Marx and the Bureaucratic State

...therefore, the basic premises of historical materialism are valid only for "evolved" countries...

...The answers are becoming ever more tangled and confused...

...Marx's view of reality inspired him to develop a concept of history in which the SaintSimonian mystique of railways as vehicles of universal brotherhood joined with the Manchesterian faith in the coming "millennium of cotton...

...The state arises independent of the classes...

...Most likely Marx and Cobden never suspected that the union of industry and demo cracy was about to turn the state into the standard-bearer of economic, political, and cultural nationalism...

...Meanwhile, Cobden had lost his seat in the Commons for opposing the Crimean War, while the England of Palmerston, Disraeli, and Cecil Rhodes was in the throes of excitement over its imperialist expansion...

...and so he condemned it to utopia and defeat...

...State and church justify their existence only as far as they manage and administer the interests of the productive bourgeoisie...

...A single conception of freedom serves as the basis of Marxist critique, whether it is directed against "the despotic form of capitalist management," the factory which denies to the worker free initiative and ties him to the order of "superior hierarchies," or against the executive power which represents "the heteronomy of the nation in opposition to its autonomy...

...The state, writes Engels in his Origin of the Family, is usually an agency of the strongest class, which controls the economy and therefore wins political hegemony...

...Narrowness of spirit and national exclusiveness become ever more anachronistic...

...Here the two "driving forces" of history, economic base and class struggles, do not operate...

...It went on to assert the complete autonomy of the economic order and the pre-eminence of the values which govern the area of private or "class" interests over other social needs and, especially, the needs of the state as such...

...Marx recognizes in Adam Smith's attacks on state intervention the language of the revolutionary bourgeoisie: All these high professions—sovereign, judge, officer, priest, etc...

...But driven by an insatiable appetite for "subjects," it abolished feudal, ecclesiastical, and municipal autonomies, just as capitalism expropriated independent producers, craftsmen, and peasants...

...The two basic classes of civil society were in full flowering when the coup d'etat cut their elan...

...A Dialectical Necessity JUST AS the despotism of capital was needed to impede the pulverization of productive forces and to arouse the creative forces latent in collective labor, so the state was needed to overcome medieval particularism and to engage the masses in collective work...

...Jefferson, the founder of American liberalism, had an almost exclusively agricultural conception of democracy...

...Some workers, including Tolain, were candidates in the 1863 parliamentary elections...

...in such countries, a hybrid situa tion prevails, so that no single part of the po pulation could dominate the others...

...For Marx, the city is the true scene of history...

...The State," Marx says in the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State, remains independent only in underdeveloped countries "where dis tinctions of rank and estate, which have van ished in more advanced countries, have not yet become completely transformed into classes and continue to perform one function of the latter...

...In the end, the state becomes the "boss" [padrone] of society...

...Originally," writes Engels in his introduction to the Paris Commune: Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, at first through a simple division of labor...

...In his polemic with Bakunin he refused to admit the possibility of the bureaucratic degeneration of political organizations, labor unions, and workers' coopera tives...

...Washington's phrase, "Our first rule of conduct with regard to other nations should be to have as few political relations with them as possible, while strengthening our commercial relations," asumes for Marx a definitive value...

...the 30 million people who emigrated to the United States between 1850 and 1910 certainly helped to frustrate Marx's prophecy...

...And he adds: America is not yet threatened by such tension because the door of colonization is still open there and ever new populations spread themselves over the Mississippi plains...

...It led him to describe the end of national antagonisms in the very year that marked the beginning of the century of nationalism: "National divisions and antagonisms between the peoples are vanishing before the growth of the bourgeoisie, the freedom of commerce, a world market, and the tendency toward a uniformity of industrial production and hence of the corresponding conditions of life...

...Max Weber, who made the first systematic study of secrecy in various bureaucracies in his Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft (Economics and Society), noted the univer sality of the bureaucratic principle and pre dicted that "the rule of secrecy will be ex tended still further with the bureaucratization of political parties...

...Second, their development has been slowed due to the absence of an active class struggle...

