According to Lenin, the state:
… has always been a certain apparatus which separated out from society and consisted of a group of people engaged solely, or almost solely, or mainly, in ruling. People are divided into ruled and into specialists in ruling, those who rise above society and are called rulers, representatives of the state.
This apparatus, this group of people who rule others, always takes command of a certain apparatus of coercion, of physical force, irrespective of whether this coercion of people is expressed in the primitive club or – in the epoch of slavery – in more perfected types of weapons, or in the firearms which appeared in the Middle Ages or, finally, in modern weapons which, in the twentieth century, are marvels of technique and are entirely based on the latest achievements of modern technology.
The methods of coercion changed, but whenever there was a state there existed in every society a group of persons who ruled, who commanded, who dominated and who, in order to maintain their power, possessed an apparatus of physical coercion, an apparatus of violence, with those weapons which corresponded best to the technical level of the given epoch. And by examining these general phenomena, by asking ourselves why no state existed when there were no classes, when there were no exploiters and no exploited, and why it arose when classes arose – only in this way shall we find a definite answer to the question of the essence of the state and its significance.
The state is a machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another. (LCW, The State, Vol. 29, p. 477.)
Why is it, as Marx stated, that the working class cannot take over the ready-made capitalist state machine and use it for its own ends? Not for mystical reasons but because of certain very concrete facts. In the modern state, all the key positions are in the hands of those people who are under the control of the ruling class: they have been specially selected by education, outlook, and conditions of life, to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. The army officers, particularly the higher ranks, the civil servants, and the key technicians, are moulded in their ideas and outlook to serve the interests of the capitalist class. All the commanding positions in society are placed in the hands of people whom the capitalist class can trust. That is the reason the state machine is a tool in the hands of the capitalists which cannot be used by the working class and must be smashed and swept away by them. Now, what does the smashing of the state machine mean?
It is possible that many, perhaps even the majority of the officials of the capitalist state, will be used by the working class once it comes to power. But they will be subordinate to the workers’ committees and organisations. For example, in the Soviet Union, in the early days after the tsarist army had been dissolved, the Red Army was forced to employ the services of ex-tsarist officers, under the control of the political commissars. Likewise, in the Soviet state apparatus a considerable proportion of the officials were made up from ex-tsarist officials. Because of unfavourable historical factors this was later to play an important role in the degeneration of the Russian regime. Not for nothing did Lenin say that the Soviet state is “a bourgeois tsarist machine … thinly varnished with socialism”.
The proletariat, according to the classical concept, smashes the old state machine and proceeds to create a semi-state. Nevertheless, it is forced to utilise the old technicians. But the state, even under the best conditions, say in an advanced country with an educated proletariat, remains a relic of class society, and implicit within it is the possibility of degeneration. For that reason, Marxists insist on the control of the masses, to ensure that the state should not be allowed to develop into an independent force. As speedily as possible, it should be dissolved into society. For the very reasons given above, under certain conditions, the state can gain a certain independence from the base which it originally represented. Engels explained that though the superstructure – state and ideology – is dependent on the economic base, it nevertheless has an independent movement of its own. For quite a lengthy period, there can be a conflict between the state and the class which that state represents. That is why Engels speaks of the state normally or in typical periods directly representing the ruling class. Thus, one can only understand class society if one takes into account the many-sided dialectical interdependence and antagonisms of all the factors within it.
When considering the development of society, economics must be considered the dominant factor. The superstructure which develops on this economic base separates itself from the base and becomes antagonistic to it. After all, the essence of the Marxist theory of revolution is that the gradual changes in production, at a certain stage, come into conflict with the old form of superstructure in both property and state. According to Marx: “From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.” A profound contradiction develops which can only be resolved by abolishing the superstructure and reorganising society on the base of the new mode of production which has developed within the old.
Although it does not exhaust the question of the class nature of the state, which at different times is defined in different ways, economy and property relations are decisive in the long run. Because of this, as all the Marxist teachers were at pains to explain, in the last analysis the superstructure must come into correspondence with it. “With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed,” as Marx expressed it. If one abandons this criterion, all sorts of superficial and arbitrary constructions become possible. One would inevitably be lost in the maze of history, like Perseus in the mythology of ancient Greece who was lost in the Palace of Minos, but without a thread to lead one out. The thread of history is the basic economic structure of society, or the property form, its legal reflection. In the words of Engels: “We regard economic conditions as that which ultimately conditions historical development.” (MESW, Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau, Vol. 3, p. 502.)
In 1793 the French Jacobins seized power. As Marx and Engels pointed out, they went beyond the framework of bourgeois relations and accomplished in a few months what would have taken the bourgeoisie decades to accomplish: the complete cleansing from France of all traces of feudalism. Yet this regime remained rooted in bourgeois property forms. It was followed by the French Thermidor and the rule of the Directory, to be followed by the classic dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon reintroduced many feudal forms, had himself crowned Emperor and concentrated the supreme power in his hands. But nevertheless, we still call this regime bourgeois. With the restoration of Louis XVIII, the regime still remained capitalist. And then we had not one but two revolutions – 1830 and 1848. These revolutions had important social consequences. They resulted in significant changes even in the personnel of the state itself. Yet we characterise them both as bourgeois political revolutions in which there was no change in the class which held power: the bourgeoisie.
Let us proceed further. After the Paris Commune of 1871 and the shake-up of the social relations which this involved, we had the organisation of the Third Republic with bourgeois democracy which lasted for decades. This was followed by Pétain, then the de Gaulle regime, and then a whole array of governments up to the present time. Consider for a moment the amazing diversity of these regimes. To a non-Marxist it would seem absurd to define in the same category, shall we say, the regime of Robespierre and that of de Gaulle or Chirac. Yet Marxists do define them as fundamentally the same – as capitalist regimes. What is the criterion? Only the one thing: the form of property, the private ownership of the means of production. Take, similarly, the diversity of regimes in more modern times to see the extreme differences in superstructures which are on the same economic base. For instance, compare the regime of Nazi Germany with that of British parliamentary democracy. They are so fundamentally different in political superstructure that many theorists of the non-Marxist or ex-Marxist school have found in fascism a new class structure and a new system of society entirely. Why do we say that they represent the same class and the same regime? The answer is: despite the difference in superstructure, the economic base of these given societies remains the same.