READ AND DISCUSS:

These sentences help explain how the capitalist class – like every ruling class in history – has developed state institutions to help cement its rule. After all, how else can a ruling minority maintain its power and privileges over an exploited majority?

Marx and Engels are warning workers that those in control of the state - the heads of the army and police, the judges, the tops of the civil service, alongside Government Ministers - aren’t neutral arbiters of ‘justice’, but, in the last analysis, act to defend the rule of the capitalist class minority against any challenge from the working-class majority.

Sometimes that warning might seem unnecessary – for example when the state forces are carrying out their role in a brutally obvious manner, under a military dictatorship for example. But under most capitalist regimes, the state exerts its influence more subtly – through the courts and legal system, the press and media, and the pretence that through ‘parliamentary democracy’ workers have real control over the decisions taken by the unelected capitalist class. However, for example in the way courts have been used to try and criminalise protest against the genocidal war in Gaza, or the experience of police being used to try and break workers’ struggles, such as the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Britain, those illusions are starting to be broken.

Marx and Engels went on to write much more about the role of the State in other writings, including in their analysis of the Paris Commune already discussed in Lesson Four of this course. Lenin usefully summarised their analysis in his 1917 pamphlet ‘State and Revolution ¹⁶’. Another useful summary of the Marxist approach to ‘the state and class rule’ can be found in the 2022 book, ‘Introduction to Marxism ¹⁵’, produced by the Socialist Party.

Lenin’s analysis includes a selection of quotes from Engels’ 1884 book ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’. In one of these, Engels explains how “the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check … it is as a rule the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the ancient state was, above all, the state of the slaveowners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument for exploiting wage labour by capital”.

Engels then adds, however, that “exceptional periods, however, occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power, as ostensible mediator, momentarily acquires a certain degree of independence of both. Such was the absolute monarchy of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, which balanced the nobility and the burghers against each other, and such was the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat ¹⁷”.

This concept of ‘Bonapartism’ – of the state acting to defend its own privileges above those of the most economically dominant class is an important concept. It helps explain, for example, how the Stalinist bureaucracy rested on a nationalised planned economy, and the hybrid nature of today’s Chinese state controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

1. To what extent do you think your workmates and friends view the police, courts, press – and elected Government themselves - as being ‘neutral’, and how much as acting in the interests of the wealthy? What experiences have they had that has influenced their outlook?

2. Why did Marx and Engels believe that the State would inevitably arise in a society based on class divisions?

3. Today, a significant capitalist class has emerged in China. But the State, under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, has a considerable level of independence and has taken measures to keep the capitalist class in check. Why might Marxists describe this as being a ‘Bonapartist’ regime?