History of the State, its Emergence
and Development
“According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order,” which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.”
-Lenin (State and Revolution)
State: A machine for the oppression of one class by another
The state is an instrument of political power in a class-divided society. It represents the interests of the ruling classes. In the different periods of the historical development of class society, the state took different forms: Slave-owning state, Feudal state, and Capitalist state. But it always remains as the means of class oppression. It represented the interests of the ruling classes of those social periods. Therefore, all the state machinery that hitherto existed bourgeois social scientists represent the State as something above classes and above class interests, which came into existence with the consent of and for the protection of all the members of society. Quite often the masses under these influences believe this conception of the state is true. The Marxist theory of class struggle unmasked the fallacy of this above-class nature of the state and revealed that the essence of the state in all of its forms it assumed in different historical stages, had been and is the instrument of class oppression, and with the abolition of classes, this instrument of class rule and oppression too will have to extinct.
Origin of State : State born as a coercive force and continuing as such
State has not always existed. State didn’t exist when there were no classes, when there were no exploiters and exploited. In the primitive classless society, there was no state. State is a product of society at a certain stage of development when classes with conflicting economic interests emerged. State emerged with the emergence of classes. With the division of society into classes, their contradictory interests emerged. Thus the state emerged as an instrument of oppression of one class by another. To enslave the people living in primitive society based on equality and brotherhood and to establish and maintain the production relations based on slavery, coercion, and application of mighty savage force became a necessity-some agency with power to maintain the system of social and economic domination by the wealthy minority over the labouring majority was required – and thus the state emerged as such an agency to serve that purpose. Engels wrote, “History shows that the state as a special apparatus for coercing people more wherever and whenever there appeared a division of society into classes, that is, a division into groups of people some of which were permanently in a position to appropriate the labour of others, where some people exploited others.”
The public power of primitive society, which was ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’, with all the members of society organized as armed forces became redundant and useless to class rule. So, as a special public power – the ruling class power – a mechanism to control the citizens – defense force came into existence. It is common with every state and it comprises of apart from the armed forces, jails, laws, and other institutions, which the primitive society never heard of. Thus the essence of this special mechanism that emerged as the public power is in fact nothing but the power of the ruling class, which forcibly keeps its enemy classes in the frame work of a particular mode of production.
So, in any class-divided society state cannot be other than the dictatorship of a single class or group of classes. That is why the essence of a state depends on the nature of the class or classes which it represents. Lenin wrote, “Political organization of the economically dominant class, having as its aim the defence of the existing economic order (status quo) — but also the annihilation of the resistance put up against it by other classes… ‘The state is a machine to maintain the domination of one class over another’.”
“…In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy….”
-Engels(Introduction to The Civil War in France)
Evolution of State: The class that rules economically – that owns the means of production – rules politically
In the primitive society, there were no classes. The first form of division into classes was the division into slaveowners and slaves. The slaveowners owned not only all the means of production – the land and the implements, but also owned people. This group was known as slave-owners, while those who laboured and supplied labour for others were known as slaves. In slave-owning states there were no rights to slaves who were the oppressed class. They were not even considered as human beings. The slave-owners had regarded the slaves as their property; the law had confirmed this view and regarded the slave as a chattel completely owned by the slave-owner. To establish and maintain such an inhuman social system a mighty force of oppression is necessary. So the state born out of the necessity of an oppressive apparatus to force free labourers in to slavery, to make them work for their masters and to suppress their dissent and resistance. In the transition from primitive classless society to class society, religion played a crucial role. It perpetuated the class rule by making slave masses resign to their fate for salvation after death. In slave-owning society, the state assumed forms like despotism, oligarchy, democracy, and monarchy. Despite these different forms, the state was a slave-owning state, irrespective of whether it was a monarchy or a republic, aristocratic or democratic. It always performed the task of perpetuating and consolidating the rule of slave owners.
