4. Capitalism and the State¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the author dismantles Eduard Bernstein’s reformist thesis that the gradual evolution of the State, coupled with the extension of democracy, will peacefully deliver socialism. The core argument is that Bernstein’s understanding of the capitalist State is undialectical, fixating on one tendency while ignoring its contradictory opposite. The State does indeed take on new functions and intervene more in economic life, a process Marx noted in labour legislation. This appears to prepare the ground for socialism, a “fusion of the State to society.” However, this is only half the truth.
The author insists that capitalist development simultaneously transforms the State in the opposite direction, sharpening its class character. This contradiction becomes explosive once capitalist development reaches a certain threshold. At that point, the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class begin to clash with the needs of further economic progress. Two phenomena are cited as proof: tariff policy and militarism. Historically, both were progressive, even revolutionary, for capitalism—tariffs nurtured young industries, and wars unified fragmented national markets. Now, however, they have become parasitic. Tariffs no longer protect developing industry but artificially sustain moribund production and serve as weapons in inter-capitalist national struggles, with agriculture, not industry, driving protectionism. Militarism, once a motor of capitalist expansion, has become a self-perpetuating “malady,” driven by internal mechanical logic and the need for capital placement and domestic class control, leading inevitably to a catastrophic war whose objectives are indecisive but whose outcome will be fatal to development.
In this clash between capitalist development and class interest, the State sides with the latter. Its class character and its general social functions, once fused, now diverge into open contradiction. The State’s growing “social control” is itself penetrated by class domination. Democracy, far from being a lever for gradual socialism, is the political form of this contradiction. Parliamentarism is democratic in form but bourgeois in content; the moment it threatens to negate that class content, the bourgeoisie sacrifices the democratic form. Bernstein’s project of winning a parliamentary majority to socialise society is a liberal illusion that mistakes the formal shell for the real substance.
The chapter culminates in a devastating polemical image. Fourier’s plan to turn the seas into lemonade was fantastic but imaginative. Bernstein’s plan to turn the sea of capitalist bitterness into socialist sweetness by pouring in bottles of reformist lemonade is merely insipid. The production relations of capitalism may approach those of socialism, but its political and juridical relations erect a steadily rising wall between them. Social reforms and democracy do not breach this wall; they consolidate it. Only the “hammer blow of revolution”—the conquest of political power by the proletariat—can break it down.