...KOSTAS PAPAIOANNOU The State as Anachronism LIBERALS HELD that the despotic bureau cratic state should be rejected as a survi val of the mercantilist age, i.e...

...It is obvious that class struggle did not produce the expected results...

...the feudal dignitaries into paid office-holders...

...Stadtluft macht Frei: city air makes men free...

...Hence, it is not the "economically dominant" class that creates the state...

...but in his Philosophy of History he drew opposite conclusions from those of Marx: "Founded upon the individual and his natural propensity for acquisition and profit," American society may have started on the right road toward "the state of the future," but has not yet passed the threshold of true political life, "because a true state exists only when there is a differentiation of classes, when wealth and poverty become enormous, and when large masses are no longer able to satisfy their elementary needs...

...Admitting the possibility that society may dispense with bureaucracy, there are still some questions to be discussed for which there have been, so far, no answers...

...Hegel, too, was impressed by the exquisitely economic structure of American life...

...The continuous increase in the number of farms sufficiently explains why "the need of an organic state" was felt so late in America...

...now he discovered that the bureaucratic state, far from being weakened by the advance of capitalism, continued to develop and to extend its influence after the end of absolute monarchy and through all the bourgeois revolutions...

...Persons of high rank are the servants of the public, just as lackeys and buffoons are their servants...

...Peasant Barbarism UNTIL THAT MOMENT Marx and Engels had believed that the peasants, "incapable of independent action," were eternally doomed to carry out the orders of the urban population, "more concentrated, more easily convinced and aroused...

...And so the general interest of the nation is transformed into "the private property of bureaucracy," a power that oppresses the citizens...

...Old national industries have been crushed and humiliated and they are still being crushed and humiliated every day...

...The aim of freedom is to ensure that "socialized man," i.e...

...Any manifestation of the political spirit is to bureaucracy a betrayal of its secrets...

...But in this they were not much different from other classes...

...Hence Marx's bitter disillusionment about France in 1852...

...As long as virgin lands offer new room for settlers, political life of the community can be restricted to a local democracy, without the need of a centralized state structure...

...The most generous (and utopian) theses of English liberals found their definitive formulation in Marx...

...There is a deep analogy between alienation by the state and economic alienation...

...Accordingly, the political influence of the allotment farmer finds its ultimate expression in an Executive power that subjugates the commonweal to its own autocratic will...

...For Marx, America remained the most accomplished example of the modem state: "The most modem French, English, and American writers unanimously state that, in America, the state exists only for the sake of private property...

...Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power, that protects them from above, bestows rain and sunshine upon them...

...In the Asiatic system, "the state was the principal exploiter of the masses, the principal holder of excess and unconsumed produce...

...Here we have one of the worst examples of that "essentialist" method that Marx constantly abused...

...It will be possible to compare America to Europe only when "the immense territory of state is settled, and civil society no longer expands but turns upon itself...

...the "government-controlled" economy which prevailed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Peru, and all archaic societies which arose out of "the need for collective control of natural forces—especially water...

...the triumph of Napoleon II was "a reaction of the countryside again-t the city," a revenge of the amorphous peasant mass upon the true classes...

...When collective control proves inefficient (or vanishes altogether), the state confronts society as an autonomous and dominating power...

...Yet Marx remained desperately attached to the notion of the state as mere superstructure, which he had borrowed from English radicals...

...In this view, political relations originate in the economic relations of production and exploitation...

...of an economy dominated by nonproducing classes...

...feudalism...

...Once again class struggle proved ineffective...

...The need to control water levels in areas periodically devastated by river floods made the primitive village communities ask for state intervention and so submit to its bureaucratic apparatus...

...It has fused the "mystery" denounced by Marx with the "commercial secret," for which the capitalists have so often been blamed...

...MARX HAD violently driven from his intellectual horizon the idea that the state may have its own history and development...

...Hegel...

...The party which officially represents modem English society is the Free Traders [the Manchesterians, reformers of Parliament and finance...

...The "independence" of the Stalinist state and the gigantic revolution which put Soviet bureaucracy in charge of agriculture were obviously not caused by the political influence of the peasants (which was nonexistent) and still less by the internal dialectics of small peasant property...

