In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels argued like Kropotkin that the State had emerged recently in human history as an apparatus of rule separate from society: ‘The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power.’ It had developed only with the division of society into classes and became a coercive machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another. The capitalist State provided liberty only for those who owned property and subjection for the rest – workers and peasants. Engels however was confident that his generation was approaching a stage in the development of production when classes and the State would inevitably fall. When that time comes
Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.37
Although Marx and Engels felt it was necessary for the proletariat to take over the State to hold down their adversaries and to reorganize production, they both looked forward to a time when the proletariat would abolish its supremacy as a class and society would become ‘an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.38 It was Engels’s contention in his Anti-Dühring that the interference of the State becomes superfluous in one sphere after another so that the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things. In the process, ‘The state is not “abolished”, it withers away.’39
Engels however still insisted on the need for a State in a transitional period of socialism before communist society could be established. While Bakunin and the anarchists claimed the direct democracy of the Paris Commune provided a model of a free society, Engels argued that
The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state … But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society …40
Lenin developed Marx’s and Engels’s view of the State. As a general principle, he declared that ‘we Marxists are opposed to all and every kind of State’.41 In his pamphlet The State and Revolution, written in August 1917 on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin gave ‘the most idyllic, semi-anarchist account’ of the proletarian revolution, describing how the State could begin to wither away immediately after its victory.42 Indeed, Lenin considered the issue of the State to be of the utmost importance in the coming revolution. In his commentary on Plekhanov’s pamphlet Anarchism and Socialism (1894), he criticizes Plekhanov for contriving completely to ignore ‘the most urgent, burning, and politically most essential issue in the struggle against anarchism, viz., the relation of the revolution to the state, and the question of the state in general!’43 He further differed from Engels who believed that a factory is necessarily authoritarian in its organization, by maintaining that it would be possible under communism to operate modern industrialized society without the need for compulsion or narrow specialization.
But Marxists and anarchists disagree profoundly over the means of realizing this desirable state of affairs. Marx suggested the need for the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in a transitional socialist period and it has since become a central part of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Yet the difference between anarchists and Marxists is more than simply a question of tactics. It also involves substantial theoretical differences. Marx’s dispute with Bakunin did have an important historical dimension, but it was fired by theoretical considerations as well. He attacked Stirner in The German Ideology and Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy for their failure to appreciate dialectical materialism. Where Marx tried to reverse Hegel’s position and give primacy to the capitalist economy over the bourgeois State, many anarchists persisted in seeing the State as a determining influence over the economy. Rather than recognizing the need to wait for economic conditions to develop before abolishing the State, some placed their confidence in the creative power of revolutionary will. Marx also opposed the anarchists’ rejection of imposed authority; he was keen to alter the form of authority in a communist society but did not seek to abolish the principle of authority altogether. He thought it was not only necessary to seize State power in order to defend the revolution but also to develop new kinds of social control of the productive forces.
The anarchists failed in Marx’s eyes to develop a coherent class analysis, either by taking an individualist position like Stirner, by adopting a ‘petty-bourgeois’ approach like Proudhon in his defence of the peasantry, or by having an ‘opportunist’ and ‘voluntarist’ faith like Bakunin in the creative energies of the undefined ‘people’ and the ‘lumpenproletariat’. There is of course some substance to this criticism. Unlike Marxists, anarchists do not have a specific class base. They recognize the differences in power and wealth between the rich and poor, and align themselves with the ‘people’, and stress the role of different classes at different times. Proudhon started his career mainly concerned with the peasantry only to finish up considering favourably the political capacity of the working class. Bakunin sometimes used the rhetoric of the ‘working class’ and the ‘proletariat’ but when he specified who the revolutionary workers were, they turned out to be the less-educated urban proletarians and the peasants. Although he felt, like Marx, that the proletarians would lead the revolution, he went out of his way to stress the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. In addition, he looked to the dispossessed and disinherited to rise up since they had nothing to lose but their chains.
Above all, Marx criticized the anarchists for struggling on the economic and cultural level only and failing to grasp the need for the working class to conquer political power. Politics even in its parliamentary form could be progressive for Marx; he even entertained the view that it was possible to use political means in order to go beyond conventional politics. In his instructions’ to the Geneva Congress of the International, he argued against the Proudhonists that the working class could win reforms through ‘general laws, enforced by the power of the state’ and ‘in enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify government power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency’.44 Referring to Bakunin, he declared contemptuously: ‘this ass cannot even understand that any class movement, as such, is necessarily and always has been, a political movement’.45 In particular, he condemned Bakunin for believing that ‘The will, and not economic conditions, is the foundation of social revolution.’46
In his dealings with Stirner, Proudhon and Bakunin, Marx certainly emerges ‘at his least appealing and at his most hectoring and heavy-handed’.47 He not only revealed the authoritarian tendency of his own social and political thought, but also the authoritarian nature of his own personality. Moreover, his anti-anarchist manoeuvres which led to the demise of the First International ensured that future Internationals in the control of Marxists would become rigid and monolithic and that Marxism itself would harden into a dogmatic creed which brooked no dissent.
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