“You have the emergence in human society
of this thing that's called the State. What
is the State? The State is this organized
bureaucracy: it is the police department.
It is the Army, the Navy. It is the prison
system, the courts, and what have you. This
is the State; it is a repressive organization.
But the state and gee well, you know, you've
got to have the police because if there were
no police, look at what you'd be doing to
yourselves -- you'd be killing each other
if there were no police! But the reality is
the police become necessary in human society
only at that juncture in human society where
it is split between those who have and those
who ain't got.”
Since the beginnings of modern socialism,
socialists have differed on the question of
state power. Will it help or hinder us reaching
a free socialist society? Over a century later,
we’re still arguing about this, but often
without really engaging with the best arguments
for each position. This really bothers us,
partly because we’re not entirely sure yet
ourselves, and partly because much of the
discussion that is our there just doesn’t
deal with what we think are the most important
arguments for each position. If we want socialism
to win, we need to get beyond sectarian narrow-mindedness
and misrepresentations and get a good understanding
of what different socialists think and why,
what their best arguments are, and what the
historical evidence tells us. So instead of
simply picking a side and arguing for it,
we want to do something different. We’ll
start by reminding ourselves of the kind of
socialist society, often called communism,
that we Marxists and anarchists want to reach,
and use this to take a strategic look at the
question of state power.
Part 1: The Goal of Free Socialism
The goal of socialism is universal human emancipation.
The emancipation of all human beings from
capitalism, the state, feudalism, slavery,
patriarchy, racism, and all other institutions
that prevent us from being free. This would
, in Marx’s words, be a society where ‘class
distinctions have disappeared, and all production
is concentrated in the hands of associated
individuals’ (Marx & Engels, 1996, p. 20),
based on the ‘free exchange among individuals
who are associated on the basis of common
appropriation and control of the means of
production’ (Marx, 1993, p. 159). This requires
“the planned distribution of labour time
among the various branches of production”
(Marx, 1993, p. 173), because it would be
“absurd (…) to postulate the control by
the united individuals of their total production,
on the basis of exchange value, of money”
(Marx, 1993, p. 159). It would replace the
hierarchical division of labour entirely and
proudly proclaim: “from each according to
his abilities, to each according to his needs!”
(Marx & Engels, 1996, p. 215)
Lots of anarchists and Marxists share this
goal. They agree that getting there requires
intersectional and international working-class
struggle against capitalism and the state.
And they agree with the immortal words of
the First International that “the emancipation
of the working classes must be conquered by
the working classes themselves” (Marx & Engels,
1955, p. 288). Where they start disagreeing
is about what we need to do to get there.
Let’s get clear about two things right away
though. First, Marxists and anarchists tend
to define ‘the state’ differently, with
anarchists defining the state in part as involving
power hierarchies – where one group of people
rules over and dominates another – while
Marxists often don’t. So for Marx, anything
that fulfils certain functions – whether
it’s hierarchical or not – counts as a
state, while for anarchists, an institution
fulfilling certain functions but without having
hierarchies, without having a ruling group
ruling over and dominating another, would
not count as a state.
That’s why Marx and Bakunin both look at
the Paris Commune, agree on all the details
about how it works – free federation, mandated
and recallable delegates, and so on – but
Marx calls it a revolutionary workers’ state
and talks about how different it is from the
bourgeois state it temporarily replaced, while
Bakunin calls it just the kind of stateless
anarchist transition he supports.
So when we talk about the existing state here,
what we’re referring to is not all the things
that might be called states by different people.
Rather, we’re talking specifically about
the kinds of hierarchical, top-down states
we have under modern capitalism. The debate
about taking state power is fundamentally
about whether we should try to take these
institutions over or not. If you think that
we should call certain revolutionary political
institutions – that are not hierarchical
r ruled top-down in similar ways – workers’
states and that these are worth having, that’s
fine, but the arguments we’ll look at here
will not be about those institutions.
It’s also worthwhile to keep in mind that
debates about taking state power didn’t
start because certain naïve anarchists, based
on abstract moral ideals, want to keep their
hands clean of messy real politics, instead
of focusing on the kinds of strategy we need
to win meaningful change. There are some people
like this, but as far as we can tells it doesn’t
reflect either how these debates arose in
the anarchist wings of the socialist movement
or the arguments of its most important and
influential thinkers. Rather, these debates
arose within radical labour movements already
engaged in the messy business of revolutionary
class struggle, and it was and is essentially
about strategy and tactics: Will taking over
the capitalist state help us win or not1?
