Marxist attitude to the state¶
Core Argument¶
In their analysis of the state, Marx and Engels, drawing decisively from the experience of the Paris Commune, concluded that the working class cannot simply seize the existing state machinery and repurpose it for its own ends. The only viable road to socialism, they argued, is a revolutionary one. This perspective is systematically developed in Lenin’s State and Revolution, which contends that Marx and Engels’ theory of the inevitability of violent revolution applies specifically to the bourgeois state. The text insists that fostering this understanding of violent revolution is central to the entirety of Marx and Engels’ teaching. It levels a sharp polemic against the social-chauvinist and Kautskyist currents—and, by extension, the Stalinists—accusing them of betraying this fundamental tenet by neglecting such revolutionary propaganda.
The historical context of this theoretical position is illuminated by the post-war settlement of Germany. At the 1945 Potsdam Agreement, the USA, Britain, and the Soviet Union formalised the terms for occupying Germany, dividing the country into four zones—American, British, French, and Soviet—with Berlin, though located in the Soviet sector, also split into four. Plans were discussed among the Allied sections to reduce Germany’s post-war industry and return it to a rural-based economy. This period also saw the incendiary articles of Ilya Ehrenburg, a Russian novelist and war journalist, who called for vengeance against the German people. These events underscore the concrete political terrain upon which the Marxist theory of the state must be applied, reinforcing the necessity of a revolutionary break with the existing bourgeois apparatus rather than its mere administrative takeover.