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	Workers Hammer No. 222	Spring 2013

Quote of the issue

The capitalist state: An instrument of class oppression

Marxists understand that the bourgeois state — the police, the courts, the army — is an agency by which the propertied classes hold down the exploited classes. Drawing on studies of earlier societies and on the lessons of the revolutionary upheavals in Europe in the 19th century, Friedrich Engels explained that whereas the earliest human societies had no state, once society divided into classes a special apparatus of repression arose committed to defending the interests of the dominant class. The capitalist state thus cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the working people, but must be smashed through proletarian revolution and replaced with a workers state, opening the road to a classless, socialist society.

This special public force is needed because a self-acting armed organization of the people has become impossible since their cleavage into classes. The slaves also belong to the population: as against the 365,000 slaves, the 90,000 Athenian citizens constitute only a privileged class. The people’s army of the Athenian democracy confronted the slaves as an aristocratic public force, and kept them in check; but to keep the citizens in check as well, a police-force was needed, as described above. This public force exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but also of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds....

The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out — the democratic republic no longer officially recognizes differences of property. Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, and themselves have their own center in the stock exchange....

The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but becomes a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong — into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.

— Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)