To answer this question, we’re first going
through the arguments against taking existing
state power, and then look at some arguments
for taking existing state power, before giving
some concluding thoughts. Links to each segment
can be found in the description.
Part 2: Arguments Against
The first argument against taking existing
state power is that it isn’t enough, by
itself, to give us socialism. Everyone basically
accepts this now. If there’s one thing that
a hundred years’ history of social democratic
parties taking state power and promising to
give us socialism has shown us, it’s that
just putting socialists into office isn’t
enough, on its own, to give us socialism.
The second argument against taking over the
existing state is that doing so distracts
from building the new institutions we need
for a free and stateless socialism. History
shows, the argument goes, that direct action
gets the goods, and that properly bottom-up
organised unions, community movements, and
so on are just as effective, if not more so,
than their more hierarchical counterparts.
It might be objected that the rise of socialist
candidates inspires popular movements, like
the recent teachers’ revolts in the US being
inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary
run, primarily by talking about four of its
leaders2. The response to this has been to
point out that two of the only four people
that this argument refers to knew each other
and one had been an active union member long
before Sanders’ presidential bid, that this
“leaves out the hundreds of other leaders,
who will never be named, because they do not
fit his narrative”, that in Kentucky it
instead grew out of Black Lives Matter organisers,
and that the social justice and rank-and-file
caucuses that lead the latest strike waves
arguably grew out of other movements, like
the Occupy movement.3
Successful direct action movements and political
change often come together. We often see things
like both a strong labour movement and a vaguely
pro-labour candidates or parties rising together,
as with European social democracy. Unlike
what liberals think, just because the state
does something doesn’t mean that the best
or only way to get the state to do what you
want is by taking it over, just like the best
way of getting capitalists to do what you
want isn’t necessarily by becoming the capitalist.
So the question is which is the real reason
for the improvements we see? Labour movements
have won better wages and conditions around
the world in the absence of progressive rule,
including the recent victorious teachers’
strikes in the US. They can win political
demands as well, such as when the Spanish
CNT won the 8-hour working day through a general
strike, or when Trump shut down government,
lots of air traffic controllers started calling
in sick, and the Association of Flight attendants’
president just mentions a general strike,
Trump immediately gave in and re-opened government.
On the other side, we have lots of history
showing that even genuinely radical parties,
once in power, don’t get very much done
in the absence of a powerful direct action
movement actively pushing for change. Once
upon a time, Obama got union support by promising
the Employee Free Choice Act, which he immediately
gave up. And the Marxist party Syriza in Greece
betrayed every single one of their promises
– from stopping cuts to public services
to standing up to the EU – in less than
a single administration. This has a long history
that goes back to the late 18 and early 1900s,
as one of the standard ways that people became
anarchists across the world – from Lucy
Parsons in the US to Kotoku Shusui in Japan
– was their perception that parliamentary
politics was ineffective at winning reforms,
much less building towards revolution, compared
to direct action.
There’s also another position that says
that evidence at least from some countries
like the US indicates that social movements
are much more likely to be able to fight and
win under governments that essentially allow
them to, or don’t repress them too harshly.
And there are combined approaches, like 21st
Century Socialism and Democratic Confederalism,
that try to take existing state power, while
also insisting on the need for social movements
autonomous from the state and party to counter
the extra-parliamentary power of capital.
In terms of just winning reforms, the questions
we’re left with are these: Are there significant
historical examples where electoral work really
achieves something without a powerful direct
action movement pushing it? If not, then should
we either just focus on organising outside
of the existing state, or seek a combined
approach of some kind, and if so, which one?
Finally, from the perspective of deciding
how best to spend our time, what evidence
is there for people devoting lots of time
and energy to participating in the capitalist
state process being more effective than devoting
it to direct action outside of it?
Let’s get back to the question of revolution.
The third argument starts from the important
materialist idea that the social relations
you’re part of determine, that they shape
and influence, your agency and your consciousness4.
