One of the most divisive issues on the socialist left involves attitudes towards the state. It is easy to see why.

Some socialists, utterly appalled by the ravages of the market economy – which leaves millions of people without housing, or lacking adequate food and healthcare – look to the state as the solution to the ills of capitalism. They see a large welfare state as central to the socialist ideal. Others on the left, however, mindful of the horrible crimes committed in the name of “socialism” by state bureaucracies in Russia, eastern Europe and elsewhere, are anxious to guard against the dangerous identification of socialism with the state. They seek a more libertarian socialist vision.

Central to the tradition of socialism from below (the approach adopted by New Socialist) has been a concern to develop a socialism that is anti-bureaucratic and thoroughly democratic. This perspective starts from the premise that both the market and the state are alienated forms of social life – alienated in the sense that they evade the democratic control of the majority. The market is dominated by the immense concentrations of wealth we call capital – which means that the majority, the labouring classes, are automatically cut off from control – while the state is organized in terms of centralized, bureaucratic structures of power (government ministries, armies, courts) administered by appointed officials and virtually immune to democratic regulation.

In opposing the market and the state, socialism from below commits itself to radical democracy, an arrangement where the vast majority are truly able to democratically shape and direct their lives. This necessarily involves the replacement of bureaucratic agencies by grassroots forms of self-government.

It comes as a shock to many people today to learn that just such an approach was characteristic of the thought of Karl Marx (1818-83), the founder of the most influential school of socialist thought. As a young man, Marx wrote that “in true democracy the political state disappears.” And this commitment to a kind of socialist democracy that does away with the modern state remained a lifelong part of his thinking. How, then, did Marx arrive at this conclusion? And what does it mean for the state to disappear?

DEMOCRACY AGAINST THE STATE

Marx began his political career not as a socialist, but as a devoted democrat. Inspired by certain ideals of ancient Greek democracy – particularly the idea of a community of truly self-governing citizens – Marx sought ways of establishing meaningful democracy in the society of his day. At the same time, Marx was conscious that ancient Greece, like modern society, had excluded huge groups of people from democratic participation. He argued for a democracy that would be truly universal, without exclusions.

In ancient Greece, thousands of citizens would attend meetings of the Assembly (held more or less weekly) where they would debate and vote upon all the issues of political life: diplomacy, war and peace, taxation, and so on. Every citizen could speak, move a motion or an amendment, and no one had authority to make decisions behind the scenes. Between meetings of the Assembly, a Council of 500 did the work of keeping things organized. But this council was prevented from becoming an unaccountable body of career politicians: membership was for only one year and all positions were chosen by lot (by blindly selecting a name). On top of this, no one was allowed to serve on the Council for more than two years in the course of their lifetime.

Ancient Greek society thus pioneered a system of direct democracy, as opposed to the supposedly representative form we have today, where the people don’t make the laws, but simply vote for those who do so. The modern system, as we know all-too-well, involves a top-heavy structure of decision-making – dominated by non-elected officials such as judges, generals and senior bureaucrats – that is radically cut off from the people.

The young Marx thought it would be possible in the modern world to create a genuinely inclusive form of direct democracy. Since, he believed, all the poor were being pushed into one class (the proletariat), if that group could emancipate itself and assert its democratic rights, then political power would pass into the hands of all the people. Unlike ancient Greece, no social group would be excluded, and we would arrive at a radical form of direct democracy.

To do this, however, would require dis-alienating political power to the point where the vast array of institutions that operate independently of the people – courts, armies, ministries, and so on – could be dismantled. These bureaucratic institutions would be replaced by new organs of direct democracy. This is what it meant to talk of the disappearance of the state.

POLITICAL ASSOCIATION

Some people have wrongly assumed that the disappearance of the state means the elimination of all organized processes for making decisions. But this is not at all the case. Those in the tradition of socialism from below strongly favour democratic forms of political association – councils and delegated structures through which communities regulate themselves. It is not democratic spaces and processes that disappear in a radical democracy – it is bureaucratically-organized institutions that are cut off (alienated) from control by the people.

Radical socialists did not have a very clear idea as to what the disappearance of the state might look like, however, until the workers of Paris, rising up in 1871, formed the Paris Commune, the modern world’s first experiment in a democracy of the poor.

The Paris Commune abolished the standing army (replacing it with citizen’s militias), created a form of democratic election and recall (where elected delegates could always be recalled and replaced by those who elected them), and declared that no elected delegate could earn more than the average worker’s wage.

In subsequent working class upheavals in the twentieth century – be it the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, or the Hungarian uprising of 1956 – mass workers councils were created. These councils were based in communities, schools and work places – which were increasingly being taken over by those who lived and worked in them. Democratically run local institutions, like neighbourhoods and workplaces, would then elect delegates to larger geographic councils, such as those representing a city or a country. In principle, council democracy could also operate at an international level.

After the short-lived experience of the Paris Commune (it was crushed militarily by the French and German ruling classes), some later socialists described it as a kind of “workers’ state.” Whatever the merits of that designation might once have been, it has become something of a problem today, after decades in which Stalinist-type dictatorships in Russia and elsewhere often referred to themselves in that way.

ANARCHISTS AND SOCIALISTS

Some people on the left today still assume that socialists support the state while anarchists oppose it. Yet, as we have seen, Marx and others in the tradition of socialism from below favoured the elimination of the state. There was, however, some ambiguity about this. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels wrote about the need for workers to “seize” the existing state and use it to their own ends. For many years, this ambiguity about the state was widespread among socialists and anarchists alike.

In the First International Working Men’s Association (1864-72), for instance, the supporters of the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin used terms like “socialist state” or “new and revolutionary state,” to describe their goals. Unlike individualist anarchists, Bakunin and his allies were “collectivists” who believed in communal forms of social life. The supporters of Marx and Bakunin often had much more agreement on these issues than later commentators have recognized. In 1869, for instance, both groups agreed to a First International resolution on the future society stating that social (as opposed to private) property ought to be controlled by communes solidarisees (associated or federated communes). A few years later, Marx’s compatriot, Frederick Engels, argued that the program of the German Social Democratic Party ought to use the word “commune” instead of the word state. In sum, while occasionally prepared to use the word “state,” both these left-wing currents generally opposed the state as an anti-democratic institution.

It was with the experience of the Paris Commune that Marx and Engels came to much more consistent views, arguing on the basis of that experience that the idea of workers seizing the existing state should be rejected in favour of the idea of dismantling the state.

During these nineteenth-century discussions of the state,“statist socialism,” or what the late Hal Draper called socialism from above, had not yet made its historical mark. Today, after the disasters of the Stalinist dictatorships and bureaucratic social democracy (such as NDP governments in Canada), it is important that radical and libertarian socialists make clear their opposition to the state as a form of organizing social and political life. Marx’s emphasis on the disappearance of the state needs to be highlighted, along with the anarchist and Marxist use of the word commune to identify non-state forms of political association.