The next form of class-divided society was feudalism. In most countries slavery in the course of its development evolved into serfdom. The fundamental division of feudal society was now into feudal lords and peasant serfs. The change in the form of exploitation transformed the slave-owning state into the feudal state. In slave-owning society the slave had no rights and was not regarded as a human being; in feudal society the peasant was bound to the soil. The chief distinguishing feature of serfdom was that the peasants were considered bound to the land—this was the very basis of ‘serfdom’. The peasant might work a definite number of days for himself on the plot assigned to him by the landlord; on the other days the peasant serf worked for his lord. The form of relations between people changed, but the essence of class society remained—society was based on class exploitation. As far as the peasant serf was concerned, class oppression and dependence remained, but it was not considered that the feudal lord owned the peasants as chattels, but that he was only entitled to their labour, to the obligatory performance of certain services. Only the owners of the land could enjoy full rights; the peasants had no rights at all. Feudal lord was regarded as the only ruler. The peasant serfs were deprived of absolutely all political rights. In practice, serfdom, differed very little from slavery since lords could not kill their serfs at will unlike slaves. This state represented the landlords who owned the land and the majority of the broad masses of serfs.
Feudalism was later replaced by Capitalism. With the development of trade and industry, the appearance of the world market and the development of money circulation, a new class arose within feudal society—the capitalist class. From the commodity, the exchange of commodities and the rise of the power of money, there derived the power of capital. During the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, revolutions took place all over the world; as a consequence feudalism was replaced by capitalism in most countries, under which division into classes remained, as well as various traces and remnants of serfdom, but fundamentally the division into classes assumed a different form – the division between capitalist class and the working class. The owners of capital, the owners of the land and the owners of the factories in all capitalist countries constituted and still constitute an insignificant minority of the population who have complete command of the labour of the whole people, and, consequently, command, oppress and exploit the whole mass of labourers, the majority of whom are proletarians, wage-workers, who procure their livelihood in the process of production only by the sale of their own worker’s hands, their labour-power. With the transition to capitalism, the peasants, who had been disunited and downtrodden in feudal times, were converted partly (the majority) into proletarians, and partly (the minority) into wealthy peasants who themselves hired labourers and who constituted a rural bourgeoisie. The class division in Capitalist society is between capitalist class and the working class. There is a perpetual conflict between these two classes. The capitalist class, through its exploitation of the working class, is handsomely rewarded with wealth, power, and prestige, while the working class is plagued with insecurity, poverty, miserable living conditions.The state exists to enforce the decisions of the class that controls the government. In capitalist society, the state enforces the decisions of the capitalist class. Those decisions are designed to maintain the capitalist system in which the working class must labour in the service of the owners of the means of production.
Abolition of state : The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class
In different periods of history – from primitive forms of slavery to serfdom and finally to capitalism, the state remain an instrument of class-oppression, an apparatus of physical coercion, an apparatus of violence. Since the state is an instrument of class-oppression, through which one class establishes and maintains its domination over the other class, genuine freedom for the oppressed majority cannot truly exist with the existence of state. There can be greater or lesser degrees of freedom- depending on the circumstances, but ‘freedom’ and ‘state’ cannot co-exist in a class society. However democratic a bourgeois republic may be, if it retains private ownership of the land and factories, and if private capital keeps the whole of society in wage-slavery, then this state is a machine for the suppression of some people by others.
To abolish the state, working-class has to overthrow the capitalism and to take this machine in their own hands, use this machine to destroy all kinds exploitations, and finally to smash it. Between capitalist and communist society there will be a period of the revolutionary transformation-a political transition period-where working-class will be the ruling class and the state will be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. When the possibility of exploitation will no longer exist anywhere in the world, when there will be no owners of land and owners of factories, and when there will no longer a situation in which some gorge while others starve, the class-rule will disappear, there will be no need for state as the conditions for its existence will not be there. Then there will be no state, no government, and no exploitation. Each member of the society will contribute according to their ability, and will get according to their needs.