If someone becomes a rich and powerful capitalist,
chances are they’re going to find ways of
justifying their position of wealth, power,
and privilege, develop some solid upper-class
consciousness, and try to fight things like
unions, strikes, and workers’ control. Similarly,
this argument holds, if you put someone into
institutions like the existing capitalist
state, their new-found position of wealth,
power, and privilege, these new social relations
they’re inserted into, will change them.
They’ll probably quite like their new-found
positions of greater power, wealth, and privilege
and come to hang out more and more with upper-class
people who also enjoy them. Gradually, they’ll
find ways of justifying their positions to
themselves and others, come to see them as
indispensable and valuable to society. And
since they’d lose this in a transition to
a free, stateless socialism, they’ll end
up fighting against such transition. Thus,
in the words of the anarchist thinker and
geographer Reclus, “socialist leaders who,
finding themselves caught up in the electoral
machine, end up being gradually transformed
into nothing more than bourgeois with liberal
ideas. They have placed themselves in determinate
conditions that in turn determine them" (Reclus,
2013, p. 147)
Someone might object that this only applies
to capitalist states, not revolutionary states
where we’d all be comrades in some sense.
From a materialist perspective however, from
the perspective of focusing on material social
relations between people, this would work
only if the new thing you call a state doesn’t
involve a minority of people ruling over others,
with greater power, wealth, and privilege
as a result. If you still have hierarchical
social relations like this in the new state,
and want to reach a free and non-hierarchical
society like what Marx calls communism, the
argument still applies, since it would still
be contrary to the interests of this ruling
minority to give up their position to the
people they rule over. Just like socialists
think you can’t rely on the benevolence
of slave-owners, feudal lords, capitalists,
monarchs, or bourgeois politicians to give
workers what they want, so, this argument
goes, it would be naïve to think that any
other ruling minorities would be any different.
Many people use this to explain why, in their
view, every Marxist seizure of existing state
power has failed to produce anything like
the free, stateless society they aimed for.
In fact, this is where social democracy comes
from. The vast majority of social democratic
parties started life as radical Marxist parties
– Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and others were
all in the Second International once upon
a time. Gradually, these parties became more
and more reformist, even before having any
real power, emphasising taking parliamentary
power and limiting what the unions they controlled
were allowed to do. The shift to mere reformism
caused a scandal when Eduard Bernstein pointed
it out, largely because he made explicit and
advocated what a lot of the German Social
Democratic party actually were like and were
really doing. They eventually supported the
imperialist First World War, which caused
the split where Lenin, Luxemburg, and others
formed the revolutionary Third International.
When the German Revolution happened after
the First World War, the social democrats
beat down the revolution and murdered its
leaders. Though most social democratic parties’
history is less exciting, they’ve all gone
from radical beginnings, to merely focusing
on reforming and governing capitalism, to
basically just becoming neoliberals.
When it comes to the parties of the revolutionary
Third International, things are a lot more
complicated. Whatever else you might want
to say about, say, the USSR, it never went
stateless, had the associated producers self-direct
production, or distributed according to need.
That is, after all, why they called it the
Union of Soviet SOCIALIST republics, because
their theory said that the state-led stage
of socialism would come before and inevitably
lead to the free and stateless communism they
aimed for. We once got some flak in another
video for pointing out that the USSR wasn’t
communist in a Marxist sense, which was really
weird because we were just pointing out a
fact that all of orthodox Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist
theory agrees on, while they were ironically
agreeing with western anti-communist propaganda
that confuses the name of the Communist Party
with the kind of society they claimed to have
built.
This doesn’t mean that these states haven’t
achieved lots of things. Vanguard parties
taking state power have definitely been able
to rule states over time, industrialise, improve
living conditions, fight off western imperialism,
and a lot more. Social democratic parties
have also overseen significant social reforms
in many countries, which have also improved
things like living standards – though as
we mentioned above their exact causal role
is a bit unclear. These are some very important
things that cannot be denied. We also know
that non-socialist revolutionary armies, like
those led by Simon Bolivar, that liberated
much of Latin America from the Spanish Empire,
can fight off western imperialism and produce
meaningful social reform. We don’t have
a lot of good information about whether anarchist
movements could effectively do the same, since
after 1917 the standard model that much of
the world’s anti-imperialist movement followed
was Third International Marxism.
