program brings into the question of the relation between state and society. He writes:
"'Present-day society' is capitalist society, which exists in all civilized countries, more or less free from medieval admixture, more or less modified by the special historical development of each country, more or less developed. On the other hand, the 'present-day state' changes with a country's frontier. It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in Switzerland, it is different in England from what it is in the United States. The 'present-day state' is, therefore, a fiction.
"Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite of their manifold diversity of form, all have this in common, that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential features in common. In this sense it is possible to speak of the 'present-day state,' in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.
"The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present functions of the state? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state."[28]
Having thus ridiculed all talk about a "people's state," Marx formulates the question and warns us, as it were, that a scientific answer to it can be secured only by using firmly established scientific data.
The first fact that has been established with complete exactitude by the whole theory of development, by science as a whole -- a fact that was forgotten by the utopians, and is forgotten by the present-day opportunists who are afraid of the socialist revolution -- is that, historically, there must undoubtedly be a special stage or a special phase of transition from capitalism to Communism.
2. THE TRANSITION FROM CAPITALISM TO COMMUNISM
Marx continues:
"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."