The state is an inherent feature of class society. It serves as one of the primary means through which class relations are reproduced and maintained. Through the state the ruling class of each epoch fortifies their authority and domination over the classes whom they exploit and oppress. Today the state plays a crucial role in the processes of colonialism and imperialism, and acts to defend and reproduce racism and patriarchy. All of these components exist within the totality of capitalism itself. The state then cannot in practice be delineated from capitalism or the various oppressive social relations that it produces and which act to reproduce it as a social system.
For anarchists, the state is both a set of social relations and a concrete social structure. It is best understood as the centralised totality of institutions and structures - military, bureaucratic, legal and administrative - within a given territory through which class rule and private property are maintained. The institutions which make up the State can be viewed as encompassing the ‘means of social administration and “legitimised” coercion’. By centralising these functions within the state, alongside capitalist control of the means of production, the ruling class is positioned above the working class who remain dispossessed and alienated from political and economic self-management.
The Emergence of the State
While the state has taken various forms for millennia, it is not an inevitable aspect of human society, nor is it necessary for social functioning. Generally understood to have emerged to organise warfare and manage social inequality arising from the production of a material surplus in human societies, the state evolved alongside class society as a means of perpetuating it. This development occurred gradually between 10,000 and 3,000 years ago in various isolated places. However, the emergence of the state was not without resistance. The social forms of class and the State did not come to encompass the world because they were freely adopted, but primarily through acts of violence and dispossession towards the mass of people that rejected it.
The modern state began assuming its recognizable form alongside colonialism and the onset of capitalism. The State, during this period, functioned predominantly in a coercive and extractive capacity, facilitating capitalism's emergence as an economic system through the wealth accumulation provided by colonialism and the creation of a working class via the dispossession of the peasantry from access to land. This is not to argue that the State created capitalism but that the inter-development of emergent capitalism with the modern State was an essential feature of its success.
The Functions of the State
The assertion that "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism" holds particularly true for most individuals when considering the role of the state. For many, the state is viewed as an indispensable institution, crucial for safeguarding national interests and citizens from societal chaos, and essential for sustaining vital social functions like healthcare, infrastructure development, and the resolution of social conflicts. The state's self-justifying narrative positions itself as reformable but never abolishable, thereby narrowing perceived possibilities for societal change, reinforcing rather than challenging the nature of class society.
The modern state is characterised by its ‘political’ decision-making bodies, such as parliaments, an unelected bureaucracy overseeing governmental systems and the professional armed forces. As noted the primary purpose of the state is to ensure the reproduction of class rule. Importantly, the state does not necessarily act in the short-term interests of this or that capitalist, but rather in the long-term interests of capital as a whole. The state's functions encompass the adjudication of laws by courts, enforcement by police, military operations, border control, and the administration of various businesses and services. To adapt to the shifting needs of capitalism, and ongoing working-class resistance, the state has significantly transformed in the past century, taking on roles in service provision and welfare. The state can be considered to serve four major functions that contribute to maintaining the class structure: reproduction, repression, economics, and ideology.
Reproductive Function
Through its reproductive function, the State acts to ensure that the working class is being reproduced at the rate and in the manner required for the current needs of capitalism. This means ensuring that the working class is reproducing itself adequately through births, that immigration fills in gaps that natural births cannot, and that a necessary rate of healthy working-aged adults is maintained. Much of the recent attacks on reproductive rates can be understood in this light, as can a given state's orientation towards international migration.
It also entails ensuring that the working class is educated and trained to fulfil the roles capitalism requires of it, indoctrinating the belief that capitalism represents a natural and common sense way of structuring society. While public health care and education have often been hard-won in response to working-class power and should be defended, they also act as a primary means for the state to manage the reproduction of the working class to suit the shifting needs of the capitalist system.