A lot of online debate is very US-centric
on these things. It inverts the standard liberal
and conservative ideology, holding that everything
the American Empire does is good, to holding
that everything that opposes the US Empire
is good, in a way that leaves the US-centric
nature of the whole thing intact. Look, there
are a lot of things that can effectively resist
the US empire – like the Taliban – but
that doesn’t make the societies they’re
creating good or mean that they get us towards
free socialism.
Let’s remind ourselves of the fact that
the disagreement here is whether taking over
the capitalist state will work to get us to
free and stateless socialism, self-governed
by the associated producers. In this light,
there are two questions we think are especially
important for thinking about this disagreement
today. First, has any single example of taking
existing state power ever looked like it was
really progressing towards a fully free and
stateless society, with people collectively
self-directing their lives and production?
Second, why have so many of them relapsed
into capitalism even after they won and secured
their rule, or, despite having relatively
secure governments, seem to be sliding back
towards capitalism again?
Part 3: Arguments For Seizing the Capitalist
State
Of the socialist arguments for taking over
the existing state, there seem to be three
that are most influential today. The first
argument we want to mention is that taking
over a centralised, hierarchical state is
necessary for things like effective coordination,
planning, and social organisation in contemporary
society. Perhaps that’s because of the supposed
necessities of large-scale coordination in
complex societies with millions of people,
or perhaps it’s because of the technical
requirements of complex machinery and technology.
Either way, the argument goes that something
like a centralised, hierarchical state of
the kind we have under capitalism is necessary
for any contemporary society to function well,
plan properly, and generally coordinate and
make sure that society keeps on running5.
This argument isn’t so much an attack on
the tactics of taking state power as it is
an attack on the idea of communism. If communism
is free and stateless, as Marx and others
say it is, and the state is necessary for
modern society to function properly then communism
is impossible in modern society. If this argument
is right, contra Max and others, communism
is impossible for us to reach.
Weirdly, there are a fair few Marxists who
make this argument, without seeming to realise
that it undermines the entire goal of basically
all of Marxism, from Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism
to Maoism to council communism. Since this
is an argument against the socialism that
anarchists and Marxists aim for, not an argument
about why we need to use the existing state
to reach such a society, we’re going to
leave this aside for now.
There’s a possible response to this that
says that we need a state during and immediately
after a revolution to defend against capitalist
attack, but that after world socialism has
been achieved, we can then transition to a
fully free and stateless communism. This brings
us to the second argument for existing taking
state power, which is that it is necessary
for military defence6. The argument here is
that states or state-like structures are particularly,
perhaps uniquely, good at warfare, and that
being good at warfare is necessary to defend
the revolution against attacks from capitalist
powers. This is a very real threat. The Russian
Revolution was immediately attacked by the
US and European powers, as well as the ruling
classes, the Chinese communist party fought
a long and bloody civil war before finally
emerging victorious, and the Vietnamese revolutionaries
first fought against the French empire to
liberate the North, then had to fight the
American empire to liberate the south, and
then, after invading Cambodia to stop the
famine under Pol Pot, had to fight off a Chinese
invasion as well.
Part of this argument seems right. States
definitely can fight wars. It’s a bit tricky
to see whether they’re uniquely good or
necessary to do it, since after 1917 almost
all the main struggles for socialism tended
to take a state-centred approach. There are
only a handful of exceptions to look at of
attempted transitions without taking existing
state power. For instance, the Shinmin Commune
of 1929-31 certainly was defeated militarily
by the Japanese Empire. The Makhnovites did
manage to liberate much of Ukraine during
the Russian Revolution and effectively defeat
the counter-revolutionary armies they faced,
before being betrayed by their Bolshevik allies.
Makhno himself argued that although the army
itself needed centralised command, it should
still have elected officers and in turn be
under the command of non-hierarchical federations
organising from the bottom up. So even if
we think that armies require a degree of top-down
command powers, the argument goes, it simply
doesn’t follow that the rest of society
needs to be organised in this way. The anarchist
armed forces seem to have been even more effective
than their republican counterparts during
the Spanish revolution, before the anarchists
put them under government control, which they
were strongly criticised for by other anarchists.
Finally, the Zapatistas have managed to not
only survive and improve their society, but
also recently announced a major expansion,
all the while without taking existing state
power7.
