Orthodox Marxian Perspective

It is generally said that Marx did not develop a coherent or systematic theory of the State⁸² per se and it is difficult to acquire any clear unitary theory of the State.⁸³ While this is true, it is not that Marx did not touch upon the relationship between class and the State. The following references and writings are important so far as Marx’s writings are concerned:

• In his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx critically analysed Hegel’s theory of the modern state and its institutions.⁸⁴ He rejected the claim that the State was eternal—for him, the State was not ‘march of God on earth’. He also rejected the Hegelian separation of civil society and the State. For Marx, the state and its bureaucracy neither represent universal interest, as Hegel holds, nor ethical evolution. In a class society, the State and its bureaucracy cannot be a universal institution, as they serve class interest.
• In his Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), he treats the State as a class institution and says, ‘[T]he executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’ He precedes this conclusion by the statement that ‘the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway’.⁸⁵ This makes it apparent that the state is a product of the class society and serves the interests of the economically dominant class. Taking this as a basis, Lenin in his, The State and Revolution (1918), described the state as ‘an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class.’⁸⁶
• In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx and Engels denounced Bonapartism, rule of Louis Bonaparte, as the bureaucratic, powerful state. Marx described Bonaparte’s regime as ‘this executive power, with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, this appalling parasitic body …’⁸⁷ Their analysis was that bureaucratic state under one powerful individual has attained dictatorial power. This was in the context of the civil war in 1848–51 and they suggested that the proletariat destroy it. Here, the class as whole was not able to hold sway and it resulted in one person representing the dictatorial power. Since the state under Bonaparte did not articulate interests of the capitalist class, it was relative autonomous. Later, in his Civil War in France, (1871), Marx described Bonapartism as a ‘form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation’.⁸⁸ Taking a cue from this view of Marx on the state as relative autonomous from the dominant interest of the society, some later Marxists such as Poulantzas and others have proposed the relative autonomy view of the State where the State is not always serving the dominant class directly.