...a state against which they must maintain a permanent army...

...The revolutionary mole was blind, and it found seers who made it their mission to lead it to "the promised land of socialism...

...The Economic Bases IT IS SURPRISING to what point Marx misunderstood the true nature of modern democracy...

...The decisive factor is, therefore, not control of the means of production but the monopoly in the management of "common affairs" and the simultaneous atro phy of "collective control," an inevitable consequence of the complexity of social life (and not only of economic life...

...But Marx's theses on the economic bases of the bureaucratic state are no less fallacious...

...A "product of society," the state becomes an independent power through the course of its internal logic: the "representatives of common interests" learn to put themselves above the community and pursue their own interests precisely insofar as the growing complexity of social life, internal tensions, and external conflicts make collective control impossible...

...But this absence does not mean, for Marx, that there is no exploitation of human labor...

...These specialized organs of the management of "common affairs" acquire an autonomy that becomes greater the more society shows itself incapable of dealing with them...

...Before the Executive power, the nation abdicates all will of its own, and submits to the orders of an outside authority...

...Hence authority is the foundation of its knowledge and worship of authority its mentality...

...MARX AND THE BUREAUCRATIC STATE Oriental Despotism IN Das Kapital, Marx attributes to a similar alienation the establishment of the "Asiatic" system, the first economic system in history, i.e...

...Marxism inherited from liberalism the belief that the role of the state should be reduced to a minimum and that, in the future, a form of spontaneous co-operation would ensure a harmonious development of society without the need of any coercion...

...The same objective mystification through which the capitalist comes "to represent, to the individual worker, the unity and the will of the collective worker [the enterprise], also transforms the MARX AND THE BUREAUCRATIC STATE state into fetishist representation of the general will...

...But it also makes impossible any comparison between the United States and the countries of Europe, because Europe, for all its migrations, does not have a similar movement of peoples...

...The State in America AMONG THESE "modern" writers is Hegel, for whom "the land of liberty" was "the land of the future," in which "the center of gravity of world history will manifest itself...

...Once this is obtained," Marx concludes, "the revolution perfects the executive power, reduces it to its simplest expression, isolates it, and directs against it all its accusations so as to concentrate against it all its destructive force...

...Yet state and state ownership are only abstractions, which camouflage the activities of certain groups and the development of certain social relationships...

...this fearful body of parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society, stopping all its pores...

...And he believed also that the "ancient," "feudal," and "bourgeois" systems of production which followed the "Asiatic" system were the results of a spontaneous development of civil society, just as their systems of social stratification were formed outside the political sphere, i.e...

...The only societies capable of direct democracy have been peasant societies like the classical city states and the Swiss cantons...

...All the more reason, therefore, to admire the amazing perspicacity he showed when analyzing bureaucratic mentality in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State (1843) . The Reign of the Secret THE SECRECY OF bureaucracy under absolutism (and, in a lesser way, under parliamentary democracy) has been a constant source of indignation for both liberals and socialists...

...The conclusion is interesting, inasmuch as it demonstrates that precapitalist societies are not subject to those historical forces which in advanced countries Marxism considers the sole determining factors...

...In any case, America, still in the "plowing-up" stage, could not be considered an accomplished example of the modern state: "When, as is happening in Europe, the number of farmers decreases, and the inhabitants, instead of crowding the countryside, abandon it for city industries and businesses, they will form an homogeneous system of political society and will feel the need of an organic state...

...The working class too, temporarily paralyzed by the terror which followed the coup d'etat, soon became strong enough to assert itself in both politics KOSTAS PAPAIOANNOU and labor organization...

...with the growth of trade and industry, individual wealth increases, while the state, reduced to MARX AND THE BUREAUCRATIC STATE mendicity, sinks ever more deeply into debt and lets itself be bought by the bourgeoisie...

...and the confusing design of conflicting medieval seigniories, into the well regulated plan of a government, whose work is subdivided and centralized as in the factory...

...They live off the production of others...

...The spirit of bureaucracy is the secret, the mystery, kept in the bosom of the hierarchy and preserved by its nature of closed corporation...

