The Second Thought of Engels on the State

I don’t think there is all that of a change in Engels’s position. Right from 1847 Marx and Engels had insisted on the need for socialists to win control of political power and use it to end capitalism. They never envisaged the immediate abolition of the state (the public power of coercion) even though they envisaged its disappearance once the division of society into classes had been ended; socialism would be a stateless society. The question was how long this would take.

One reason they were not in favour of the immediate abolition of the state was that they anticipated that it would be needed to deal with a “slaveholders’ revolt” by the capitalist class. But there were also economic reasons to do with how socialised the productive forces were.

Engels was realistic enough to accept that this might take some time in the 1880s, so there would be a period during which the socialist working class would be in control of the state but not unchanged. As he says in one of the quotes in the article, as soon as they win control the working class should lop off its undemocratic elements and completely democratise it before using it to end class ownership (and deal with any slaveholders’ revolt).

We ourselves have made the point that there is a difference between translating Engels’s German as “withers away” (as favoured by Moscow) and “dies out” (the more literal translation). So that point has been noticed before.

Although for some 20 years from 1984 we were committed to the “immediate abolition of the state” this was finally rescinded in 2004 when Conference passed the following resolution;

“That the 1984 Conference Resolution, ‘This Conference affirms that socialism will entail the immediate abolition and not the gradual decline of the State,’ be rescinded and replaced with; ‘That as the State is an expression of and enforcer of class society, the capture of political power by the working class and the subsequent conversion of the means of living into common property will necessarily lead to the abolition of the state, as its function as custodian of class rule will have ended. Those intrinsically useful functions of the state machine will be retained by socialist society but re-organised and democratised to meet the needs of a society based on production for use.’”

In short, the working class only needs to retain the state for as long as it takes to end class ownership of the means of life, which today needn’t take very long. The purely administrative and non-coercive aspects of the ex-state would then be integrated into the democratic administrative structure of socialist society.

The occasion for the 1984 resolution was that one of the 16 had written about the “gradual decline” of the state. Most members were opposed to this but the resolution went too far in the other direction by talking of the “immediate abolition” of the state. So it wasn’t just the 16 who voted against it. I did too for instance. But it wasn’t for this that they were to be expelled (it was for repeatedly and deliberately refusing to carry out a conference resolution, backed by a Party poll, on the use of the various names under which the party was known). However, that resolution was a stick they used to beat us, accusing us of having become anarchists. Eventually, after 20 years, those of us opposed to it managed to get it rescinded and the previous, long-standing Party position restored.

I always prefer to say socialism will begin the dismantling of the State. An emphasis that it is a process, not an all-encompassing act.

And I usually add that there are some very useful government departments that may very well be preserved and adapted for a role inside socialism as a part of its administration.

I have just checked and found I have a copy of the original 1880 French version of Engels’s Socialisme Utopique et Socialisme Scientique, published by a Left Communist group (Le Mouvement Communiste) who comment in their introduction that it does not include the editorial changes Engels made for the German version.

I have to confess it reads better in the context of today. But Engels explains in the text itself of the German edition why he had made the changes — it was to distinguish his position from “the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand” (a better translation would be “overnight”) as well as those who talked of a “free State”.

I also have a French translation of the German version published by the French CP with tendentious subheadings inserted including abolition of the “class State” (to fit in with the official Stalinist position that the Russian State was a non-class one). But even that translates the second reference to the State’s disappearance as “the political authority of the State goes to sleep” (“entre en sommeil”).