Economic Function
Despite neoliberal rhetoric, the state plays a crucial role in sustaining capitalism, for example by providing bailouts, trade deals, market interventions, infrastructure development, and facilitating international labour. The state is not a constraint on the market but is crucial for its continued functioning. Imperialism, in particular, can be viewed as a manifestation of the state's economic function, as it seeks to reshape the global market to benefit national capitalists.
Repressive Function
Capitalism is predicated on a minority of capitalists hoarding access to the means of production, with the result being the dispossessed working class being coerced to sell its labour for profit. The state's repressive apparatus and monopoly on violence (via police, the judiciary and military) serve to reproduce this state of affairs by defending private property and attacking working-class resistance. We refer to the state maintaining a monopoly of violence, as under the state-system, the state legitimises its own use of violence, surveillance and coercion, while criminalising any violence, even in self-defence, which goes against the interests of capitalism.
The state uses its repressive apparatuses in particular against oppressed groups such as First Nations people in Australia, African-Americans in the US, and Muslims and LGBTQI people across the West. By constructing an internal population on whom the state wages a perpetual ‘justified’ war based on constructions such as racism, the state serves to justify its constant build-up of repressive force alongside calls to maintain and extend “national interests' ' on the international level.
Ideological Function
While violence is the state's base, it doesn't solely defend capitalism through repression. Equally crucial is the state's legitimation of capitalist rule, achieved through an interplay between law and morality. The state's ideological function is closely tied to its roles in reproduction, repression, and economics. For example, public education, as part of the reproductive function, creates the illusion of the state as the provider of social goods while indoctrinating children into the ideology that capitalism is the only legitimate social organisation.
Laws not only legitimise state violence but also establish the State as a necessary body by addressing certain societal issues. The State's primary objective however is not the common good, but legitimising the domination and exploitation inherent in its structure and guarding against societal upheaval. The ruling class recognises that if the police force were solely to protect private property (their primary objective), the true class-oriented nature of the State would become glaringly apparent, eroding the system's overall legitimacy. By integrating roles such as the investigation of domestic violence (which are rarely taken seriously) into the police force's portfolio, the State strengthens its justificatory narrative and strengthens the foundation of the capitalist-state system.
By instilling the belief that laws, even unjust ones, must be followed and challenged only through legal pathways, the State ensures that breaking the law is seen as a greater issue than challenging unjust laws. This limits the range of actions individuals may consider and aligns them with their oppressors in times of struggle.
Finally, the ideological mythos of the nation-state fosters patriotism and nationalism among the working class, tying them to their capitalist exploiters. By instilling a nationalist spirit from birth, the State ensures that the working class identifies with national capitalists rather than the international working class. This integration weakens working class power, independence, and international solidarity, compelling the working class to willingly endure wars, surveillance, and economic hardships for the supposed benefit of the nation, which ultimately serves the interests of capitalists.
The State and Capitalism: A Symbiotic Relationship
Through detailing the function of the modern state, we see it and capitalism are inextricably linked. Far from being neutral, the State serves the interests of the capitalist class by maintaining class rule and private property. Capitalism necessitates the State to facilitate accumulation and suppress exploited classes, while the State depends on the wealth generated by capitalism to sustain itself and augment its power. The illusion of separation between the free market and the State is a veneer that shields capitalists from direct scrutiny, redirecting working-class discontent towards politicians and bureaucrats. The result is that visions of change become mired in replacing one set of politicians with another rather than ending the rule of the capitalists themselves.
Yet changing politicians cannot change the reality of the State. For one the State goes far beyond whatever political party is currently in power. Bureaucrats, generals, and administrators rarely change based on the election cycle. Even with a change of political party nothing truly changes. Politicians, even if intent on acting against capital, find themselves reliant on its economic might, and at the whims of the arms of the State that reach beyond parliament. The perpetuation of class society is not contingent on the particular party in control but rather on class relations and the inherent structure of the State.
