% A Theory of Revolution.

My apologies for the length. I cut out an entire thousand words at the
end that dealt with the intersection of the capitalist state and the
economy.

# Introduction.

The topic of this contribution is the capitalist state, and its
eventual abolition. This book aims to offer up a provocative theory of
the capitalist state, and a similarly provocative theory of communist
revolution. My own intellectual development has been particularly
perplexed by the distinctions that Marxists and anarchists use to
divide and distinguish themselves.

I have never quite subscribed to the insistence that many Marxists
have placed on the necessity of the construction of a worker’s state,
and, similarly, I have never quite understood the prescription most
anarchists raise about the necessity for the total abolition of
authority.

The creation of these two theories–one of the bourgeois state, and the
other, a theory of communist revolution–is as much an intellectual
exercise as it is a project to raise interesting and pointed questions
for others.

# A Voluntarist Theory of Communist Revolution.

The first part of this contribution adopts an instrumentalist account
of the bourgeois state. Following Ralph Miliband in his book The State
in Capitalist Society,[^1] I will conclude that a complex structural
analysis of the bourgeois state does not have to be produced in order
to understand its modern workings.

In much the same way that the famous cartoon caricature, the Pyramid
of the Capitalist System, puts across the message that the working
class are being crushed by capitalism’s hierarchy of power and wealth,
I argue that a complex formulation of the structure of the modern
capitalist state is not needed in order to understand how it might be
abolished.

It is enough to know that the social origins, and the personal ties,
as well as the influence that social elites have over each other in
capitalist societies is the main cause of the oppression dealt out by
the capitalist state.

From this argument, we easily pass into a voluntarist theory of
communist revolution. Personally, I would do so by performing a
reading of Georg Lukacs’s famous text Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat.[^2] This text is famous for deducing
the humanist philosophical import of the Marxist dialectic.

Lukacs’s deduction of Marx’s humanism in Das Kapital: Volume One was
proven to be correct upon the discovery and publication of the early
Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. In the third section of Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat, titled The Standpoint of the
Proletariat, Lukacs argues that when the working class is able to
collectively grasp its true nature in its political consciousness, it
will be able to usher in the abolition of capitalism, and bring on the
next phase of human history.

Lukacs’s ontology is complex, but his general argument is as follows:
every class under capitalism has a position with respect to the
control of the means of production. Regardless of the empirical
consciousness of the multitude of individuals of which a class is
composed in capitalism, every class has an imputed class perspective
on the world.

Only the working class, when it is able to grasp the essence of its
imputed class consciousness, will be able to see the mode of
production of capitalism for what it really is, and therefore become
an unstoppable revolutionary force, and abolish capitalism.

Where Lukacs’s writings are normally taken to be anti-naturalist in
import, I mean to replace this concept of ‘imputed class
consciousness’ with a naturalist, Aristotelian concept of virtue. I
will argue that it is in the essence of human nature to want to
discover the truth behind capitalism.

Once this knowledge has been obtained, one cannot help but want to
abolish the present mode of production. The actual essential nature of
the political consciousness of the working class aside, I say that it
is not just the ideas that the working class have about themselves,
but it is in the very objective nature of the working class that once
it understands its position in the hierarchy of the capitalist system,
it will necessarily be compelled to abolish capitalism.  States and
Classes: Both Natural.

I have previously shown how the working class should be taken to
possess an objective, essential social nature. I did this by offering
up a naturalist theory of the capitalist state. I will be arguing
that, against what passes for popular wisdom, the bourgeois state is
not a social institution of human artificial creation. It is in fact,
I will say, an institution that follows from the natural evolution of
human civilisation.

This will, perhaps, strike many as an odd and indeed reprehensible
theory to put forward, considering the disgusting oppression that the
bourgeois state perpetuates against the great mass of labouring people
of the world. How could something so poisonous for the human spirit be
a natural part of the development of human civilisation? Would this
not mean that it is a necessary part of the life we have to live?

I think such objections could only stem from a lack of opportunity to
have looked into the matter. I take the capitalist state to be a
natural part of human civilisation, but, like a deadly infection that
damages, and must be removed from an otherwise healthy individual
human body, the capitalist state is real, but is an alienated,
reified, or “false” form of human social organisation.

If the capitalist state is natural, and therefore ‘real’ and
historically necessary, but, crucially, false; the working class is
the similarly natural product of the capitalist state. It is for this
reason we should consider ourselves entitled to say that the working
class would take no other course of action to abolish capitalism once
it had gained the self-knowledge of its place within capitalism.

# ‘The Classics’: Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

It is true that Marx and Engels never produced an analysis of the
capitalist state in a single piece of work. I argue in this
contribution that despite this, Marx and Engels did produce a
definitive analysis of the capitalist state. This theory of the
capitalist state can be pieced together from the works of Marxism, and
of Lenin.

In this contribution I will demonstrate my conception of Marx and
Engels’s theory of the capitalist state as it appears in their
original work.

# A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Marx and Engels deal explicitly with the nature of the capitalist
state throughout their lives from the 1840s to the 1880s. The first
piece of work in which Marx deals with the capitalist state is the
Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. The work is mainly
concerned with discussing and critiquing Hegel’s dialectical method,
but the content of the work touches explicitly on how best to
characterise the modern capitalist state, and exactly what method to
employ instead of Hegel’s Idealist method.

Marx’s first move in the piece is to show how Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right terminates in an apology for the authoritarian Prussian
state. Marx argues that Idealist logical method directly causes this
conclusion of Hegel’s political philosophy:

> But if on the contrary family, civil society, the state, etc., are
> attributes of the idea, of substance as subject, they must be given
> an empirical actuality, and that body of people among whom the idea
> of civil society unfolds are members of a civil society, that other
> body of people [among whom the idea of the state unfolds] being
> state citizens. Since all we have here, really, is allegory, for the
> sole purpose of conferring on some empirical existent or other the
> significance of being the actualised idea, it is clear that these
> vessels have fulfilled their function as soon as they have become
> specific embodiments of elements in the life of the idea. The
> general, therefore, appears everywhere as something specific,
> particular; and individuality, correspondingly, nowhere attains to
> its true generality.

> It therefore necessarily seems that the most profound, most
> speculative level has been reached when the most abstract
> attributes, the natural bases of the state such as birth (in the
> case of the monarch) or private property (in primogeniture), which
> have not yet developed at all into genuine social actualisation,
> appear as the highest ideas directly personified.

> And it is self-evident. The correct method is stood on its head. The
> simplest thing becomes the most complicated, and the most
> complicated the simplest. What ought to be the starting point
> becomes a mystical outcome, and what ought to be the rational
> outcome becomes a mystical starting point.[^3]

So Marx argues that Hegel’s speculative Idealist method just ‘confers’
the being of Hegel’s actualised idea on some empirical content. Hegel
merely searches the world and consecrates some specific historical
circumstances with ‘holiness’ in a completely eclectic manner. They
are like ‘vessels’ to hold the self-incarnation of the Hegelian
pantheistic God, in order to allow heaven to exist on earth. As Marx
remarks, this is completely backwards. One is not supposed to devise a
logical system and then search for its embodiment on earth. One is
supposed to start with the concrete first, the actual objective
historical conditions, and then work through their immanent logical
and historical contradictions, in order to understand their
tendencies.

Hegel argues that prior to the creation of the ideal nation state,
citizens are logically and historically assembled into a society of
extreme egoism, where everyone’s individual interests are in
competition with each other. In this ‘state of nature’, people are in
a war of each against all, and he agrees with Thomas Hobbes that the
fundamental conflict between individuals in this logical state risks
making life, as Hobbes says, ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. This ‘state
of nature’ Hegel calls ‘civil society’. Marx agrees with Hegel on this
point. Marx also agrees with Hegel that in its embryonic or
undeveloped stages, an imperfect nation state risks being an
illegitimate and oppressive social force against the people in ‘civil
society’.

Marx’s second move in the Critique is to show that Hegel’s specific
instructions about how to guarantee a harmonious political community
in accordance with the Absolute Idea terminate in failure. Hegel
argues in the Philosophy of Right for a specific state structure,
involving a monarchy, a legislative assembly, and a state
executive. The idea behind this is that each of these three state
organs are able to embody different phases of Hegel’s logical system
developed in the Science of Logic. When a nation state is organised in
the way the Absolute Idea is also structured, then perfect political
harmony is achieved, and there is supposedly no more Hobbesian war of
each against all.

Key in the story that Hegel tells is that the election of a national
legislative assembly, and the creation of a neutral and universal
bureaucracy. These two state organs are the critical social
institutions that Hegel argues are able to overcome the egoism in
civil society.

Although Marx agrees with Hegel about the differentiation of a modern
society into an unstable and potentially oppressive balance between
civil society and the state, Marx disagrees that this separation is
immanent in modern society. He also disagrees that the state can, as
Hegel argues, transcend the state of nature individuals find
themselves in in civil society, and that the state can guarantee the
common interest of all citizens. Marx argues at length how Hegel’s two
favourite social institutions, the legislature and the state
bureaucracy, cannot achieve this transcendence.[^4]

Marx writes:

> The true point of departure, self-knowing and self-willing mind,
> without which the “purpose of the state" and the "state authorities"
> would be untenable fantasies, unreal, even impossible phenomena,
> this true starting point makes its appearance only as the last
> predicate of substantiality, which has already been described as the
> general purpose and as the various state authorities. Had actual
> mind been made the starting point, the "general purpose" would have
> been its content, the various authorities its mode of
> self-realisation—its real or material existence, whose specific
> character could have been explained from the very nature of its
> purpose. Because, however, the "idea" or "substance" as subject, as
> actual essence, is made the starting point, the real subject appears
> only as the last predicate of the abstract predicate. The "purpose
> of the state" and the "state authorities" are mystified since they
> are presented as "modes of existence" of "substance" and cut off
> from their real mode of existence, from "mind knowing and willing
> itself, educated mind".

> ... The concrete content, the actual definition, appears as
> something formal; the wholly abstract formal definition appears as
> the concrete content. The essence of the definitions of the state is
> not that they are definitions of the state, but that in their most
> abstract form they can be regarded as logical-metaphysical
> definitions. Not the philosophy of law but logic is the real centre
> of interest. Philosophical work does not consist in embodying
> thinking in political definitions, but in evaporating the existing
> political definitions into abstract thoughts. Not the logic of the
> matter, but the matter of logic is the philosophical element. The
> logic does not serve to prove the state, but the state to prove the
> logic.[^5]

What Marx is saying here is that the modern nation state does not
become fully differentiated into the different state institutional
organs because of the power of Hegel’s logical system. Hegel may have
produced a powerful logical analysis of the structure of experience
and reality in the Science of Logic, but Hegel has misapplied his
philosophy in the Philosophy of Right. Marx argues that it is the
other way around—it is definite concrete historical circumstances
which determine the development of the state into its particular
institutions. Fundamentally, Marx argues—rightly—that it is private
property, and the sphere of civil society which determines exactly how
a state is constituted.[^6]

It is Hegel’s Idealist dialectical logic which leads him to conclude
that the bureaucracy and the legislature in a modern state are a
‘universal classes’ who embody the ‘universal interests’ of civil
society in modernity. Marx smashes this conception by showing that
this solution from Hegel is entirely eclectic.  Hegel brings in the
concept of a ‘universal interest’ in modern society from the
outside. Marx shows that any conception of a ‘universal interest’ in
modern capitalist society is completely abstract, and is not a
component of social reality at all:

> Within the bureaucracy itself, however, spiritualism becomes crass
> materialism, the materialism of passive obedience, of faith in
> authority, of the mechanism of fixed and formalistic behaviour, and
> of fixed principles, views and traditions. In the case of the
> individual bureaucrat, the state objective turns into his private
> objective, into a chasing after higher posts, the making of a
> career. In the first place, he looks on actual life as something
> material, for the spirit of this life has its distinctly separate
> existence in the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy must therefore proceed
> to make life as material as possible. Secondly, actual life is
> material for the bureaucrat himself, i.e., so far as it becomes an
> object of bureaucratic manipulation; for his spirit is prescribed
> for him, his aim lies beyond him, and his existence is the existence
> of the department. The state only continues to exist as various
> fixed bureaucratic minds, bound together in subordination and
> passive obedience. Actual knowledge seems devoid of content, just as
> actual life seems dead; for this imaginary knowledge and this
> imaginary life are taken for the real thing.[^7]

The bureaucracy is in absolutely no way a universal class able to
interpret and execute decisions which promote the ‘universal interest’
of civil society.  Instead, the state emerges from the crass
materialism of civil society. The state is not Spirit settling down
from heaven into earth—the bureaucracy is just one sectional material
interest competing with all the other forces in civil society. Marx
argues—again, correctly—that the Prussian bureaucracy only appears to
be the guarantor of the universal interest because the different
competing political forces in Prussia sometimes use the bureaucracy to
guarantee their interests against other groups.

Therefore the Prussian state actually perpetuates the war of each
against all, because the Prussian bureaucracy is in a constant state
of appropriating state power for itself in order to guarantee its
continued existence. The protection of private property is the
fundamental material explanation for all of this, Marx says. It is the
driving force of the ‘state of nature’ in Prussia. Marx concludes that
the citizens of modern nation states therefore live ‘estranged’ and
alienated public lives because their formal legal equality in the
capitalist state is necessarily abstract, and in short, a lie.[^8] 

# On the Jewish Question

The argument that Marx develops in the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy
of Right’ is continued in in the other essay he developed in 1843. In
this piece, Marx appears to attack Bruno Bauer on the question of the
emancipation of Jewish people in Germany. The piece may seem to deal
exclusively with the question of Jewish people, Marx actually deals
with the broader theme of the nature of religious and political
emancipation under capitalism.  Marx argues that it is true that the
modern capitalist state abolished the political effects and
significance of inequalities (like religious inequalities, class
differences, and social rank):

> Nevertheless the political annulment of private property not only
> fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state
> abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank,
> education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank,
> education occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it
> proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member
> of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when
> it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the
> standpoint of the state.[^9]

But, despite this, all of these inequalities still exist and
completely run rampant in the sphere of civil society. While the
capitalist state may be able to guarantee formal equality, it does not
remedy the substantive inequalities in civil society:

> None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic
> man, beyond man as a member of civil society, that is, an individual
> withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests
> and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights
> of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the
> contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework
> external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original
> independence. The sole bond holding them together is natural
> necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their
> property and their egoistic selves.[^10]

Marx argues that the alienation that is intrinsic to the nature of
societies with capitalist states is due to the historical nature of
the bourgeois political revolution. Before the revolution of the
bourgeois class and their conquest of power, society did not separate
the political citizen into their pure, equal public lives, and their
egoistic, unequal private lives:

> The political revolution thereby abolished the political character
> of civil society. It broke up civil society into its simple
> component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other
> hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content
> of the life and social position of these individuals. It set free
> the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up,
> partitioned and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal
> society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit,
> freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it
> as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation,
> ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life. A
> person's distinct activity and distinct situation in life were
> reduced to a merely individual significance. They no longer
> constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a
> whole. Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general
> affair of each individual, and the political function became the
> individual's general function.[^11]

Furthermore, this separation of the citizen of capitalist society is
completely undialectical. The relationship between the opposing
components of the citizen under capitalism is fully antinomial. The
private and public lives of people under capitalism are completely
contradictory, and stand in a destructive relation towards one
another. Marx puts this in Spinozist language in the following
passage. He equates the ‘real’ citizen as the egoistic and private
person, and the ‘true’ citizen as the public, equal, and morally
virtuous person:

> The political revolution resolves civil life into its component
> parts, without revolutionising these components themselves or
> subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of
> needs, labour, private interests, civil law, as the basis of its
> existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation
> and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of
> civil society is held to be man in the proper sense, homme as
> distinct from the citoyen, because he is man in his sensuous,
> individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only
> abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical
> person. The real man is recognised only in the shape of the egoistic
> individual, the true man is recognised only in the shape of the
> abstract citoyen.[^12]

People’s lives are therefore in radical and undialectical
contradiction—the result is that people feel completely alienated. The
upshot of making this distinction is that the existence of the citizen
under capitalism (the egoistic individual in civil society) does not
express their essence (the individual as a state citizen). The
individual under capitalism is therefore not ‘free’ in the Spinozan
sense, but ‘compelled’ or ‘necessary’:

> Definition 7: That thing is called free which exists from the
> necessity of its own nature alone, and is determined to action by
> itself alone. That thing, on the other hand, is called necessary, or
> rather compelled, which by another is determined to existence and
> action in a fixed and prescribed manner.[^13]

Posing the problem in Spinozist terms presents the solution to the
alienation of the individual under the capitalist state: the citizen
must become ‘free’—their essence as virtuous moral beings must become
expressed in their existence. The individual under capitalism must
come to exist by the necessity of their ‘nature’ alone. Marx puts this
in colourful lanuage: the being under civil society, as egoistic
individuals in civil society, must absorb their abstract nature as
moral citizens of the state into themselves:

> Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the
> abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a
> species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in
> his particular situation, only when man has recognised and organised
> his "forces propres"* as social forces, and consequently no longer
> separates social power from himself in the shape of political power,
> only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.[^14]

# References

[^1]: Ralph Miliband (1969). The State in Capitalist Society. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

[^2]: Georg Lukacs (1971). History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[^3]: Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 3, 40.

[^4]: Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 3, 20-149.

[^5]: Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 3, 17-18.

[^6]: Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 3, 31-32.

[^7]: Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 3, 47.

[^8]: Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 3, 46.

[^9]: Karl Marx, ‘On The Jewish Question’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 146, 153.

[^10]: Karl Marx, ‘On The Jewish Question’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 146, 164.

[^11]: Karl Marx, ‘On The Jewish Question’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1975) 146, 166.

[^12]: Karl Marx, ‘On The Jewish Question’ in Marx & Engels Collected Works (Progress Publishers,1975) 146, 167.

[^13]: Benedict Spinoza, ‘First Part: Of God’ in Ethics (Wordsworth, 2001) 3, 3.

[^14]: Ibid 12.