The State. Anthony de Jasay

though, that such “frontier” phenomena should be regarded as exceptions, i.e. that capitalism can colonize and settle a frontier, without being helped or feeling hindered by the state.)

      Whether with or (in deference to historical evidence) without the benefit of revolution, the capitalist class nevertheless ends up with the state serving its interest. Sometimes, in aberrant, “untypical” situations, however, the bourgeoisie does not dominate the state. The distinction is important as it admits an at least quasi-autonomy of the state in particular historical settings. Engels formulates this as follows: (The state) “in all typical periods is exclusively the state of the ruling class, and in all cases remains essentially a machine for keeping down the... exploited class.”³⁴ We must, I think, take this to mean that there are periods (which we can thus recognize as typical) when the state is an instrument of class oppression acting at the behest of the ruling class, while at other times it escapes the control of the ruling class yet continues to act on its behalf, for its good, in its interest. The ruling class, of course, is the class which owns the means of production, whether or not it “rules” in the sense of governing.

      Just as the weather is not unseasonable in Russia except in spring, summer, autumn and winter, so there have not been untypical periods in the history of capitalism except in the golden ages of the English, French and German bourgeoisie. In England, the bourgeoisie has purportedly never sought political power (the Anti-Corn Law League and later the Liberal Party for some reason do not count), and was content to leave the state in the hands of the landowners, who could attract atavistic popular loyalties and whose apparent even-handedness and social concern helped retard the development of proletarian class-consciousness. It is not clear whether the English state is to be regarded as autonomous—Engels speaks of the aristocracy being properly remunerated by the capitalists for governing—but no doubt is left that it represents the capitalist interest more effectively and cleverly than the politically inept bourgeoisie could have done.

      In France, at the fall of the July Monarchy the bourgeoisie momentarily found itself with political power on its hands. It was unfit to wield it, parliamentary democracy (viz. the election of March 1850) unleashing popular forces which endangered the bourgeoisie more than any other group or class.³⁵ (Contrast Marx’s diagnosis with the astonishing position taken by Lenin in “The State and Revolution” that parliamentary democracy is the ideally suited system for the requirements of capitalist exploitation.)³⁶ In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx talks of the bourgeoisie abdicating power, condemning itself to political nullity; he compares the dictatorship of Napoleon III to a Damocles sword hanging over the head of the bourgeoisie. It is not clear whether Marx thought that in abdicating, it was aware of the dangerous aspects of Bonapartism, lower-middle class populism, state parasitism, etc. He felt sure, though, that in doing so the bourgeoisie bought itself the secure enjoyment of property and order, which would suggest that the Damocles sword was not really poised over its head. Engels, as usual plainer in meaning, states that Bonapartism upholds the wider interests of the bourgeoisie even against the bourgeoisie. Like the rod for the good of the child, the autonomous state of the Second Empire was really for the good of the capitalist class even at times when the latter felt restive under it.

      Germany, while being (as ever) a case apart, with its bourgeois revolution of 1848-9 coming much too late and miscarrying into the bargain, has nevertheless this in common with England and France; the Prussian state and, after 1871, the Reich, did what it had to do to further capitalist exploitation without being in any way under capitalist direction or control. When Engels says that Bismarck cheated both capital and labour to favour the “cabbage Junkers” (who, despite the favours, the grain tariff and the Osthilfe, stayed stubbornly poor), he is admitting the autonomy of the state (for subservience to the landed interest did not make the state class-controlled, as landowners no longer constituted a functionally real, live class—only the capitalists and the workers did that), without suggesting that this cheating gave the capitalists cause for complaint, any more than did the treacherous alliance of Bismarck with the despised Lassalle, and Bismarck’s whole reformist, “social,” welfare-statist drift. Solid bourgeois interests were being consistently served throughout, despite the bourgeoisie.

      The Marxist prototype of the state, in short, allows it a good deal of autonomy outside “typical periods,” i.e. virtually all the time, yet obliges it always to use this autonomy in the sole interest of the capitalist class. Nothing much is made by Marx, nor by his successors down to the present, of his original insights into the phenomenon of the state lacking a particular class base and serving its own ends, nor into bureaucracy, parasitism, Bonapartism and so forth.

      In the end, Marx could not admit that it really mattered whether the state was or was not controlled by the ruling class. It had to act in its interest regardless. It made little odds whether the state was directed by true representatives of their class like Casimir-Périer and Guizot, Peel and Cobden, or by a classless adventurer like Louis Bonaparte, not to speak of men like Castlereagh or Melbourne in England, Roon or Bismarck in Prussia or Schwarzenberg in Austria-Hungary, who had little time for bourgeois concerns. Any state, it would seem, would do. Any state could be relied on to do what was good for capitalism.

      Pursuing this logic further, we find moreover that the converse is also asserted: not only will any state do, but whatever it does turns out, on examination, to be good for capitalism. When in December 1831 Marshal Soult leads 20,000 troops against 40,000 striking silk workers in Lyons, when in June 1832 General Lobau reaps 800 dead or wounded rioters in putting down the Montmartre disorders, when in April 1834 there are 300 casualties in Lyons again while in Paris Bugeaud’s troops fire into women and children, the state is helping the exploiters. When the English Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 make it (broadly speaking) a criminal conspiracy for employees to organize, the state is an ally of capital.

      When the 1802 and especially the 1832 English Factory Acts make it illegal to work children under eighteen the same hours in industry as on the land, the state is somehow still helping the manufacturers. When trade union organization is (to put it simply) made lawful in England in 1824, in Prussia in 1839, in France and most German states in the early 1860s, when a ten-hour day is laid down by law in much of the USA in the 1850s, the state is still acting in the capitalist interest, properly understood. (The Marxist hypothesis of the state always acting in the interest of the ruling class is as irrefutable as the vulgar Freudian one of a person’s actions always being the result of his sexual drive, both when he yields to it and when he resists it. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.)

      The sole difference between the manifestly pro-capitalist and the ostensibly anti-capitalist acts of the state is that we need the dialectic method correctly to place them in a triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in order to see that the latter are the same as the former. Virtual, formal, superficial, ephemeral anti-capitalist appearance will thus dissolve into basic, genuine, long-term, true pro-capitalist reality.

      In fact it is hardly feasible to reconstitute what might be the Marxist theory of the state, without recourse to dialectics. The state engages in acts that harm capital and capitalists, like progressive taxation, the grant of legal immunities for trade unions, anti-trust legislation, etc. These acts are pro-capitalist. The state serves the ruling class,³⁷ and as these are acts of the state, they are necessarily in the (“real”) interest of the ruling class. Individual members of the capitalist class may be too short-sighted to recognize their real interest, and may be restive about the state’s actions, joining the John Birch Society in opposition to bourgeois democracy, but the class as such will see the identity of its interest with that of the state, for this is how Marxism defines the concepts of ruling class, class consciousness and state.

      The same iron-clad reasoning goes today for the socialist state, the working class and proletarian class consciousness. Many (or for that matter all) workers may be individually opposed to the actions of the socialist state. These actions are, nevertheless, in the interest of the working class, for the necessary terms are so defined as to make this true. Antagonism between the socialist state and the working class is a nonsense term; empirical evidence of conflict is admitted only on condition of redefining one of the terms, for instance in the 1953 East Berlin or in the 1956 Hungarian uprising the security