Marxist State Theory
Discussion
Distinguishing the schools of thought
Donald Parkinson:
"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.”
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.
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.”
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."
(https://cosmonautmag.com/2019/02/making-state-theory-revolutionary/)