...There exist, however, other passages of Marx, and especially of Engels, which postulate a clear distinction between the two modes of power...

...Marx bestowed upon the revolutionary proletariat a heritage that included his inability to understand the problem modern bureaucracy poses for modern society...

...Marx, too, saw industry as "the thermometer of the workers' progress," and the thermometer of the military power of states...

...are placed by Smith, from the economic point of view, on the level of the lackeys and buffoons who divert the idle rich...

...But now the "class of barbarians," almost put "outside civilization," was on the march...

...at the very moment when the Sepoy Rebellion unchained nationalist passions, he prophesied the coming of "the day when England will no longer possess a single hectare of land in Asia...

...hence, political power is a "superstructure" of economic power...

...Bureaucracy as Parasite THIS AFFIRMATION of Marx that the liberal and proletarian perspectives are harmonious can be found again in his notes on The History of Economic Doctrines, which was to * " `To preserve the secrets of party and stateand to be on guard in all sectors and in all circumstances' is the eleventh commandment of a good Bolshevik"—"Party Regulations," Pravda, October 14, 1952...

...Unfortunately, Marx did not develop his thesis, which is so topical today, on the transformation of the state into "the principal holder of excess and unconsumed produce...

...And, just as the factory regulations are only "a caricature of the true social regulation of work," so the bureaucracy represents "the inferior and brutal form of a centralization still saturated with its opposite, i.e...

...But, as soon as "class" factors start to act upon American society, they rapidly transform it into a "compact system of political society...

...The power of the state, replies Marx, does not operate in a vacuum...

...There, too, the increased political influence of the peasants produced results contrary to those that scandalized Marx...

...And when the peasants, and still more the industrialists and workers, asked for state intervention, it was not to protect them from "the other classes," but against foreign competition...

...And Marx comments: "Political economy in its classical period, like the bourgeoisie in its phase of expansion, is severe toward the organization of the state...

...The uncontested domination—and he believed it to be uncontested—of the "industrial and civilized nations of the West" over "the agrarian, barbarous, or semi-civilized nations of the East...

...Hegel notes in this connection that "the free states of North America, unlike European countries, have no frontiers with a hostile state, i.e...

...It is because it works with a method...

...When the French Revolution smashed all local, territorial, communal, and provincial powers, it merely continued and extended the centralizing action of the monarchy...

...Hence, in the Asiatic system the state is "the supreme proprietor of land, and political sovereignty is agricultural property concentrated on a national scale...

...Thus, Marx views the increase of public debt only as an indirect proof of the triumph of civil society over the state: "The state," he wrote, "has fallen completely into the hands of private proprietors...

...Political estates," Marx adds, "are transformed into social estates through a progress of history...

...Marx attributed the independence of the state to the immaturity of bourgeois economy and the absence of class struggle...

...Today, considering the homines ad servitutem paratos (men born to be slaves) who boast of their "monolithism," he would have said that democracy is to totalitarianism as the New Testament is to worship of stones...

...Marx thought—and said so in The Eighteenth Brumaire— that if the National Assembly, representative of the nation's autonomy, had "given more time to class struggles," it would have "made the executive power its dependant...

...it produces an even level of conditions and of persons over the whole surface of the country...

...Its action is always determined by class aspirations, which are the true protagonists of history: `Bonaparte represents a definite class, the most numerous of French society, the small peasant proprietors...

...According to Hegel, the exact contrary occurs: the authority of the state is strengthened and placed MARX AND THE BUREAUCRATIC STATE above society as class conflicts grow more serious...

...We may deplore the fact that Marx, for all his genius as the theoretician and critic of "ideologies," lacked the historical sense needed to understand that his theory of the state was merely an indication of perspectives necessarily limited in validity...

...It perfects parliamentary power to enable itself to overturn it later," by showing the complete impotence of the legislative with regard to the executive...

...And again, the peasant masses of Scandinavia showed themselves capable of economic and political initiatives that proved decisive in the formation of democratic institutions...

...The same subterranean revolution which reduces the exploiting class to a few magnates, isolated from the immense proletarian masses, and prepares the expropriation of the expropriators, also isolates the state from the enslaved and terrorized population and strips it of all its tinsel: "The revolution goes to the bottom of things...

