On Marxism and the State¶

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument¶

The central thesis is that the state is not a neutral arbiter or eternal institution but a historically specific product of class society — a specialised apparatus of coercion created by the minority to suppress the majority. Phil Mitchinson argues that the state cannot be reformed or gradually transformed in the interests of the working class; it must be smashed and replaced with a qualitatively different form of organisation: a workers' democracy that begins to wither away from its inception. The article positions this as the decisive dividing line between Marxism and reformism, insisting that the experience of the Paris Commune, as interpreted by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, provides the only viable strategic orientation for the working class.

Theoretical Grounding¶

The analysis draws directly on the classical Marxist tradition of state theory, anchored in three foundational texts: Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Marx's The Civil War in France, and Lenin's State and Revolution. The argument operates within the framework of historical materialism, tracing the state's emergence from the development of a surplus, the division of society into classes, and the consequent need for "special bodies of armed men" to maintain class rule.

The article explicitly rejects both anarchist anti-statism (which it characterises as mysticism) and reformist gradualism (which it treats as a misunderstanding of Marx's warning that workers cannot simply take over the existing state machinery). Instead, it insists on the dialectical proposition that the working class requires a state precisely to end class rule — a "semi-state" that begins to wither away as it abolishes class distinctions. This positions the article firmly within the Leninist tradition of the revolutionary seizure of power, while grounding its strategic conclusions in the concrete historical experience of the Paris Commune rather than abstract principle.

Conjunctural Relevance¶

The article was published in 2005, a period when the British labour movement was still recovering from the defeats of the 1980s — the miners' strike (1984-85), the destruction of the print unions, and the consolidation of New Labour's accommodation to neoliberalism under Tony Blair. Mitchinson references these defeats directly: the sequestration of union funds, the use of police and army on picket lines, and the media's role in demonising striking workers. The argument is thus situated in a conjuncture where reformist strategies had demonstrably failed, yet the labour movement remained trapped within the framework of parliamentary politics and legalistic industrial action.

The article also gestures toward the broader geopolitical context of the early 2000s — the "war on terror," the erosion of civil liberties, and the continued existence of NATO-linked contingency planning (Gladio) for military intervention against left-wing governments. The South African state's collusion with Inkatha and the military coups in Latin America and Africa are cited as evidence that the ruling class will abandon democratic forms when they threaten capitalist interests. This connects the theoretical argument to a living history of state violence that the author insists is not past but ongoing.

Where the Argument Continues¶

The article is a relatively compressed introduction to Marxist state theory, and several threads are left underdeveloped. The question of how a workers' state would actually function in practice — the concrete mechanisms of democratic control, the relationship between central planning and local autonomy, the handling of counter-revolution — is gestured toward but not elaborated. The "withering away" of the state is presented as a necessary outcome but not explored in terms of the transitional forms it might take.

These questions are taken up elsewhere in the IDOM corpus. The relationship between the state and the party, the question of dual power, and the experience of the Russian Revolution are treated in greater depth in other articles on the Marxist theory of the state and the history of the Bolshevik Revolution. The critique of reformism and the parliamentary road to socialism is developed more fully in articles on the British Labour Party and the evolution of social democracy. Against the Stream episodes on state theory and the Paris Commune provide further elaboration of the strategic conclusions drawn here.

Connections¶

The article sits within a broader Marxist literature on the state that includes:

Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — the foundational text on the state's emergence from class society
Lenin, State and Revolution — the most systematic treatment of the Marxist theory of the state and the necessity of smashing the bourgeois apparatus
Marx, The Civil War in France — the analysis of the Paris Commune as the first example of a workers' state
Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte — the earlier analysis of the French state that Marx revised in light of the Commune
Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society — a later Marxist analysis of the state's role in advanced capitalism, though one that operates within a different strategic framework
Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism — a structuralist Marxist account that the article implicitly rejects in favour of the classical Leninist position

The article also connects to the broader IDOM corpus on the nature of bourgeois democracy, the critique of reformism, and the strategic orientation toward revolutionary rather than parliamentary roads to socialism.

Key Quotes¶

"The state is a product and manifestation of the irreconcilability of class contradictions. The state arises where, when, and to the extent that class contradictions objectively cannot be reconciled. And conversely, the existence of the state proves that class contradictions are irreconcilable."
"The state in so far as it is a state will be there to suppress the people, and in so far as it becomes an instrument of the people it ceases to be a state."
"The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for their own purposes."
"While the capitalists need a state to maintain class rule, the workers need one precisely to end it."
"The first act in which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is at the same time its last independent act as a state."
"Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong — into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe."