One of the goals of An Anarchist FAQ – alongside its main goal of explaining anarchism and winning people to it – is to provide anarchists with resources with which to better critique those who reject anarchism, primarily the supporters of the status quo or capitalism in general. However, it also – in section H – discusses anarchism’s great rival within socialism, namely Marxism and Marxist-Leninism (primarily in its Trotskyist form, as Stalinism should be completely discredited with all genuine socialists).
This involved both debunking common Marxist myths about anarchism (section H.2) but also critiquing core aspects of Marxism itself (section H.3) and the movements it generated (not least, as discussed in section H.6, the Russian Revolution and the myth that the Bolshevik retention of power equates to a “successful” socialist revolution). The Marxist theory of the State, such as it is, is an important area for critique, given that this is one of the core differences between anarchism and Marxism. This involved clarifying what exactly is that theory, given the range of positions held based on the same set of writings.
While Lenin’s interpretation of it in The State and Revolution is probably the most commonly held one today, this does not mean that it is correct nor that those interpretations held by Marxists (including Lenin!) before 1917 were necessarily wrong or the product of “opportunist” or “revisionist” bad-faith. Indeed, as discussed in section H.3.10, Lenin’s interpretation cannot explain all of the comments by Marx and Engels on the State and socialist strategy. This is because Lenin confuses the State with “the State machine” and while Marx and Engels argued (post-Commune) for the smashing latter, they did not argue for the smashing of the former – indeed, their preferred strategy of “political action” (i.e., electioneering) was premised on capturing the former in order to ensure the latter.
This Leninist confusion – shared by most Marxists today with the notable exception of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its sister parties – produces confused analysis by Marxists when they seek to make Marx and Engels subscribe to positions they wish the founders of the ideology held rather than the ones they actually did.
An example of this can be seen in Joe Pateman’s “Friedrich Engels on state socialism” (Human Geography, Vol. 14, No.2 [July 2021]). Needless to say, we cannot cover everything he raises and will concentrate on the central contradiction, namely the suggestion that Engels was opposed to “state socialism” when in fact he was in favour of utilising the State to build a socialist system (in which, allegedly, the State would then “wither away”). This is achieved – as is so often the case with Marxists – by redefining “state socialism” to mean using the existing (non-modified) state to introduce measures which many think are “socialist” (such as nationalisation, income redistribution, and so on). An example of such redefining was when, in the 1920s, Trotsky redefined “workers’ democracy” to mean “party democracy” for he was – like all good Leninists – a staunch advocate of party dictatorship: which is useful for Trotskyists for cherry-picking quotes, but less useful for securing a successful social revolution.
Pateman starts as he means to go on, attributing positions to Engels that he did not hold:
He [Engels] shows that the construction of socialism demands the building of a new state, one that guarantees the workers’ democratic control over their public affairs. Proletarian ownership of the means of production is rightly at the core of his vision. Engels demonstrates that state socialism cannot realise this goal. Instead of building a new proletarian state, it utilises the existing one to enact a few reforms. Instead of realising workers’ control over their economic activities, it grants this control to the exploiting state.
In the Communist Manifesto, Engels demanded state ownership and control rather than “proletarian ownership” and the idea of workers’ control is one not raised by him or Marx in that work or any others (it is to Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin that you have to turn for that). It is worthwhile quoting these demands as they clearly influenced most of the Marxist movement’s vision of what socialism was to this day:
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State… Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State… Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State… Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State… Establishment of industrial armies… (Collected Works 6: 504-5)
The Manifesto also makes no mention of “building a new proletarian state” – rather “to win the battle of democracy… the proletariat organised as the ruling class” (Collected Works 6: 504) – and the idea of utilising the existing one was very much the position until, apparently at least, the Paris Commune of 1871 made him and Engels revisit the position. Yet even here, we must understand the difference between “the state” and the “state machine” – the former must be seized but that involves the destruction of the latter, as Engels acknowledged a few years after Marx’s death:
It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administrative centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes: whereas all bourgeois republicans since 1848 inveighed against this machinery so long as they were in the opposition, but once they were in the government they took it over without altering it and used it partly against the reaction but still more against the proletariat. (Collected Works 47: 74)
So far, so wrong – but, to be fair, it is a common misunderstanding and has been since Lenin’s The State and Revolution (in spite of knowledgeable Marxists like Julius Martov pointing out its errors in 1919, although as a dreaded Menshevik he could be ignored).
Pateman continues:
That is why Engels (2004b: 276) describes state socialism as ‘one of the infantile diseases of proletarian socialism’.
The rest of this letter is of note. A few paragraphs before the quoted words sees Engels stating:
But just take the proposal to make the State responsible for corn imports. Jaurés wants to prevent speculation. So what does he do? He makes the government responsible for the purchase of foreign corn. The government is the executive committee of the majority in the Chamber, and the majority in the Chamber represents as fully as possible these very speculators in corn, in shares, in government stocks, etc. It’s like the last Chamber, where they made the Panamists responsible for the Panama investigation! (Collected Works 50: 275)
So the flaw is handing over economic functions to a state without a socialist majority. As he puts it in the very next paragraph after the one Pateman cherry-picked:
Ah, yes, but we have a republic in France, the ex-Radicals will say to you; it’s quite another matter in our case, we can use the government to introduce socialist measures! A republic, in relation to the proletariat, differs from a monarchy only in that it is the ready-made political form for the future rule of the proletariat. You have the advantage of us in that it is already in being; we, for our part, shall have to waste 24 hours creating it. But a republic, like any other form of government, is determined by what composes it; so long as it is the form of bourgeois rule, it is quite as hostile to us as any monarchy whatsoever (save in the, forms of that hostility). Hence it is a gratuitous illusion to treat it as an essentially socialist form; to entrust it, whilst it is dominated by the bourgeoisie, with socialist tasks. We can wring concessions from it, but never look to it to carry out our job. Even if we were able to control it by a minority so strong that it could become a majority from one day to the next. (Collected Works 50: 276)
So Engels is clearly arguing the opposite of what is being claimed – he is not against the state (the current state) being used to take over economic activities or ownership as such, he is against it when that state does not have a socialist majority in the chamber.
The following is then claimed by Pateman:
Engels began to scrutinise state socialism early on in his intellectual development. The phenomenon came up in his 1847 text Principles of communism (Engels, 2005), which served as a draft for the Communist manifesto, published a year later. Here, Engels argued that socialism would become possible only once the working class seized state power and established ‘a democratic constitution’, one expressing ‘the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat’.
Yet this is what Engels actually argues:
In the first place it will inaugurate a democratic constitution and thereby, directly or indirectly, the political rule of the proletariat. Directly in England, where the proletariat already constitutes the majority of the people. Indirectly in France… (Collected Works 6: 350)
So state power is seized (by whom?) and then democracy is introduced later to secure “the political rule of the proletariat” – which raises the interesting paradox of the working class apparently seizing state power but not actually having “political rule” or “dominance” by so doing! A paradox which cannot help but bring Bakunin’s words to mind:
There is a flagrant contradiction in this theory. If their state would be really of the people, why eliminate it? And if the State is needed to emancipate the workers, then the workers are not yet free, so why call it a People’s State?… Upon this contradiction our polemic has come to a halt. They insist that only dictatorship (of course their own) can create freedom for the people. We reply that all dictatorship has no objective other than self-perpetuation, and that slavery is all it can generate and instill in the people who suffer it. Freedom can be created only by freedom, by a total rebellion of the people, and by a voluntary organization of the people from the bottom up. (Bakunin on Anarchism [Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980], 331-2)
Interestingly – and unmentioned by Pateman – Engels states that “a democratic constitution has been introduced” in America (Collected Works 6: 356) This places his earlier comments in context, namely that a proletarian revolution need not be required to create democracy and that one of the aims of the Communists would be to secure a bourgeois republic as the obvious implication is that voting strength (in numbers) is what counts to secure “political rule”.
This, it should be stressed, was the position from 1848 onwards – first secure a republic, then use political action to achieve socialism. Engels suggestion that the “government is the executive committee of the majority in the Chamber” sheds light on the famous comment in the Communist Manifesto that the “executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. (Collected Works 6: 486) For lest we forget his words from 1881:
where the industrial and agricultural working class forms the immense majority of the people, democracy means the dominion of the working class, neither more nor less. Let, then, that working class prepare itself for the task in store for it – the ruling of this great Empire… And the best way to do this is to use the power already in their hands, the actual majority they possess… to send to Parliament men of their own order… Everywhere the labourer struggles for political power, for direct representation of his class in the legislature – everywhere but in Great Britain. (Collected Works 24: 405)
The consistency between Engels views in 1847 and 1881 is remarkable – and continued to his death. Pateman ignores these and other comments by Engels – even in articles and letters quoted by him! – in spite of their relevance to his arguments and the subsequent evolution (degeneration!) of Marxist social-democracy into the very “state socialism” Pateman seeks to distance Engels from.
Then there are the economic measures demanded in 1847 which include:
Gradual expropriation of landed proprietors, factory owners, railway and shipping magnates, partly through competition on the part of state industry and partly directly through compensation in assignations… Organisation of the labour or employment of the proletarians on national estates, in national factories and workshops… and compelling the factory owners, as long as they still exist, to pay the same increased wages as the State… Formation of industrial armies… Centralisation of the credit and banking systems in the hands of the State… Increase in national factories, workshops, railways, and ships… Concentration of all means of transport in the hands of the nation. (Collected Works 6: 350-1)
Does “state industry”, wages paid by the state, and “centralisation of credit and banking systems in the hands of the State” and so on, not sound like the dreaded “state socialism”?
