Anarchism and Marxism - Arguments Surrounding The Issue of The State

Arguments Surrounding The Issue of The State

Modern political scientists generally define the "state" as a centralized, hierarchical, governing institution which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, in keeping with the definition originally proposed by the German sociologist Max Weber in his 1918 essay "Politics as a Vocation". Marxists, and some anarchists, dispute this definition. Marxism has a unique definition of the state: that the state is an organ of one class's repression of all other classes. To Marxists, any state is intrinsically a dictatorship by one class over all others. Therefore, within Marxist theory, should the differentiation between classes disappear, so too will the state.

However, there is some convergence of views. Anarchists believe that any state—be it a worker's state or a bourgeois state—will inevitably be created and ruled by a political and economic elite, therefore becoming an organ of class domination. Conversely, Marxists believe that successful class repression almost always requires a superior capacity for violence, and that all societies prior to socialism are ruled by a minority class, so that in Marxist theory any non-socialist state will possess the properties attributed to all states by anarchists and others.

Disputes arise between anarchists and those Marxists who believe that a state is required for the repression of classes other than the working class. In example, Bakunin wrote in his work "Anarchism and the State":

They maintain that only a dictatorship—their dictatorship, of course—can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up.

Bakunin believed that Marx's desire to abolish the state and create, in the last analysis, an anarchist system via state power is irrational. Commenting on that he added that "anarchism or freedom is the aim, while the state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses, they have first to be enslaved." Marx replied to Bakhunin's criticisms by jotting marginal notes in his copy of Anarchism and the State.