The last section of this blog attempted to address the continued survival of capitalism in the world into the 21st century and its further capacity to produce progress for humanity as a whole? Is its destruction inevitable as a result of its internal contradictions? It was a part of a discussion of four distinct issues facing modern Marxism. The second is the modern state – especially the 21st Century western states.
What is the question here? Has the modern state outgrown the traditional Marxist revolutionary shibboleths – dictatorship of the proletariat, soviet power etc.? How do Marxists now analyse the state?
Lenin is not everybody’s cup of tea. But he has the merit of elaborating a theory of the state and then implementing it, which makes his writing a good place to start. Lenin outlined the Marxist view of the state most comprehensively in State and Revolution. This is what he thought about parliamentary democracy in Germany.
‘This, in turn, is connected with the fact that at a certain stage in the development of (capitalist ed.) democracy, it first rallies the proletariat as a revolutionary class against capitalism, and gives it an opportunity to crush, to smash to bits, to wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois state machinery - even its republican variety: the standing army, the police, and bureaucracy; then it substitutes for all this by more democratic, but still a state machinery in the shape of armed masses of workers, which becomes transformed into universal participation of the people in the militia.’
He was arguing against the German Social Democratic leaders who were the first socialists to believe that the working class would find victory via the extension of the democratic portion of the existing German state. He went on:
‘What, then, is this largest proportion of politically conscious and active wage slaves that has so far been observed in capitalist society? One million members of the Social Democratic party-out of fifteen million wageworkers. Three million organised in trade unions-out of fifteen million.
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich- that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the mechanism of capitalist democracy, everywhere, both in the "petty" - so called petty - details of the suffrage (residential qualification, exclusion of women, etc.), and in the technique of the representative institution, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "beggars"!), in the purely capitalist organisation of the daily press, etc., etc.-on all sides we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions obstacles for the poor, seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has himself never known want and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine tenths, if not ninety-nine hundredths, of the bourgeois publicists and politicians are of this class), but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics and from an active share in democracy.’
All quite clear then. But wait a moment. He writes, again in State and Revolution, something quite curious about the German post office:
‘A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true. At the present the postal service is a business organized on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type, in which, standing over the "common" people, who are overworked and starved, one has the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is here already to hand. Once we have overthrown the capitalists, ... we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed from the "parasite", a mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all "state" officials in general, workmen's wages ....To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service ... all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat - that is our immediate aim. This is what will bring about the abolition of parliamentarianism and the preservation of representative institutions. This is what will rid the laboring classes of the bourgeoisie's prostitution of these (representative ed.) institutions.’
Earlier in State and Revolution Lenin also noted Marx’s silence on the necessity for armed revolution to smash the state in Britain when Marx advises on such a course for France in 1871. Lenin suggests that the absence at that historical point of the domination of a bureaucratic/military apparatus in Britain might have been the cause of Marx’s reserve. But in 1917 Lenin adds Britain and the US to the list where the policy of armed revolution is necessary to overthrow the state because since Imperialism has produced the highest stage of capitalism, both the UK and the US have proved, by their reorganisation of their states in the interests of winning WW1, that their states are truly dominated after all by a bureaucratic/military machine.
So, some interesting assertions emerge about the state from the point of view of the modern discussion. It is, for Lenin and Marx at least, the military/bureaucratic (appointed ministries etc) core that identifies the fundamental character of the capitalist state. According to Marx it seems some advanced capitalist states, prior to the new Imperialist stage of the capitalist system and which were on the way to granting universal franchise, might not have required their violent overthrow, depending on the weight and power of their military / bureaucratic machines – although those conditions and that time has now gone. And finally a new accretion to capitalist state power in the form of trusts, like the German PO, might be reformed rather than dissolved and replaced, so long as overall state power lay with the working class.
These and other considerations make mincemeat of any claim that Marxists have a set formula for the state and for revolution – a set of caste iron principles that are eternal in their composition. Instead we see decisive considerations, derived from an analysis of the totality of class relations.
Gramsci’s contribution, particularly on the state in Western Europe in the 1920s and 30s is worth, and has produced, volumes. The centre of his concern was how to tackle these post WW1 phenomena from a revolutionary point of view. No real justice can be done to his thinking here and readers interested should get hold of Perry Anderson’s brilliant essay, the Antimonies of Antonio Gramsci, published in New Left Review which opened up the heart of Gramsci’s argument, which was a struggle for the state conceived as a prolonged war of position. Anderson pointed out the crucial ambiguity in his approach on the key question of the passing of power from one social class to another. Today we are in an altogether different world than Gramsci – writing in code from Mussolini’s prison. We have had decades of new experience of the state in the context of new, world changing, wars and revolutions.
