Abstract
A crucial distinction between state and society is found throughout Marx’s writings. For example, on Marx’s view: “Every revolution dissolves the old society and to that extent it is social. Every revolution overthrows the old power and to that extent it is political” (MECW 3, p. 205). This distinction has an interesting role, badly misinterpreted, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. This chapter clarifies what Marx said about phases of communism and about a transition between capitalism and communism. A crucial point is that, according to Marx, in communist society there would be analogous functions of those of a state. Some things about those functions can be extrapolated and refined from what Marx did say, but there is also much that needs to be developed.
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Notes
- 1.
Some of these are due to V. I. Lenin in The State and Revolution. It is an added misfortune when a bad interpretation is made by a dominant Marxist.
- 2.
Although it was written in 1875, the Critique was first published in 1891.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
In a draft about the Commune, Marx wrote that “the centralized state machinery which, with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, entoils (inmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor” and then added that it became more centralized and “expand[ed] the circumference and the attributes of the state power” (MECW 22, pp. 483 and 484).
- 7.
On the other hand, perhaps Engels was right that “[a]ll the palaver about the state ought to be dropped, especially after the Commune, which had ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term” (MECW 24, p. 71).
- 8.
That the transition would be long is a view that seems to be taken by Lebowitz (2015) on the Critique and Lebowitz (2010) on the wealth and production of people. See also Ehrenberg (1992) for the view that the transition will last for the whole first “socialist” phase overseen by the dictatorship of the proletariat . Levine (1987, p. 137), depending on greater abundance than what is even known now, thinks that the transition “may require generations to overcome” old institutions.
- 9.
Of course there are those who think that revolutions will require long periods of transformation and education supervised and guided by the most advanced in the society. Full-blown communism, on this view, must wait until the development of “socialist man”—and women, of course. The questions, regarding transitions, of human nature, human change, and adaptation to human society are complex and about convoluted realities. The answers are likely to come more from trial and practice than from theory and prediction. See Chap. 12 for some exploration of intuitions about these issues.
- 10.
Also in the French translation of Capital , which was edited and “improved” by Marx, it is simply direction.
- 11.
Lebowitz (2012), who has a section entitled “A Directing Authority” on just that, seems to have been misled about Marx by the unfortunate mistranslation. When I presented a precursor to this paper at a conference in Shanghai, Gilbert Achcar commented that there was an organization in the Soviet Union to promote orchestras without conductors, Persimfans. There are some good socialist democratic ideas behind this idea, which has spread elsewhere, but instrumentalists in a sizable orchestra will still want to know from someone in front how they sound together, someone in a position to give some direction.
- 12.
Elsewhere Engels remarked that if ever a communist society needed to regulate population, “then it, and it alone will be able to effect it” (MECW 46, p. 57).
- 13.
Engels wrote to another correspondent in 1875 that “less importance attaches to the official programme of a party than to what it does” (MECW 24, p. 72).
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Ware, R.X. (2019). Marx on State and Society in the Future. In: Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97716-4_10
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