“How the State Arose” traced the evolution of the state — the army, courts, cops, prisons and tax collectors — from its formation about 5,000 years ago. This state has always served a ruling class — the slave owners, the feudal lords and today the capitalists.
The costliest state in history
The U.S. has developed one of the most expensive states in human history. The federal budget for the military alone now tops $1 trillion a year — and that does not count the hidden budgets of paramilitary agencies like the CIA, or the cost of past wars in the form of military pensions and interest on the national debt. Add it all in, and the true bill for the war machine comes to some $2.3 trillion. To this must be added the billions spent from state and local treasuries on police, prisons and courts.
The state serves the billionaires
This vast apparatus serves and protects the power of the handful of billionaires who rule this country. The character of the state as a tool of the bosses is reaffirmed every time striking workers are jailed by the courts, every time a young unarmed Black man dies at the hands of a racist police officer, every time a country is “shocked and awed” into submission.
The state has become almost completely merged with the capitalist class itself — a shuttle service running from boardrooms to government office and back, and a conduit of limitless funds from the public treasury to the bank accounts of finance and industry executives.
The capitalist state shows its face
The ruthlessness of the capitalist state has been revealed again and again in recent years — in the U.S.-armed genocide in Gaza and the U.S. war on Iran; in immigrant communities across the country, where masked ICE agents snatch working people from their homes and workplaces and disappear them into detention camps and deportation flights; and in Minneapolis, where police murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes — a killing that touched off the largest protests in U.S. history, the Black Lives Matter uprising.
1917 proved another state is possible
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 showed that a new kind of state — a workers’ state — could exist. It abolished capitalism in Russia, just as slavery and serfdom had been overthrown before. All wealth, except personal property, was made the common property of the workers, and the economy was planned to meet human needs, not the profits of the few.
The Soviet state existed in the historic interests of the entire world’s working class and oppressed. Despite its deficiencies, and its eventual defeat in 1991, it inspired socialist revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam and other countries around the globe. Even today, after many of those countries have suffered counterrevolutions or turned toward the market, millions are fighting and dying for a state of this kind. Workers and the poor in countries as varied as Venezuela, the Philippines and India struggle daily for a workers’ state like the one Cubans have been building since 1959.
As the economic crisis in the U.S. deepens, workers at home will begin to demand a new state as well.
The state can wither away
The state has always been an instrument of class dictatorship — the rule of those who own society’s wealth over those who produce it: the slave owner over the slave, the feudal lord over the serf, the capitalist over the workers and oppressed. The workers’ state maximizes democracy for the working class as it exercises a dictatorship over the remnants of the former capitalist ruling class.
The growth of socialism holds the promise of abolishing all class antagonisms. The overthrow of capitalism worldwide will set the stage for the gradual disappearance of the state as the world now knows it. Capitalism robs both the worker and the soil, draining human labor and the earth alike for private profit. Only production planned for human need can end that plunder — healing the rift capitalism tore open between humanity and nature, and holding the earth in common as a trust, to be handed on to future generations in better condition than we found it. Capitalism’s demise will unlock the potential for humans to live in a modern, peaceful society — at peace with the natural world as well — without any need for the old state’s instruments of suppression.
Additional reading
- The State and Revolution — by V.I. Lenin (1917). Lenin on the state as an instrument of class rule, and why the working class must smash the old state and build its own.
- The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University — by V.I. Lenin (1919). Lenin’s plainspoken lecture on the origin and class nature of the state.
- Generals Over the White House — by Sam Marcy (1980). On the rising political power of the military brass — the “political generals” — and the drive toward militarism and war as U.S. capitalism sank into economic crisis, from the decline of steel and auto to the failed 1980 U.S. rescue mission in Iran.
- A Special Type of Bonapartism (France, 1968) — by Sam Marcy (1968). Analyzes the de Gaulle regime in France as a Bonapartist state — posing as a mediator above the classes while serving the bourgeoisie and ruling through the police and army — and how the May–June 1968 upheaval exposed its isolation from both class camps.
- A Marxist Defense of the L.A. Rebellion — by Sam Marcy (1992). A defense of the Los Angeles rebellion that followed the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King.
- Return to What is Marxism?