And what has happened to the state since Lenin and Gramsci?
Two things. First in most developed and semi-developed countries it has grown massively. Some examples, with more easily accessible information are typical of the whole. In the UK prior to World War I, public spending sat at about 15 percent of GDP. Then, after the war it emerged at about 25 percent of GDP and remained at about that level, except for a surge at the start of the depression in the 1930s. After World War II, public spending amounted to about 35 percent of GDP, and this level continued through the 1950s. At about 1960, state expenditures began a steady rise that peaked in the early 1980s at 45 percent of GDP. During the 1980s public spending was cut as a percent of GDP from about 45 percent down to 35 percent in 1989. But then, with the ERM sterling crisis and associated recession, it rose back to 40 percent of GDP before declining to 36 percent in 2000. After 2000 public spending increased rapidly, with a peak of 45.5 percent of GDP in 2010 in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 (followed by a minor decrease up to the present day.)
The UK is not a special case.
As a share of national income, German government expenditure was about 15 percent before World War I, 25 percent during the interwar period, 35 percent around 1960, 48 percent in 1975, and about 50 percent by 1980-81. The German share has risen well over 50 percent again during the early 1990s where it remains. The government's share of spending in Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium showed the same gradual increase but in modern times reached higher levels than that of the UK. In the most recent period, the United States government expenditure averages about 37 percent, and Japan, (before last year’s Trillion dollar QE) about 33 percent. Both countries show a marked increase in state expenditure in the last century.
Second, the character of the states’ physiognomy has changed drastically in the advanced capitalist and post capitalist societies since 1917.
To take two distinct, even surprisingly contrary, examples;
The US government spends the equivalent of 4.5% of GDP on military expenditure. But if you dig down into what this means for the bureaucratic/military axis or ‘industrial military complex’ that rules the US according to the late President Eisenhower – 37% of US taxes in 2012, double the amount of the next biggest spend (which is on health) goes into war and the results of war. The US state remains today the most similar Western state to the, albeit much smaller, state machines that went into action in 1914 / 18.
By way of a much more typical contrast; to take the example of the UK government; its type and proportion of expenditure has much more common with modern Europe and some of the newer developing countries. In 2013 the British state spent £720 billion. It has the fifth highest military expenditure in the world but it spent 71% of its budget on health, education and welfare. It spent less than 10% on ‘defense’ and ‘protection’ (police etc) together. No wonder Merkel spoke up about the European state expenditure at the end of 2012:
‘If Europe today accounts for just over 7 per cent of the world’s population, produces around 25 per cent of global GDP and has to finance 50 per cent of global social spending, then it’s obvious that it will have to work very hard to maintain its prosperity and way of life.’ We know what that means. Our rulers are testing those means today in Greece.
So the modern state has engorged itself and, in significant parts of the globe, protected private capital by collectivising the necessary concessions to the working class coming out of a century of war and revolution (see last blog, second part on ‘the highest stage of capitalism’.)
The evolution of this type of modern state has, in turn changed the nature of class configuration in those countries where it is most developed. There are some hints of this idea even in Lenin’s ‘State and Revolution.’ He points to layers among the more ‘comfortable’ workers and peasants who have been incorporated as minor office holders into the secure and burgeoning state machine in both Russia and Germany. This process has steamrollered into modern times where millions of workers now work for the ‘the state’ in some capacity. And this process has in turn created a class recomposition from the very top to the bottom of politics and society.
For example Blair’s New Labour did not so much represent the disaggregating remnants of the once powerful trade union bureaucracy (the traditional roots of the Labour Party) as basing itself on the vast layer of highly paid and secure managers and middle managers working in the state. And this material and social layer in society was the also the root and economic and social basis of the Labour section of the political class that sought its tenure in office from the state employees’ more active voting record and interest in the future of employment in the institutions where they worked. Indeed this process (the increasing job security and incomes of the public sector workforce over decades, vis a vis its private sector comparators) performed a major role in data underpinning Picketty’s analysis of the decline in wealth differentials between the richest section of society and the rest of us in the 20th century.