...it, therefore, allows the exercise of an even influence upon all parts of this even mass from a high central point downwards...

...tremendous bureaucratic and military organization...

...The agricultural protection which France decreed in 1881 was only a warning notice of a policy of general MARX AND THE BUREAUCRATIC STATE protection, demanded by all classes and granted by the Republic...

...Only the authoritarian intervention from the center could break the isolation of the villages and only a state founded upon forced labor could offer an effective response to the great challenge of nature...

...Marx was doubtlessly right in emphasizing the French peasants' need for protection...

...Marx has rarely been so mistaken...

...it did not repel the invasion of the state...

...And since it was only the French Revolution "that accomplished the transformation of political estates into social estates," it is surprising that Marx should have so quickly forgotten the recent, for him almost contemporary, creation of civil society and said, "The civil society is the true theater of all history...

...As the enslavement of the producers is a necessary stage of a dialectics of ascension and redemption, so the crucifixion of society by the state is the necessary precondition of its future resurrection...

...They are the party of the conscious bourgeoisie, of industrial capital, which wants to use its social force as a political force to extirpate the last arrogant vestiges of feudal society...

...Marx, for whom class membership and consciousness were the only titles of social nobility, refused to consider the peasants a class...

...Such systematic ignorance of the true nature and origin—economic or not—of the bureaucratic state inevitably produced the falsest illusions on the coming "weakening" and disappearance of the state...

...Cobden declared in 1835 that "the KOSTAS PAPAIOANNOU middle and working classes of England have no other interest than the preservation of peace...

...it "did not want to play with fire...

...this is why there is no private ownership of land...

...By "free trade" they mean the absolute freedom of movement for capital, freed from all political, national and religious ties...

...Is it still in purgatory...

...And the fact that the law of 1864, which gave the workers freedom of assembly and strike, was not won by strike action shows that the bureaucracy of Napoleon III could not be even remotely compared to a modem apparat...

...All these unproductive classes are, to Smith, as they are to the industrial capitalist and the working class, merely the `petty expenditure' of production, which should be reduced to a minimum...

...In primitive ("classless") societies, there arise "certain matters of common interest which must be entrusted to individuals: settlement and suppression of disputes, control of water rights, religious functions," writes Engels in his Anti-DUhring...

...Marx attributed the "independence" of the state to the lack of strong class differentiation and the immaturity of social antagonisms...

...The proletarian revolution announced in the Communist Manifesto would probably have happened, but for the existence of the immense American prairies...

...The demand, the wish, the dream of a certain type of European liberal—to include and absorb the political fact in the economic fact —becomes for Marx an immediate and imminent reality and the prospective center of his sociological doctrine...

...For him, just as the quality of "stoneness" is the essence of the stone, so the essence of the peasant masses is their incapacity for self-defense, self-determination, and participation in power...

...There he gives ample quotes from The Wealth of Nations, in which Adam Smith "gives free rein to his hatred of the unproductive class"—a "class which includes employees considered superior, officials, officers, priests, judges, lawyers, etc...

...Civil society "turned upon itself," i.e...

...Many of his supporters were independent farmers, stubborn opponents of urban capitalism and by no means inclined to seek the protection of the state and to fall on their knees before any "superior authority...

...it, consequently, calls from all sides for the direct intervention of the Government and for the intervention of the latter's immediate organs...

...Certainly, the French Revolution would not have happened if Germany had still been covered by immense forests...

...It has turned into military secrets not only the most "material" social and political facts but even—a unique phenomenon in the modern world—statistics on real wages and standards of living.* The regimes which claim to be "Orthodox Marxist" are the only ones which do not publish tables of wages and salaries...

...In this other, more problematic version of Marxist sociology, the state is no longer a simple excrescence of the ruling class and the explanation of its origin calls for a wider dialectic than the one which accounts for the development of classes...

...Where then did the state get sufficient strength to smother the class struggle and thus to paralyze "the driving force" of history...

...ceased to expand, only around 1920, when the city population for the first time surpassed the rural popula tion...

