The ideas of the State in Marxism

Marx and Engels did not develop a comprehensive and formal theory of the State. Instead, their discussion of the State consisted of a number of scattered inconsistent general observations and some detailed investigations of the State and its character in particular historical situations. Thus, they only produced ideas about the State. In his earliest writings Marx treated the State as an irrational abstract system of political domination which denied the social nature of man and alienated him from genuine involvement in public life. The solution for this alienated social power in the young Marx was to exercise true democracy ; unfortunately, though, he failed to define this term precisely. The second notion was that the State is an instrument of class rule. This notion was expounded on the writings of the mature Marx and Engels. The main point was that political power was merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. This notion was fused with a subjectivist and voluntarist orientation. The third notion, characterized by structuralism, could be assimilated to economic reductionism through the assumption that the economic base determines the balance of political forces. The fourth idea was that the State was a mediator attempting to reconcile the contradiction rooted in the economy and in the social formation. This functional role resulted in a State with autonomy and an institutional ensemble. However, Marx and Engels treated the State as an evil , and they thought that it would wither away with the emergence of a new stage of highly humanized simplicity. But first there was a need for a transitional state--the dictatorship of the proletariat--which was to provide the preconditions for a stateless society. Although communism, as Marx and Engels described it, entailed the positive abolition of the State, the survival of state-like functions in the future society could not be avoided. Obviously, nothing is being abolished but the word state . Thus no systematic theory of the state emerges from their writings