And, of course we now learn what actually happens to the modern equivalents of Lenin’s post office as they mature inside capitalist societies. They become themselves a set of new engines for class differentiation – of political and social compromise with the capitalist system and, latterly, the source of gross profit for new parasitic private capitalist formations. We also see a parallel process in the great new state bureaucracies that were established in the major post capitalist states like China. The emergence of massive state organisation, even if under revolutionary conditions in the first instance, still apparently leads to bunkers of secure privilege for those who successfully maneuvered themselves into the inheritance of the political mantle of the revolution itself, mostly via ‘the leading party.’ So, ‘laying hands’ on the trusts like the ‘socialist’ post office, is not so simple. Not only must there be an unequivocal answer to the question ‘who rules?’ But also there needs to be a most thorough going reform of ‘social trusts’ to turn them into working class organisations.
But it is still the case that a large number of modern, west European and wider states cannot simply be reduced to their ‘armed bodies of men’. (Even the 1974 Portuguese revolution had to fight the police – with the help of the army!) And although we must beware any blindness towards the major hidden armies and police – of NATO, of the security services, of the military bases, of the World Bank, the IMF, the City of London and the EU – that bestride the modern world, many national states are not equipped to suppress a majoritarian upsurge by force alone. It is a structural consequence of the retreat of world Imperialism and the concessions made to the western working class, especially in Europe, over the last century. It is likely therefore that while a core of state machinery that is expected to use force in defense of the state, the military, police, state security services etc, would still need to be broken up and dismantled and completely evacuated from society, large parts of the modern state could be adopted under the new dispensation, reorganised in the majority’s interest and opened out to the needs of all the people.
And the dictatorship of the working class? And soviet power?
The call for the dictatorship of the working class is associated in modern history more with dictatorship by the party that with anything else. As the discussion about ‘agency’ (see below) is opened then who struggles against capitalism, who goes ‘all the way’ and who rules after, inevitably emerges.
Turning to the soviet question, most directly linked, as a socialist ‘solution’ to the issue of the state and state power, it is so far an historical fact that while prominent, and in the Russian case, even determinant, under extreme revolutionary conditions, the great achievements of soviets have never yet extended into a post revolutionary society. Some, like Trotsky argued that they were first stifled by material conditions and that their proposed renovation later crushed by the political decision of the party clique around Stalin. The great Chinese revolution started with the Shanghai commune but was won twenty years later, by prolonged war. Cuba and Viet Nam never developed the form. For many years, great Marxists in the west (for example Ernest Mandel) argued that the working class would create superior agencies of democracy, which would express the political will of the working class much more directly than any parliament. They pointed to the workers’ commissions established by the mass struggles and political revolutions across Southern Europe from 1968 – 74. Today new formations like ‘Occupy’ are experimenting with the idea that the democracy of the 99% is universal, consensual and does not accept a distinction between decision and implementation. This proposition is expressed in Lenin’s State and Revolution as a future goal of socialism /communism. It has proved to be too fragile for history so far.
So, looking at the history of revolution it is surely difficult to maintain that the soviet is an indispensable ideal against which we measure our progress against the capitalist state. Trotsky, writing on Britain in the 1930s, underlined the importance of the multitude of working class organisations, for education, for health, for insurance, for leisure and for defense at work, as a school of workers democracy. Although the Councils of Action sprang up in the 1926 general strike, they restrained themselves to unifying support for the action.
In reality soviets up to now have proved themselves to be one type, a very significant type, of means to provide unity across layers in society to carry through revolutionary change. It would seem that even in Russia; where the capitalist state was extremely primitive, the soviets could not carry out the revolution and then also go on to provide anything like the adequate administration and organization of the new state. A traditional army and the old administrators were required. Trotsky and the other oppositionists to the direction of the party from 1924 onward called for the renewal of the soviets as a political instrument to involve the working class in and challenge the major party political decisions of the day. There was no proposal that they ran society.
The new conditions of the capitalist state in parts of the west and the value of already existing social institutions are a tremendous plus in that regard. The struggle can start from their defense and open out into the potential provision of a tried and tested backbone to the organisation and administration of major parts of society. The multinationals are a deadly model for society. The principles of the NHS are the opposite. The necessary novel and revolutionary experiments in political representation can maintain their inspection of the social ‘trusts’ for bureaucratism and worse while gradually maturing to a later point where they can consider taking over the day to day administration of social life.
Next we turn to ‘agency’, the question of who will carry through revolutionary change.
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