The presentation is a class report during my college years. Thus, this is a summary only on the Marxist ideology.

1. Class, Coercion
and the Marxist
Critique

2.  In the Philosophy of Life, Hegel portrayed
the Prussian state as divided into three
substantive divisions – the legislature, the
executive and the crown – which together
express ‘universal insight and will.
 The most important institution of the state
is the bureaucracy, an organization in which
particular interests are subordinated to a system
of hierarchy, specialization, expertise and
coordination on the one hand, and internal and
external pressures for competence and
impartiality on the other.

3.  Marx’s emphasis on the structure and
corporate nature of bureaucracies is significant
because it throws into relief the ‘relative autonomy’
of these organizations and foreshadows the
arguments elaborated in what may be his most
interesting work on the state, The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
 The study highlights Marx’s distance from
any view of the state as an ‘instrument of
universal insight’ or ‘ethical community’ for he
emphasized that the state apparatus is
simultaneously a ‘parasitic body’ on civil society
and an autonomous source of political action.

4.  The analysis offered in The Eighteenth
Brumaire, like that in the Critique, suggests that the
agents of the state do not simply coordinate
political life in the interests of the dominant class of
civil society.
 He emphasized the importance of its
information network as a mechanism for
surveillance, and the way in which the state’s political
autonomy is interlocked with its capacity to
undermine social movements threatening to the
status quo.

5.  Marx (and indeed Engels) insisted on the
direct dependence of the state on the
economic, social and political power of the
dominant class
 The state, in this formulation, serves directly
the interest of the economically dominant class: the
notion of the state as a site of autonomous political
action is supplanted by an emphasis illustrated by
the famous slogan of the Communist Manifesto.
‘The executive of the modern state is but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the
whole bourgeoisie’.

6.  The state, nevertheless, is characterized as
essentially dependent upon society and upon those
who dominate the economy: ‘independence’ is
exercised only to the extent that conflicts must be
settled between different sections of the capital
(industrialists and financiers, for example), and
between ‘domestic capitalism’ and pressures
generated by international capitalist markets.
 On the basis of position 1 it is possible to think
of the state as a potential arena of struggle, which
can become a key force for socialist change.

7.  In contradistinction, revolutionary socialist
traditions developed from position 2. Following Marx’s
analysis, Lenin insisted that the eradication of
capitalist relations of production must be accompanied
by the destruction of the capitalist state apparatus: the
state, as a class instrument, had to be destroyed and
direct democracy – as imagined in part by Rousseau –
must be installed.
 Accordingly, a dominant economic class can
rule without directly governing, that is, it can exert
determinate political influence without even having
representatives in government. This idea retains a
vital place in contemporary debates among
Marxists, liberal democratic theorists and others.

8.  Lenin (1870-1924) followed the tenets of Marx’s
position 2. His views are stated succinctly in State and
Revolution where he listed his first task as the
‘resuscitation of the real teaching of Marx on the
state’ . Lenin conceived of the state as a ‘machine for
the oppression of one class by another’.

9.  Although State and Revolution reiterates what I
have called Marx’s position 2, Lenin made more than
Marx did of one central point: the crystallization of
class power, within the organs of state administration
 Strong central control would be necessary after
the Revolution, but a precondition of revolutionary
success is the destruction of the ‘old state machine’.

10.  There are many tensions in Lenin’s treatment
of the state and political organization. He thought
the work of the new socialist order could be
conducted by workers organized in a framework of
direct democracy (soviets), yet he defended the
authority of the party in nearly all spheres. His
argument that state bureaucracies need not entail
fixed positions of power and privilege is
suggestive, but it remains, especially in light of the
massive problem of organization faced during and
after the Revolution, a very incomplete statement.

11.  Contemporary Marxism is, however, in a state
of flux.There are now as many differences between
Marxists as between liberals or liberal democrats.
Moreover, the reconsideration of the classical Marxist
account of the state had led to a reappraisal by some
Marxists of the liberal democratic tradition with its
emphasis on the importance of individual liberties
and rights, that is, citizenship

12. Bureaucracy, Parliaments and the
Nation-state

13.  Max Weber (1864-1920), a founder of
sociology, a champion of European liberalism and of
the German nation-state, contested this view
 In contrast to Marx, Engels and Lenin, Weber
resisted all suggestion that forms of state
organization were ‘parasitic’ and a direct product of
the activities of classes.
 He dismissed the feasibility of direct
democracy. Where the group grows beyond a certain
size or where the administrative function becomes
too difficult to be satisfactorily taken care of by
anyone whom rotation, the lot, or election may
happen to designate.

14.  Weber developed one of the most significant
definitions of the modern state; placing emphasis
upon two distinctive elements of its history:
territoriality and violence.
 The growing complexity of the administrative
tasks and the sheer expansion of their scope
increasingly result in the technical superiority of
those who have had training and experience, and
will thus inevitably favor the continuity of at least
some of the functionaries.

15. End Report