...But we must not forget that it was by following "the line worked out in detail by Marx and Engels" for the definite extermination of bureaucracy that Lenin and his companions laid the foundations of the most formidable bureaucratic state of all history...

...Bukharin answers this question in his Theory of Historical Materialism: in systems of production where the "management of production is almost identified with the administration of the state [and] the greater part of production belongs to the state," the class that ruled the people enslaved by the state was the bureaucracy...

...In nineteenth-century Scandinavia, the struggle between liberals and conservatives took the form of a struggle between an urban patriciate and the country people who were the chief source of democratic sentiment...

...Marx believed he attended the mystical birth of a truly ecumenic society which would eventually embrace the whole world and had already made national wars—and, more generally, national politics —superfluous and anachronistic...

...He believed that government control of the economy was characteristic of an extremely archaic stage of social development...

...He derived from it an unreal picture of the social tendencies at work in a Europe of nascent nationalisms and industrial wars, which were soon to spread across the earth...

...It is true, nonetheless, that, for all the immaturity of his formulas, he did not—contrary to the intentions attributed to him by his disciples— claim to have advanced a general theory of the state in history...

...And it was only during the Great Depression that, for the first time in American history, "the large masses" were "no longer able to satisfy their needs...

...The medieval bourgeois had only local ties, the slaves never created political organizations...

...They could not imagine the organization of "monolithic" cadres into groups which oper ate without discussion...

...Did not Aristotle consider the class of small rural proprietors the social base of a true politeia...

...We may now understand why, for Marx, "democracy is to all other political forms as their Old Testament...

...It is something more and different, since it forces the whole society (and hence all the classes) to alienate itself from the foreign power that has wedged itself between the community and the common work...

...The princely privileges of the landed proprietors and cities were transformed into so many attributes of the Executive power...

...True, he foresaw the growing bureaucratization of the economy...

...In his hypothesis, international relations are, and always will be, political relations, and the subordination of civil society to the state becomes necessary by virtue of the pre-eminence of international relations...

...freely associated" producers, control directly all the activities of social life and become themselves the leaders and protagonists of their liberation...

...Any progress of bureaucratic centralization means an ever-deeper frustration of society...

...and the universal expansion of the [English] bourgeoisie, the [anticipated] penetration of capitalism into agricultural countries [which then had nine-tenths of the world's population]—all this persuaded him to launch the hypothesis of a planetary "world economy" in which the old independent nations would become loyal economic provinces of a worldwide division of labor...

...It arose, in the first place, to ensure order and to protect the bourgeoisie from feudal brutality and, afterward, to extend its field of action on a national scale...

...The same blind necessity that enriches the "collective worker" and impoverishes the individual worker strengthens the state and empties society of its substance...

...KOSTAS PAPAIOANNOU become Volume IV of Das Kapital...

...This is how Marx judged the political situation of England in an article which appeared in the New York Daily Tribune of August 25, 1852: The Tories, the Whigs, and the party of Peel already belong to the past...

...Actually, from the times of the Second Dynasty, access to the "secrets of the King" was a distinctive characteristic of the official class, so much so that the prime minister was called "chief of the King's secrets, director of all of the King's works...

...The very complexity of social Iife offers, day by day, "new material for the administration of the state...

...Marx believed that the implacable law which doomed small peasant property to a slow but sure death also cut the ground from under the bureaucracy, making it completely superfluous: "With the progressive decay of small KOSTAS PAPAIOANNOU peasant property, the whole edifice of the state, which had been built on it, collapses...

...Yet he, who took his model of the modem state from American democracy, should have been more cautious...

...in Italy and Flanders] to unite in joint water utilization schemes, imposed in the East [where the level of civilization was too low and where the territories were too big to permit the rise of such associations] the centralizing intervention of the government...

...Thus, the "premises of state power" are placed outside the technical and economic determinisms that bring about the formation of classes...

...But the Assembly did not do so...

...What the citizens lose in their capacity for self-determination and collective initiative is concentrated in the powers of the state...

...All this is the exact opposite of what Marx believed to have found in his time...

