The Capitalist State Cannot Be Reformed

(Quote of the Week)

The cops who continue to gun down black people with impunity and the intelligence agencies who spy on everyone are parts of the bourgeois state. This state exists to defend the interests of the capitalist ruling class through the use of violence against workers and the oppressed. In January 1920, Gregory Zinoviev, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, wrote an appeal to the Industrial Workers of the World, the leading American syndicalist organization at the time. Seeking to win the IWW to Communism, he explained key lessons of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which included a Marxist understanding of the nature of the state.

The war and its aftermath have revealed with startling clearness the real function of the capitalist state, with its legislatures, courts of justice, police, armies, and bureaucrats.

The state is used to defend and strengthen the power of the capitalists and to oppress the workers. This is particularly true in the United States, whose Constitution was framed by the great merchants, speculators, and landowners with the deliberate purpose of protecting their class interests against the majority of the people.

At the present time the government of the United States is openly acting as the weapon of the capitalists against the workers....

Any worker can see this fact with his own eyes. All the people vote for governors, mayors, judges, and sheriffs; but in time of strike the governor calls in the militia to protect the scabs, the mayor orders the police to beat up and arrest the pickets, the judge imprisons the workers for “rioting,” “disturbing the peace,” and the sheriff hires thugs as deputies to break the strike.

Capitalist society all together presents a solid front against the worker. The priest tells the worker to be contented, the press curses him as a “Bolshevik,” the policeman arrests him, the court sentences him to jail, the sheriff seizes his furniture for debt, and the poorhouse takes his wife and children.

In order to destroy capitalism, the workers must first wrest the state power out of the hands of the capitalist class. They must not only seize this power, but abolish the old capitalist apparatus entirely.

For the experience of revolutions has shown that the workers cannot take hold of the state machine and use it for their own purposes—as the Yellow Socialist [i.e., reformist, social-patriotic] politicians propose to do. The capitalist state is built to serve capitalism, and that is all it can do, no matter who is running it.

And in place of the capitalist state the workers must build their own workers’ state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

—Gregory Zinoviev, “Appeal to the IWW,” reprinted in The Communist International in Lenin’s Time: Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, Vol. 2 (Pathfinder Press, 1991)