Conflict Within and Without
The ruling class under capitalism can be conceived as being made up of two interrelated and intermingled components. The economic component - the capitalists- is premised on the ownership and control of the means of production, while the political component - ie politicians, generals, high ranking-bureaucrats etc. - is predicated on control of the means of administration and legitimatised coercion. Often there is no clear distinction between the two and each component interacts with and benefits the other. The importance of such an analysis is not to create an arbitrary division within the ruling class between its economic and political components. Rather it is to make clear that to enter into the State, like to become a boss is to abandon the class position of worker.
While we do not seek to construct an arbitrary and abstract division within the ruling class this does not imply that within the ruling class, there are no concrete differences and even conflict. It is important to remember that the State serves to protect capitalism as a system, not necessarily individual capitalists. Often the State acts as a crucial battleground for these conflicts to play out. One of the benefits to the capitalists of our current political system is that regular elections can serve as one mechanism for these differences to play out while maintaining the essential unity of the ruling class. While there are differences within the ruling class they should not be overstated. They pale in comparison to what unites the ruling class; the maintenance of capitalist society and the growth of their class power at the expense of the workers.
The working class is not passive in this process. Rather working-class struggle and the exertion of workers' power are capable of gaining concessions and reforms from the state and can also stoke it into significant restructuring of capitalism to squash and crush down such activity. Many of the gains of the post-war era are the result of the former factor and the past 40 years of neo-liberalism of the latter. In essence reforms from the State must be understood as a complex interplay between material conditions, competing class interests and the class struggle. The working class can and should exert its force upon the State to win concessions as a means to improve our conditions and build up our strength. But this strength must be independent from the State, and the struggle waged not from within it but without.
The State and Socialism
The two major wings of socialism, anarchism and Marxism offer distinct perspectives on the state. While Marxists generally advocate for capturing and transforming the State, anarchists assert that the State, as a mode of class-based social organisation, cannot be wielded in the interests of the working class. Rather socialism requires its own distinct form of social organisation rooted in working-class self-management.
Critique of State Socialism
As anarchists, we reject the assertion from traditional Marxists of the need for the Workers State to manage the transition from capitalism to communism before its withering away. However, this assertion can become muddied due to the often contradictory definitions of the worker's state provided by the Marxist tendency. Within Marxism, the State is often defined in two contradictory ways depending on the circumstance.
The State as the organisation of one class oppressing another. In relation to socialism this amounts to smashing of capitalist rule through the collective force of the working-class through self-managed organs of workers' struggle. The State as centralised apparatus for the reproduction of class, made up of a series of institutions such as parliament, military, judiciary etc and controlled by a ruling minority above the majority.
While Marxists make frequent use of this dual meaning of the State, anarchists have been consistent in only accepting the second definition as constituting the State form. For anarchists, to refer to the act and process of the working class asserting its power over the capitalists as a Workers State serves little more than to obfuscate the reality of the State and the revolutionary process. The smashing of capitalist rule through self-managed organs of struggle, rather than representing the establishment of a new workers state, represents the negation of the state itself.
However, assuming Marxists are genuine in their commitment to the self-managed control of the working class in the process of destroying capitalist power, then our disagreement with the worker's state remains semantic. As famed Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta argued during the early period of the Russian Revolution:
[Perhaps] our Bolshevized friends intend with the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat” merely the revolutionary act of the workers in taking possession of the land and of the instruments of labor and trying to constitute a society for organizing a mode of life in which there would be no place for a class that exploited and oppressed the producers. Understood so the dictatorship of the proletariat would be the effective power of all the workers intent on breaking down capitalist society, and it would become anarchy immediately upon the cessation of reactionary resistance […]. And then our dissent would have to do only with words.
Unfortunately, the history of so-called workers' states indicates that this understanding of the worker's state is not taken seriously within Marxism itself. During the Russian Revolution, rather than representing the self-managed rule of the working class, the Workers State quickly came to dismantle and strangle the revolutionary self-management of the workers. Rather than withering away, the Workers State transformed itself into a leviathan of unmatched scale.