There’s a lot less historical evidence to
go on here than we’d like, and certainly
a lot less than there is for, say, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist
and Maoist approaches. But we do think it
shows that military defence is at least possible
without taking over the existing state especially
if, like the Zapatistas, they don’t either
join a hierarchical state or rely on allies
who do. I don’t think I’m in a position
to say much about whether it’s more or less
effective, all things considered. Here there
are two questions I think we should think
about going forward. First, how essential
is military defence, as opposed to other forms
of resistance – violent or not – going
to be for today’s socialists? Second, if
it is important, can it be effectively carried
out without capitalist-type hierarchical state
machinery today?
A third important argument is that taking
over the existing state is necessary because
that’s the only way to plant the seeds of
a free and stateless socialism under capitalism.
The argument goes that while capitalist social
relations already sprouted within feudalism,
free socialist ones don’t under capitalism.
So only by taking over the existing capitalist
state can socialists “begin to create the
conditions that allow them to move gradually
toward establishing socialist relations of
production in the various economic spheres
of the society” (Harnecker, 2015, p. 174).
By doing this, the state can help to overcome
capitalism’s social fragmentation, change
its individualistic culture, and help teach
people how to organise production from the
bottom up.
Anarchists would respond that, in a sense,
capitalism doesn’t inherently and of itself,
simply contain the institutions we need for
a free socialist society. But it does, as
Marx points out, generate a working class
movement that’s capable of creating them.
History shows us plenty of examples of workers
creating soviets, factory committees, and
other institutions that can take over production
and replace capitalist top-down organisation
with bottom-up workers’ control. It also
generates labour movements and organisations,
which can prefigure free socialist institutions
by themselves organising in free ways. We
should remember here that the vast majority
of the world’s radical labour movements
were set up and organised by anarchists and
syndicalists before 1917, organising people
on scales of hundreds of thousands and sometimes
even millions of people and winning major
social reforms.
A defender of Harnecker’s argument can respond
by arguing that it will be much more effective
and reliable if the state can be used to help
create, protect, and nurture and support organisations
like bottom-up community councils and a non-capitalist
social economy, that can gradually replace
the hierarchical capitalist state with a free
and stateless form of social organisation.
How plausible you think this is will ultimately
depend on your answers to a number of questions
like, first, in light of the arguments about
how taking over the existing state changes
those who do so, and the history of the last
century, can you rely on the state to actually
do this consistently for a long enough time
to get to free socialism? If you have doubts
about that, but think that maybe independent
social movements and organisations outside
of the state – like unions – could pressure
and keep the state on track, how do you do
that in practice? If, as this argument suggests,
there are ways of combining certain forms
of prefigurative politics with certain kinds
of existing state power, how exactly should
we go about doing so?
Part 4: Conclusion
We’re deliberately not trying to argue for
any one specific point here, partly because
we’re not sure ourselves. But there are
some general lessons we want to mention that
we do think we’re clear about.
First, social movements and organisations
like unions and ecological movements must
retain their autonomy from both states and
political parties. Co-optation by social democratic
parties and their power to disempower unions
over time is one of the main things that stopped
social progress in Europe and laid the grounds
for neoliberalism. We must avoid the same
mistake.
Second, we must recognise that working-class
organisation is key to winning our demands.
Working class organisation is key not only
to the victories affecting specific groups
of workers, but to much broader demands as
well. For example, a recent study showed that
mass protest movements are most likely to
result in democratisation if led by the working
class (Dahlum, et al., 2019). This, coupled
with the wealth of historical evidence of
workers’ organisation leading to better
societies across the board, suggests that
if we want the climate and other movements
to win, we need to make sure that it’s led
by the working classes, not the middle, and
certainly not the ruling classes.
Third, we all need to think very seriously
about where to devote our time and energy.
Building movements takes time, but so does
building parties. Above all, we need to actually
win both reforms in the present and the kind
of long-term social change that takes us from
capitalism to a free, future society that
can help us deal with the climate crisis.
As you can tell from this video and how we
laid it out, we’re quite sure that we don’t
have all the answers to this, and you probably
don’t either. But we hope that this helps
us to understand the positions and arguments
involved better, so that we can find them.