...The regulation of water levels was thus "one of the material bases of the domination of the state over small communities," since the weakness of individual villages prevented them from establishing irrigation works...

...Against all common sense, he proclaimed the theory that the bureaucratization of the modern state was an epiphenomenon of the precapitalist (land parcel) structure of agriculture: The system of ownership, involved in the system of allotments, lends itself by nature for the groundwork of a powerful and numerous bureaucracy...

...the feeble economic articulations of a very weak industry and trade are ruled by judicial and political norms arbitrarily imposed by an independent state...

...The world in which the basic concepts of Marx were worked out belongs to the "prehistory" of the modern state...

...In the first place, they have no solid economic base...

...America could for so long offer a pure image of a civil society because of her double isolation, which was political and economic...

...Civil society," Marx concludes in the German Ideology, "is by now the true theater of history and the foundation of the state and of all superstructure...

...How could the state regress toward a situation of "independence...

...Hegel, then, was right in denying that the North American republic had the characteristics of a modern state...

...The state is thus not merely a simple instrument by which one class oppresses another...

...must we therefore conclude that they were not classes...

...If the "bureaucratic spirit" seemed to Marx to be the exact opposite of the "political spirit," it was because of its cult of the "mystery...

...On the contrary, Marx asserts that the relationships of exploitation were transparent in this system of production, whereas in capitalist societies they oper ate in a veiled form...

...The peasants, he said, seem a class to whoever judges things by exclusively economic criteria, "but they do not constitute a class, since free peasants have only local ties, and their community of interests does not in spire them to form national associations or political organizations...

...Only Marx's contempt for the peasant could explain such errors...

...In contrast with the Legislative, the Executive power expresses the heteronomy of the nation in contrast with its autonomy...

...Napoleon completed this governmental machinery: the Executive power, with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of government —an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together with a military force of another million men...

...Marx's surprising theory seemed rational only when his disciples plundered the barns of the so-called Kulaks and requisitioned their secret stores...

...A bureaucracy of the kind Marx called "Jesuitical" is then enabled to liquidate the very roots of the political spirit and to transform public life into a gray squalor, a phenomenon external to the world of thought...

...it] has been in all ages, the base of the state and of all superstructure...

...What is the ruling class in systems founded on the state ownership of the means of production and the forced mobilization of workers...

...Such works, which presupposed the existence of a detailed plan of operations, required the mobilization of large masses of workers, perhaps over several generations...

...ladedependently of the action of the state...

...Marx sees it as a new alienation —as oppressive and intolerable as capitalist alienation...

...The totalitarian bureaucratic state became, like the Egyptian Dynasty, a wholesale manufacturer of secrets...

...All these facts did not fit into Marx's freetrade conception of "world" capitalism...

...In all countries where terror is not an integral part of the economic policy, the behavior of peasant economy toward the state has been the opposite of what he said...

...hence their number should be reduced to a minimum...

...In America, the state—in the modern meaning of the word—was established only when Franklin D. Roosevelt occupied the White House...

...What were the "class" foundations of Bonapartism...

...The state "under the second Bonaparte seems to have become completely independent," he says the day after the coup d'etat...

...So Marx wrote in 1852...

...What is the historical significance of the centralization of political power...

...Also, the colonizers of the American West were peasants of a special type, emigrants who renounced all the traditions of rural immobilism and servitude...

...Marx viewed the ever more extensive functions that a constantly growing bureaucracy began to claim even in private enterprises as only a "superintendence," more or less like the work of a "crew boss" in the first factories...

...A few years later, all England sang: We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do, We have the ships, we have the men, And have the money, too...

...The state was a product of society...

...Marx writes in The Government of India: The same fundamental necessity to use water in common which convinced private cultivators in the West [e.g...

...indeed, before society divides into classes...

...more than that, it "seemed satisfied to see all classes, silent and impotent, on their knees before the barrels of the guns...

...This has dried up the principal source of popular protest and strengthened the stability of the present political order...

...Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism FOR MARX, as for the Saint-Simonians, peace is congenial to the industrial system...

...CCORDING TO MARXISM, the state is a tool of the ruling class...