It is utopian to believe that a social structure based on minority rule such as the state will wither away after the revolution. A system of minority rule must be predicated upon the ability to command, to direct labour, collect taxes and maintain a monopoly on violence. This is to say that minority rule can only be based upon the domination of the majority. Such a system will not simply wither away when the last capitalist is gone. Minority rule can only continue to reproduce minority rule. Either the working class rules as a whole, in which case there is no state, or a minority rules over the workers, in which there can be no socialism.
When in the hands of socialists, the state has played a crucial role in suppressing workers' revolution and self-management precisely because it is a self-perpetuating institution inseparable from class domination. Workers' self-activity inevitably comes into conflict with the control of the State and the ruling class. The workers' state then is forced, in the name of the workers and socialism, to confront and destroy the emancipatory activity of the class. To defend socialism in name, the worker's state destroys socialism in practice.
We also reject the social democratic illusion of a class-neutral state that can be peacefully redirected to serve the interests of the workers. Social democracy deceives with the assurance of a gradual, peaceful, legal, and reformist societal transformation from capitalism to socialism through laws and decrees, and through the idea the state can be wielded against capitalism as a whole. The outcome is a political strategy deeply rooted in, and deferential to, the institutions of capitalism.
Throughout the 20th century, social democracy may have coincided with certain social advances, but these achievements were the result of working-class strength rather than parliamentary victories. Social democracy's role as an agent of the ruling classes is to quell these workers' struggle by co-opting the hopes of the working-class before they gain too much momentum and challenge the foundations of the capitalist system. In periods of low struggles, social democracy in power secures no wins and often directly contributes to the erosion of previously won victories. Like their revolutionary Marxist counterparts, trapped in the management of capitalism and its institutions, social democracy has consistently been subsumed into the system it claims to stand against.
The record of state-socialism is disastrous for the working class. The establishment of "social peace" under social democracy has led directly to a weakening of workers' resistance, and the subordination of mass organisations and movements to the electoral calendar or government policy. Revolutionary state socialism meanwhile, while “successful” on paper, has provided the working class little more than repression, the integration of the working-class into the nation-state ideal, authoritarianism and the death of socialism as an act of working-class self-emancipation.
The Anarchist Position on the State
If the State is a form of capitalist social organisation it cannot simply be wielded by the workers in their interests. Rather the workers must develop a form of social organisation suited to the needs of socialism. We call this form of social organisation organs of workers power.
Such organs have always been created through the process of class struggle and fully developed during revolutionary periods. Examples include revolutionary trade unions, workers councils, workers' militias and self-defence committees and communal assemblies. Through such organs the working-class can fulfil two dual functions; firstly it is through such organs that the class struggle and revolution can be waged and capitalism overcome. Secondly, such organs provide a ready-made means to replace the structures of the state with structures directly under the self-managed control of the working-class.
These structures must be based on mandated delegation, rather than elected representation. While both systems can entail electing individuals to take on roles, under a representative system, those elected maintain independent decision-making authority, and remain to differing degrees unaccountable to the base that has elected them. In comparison, mandated delegation is strictly organised from the bottom up, with authority based within mass assemblies which provide strict mandates dictating the actions and activities of the delegates elected to higher bodies, who can be recalled at any time. This allows for complex societal coordination, built from the bottom up and in which the working-class, rather than its “representatives” remain in the driving seat.
Through organs of workers' power, the class can expropriate both the means of production alongside the means of administration and legitimate coercion thus establishing self-managed, collective and participatory working-class control of society itself, the fundamental basis of socialism.
Organs of class power will inevitably be confronted by the dying embers of the capitalist state. It is through this inevitable violent confrontation that the success of the revolution will be decided. This is why the creation of such organs should not be a task left until after the revolution. Rather they must be built through the worker's daily struggles against capitalism. The organisations we build and nurture in the struggle for capitalism lay the foundations for the society to come. For this reason, they must mirror the socialism we seek to build - directly democratic, federalist and united based on shared class interests while accumulating the power needed to achieve it.