The state, as an organ of class rule, arose with the emergence of class society. This was clearly explained by Engels in his book, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. In normal times, the state serves the interests of the dominant class in society. It was strengthened and perfected as an organ of class rule to maintain the power and interests of the ruling class. The state serves to keep the majority in subjection to the minority. A new workers’ state, however, unlike previous states, seeks not to hold down the majority of the population but only to keep in check a tiny handful of ex-capitalists and landlords. For this purpose, a mighty bureaucratic state machine is totally unnecessary. On the contrary, the workers’ state serves the interests of the majority of the population and is in reality a semi-state.
To the degree in which classes and inequality are eradicated, so too the semi-state begins to dissolve into society.
A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the ‘state’, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word… And it is comparable with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear. (LCW, Vol. 25, p. 468.)
The state is a relic of class society, and will ‘wither away’ as a classless society comes into being. Therefore, the interest of the proletariat is to dissolve these left-overs of capitalism as quickly as possible. This comes about as soon as the productive forces reach a level that can do away with want and guarantee everyone their needs.
In Anti-Dühring Engels wrote:
When, together with class domination and the struggle for individual existence created by the present anarchy in production, those conflicts and excesses which result from this struggle disappear, from that time on there will be nothing to suppress, and there will be no need for a special instrument of suppression, the state.
In order that the state shall disappear, “class domination and the struggle for individual existence” must disappear. Society will have reached the stage where it can guarantee “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.
The workers’ state from its inception begins to wither away. Despite the wishes of the anarchists, the state, money and the bourgeois family cannot be abolished overnight. Only when the material conditions are sufficiently developed can they be relegated to the “Museum of Antiquities” as Engels put it. They have to exhaust their historic mission. They cannot be administratively abolished. Prior to that, the task of the state is to bring about these conditions. In the first instance, the workers’ state cannot allow everyone to work “according to their abilities”, as much as he or she wishes, nor can it reward everyone “according to their needs”, regardless of the work they do.
To begin with, the workers’ state acts as a powerful lever for stimulating the growth of production. This can only mean the application of the methods of wage labour developed by capitalism. As all wants cannot be immediately satisfied and scarcities will remain for a period, people will be allocated their share of production on the basis of the wages they earn. In other words, the workers’ state will initially be forced to defend the inequalities of wage labour, i.e., bourgeois norms of distribution. After allocating a proportion to investment and the social services, the remainder will be shared out by society in the form of wages. On this point, Marx corrected Lassalle’s mistake that the new society would guarantee straight away “equal right of all to an equal product of labour”. Marx said that “equal right” is in reality a violation of equality and an injustice left over from a situation of scarcity, of class society:
… As far as the distribution of the latter [means of consumption] among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity-equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form. Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right. (MESW, Critique of the Gotha Programme, by Marx, Vol. 3, p. 18.)
This first phase of the new society cannot yet provide complete equality: differences in income will still continue to exist, although the gap between the highest and lowest paid will be drastically reduced.
One man is superior to another physically or mentally and so supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard… (Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 18, emphasis in original.)
In other words, the effort of workers is rewarded by the wages they earn. This does not take into consideration their different needs. As Marx goes on to explain the differences between one worker and another: “One worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.
But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby. (Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 18-9, my emphasis.)
In other words, the first stage of communism (socialism), cannot yet provide complete justice and equality: differences, and unjust differences, in wealth and income will still exist for a period, although general living standards will be massively raised. Society cannot at this moment permit everyone to work “according to their abilities”, nor can it reward everyone “according to their needs”, regardless of the work they do. The workers’ state will oversee the relation between these two antagonistic features, ensuring the final domination of the socialist tendencies and the liquidation of the state.
Thus, this new state assumes a dual character: socialist in as far as it defends nationalised property relations, and bourgeois in so far as the distribution of goods and services is carried out by capitalist methods of wage labour. However, by using bourgeois norms of distribution, the productive forces will be propelled forward and will serve socialist objectives in the last analysis. Nevertheless, as Lenin points out, the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because the means of production will remain social property. This fact alone cannot remove the defects of distribution and the inequality of bourgeois law. The immediate abolition of capitalism does not provide the material basis for an immediate classless society. It is a means to an end. The state itself – although a semi-state – sees its role as to safeguard this bourgeois law, which still sanctifies a certain inequality in society. With the further development of the productive forces and the attainment of communism, the state and the other vestiges of capitalism disappear. “So long as the state exists there is no freedom,” says Lenin. “When there is freedom, there will be no state.” (LCW, Vol. 25, p. 473.)
Marx went on to explain how bourgeois law disappears in the higher stage of communism:
After the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (MESW, Critique of the Gotha Programme, by Marx, Vol. 3, p. 19.)
Lenin, who commented on these remarks in his classic work The State and Revolution, added in relation to the transition period:
Bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law. It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie! (LCW, Vol. 25, p. 476.)
This seems an incredible remark to make. It certainly horrifies those who regard a workers’ state in an idealistic fashion. Having only the limited experience of the Paris Commune to go on, Marx was only able to anticipate the form of a future workers’ state in the most general outline. Lenin developed Marx’s thoughts on the subject, but did not deal in any great detail with the processes that could take place if the Russian workers’ state were to remain isolated in conditions of extreme backwardness. On many occasions, he made it clear that, without the help of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries, he did not expect the revolution to survive. However, he confidently expected that the victory of the world socialist revolution would reduce this early phase to a very short duration. It was left to Trotsky to analyse this phenomenon in greater detail, on the basis of the growing bureaucratism of the Soviet regime and the emergence of Stalinism.
What is clear is that the poorer the society that emerges from a revolution, the cruder, the more bureaucratic and more primitive the forms of the transitional state would be, and the greater the danger of power slipping out of the hands of the working class. This had a powerful bearing on the state that emerged from the Russian Revolution, which was isolated in a backward country, and faced with total economic collapse. In the words of Trotsky:
For the defence of ‘bourgeois law’ the workers’ state was compelled to create a ‘bourgeois’ type of instrument – that is, the same old gendarme, although in a new uniform. (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 55.)
Lenin was aware of the dangers in such a situation. He explained that the state is a relic of class society and can degenerate under certain conditions, and therefore has to be under the constant democratic control and check of the working class. That is why an essential measure for Lenin was the reduction in the working day to allow time for the masses to participate in the running of industry and the state. It was not for sentimental reasons, but was a defence to prevent the new Soviet state rising above and becoming divorced from the working class. In other words, to prevent its degeneration. To combat such a development Lenin put forward a series of measures designed to fight bureaucratism. These included: election and recall of all officials, no standing army, no official to receive more than a skilled worker, and rotation of jobs and responsibilities. “So that all may become ‘bureaucrats’ for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a ‘bureaucrat’,” concluded Lenin. (LCW, Vol. 25, p. 486.) These measures were to be introduced immediately to deal with bureaucratic deformations that would inevitably arise from the numerical and cultural weakness of the proletariat. The chronic backwardness of Russia, however, constituted an insurmountable obstacle to their full implementation. The working day was lengthened, not shortened, and competent administrators were extremely scarce.