The State
It's role and what is means for future revolutionary situations.

Whenever we challenge the multimillionaire corporations that rule the world, we find an organised opposition lying in wait for us. Against every march, however peaceful - every protest, however well-intentioned - every picket, boycott, strike and action... there is an organised force trained, prepared and waiting to block us, smother us and stop us.We saw this force on Mayday in London, at the great anti-capitalist demonstrations in Seattle, Prague and Gothenburg. We will see it in action next month in Genoa, defending the leaders of global capitalism from the protests against the G8 summit. What is this force? Revolutionaries call it the State.

Who is in the State?

It's the police that threaten us, move us on, caution us, batter us, arrest us and imprison us.

The judges who try us and condemn us, even though they know nothing about how we live and never will.

The faceless civil servants, bureaucrats and lawyers, who pore over documents and draft complicated laws to isolate, stifle and stamp on any resistance to the power of big money.

And there's the last deadly line of defence for the system, the Army - a killing machine waiting to spring unthinkingly into action when their paymasters' dirty work needs to be done.

So how did the state come into being? What makes it tick, and can it be abolished?

If we want to be free and to break the power of the corporations and the billionaires, we need to try and answer these questions.

Let's start with the origins of the state. The earliest human societies did not have and could not have had a state. This was because their society was not divided into different classes. In the first tribes of hunter-gatherers, human beings did not yet possess sufficient skill, knowledge and technology (tools) to produce a surplus. After a day's work, every individual had only produced roughly what it took to keep them alive. There was next to nothing left over. In this situation, there is no point in forcing another human being to work for you - there could be no benefit from it.

It was only when societies had advanced far enough for each person to be able to produce a little bit extra that a surplus arose - and it is at this stage that a part of society struggles to control that surplus. Suddenly it is worthwhile forcing other people to work for you. It is possible to get rich - but only by oppressing others. At this stage, a class seizes control. It makes the surplus of the group its own private property. And it can only do this by holding the rest of the people down - by using force. In other words, by establishing a state - kings to rule, priests to lie to the people about the king being holier than everyone else, soldiers to take action if the people saw through the lies and demanded a fairer share.

Liberals believe that the state is a neutral force that exists to ensure fair play between different interest groups in society. To them, the state mediates between the classes. The ecologist and anti-globalisation journalist George Monbiot is an example of this way of thinking. He says that the way to control global capitalism is to strengthen the powers of the state. The state will then be able to take steps to limit the abuses of the big corporations, cutting them down to size and restricting the extent of their control of the world's resources.

It sounds nice - but it completely misunderstands what the state is and what it exists to do.

As we have seen, the State comes into being when society is divided into classes with different relationships to the wealth that its members have produced. It is not some wonderful power that descends on society from above to keep the warring people apart and impose a sense of fair play. It is, in the words of one of the first revolutionary communists, Frederick Engels, the product of the division of society into "irreconcilable" classes, groups of people who interests directly clash and collide.

In short, the state is not a referee in a football match who blows the whistle when either team commits a foul. It is a weapon that fights for one class against another.

This means that there is no point imagining that the state that exists today will help the people do away with capitalism. It exists to defend the property of the capitalist minority from the working class majority.

But it also means it is ridiculous to imagine that the state must always be with us - that we must always have a special armed force ready to be used against the people.

We have not always had a state, and we will not always have one. Once we get rid of the division of society into classes and all human beings have a common set of interests, the whole need for the state will pass away.

As Engels explained:

"The state ... has not always existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers, will put the whole machinery of the state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe."

Today we have reached this stage. The division of society into a tiny capitalist class and a huge majority of working class people is an obstacle to progress. At every step the capitalists increase the threat of global warming, destroy public services in favour of private corporations, tighten the hold of the banks on third world countries through debt and build up ever bigger nuclear arsenals. Production has reached the stage where we can feed, clothe and house the whole population of the world a hundred times over - but still millions starve in shanty towns.

To overthrow the rule of the capitalist minority, we will first have to overcome their resistance, which means we have to overcome their state power.

Reformists and liberals believe that this can be done peacefully through parliamentary and constitutional action. All history proves otherwise.

In Chile in 1973, the working class won a parliamentary majority for the socialist party and tried to take steps against the capitalists, in order to redistribute wealth and power in favour of the poor. But real power does not rest in parliament - it rests in the hands of the unelected state - the army and police. It was these forces - working hand in hand with the CIA - that moved violently against the government and overthrew it. General Pinochet came to power, torturing and executing thousands of socialists. And this is just one example.

That is why the most determined part of the working class, throughout the history of modern capitalism, has always argued that the state cannot be reformed; it has to be forcibly overthrown. While such and overthrow will require the support of the majority of the working class, it will also have to break up the forces of the state, using ruthless methods to overcome their resistance.

The only way this can be done is by forming mass councils of delegates from the working population as alternative centres of power, and by organising a popular militia from among the armed people to take action against the capitalists, their allies and protectors.

In short, it will take a revolution to smash the capitalist state.

But does this mean we can move overnight to a stateless society?

The capitalists will use every means at their disposal to get their property and their power back. Until such time as a planned socialist economy can redistribute wealth and do away with class division altogether, the old ruling class will continue the fight. While classes exist, there will be a need for a state.

But after a socialist revolution, a completely different type of state will be needed - a working class state.

The capitalist state exists to defend the power and property of a tiny minority. A working class state would exist top do the opposite - defend the property of the overwhelming majority of the world's population from a tiny former elite.

Instead of a standing army and police force, the people itself could be organised democratically to defend our communities. Instead of a parliament elected every five years stuffed full of careerists who can break their promises and get away with it, we could be governed by delegates elected from mass popular councils of working class people. They would be subject to instant recall if they broke their promises and would be paid the same as the people they represented. Bureaucratic positions could be rotated so no-one could concentrate too much power in their hands.

As classes disappeared there would be less and less need for even this special state machine. The functions of the working class state could be more and more taken over by society as a whole. The state would wither away as government and authority, even of the most democratic sort, could ever more be replaced by the simple administration of society by the people. As Engels put it, "the government of persons would be replaced by the administration of things".

The future lies in a society without classes and states - a society based on real freedom, fairness and fulfilment. But there is only one road to freedom: the revolutionary break-up of the capitalist state, and the establishment of a democratic working class state.

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Democracy: do we live in a democratic society?

Police: only doing their job?

Police: whose side are they on

State & Revolution

Lesson of Chile