Abolish the State

 

The common view of socialism is a collection of confusing misconceptions. One popular idea is that socialism means nothing more than the control of everything and everybody by an all-powerful Big Brother State. Anti-Socialists tell us that with socialism we would all become regimented and lose our individuality. There is the illusion that socialism will create such a pervasive coercive one-party government. Once again, the Socialist Party makes it very clear that socialism cannot be created by any State, benevolent or authoritarian. The Socialist Party is not concerned with the “coming” of any state, but with its “going.” The Socialist Party agrees with Marx and Engels that, ‘with the disappearance of classes, there also disappears the necessity of armed repression or state power’ (Letter to Von Patten, on April l883). The state will, therefore, in due course ‘wither away”. 

We would not now be so inclined to use the words "wither away" which is one translation of what Engels wrote in German. This suggests some quasi-natural and not necessarily rapid process. It does lend itself to interpretation as meaning “gradual decline”. This was probably Engels's own view but it is a decline he envisaged as taking place in the period between the winning of political power by a socialist majority and the establishment of socialism and not in socialism after it had been established. Engels, just as much as us. repudiated the idea that the state should continue into socialism and only then decline. Engels and Marx did envisage a more or less lengthy period of transition between capitalism and socialism.This was understandable in the 1870s when the means of production were much less developed than they are now. Our view is that the "period of changeover” between capitalism and socialism can now be very short. All that is required today to bring the means of production into common ownership under democratic control is, on the one hand, a declaration that all property titles over means of production (stocks and shares, etc) are no longer valid and will no longer be enforced by the state and, on the other, the implementation of the precise arrangements for them to be democratically controlled. Such arrangements will have been worked out before the actual winning of political power by a socialist majority and would be able to be put into practice fairly rapidly after it. This is why we prefer to use. in connection with the end of the state and its repressive organs, terms such as "dismantle”, “abolish” or "dissolve" which suggest an active intervention rather than "wither away”, “die out" and "decline” which can suggest a passive, gradual process.

 

Only when the workers, organised consciously and politically, capture the State and convert it into the agent of emancipation will it be possible to convert the means of life (i.e., the land, factories, transport, etc.) into the common property of the whole people. This revolution within the State, necessary as it is for the social revolution, so far from extending the bureaucracy will abolish it. The first act of the revolutionary administration will be to take direct control and responsibility from the hands of the officials in every department. The working class must itself become the State. As the revolution proceeds and the capitalist class are stripped of their economic privileges, so the workers’ organisation will cease to be political and will become economic. It will be concerned, not with the government of persons, but with the administration of the social means of production and distribution. Class distinctions have been abolished, class antagonism will disappear and with it the need for a repressive force. The concern of society under socialism will not be oppression. Camaraderie will take the place of coercion. Socialism will be a system of society involving a community of shared interests. Socialism is not the result of schemes and dreams. It is but a convenient name for the stage in social evolution made possible and inevitable by the economic tendencies of our time. It is not built up out of vain yearnings and longings.  The Socialist Party understands that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. Unless we can convince and convert the majority of workers, socialism is an idle dream. If you bring about a revolution with an uninformed or hostile working class, defeat sooner or later faces you. 

When classes disappear so also disappears the need for the state as a public power of coercion resting ultimately on the ability to use armed force to impose the will of those who control it. Socialism will be a state-free society, which follows from the fact that the state is an instrument of the class rule while socialism will be a classless society and so have no place for such an instrument. There is no place in socialism for a state even a declining one.

Genuine cooperation can be born only when working people, having seized political power, use it for the purpose of making the means of production the common property of the whole of society, and proceed to administer them for the common welfare of all. Then the need for the State, for government, will vanish, and mankind will, at last, be free.