In what follows I use Lenin's The State and Revolution (1917; hereafter S&R quoted by chapter and section) as my guide to an orthodox Marxist interpretation of Marx and Engels on the nature of the late nineteenth century capitalist-imperial state. It's perfectly fine for my purposes if you think that Lenin flattened Marx and Engels or misrepresents them (or the evolution of their thought, etc.). It's also fine for my purposes if you think that this is not the best version of a Marxist theory (orthodox or not) of the capitalist state out there.
Drawing on Engels' fascinating (1884) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, for Lenin the modern state is the effect of class conflict; the state exists in order, it's fundamental function is, to reduce the transaction costs of class conflict. As Engels puts it: "in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, shall not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, a power, apparently standing above society, has become necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order”; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state." This independent power understands itself "as apparent mediator." In some respects (I will qualify this below) this anticipates the idea familiar from twentieth century neoliberalism which conceives of the state as an "impartial umpire" above civil society (I am quoting the excellent SEP entry on Hayek by Schmidtz and Boettke).
Of course, Marxists emphasize that the mediating role is not truly impartial. It serves the interest of capital. In particular, the bourgeoisie have captured the state for their own interests. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, "the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." Or as Lenin puts it, "According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. (S&R 1,1) It is worth noting that this emphasis on the order creating nature of states anticipates the Ordoliberal self-understanding in non-trivial ways, and also, as I learned from Erwin Dekker's biography of Tinbergen, more technocratic social democrats like Tinbergen, and the young Rawls as Katrina Forrester persuasively argues in the early chapters of In the Shadow of Justice. I return to this below.
While Lenin suggests that bourgeois politicians would deny it, as an empirical matter, it's not difficult for liberal thinkers to agree that late nineteenth century liberal states are characterized by rent-seeking elites biased toward relatively narrow interests. This was, in fact Hobson's view in his (1905) Imperialism -- a book Lenin (recall) studied carefully -- and Lippmann's in his (1937) The Good Society. And it is a familiar refrain from, say, the Chicago school onward in so-called classical liberal understandings of the contemporary state (recall here).
As an aside, Lenin anticipates the view of liberals of the 1930s that the 1870s were a watershed period in the development of the nineteenth century liberal state. As Lenin notes, in commenting on a remark by Marx that it "was understandable in 1871, when Britain was still the model of a purely capitalist country, but without a militarist clique and, to a considerable degree, without a bureaucracy." (3.1) For, in the 1920s and 30s, in reflecting on the collapse the global order during WWI, so-called neo-liberals came to believe that a corruption of liberalism was manifested after the 1870s. (They would tell different stories about the timing and original source of that corruption (compare here with here).
The point of the last few paragraphs is that there is non-trivial overlap between Lenin's Marxist analysis of the period leading up to WWI and the liberal analysis of that same period in the first third of the twentieth century. This is, as I have shown in a different context (recall), also visible in the accounts of the rise of militarism and imperialism as an effect of national monopoly. A crucial difference is that for Lenin capitalism naturally tends toward monopoly whereas Hobson treats it as an effect of rent-seeking behavior.
I use the language of 'rent-seeking' because the Marxist-Leninist position is that in addition to the exploitation of proletariat by capital, and the structural domination of all under capitalism, government offices and the leading functionaries in the bureaucracy are treated as special rents. This is manifest in the following passage (and others like it): "The bureaucracy and the standing army are a “parasite” on the body of bourgeois society--a parasite created by the internal antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which “chokes” all its vital pores." (Lenin S&R, 2,2) I don't mean to deny that in context Lenin's major point is the intrinsically coercive nature of the state. I return to that below. But on the orthodox Marxist view it is notable that the bureaucracy (and the army) is parasitic on the body of bourgeois society. These are rents extracted not just from the proletariat, but even from the bourgeoisie. This is pretty much Hobson's own position. (It is peculiar that Lenin implies this would be denied by "the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists.")
That is to say, on the Orthodox Marxist view the state is a coercive mechanism for upward redistribution. Further evidence for the claim that the bureaucracy is understood as a source of class based rents can be seen in the proposals what to do with the bureaucracy in the transitional period after a successful revolution (and before the state has withered away):
After the revolution, functionaries in the bureaucracy will be paid workman's wages, the implication being that their existing wages are a form of extraction, parasitic on proletariat's labor, that is, a rent. I don't mean to suggest that's the extent of the change. Lenin also re-activates ideas I associate with the French revolution (including Girondins intellectuals like Grouchy) in which bureaucrats are elected and subjects to recalls. (For example: "The workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the ground; they will replacce it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and other employees, against whose transformation into bureaucratic will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election, but also recall at any time; (2) pay not to exceed that of a workman; (3) immediate introduction of control by all, so that all may become “bureaucrats” for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a “bureaucrat”. S&R 6, 2; see also 6,3))
Let me wrap up with the crucial issue. While compared to anarchists, liberals tend to expect obedience to legitimate law, liberals understand the liberal state as providing order without authoritarianism. In fact, the introduction of professional police -- as opposed to citizen militias and armed forces -- is seen as a crucial means forward away from despotism in part because the use of force against civilians can be more calibrated and less lethal than it is when every riot or public disorder is treated as a trigger of military action. And even states in which the mercantile tendency toward state violence is not fully defeated, but only partially tamed by parliament, law, press, and public opinion are often understood as doing so without extensive authoritarianism. (Of course, there are standing objections to this claim during, say, the Jim Crow era, and many periodic states of emergency.)
By contrast, for Lenin [here he is quoting Engels (1891 preface to the third edition of The Civil War in France)], the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy." (S&R 4.5; see also 2.1) Fundamentally, according to the Marxists we're focusing on here, the modern state is a coercive entity to impose class interests. Lenin (S&R 1.1) quotes Engels to that effect, the state “consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds.” (Engels 1884; ch. 9)
That according to Lenin the most democratic state is essentially coercive is also revealed, by his view of what happens after the revolution:
What's notable about this is that the intrinsic coerciveness of the state is treated as an essential core that must be preserved through the transitionary period (the dictatorship of the proletariat) as a means to destroy class enemies, and to force changes in class structure and the possibility of acquiring rents. As Luxemburg discerned (recall the post earlier in the week) this understanding of the state, and the post-revolutionary transition period, has an inherent fragility; in so far as one leaves the coercive nature of the state untouched, one then opens the door to state capitalism in which a new managerial class extracts rents (as described by Burnham (recall) in The Managerial Revolution).
My point in the previous paragraph is not a victorious one. For, after the work of Foucault, few would be satisfied with the relatively limited list of coercive institutions that the orthodox Marxist tradition focus on. In addition, the last few years of financial crisis and pandemic have shown that liberal states have many instruments of coercion that they can use without fundamentally altering the liberal structure of the state or even traditional political institutions (elections, parliaments, press, rule of law, etc.) Simultaneously, Black Lives Matter has reminded many that even policing can easily be experienced as occupation, or worse. So, what I take away from the Marxist orthodoxy is that for liberalism to have proper self-understanding it needs to have an account of the centrality of the liberal state's coerciveness.** To be continued.
*Part of the interest in S&R is to understand Lenin's view on what happens after the proletarian revolution and the process of withering away of that state (after all this is written in the midst of a revolutionary year), and where appropriate I will remark on this, too.
**This is central to Matt Sleat's fascinating Liberal Realism: A Realist Theory of Liberal Politics, which I read recently. So, this post is undoubtedly shaped by my encounter with Sleat's book.
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