...Marx praised the bourgeoisie for having inaugurated a "truly universal" history by creating a united world...

...When this second part of its preparatory labor is complete, Europe will jump to its feet and rejoice, `Well done, old mole!'" It is then that the proletarian revolution, taking its example from the Commune, "will make the slogan of the bourgeois revolution, `to govern without waste,' a reality through the destruction of two big items of expenditure: permanent army and state bureaucracy...

...If he did not further develop his clear distinction between advanced and backward countries, it is because he believed (rightly or wrongly, it does not matter) that only the Western capitalist societies would determine the future organization of the world...

...The balance sheet of the national economy is another "secret," whose divulgation is considered treasonable...

...Nonetheless, the bourgeoisie, which seemed to lose in 1848 the power it had acquired under Louis-Phillipe, had an age of splendor in the Second Empire and, all through subsequent French history, showed itself eager for political power...

...It is a conception that sees in freedom the tool which permits the individual not only to resist all claims of the authorities but also—and most of all—to restrict and limit the bureaucracy's field of action, to enrich the spontaneity of social life, to restore to society all prerogatives usurped by state and capital...

...The optimism of his previous writings is replaced by a tragic vision of the increasing growth of the state, a state that comes out strengthened from wars and revolutions, from class struggles and class equilibrium, a state which "feeds on society and paralyzes its movements...

...but it was only to cast a light on the "parasitic" nature of capitalism...

...He seems to be dreaming...

...But neither Marx nor Weber could conceive of the age of the "se cretary-general" and of totalitarian parties...

...Even before a minority appropriates the means of production, the whole society is obliged, by the nature of things, to give up the management of its common affairs and to entrust them to a particular group...

...Small property always tends to escape all administrative regulation and control and, far from provoking state intervention, discourages it...

...He writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire: The...

...The subjection of workers and city dwellers is a necessary but transitory effect of the irresistible tendency toward the socialization of labor...

...But if things were seen that way, American workers would deserve still less to be called a class...

...it annihilates the aristocratic gradations between the popular masses and the government...

...For Marx, the hybrid character of the peasants, half class and half mass, makes them "incapable of defending their class interests in persons, either through an assembly or through Parliament...

...There is, in both, the same fatal usurpation...

...The bourgeoisie has removed industry from its national base...

...But France was not a backward country and became, after 1830, the land of social struggles...

...To prohibit the peasants entry to his historical "club," he did not hesitate to alter his sociology and to introduce ever more intransigent ideological criteria into his theory of classes, which hitherto had been purely economic...

...But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had, in the course of time and in the pursuit of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society...

...The consolidation of the bureaucratic apparatus produces, for Marx, an alienation that is equivalent to that of capitalist economy since, in both cases, man is subjugated by his own products and lets himself be dominated by objective forces in which he does not recognize himself...

...by themselves and in themselves, they are the petty expenditure of production, which must be reduced to the indispensable minimum...

...When Marx wrote this in 1843, he could not have known that formulas like "The location of the secret fortresses is known," "The secrets of the country are known," "The secrets of the King are known," recur like an obsessive Leitmotif in the report of a high Egyptian official on the revolutionary movements that brought about the fall of the old Empire of Memphis...

...Absolute despotism (the Second Empire) was "necessary to show in its essense the existing antagonism between state and society...

...He repeats the same formulas in the famous 1859 preface to the Critique of Political Economy, in which he outlines the general results of his researches and describes the relations between civil society and state as relations between base and superstructure...

...originated at the time of the absolute monarchy, along with the decline of feudalism, which it helped to hasten...

...Everything that is conquered on the industrial level is lost on the military level," said Saint-Simon, as if to exorcise the specter of Napoleon...

...The refusal of the bourgeoisie to assert itself as the ruling class scandalized Marx: "It was burning with the wish to free itself of its political power and of the attending worries and dangers...

...But according to Marx, the peasants weigh, like a grave menace, upon society: They cannot represent one another, they must themselves be represented...

...The Class Struggle THE RETURN of bureaucracy, originally the tool and now the master of the bourgeoisie, must now be explained...

...The subsequent development of American society has fully confirmed Hegel's diagnosis...