The State and the Bureaucracy in the Capitalist Mode of Production

Abstract

As already indicated, a complete discussion of state and bureaucracy in Marx’s writings or, more vaguely, in Marx’s thought, should follow the subject from one mode of production to another, taking into account the transitions between them — from the various pre-capitalist modes of production outlined in the Grundrisse¹(and,before, in The German Ideology),² to the capitalist mode of production, to the socialism sketched in the ‘Civil War in France’,³ the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’,⁴ and the letters on the Russian commune to Vera Zassoulitch.⁵ But for the purposes of my present discussion I will focus now on the state and bureaucracy in the capitalist mode of production — with little more than a brief and final reference to the role of the state and bureaucracy in the transition to socialism and in socialism itself.