Marxism explains that a workers’ state will need to create a state apparatus to defend itself against the resistance of capitalism and imperialism. Safeguards will be needed to ensure that any state bureaucracy is kept under democratic workers’ control. Over time, as class divisions are overcome, the need for such a state will disappear.

Lenin, shortly before the October revolution, brilliantly explained how a workers’ state should function in his book ‘The State and Revolution’: (Read this book in MIA)

“Alongside of an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor… the workers’ state brings about a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery; their resistance must be crushed by force… but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. … The exploiters are naturally unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine … but the people can suppress the exploiters with a very simple ‘machine’… by the simple organisation of the armed masses (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers Deputies)”.
How would this “simple machine” work in practice? How can the working people keep control over the state they had created, and prevent the growth of a military and bureaucratic elite? Lenin’s basic guidelines are as valid today as on the day they were written:

1. No official to receive a higher wage than that of the average skilled worker.

2. Administrative duties to be rotated amongst the widest strata of the population to prevent the crystallisation of an entrenched caste of bureaucrats.

3. All working people to bear arms to protect the revolution against threats from any quarter, internal or external.

4. All power to be vested in the Soviets made up from lay delegates elected from the workplaces. Delegates must report back to workplace meetings to ensure maximum mass participation, and all are subject to instant recall – to be replaced with a newly elected delegate if the meeting votes for it.

Marx and Engels had also explained how, as society undergoes its transition from capitalism towards socialism, creating a society of abundance through the planned use of resources, class divisions would start to disappear. At the same time, the need for a separate state apparatus would disappear too. It would ‘wither away’. Lenin and Trotsky both explained how this applied to the Russian workers’ state:

“A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the ‘state’, is still necessary, but this is already a transitional state. … when the resistance of the capitalists has disappeared … freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse … They will become accustomed to observing them without force … without the special apparatus for coercion called the state … ‘the state withers away’ ” (Lenin, State and Revolution)

A workers’ state is “just a bridge between the bourgeois [capitalist] and the socialist society … it bears a temporary character. An incidental but very essential task of the state … consists in preparing for its own dissolution. The degree of the realisation of this ‘incidental’ task is, to some extent, a measure of its success in the fulfilment of its fundamental mission: the construction of a society without classes and without material contradictions. Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other”. (Trotsky, ‘The Revolution Betrayed’). (Read this book in MIA)