The State. Anthony de Jasay

non-dialectical argument.)

      Having said this, let us nevertheless venture to put forward the bare outline of an interpretation where we will remain committed, as far as possible, to a non-dialectical (hence easy to refute) meaning. It is quite legitimate to take Marxism to hold that the victory of the working class and the extinction of class antagonism means, by definition, that the state withers away. Lenin, understandably, has a strong interest in adopting the contrary interpretation. He goes to immense trouble to argue that the cessation of class conflict does not entail the withering away of the state. There are no classes but there is a (coercive) state under socialism. Only in the abundance corresponding to full communism can the state wither away. Its doing so is not a logical implication, but a process in real historical time, about whose required length it would be naive to speculate in advance.

      Though there will still be an apparatus for the “administration of things,” there will be none for the “government of men.” Close reflection is needed to grasp, if grasp one can, how it is possible to “administer things” without telling people to do this or that about them; and how telling people differs from “governing people.” A tentative answer, for what it is worth, would seem to be that this becomes possible when men will do what is required of them in order for things to get administered, without being made or commanded to do so.

      The classless society, then, can tentatively be defined as a state of affairs where this holds true, i.e. where men spontaneously administer things without being administered themselves. However, if men freely do what they have to do, what is the residual need for the administration of things and what is the residual non-coercive quasi-state which is said to subsist after the state proper has withered away? A necessary condition for the non-withering-away of the coercive state is the existence of more than one class. The interests of “historic,” principal classes are necessarily antagonistic. The ruling class needs the state to deter the exploited class from attacking its property and breaking the contracts which provide the legal framework of exploitation. As history proceeds on its preordained course towards the victory of the proletariat and the one-class society, functionally obsolete classes fall by the wayside. The last-but-one surviving class is the bourgeoisie, which possesses all capital and appropriates the surplus value produced by labour. The state is the protector of property. If it is the bourgeoisie that possesses property, the state cannot but serve the bourgeoisie and any state would do so. This is why such autonomy as Marxism (sometimes, not always) allows the state, is so ambiguous. The absolute monarchy, the bourgeois republic, the Bonapartist, the “English,” the Bismarckian and the Czarist states which Marx and Engels admitted differed from each other, were all said to be states obliged to further the interests of the possessing class, just as the compass needle is obliged to point northwards, no matter in what exotic corner we set it down.

      The reduction of the state to the role of blind instrument of class oppression is obviously unsatisfactory. Engels and Lenin make intellectually more exacting Marxists wince when they resort to it. Yet the concept of an autonomous state, a state with a will of its own which keeps surfacing in Marx’s early political writings, is even less acceptable; to elevate the state to the rank of a subject is revisionism, Hegelian idealism, fetishism if not worse, inconsistent with the mature Marxism of the Grundrisse and of Capital. It leads to deep political pitfalls. Among them, mainstream socialism is menaced with lukewarm reformist notions of the state reconciling society’s inherent contradictions, promoting worker welfare “despite the bourgeoisie,” taming “crises of overproduction,” etc. The proponents of planned “state monopoly capitalism” as the means to mitigate capitalist chaos, and Juergen Habermas and his Frankfurt friends with their doctrines of legitimation and conciliation, are all considered as carriers of this menace.

      A synthetic solution of some elegance, elaborated mainly by modern West Berlin Marxist scholars, consists in grafting social contract theory on to the trunk of Marxism. Capital in the “fragmented” (i.e. decentralized) capitalist mode of production consists of “individual capitals” (i.e. separate owners have separate bits of it). These “capitals” require that workers be docile, trained and healthy, that natural resources be renewed, legal relations enforced and streets paved. No individual capital, however, can profitably produce these goods for itself. A problem of “externality” and a problem of “free riding” stand in the way of capitalist reproduction and accumulation. Non-imposed cooperative solutions, sparing capital the risks involved in surrendering itself to a state, are not envisaged. There is, thus, an objective necessity for a coercive state “beside and outside society” to protect workers’ health, provide infrastructures, etc. From this necessity, its form and function can be logically derived (Ableitung).²⁹ It leads to the state’s monopoly of force, just as various other forms of political hedonism lead to it in the systems of Hobbes and Rousseau. Yet the “doubling” (i.e. splitting) of the economic and the political sphere and the Besonderung (separateness) of the state are subject to the “dialectic of appearance and essence.” The state appears neutral and above classes because it must stand above “individual capitals” in order to serve general capital; it must subjugate the individual bourgeois in order to secure the interests of the bourgeoisie. Any state having the power of coercion, whether absolute monarchy, republic, democracy or despotism, seems able to fulfil this function.

      However, the bourgeoisie must for some reason be requiring more than this, for otherwise it would not rise up in revolution, as it is supposed to do, to smash the pre-capitalist state. It is desperately important to Marxism to maintain, despite all contrary evidence, that revolutions reflect the economic requirements of the class which is called upon by the developing “forces of production” to rise to dominance, and that the contradiction between capitalist techniques and pre-capitalist relations of production must be resolved by revolution.

      This belief is a source of difficulties and for none more so than for historians who hold it. An historian who does not, and who did more than most to dispel many of the myths that used to be spread about the French Revolution, reminds us: “neither capitalism nor the bourgeoisie needed revolutions to appear and become dominant in the main European countries of the nineteenth century,” remarking drily that “nothing was more like French society under Louis XVI than French society under Louis Philippe.”³⁰ Starting off in 1789 firmly committed to the sacredness of property, in a little over four years this revolution reached the point where property rights were to become contingent upon active support for the state of the Terror (Laws of Ventôse). Ironically it was Thermidor—the counterrevolution—which called the state to order, rescued the inviolability of property and secured the bourgeois interests which were supposedly the raison d’être of the revolution. Once it ejected the Girondins, the revolution made the purposes of the state override the security of tenure of property and, contrary to the usual excuse made for it, it continued to escalate its radicalism long after the tide of war had turned in its favour. Marx, who (notably in “The Holy Family,” 1845) recognized perfectly well that the Jacobin state “became its own end,” that it served only itself and not the bourgeoisie, considered this a perversion, an aberration, a departure from the norm. He diagnosed the trouble as the alienation, the detachment of the Jacobin state from its bourgeois class basis,³¹ and in no wise suggested that it is far from being an aberration for the state to detach itself from its “class base,” if indeed it was ever attached to it.

      Nor is Marxist theory better served by the historical facts of other revolutions. Engels is reduced at one point to grumble that the French have had a political and the English an economic revolution—a curious finding for a Marxist—and at another juncture that the English have, in addition to their bourgeoisie, a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois working class. It has been pointed out that while the view that the “big,” “real” revolutions were brought about by the interest of a class, fits badly 1776 (USA), 1789 (France), 1830 (the Low Countries) and 1917 (Russia), it fits worst of all the two English revolutions of 1640-9 and 1688—the Puritan and the Glorious.³² Nor did capitalism need a revolution to rise to dominance of a sort in the Italian city states. Moreover, Russian peasant and mercantile capitalism between the seventeenth and nineteenth century throve to such good effect that it colonized the Black Soil region and Siberia, without noticeable hindrance from Moscow, which was the seat of