One of the most, if not the most, remarkable observation on the state in the works of Marx and Engels is contained in the following passage in Engels’ letter to Bebel dated 18-28 March 1875. This letter, we may observe in parenthesis, was, as far as we know, first published by Bebel in the second volume of his memoirs (Aus meinem Leben), which appeared in 1911, i.e., thirty-six years after the letter had been written and sent.

Engels wrote to Bebel criticising the same draft of the Gotha Programme that Marx criticised in his famous letter to Bracke. Referring specially to the question of the state, Engels said:

The free people’s state has been transferred into the free state. Taken in its grammatical sense, a free state is one where the state is free in relation to its citizens, hence a state with a despotic government. The whole talk about the state should be dropped, especially since the Commune, which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. The ‘people’s state’ has been thrown in our faces by the anarchists to the point of disgust, although already Marx’s book against Proudhon and later the Communist Manifesto say plainly that with the introduction of the socialist order of society the state dissolves of itself [sich auflost] and disappears. As the state is only a transitional institution, which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore propose replacing the state everywhere by Gemeinwesen, a good old German word which can very well take the place of the French word commune. (pp. 321-22 of the German original.)[3]

It should be borne in mind that this letter refers to the party programme, which Marx criticised in a letter dated only a few weeks later than the above (Marx’s letter is dated 5 May 1875), and that at the time Engels was living with Marx in London. Consequently, when he says “we” in the last sentence, Engels undoubtedly, in his own as well as in Marx’s name, suggests to the leader of the German workers’ party that the word ‘state’ be struck out of the programme and replaced by the word ‘community’.

What a howl about ‘anarchism’ would be raised by the leading lights of present-day ‘Marxism’, which has been falsified for the convenience of the opportunists, if such an amendment of the programme were suggested to them!

Let them howl. This will earn them the praises of the bourgeoisie.

And we shall go on with our work. In revising the programme of our Party, we must by all means take the advice of Engels and Marx into consideration in order to come nearer the truth, to restore Marxism by ridding it of distortions, to guide the struggle of the working class for its emancipation more correctly. Certainly no one opposed to the advice of Engels and Marx will be found among the Bolsheviks. The only difficulty that may perhaps arise will be in regard to the term. In German there are two words meaning ‘community’, of which Engels used the one that does not denote a single community, but their totality, a system of communities. In Russian there is no such word, and we may have to choose the French word ‘commune’, although this also has its drawbacks.

“The Commune was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word” – this is the most theoretically important statement Engels makes. After what has been said above, this statement is perfectly clear. The Commune was ceasing to be a state since it had to suppress, not the majority of the population, but a minority (the exploiters). It had smashed the bourgeois state machine. In place of a special coercive force the population itself came on the scene. All this was a departure from the state in the proper sense of the word. And had the Commune become firmly established, all traces of the state in it would have ‘withered away’ of themselves; it would not have had to ‘abolish’ the institutions of the state – they would have ceased to function as they ceased to have anything to do.

“The ‘people’s state’ has been thrown in our faces by the anarchists”. In saying this, Engels above all has in mind Bakunin and his attacks on the German Social-Democrats. Engels admits that these attacks were justified insofar as the ‘people’s state’ was as much an absurdity and as much a departure from socialism as the ‘free people’s state’. Engels tried to put the struggle of the German Social-Democrats against the anarchists on the right lines, to make this struggle correct in principle, to rid it of opportunist prejudices concerning the ‘state’. Unfortunately, Engels’ letter was pigeon-holed for thirty-six years. We shall see further on that, even after this letter was published, Kautsky persisted in virtually the same mistakes against which Engels had warned.

Bebel replied to Engels in a letter dated 21 September 1875, in which he wrote, among other things, that he “fully agreed” with Engels’ opinion of the draft programme, and that he had reproached Liebknecht with readiness to make concessions. (p. 334 of the German edition of Bebel’s memoirs, Vol. II.) But if we take Bebel’s pamphlet, Our Aims, we find there views on the state that are absolutely wrong.

“The state must… be transformed from one based on class rule into a people’s state.” (Unsere Ziele, 1886, p. 14.)

This was printed in the ninth (ninth!) edition of Bebel’s pamphlet! It is not surprising that opportunist views on the state, so persistently repeated, were absorbed by the German Social-Democrats, especially as Engels’ revolutionary interpretations had been safely pigeon-holed, and all the conditions of life were such as to ‘wean’ them from revolution for a long time.

  1. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, pp. 293-94.