It should also be noted that in the early days of the German Revolution of 1848 the Communist League published a list of Demands identical to that raised previously in both the Principles and the Manifesto, namely state ownership and control of property:
The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic… Princely and other feudal estates, together with mines, pits, and so forth, shall become the property of the state… Mortgages on peasant lands shall be declared property of the state…. the land rent or quit rent shall be paid to the state as a tax… A state bank… shall replace all private banks… All the means of transport, railways, canals, steamships, roads, the posts etc. shall be taken over by the state. They shall become the property of the state… Inauguration of national workshops. The state guarantees a livelihood to all workers and provides for those who are incapacitated for work (Collected Works 7: 3-4)
Of course, Marx and Engels – ignoring what they had just proclaimed as their tasks in the Communist Manifesto – quickly moved to supporting the bourgeois and viewed their initial demands as something of an embarrassment to be ignored in case it frightened the owning class, yet the position is clearly that of a state socialism – in the sense that the state owns and controls economic activity in various areas and that ownership and control was expected to increase overtime. To suggest otherwise is simply untenable.
Pateman continues:
As such, the workers could not achieve socialism by utilising the capitalist state or by pressurising it to grant concessions from above. They had to smash this state, replace it with their own revolutionary democracy and emancipate themselves. Engels did not view the state as a permanent feature of socialism, however.
This position was, apparently, firmly in place in 1847 – so the Paris Commune of 1871 demonstrated nothing in spite of Marx proclaiming in The Civil War in France that it had – but nothing as trivial as evidence is presented to bolster this claim. As indicated, there is significant evidence all through his lifetime that Engels held a different position, evidence which is often skilfully avoided by Pateman.
And to requote the letter of Engels previously quoted:
We can wring concessions from it [the State], but never look to it to carry out our job.
Which is, to state the obvious, another way of describing “pressurising it [the State] to grant concessions from above” – after all, how else can a hierarchical, centralised social structure introduce “concessions” which are wrung or pressurised from it?
So Pateman is wrong on all levels.
Then there is this:
Engels denounced the ‘revolutionary’ solution proposed by the eminent socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. This French theorist proposed to end exploitative private landlordism by converting the tenants’ rents into purchase payments, so that the workers could own their homes.
To be fair, Engels did proclaim this and so Pateman is just repeating that – but Proudhon did not advocate what Engels said he did. Rather than rents being used to give individual ownership, in fact ownership would revert to the commune. Engels, moreover, was well aware of Proudhon’s actual position (in a letter from 1851) and so seems to have forgotten it 20 years later… perhaps, although a more likely possibility remains.
However, this takes us away from our subject. Returning to “state socialism,” there is this:
Engels (1987b: 265) also denies that nationalisation is necessarily an advance towards socialism:
For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the state has become economically inevitable, only then—even if it is the state of today that effects this—is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself.
Nationalisation may potentially show that the means of production have reached an order of magnitude that private owners can no longer cope with, in which case it is a step towards socialism.
So it is not “an advance towards socialism” but also “a step towards socialism”!
It is “an economic advance” in the sense that it is “another step” to “the taking over of all productive forces by society itself” – and as the Communist Manifesto made clear, that would be done by the state. As Engels put it in Anti-Duhring:
State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution… Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialised, into state property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state. (Collected Works 25: 266-7)
Again, state socialism in the sense that the state is the agent and ownership is transferred to it – a state in which the socialists are, finally, in the majority and can implement its programme (first and foremost, smashing the state machine, the bureaucracy, the armed forces, etc.). Thus, apparently, Engels simultaneously advocates and rejects “state socialism” – something only possible if you define “state socialism” to mean something different to what most people would understand by the term.
So Pateman is somewhat correct when he states:
Engels does not suggest that nationalisation is unrelated to socialism. He does, however, highlight the conditions for this relationship. The class character of the state is for him the deciding factor (Draper, 1990: 113). Nationalisation under a bourgeois state cannot be socialist, since production is controlled not by society, but by a minority in control of the state.
But the key issue is not “the class nature” of the state but whether the majority in the chamber are socialist or not. “State socialism”, then, refers to state intervention by a state without a socialist majority (and so done by bourgeois forces in their own interests) but when the state has a socialist majority then state intervention will be socialist. In both situations, the state is the key factor, the driving agent, in socialistic measures – albeit in one case it is considered genuine and in the other not.
Moreover, as anarchists, we must note here that a State is a centralised, hierarchical social structure which produces minority control by its very nature .“The State is necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian—or it ceases to be the State” and consequently anarchists “renounce the organisation of hierarchical centralisation which is termed ‘State.’”. This is why anarchists argue for new federal social organisation, one based on “independent Communes for the territorial groupings, and vast federations of trade unions for groupings by social functions” for “new function require new organs” and “these new organs would… be created by the workers themselves, in their unions, their federations, completely outside the State” (Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchy [Edinburgh: AK Press, 2018], 164, 277, 199). This means that placing political and economic functions into the hands of a State (whether the current one, a transformed one or a new one) means placing it into the hands of those few at the top of its structure and the bureaucracy they would need to govern – it would create a new class system, as the Russian Revolution confirmed. Genuine – libertarian – socialism means creating a new social organisation based on decentralising power into the hands of all and federating appropriately to coordinate social activities (see section I).
Then there is this:
Engels emphasised the necessity of solving socialist tasks ‘in the usual democratic way’, with elected and accountable officials, not bureaucrats. In his view, socialism demanded the mass participation of the toilers. The state had to extend democracy into every sphere of organisation. This was no utopian dream, but a practical necessity, an objective condition for building communism.
First, Marx and Engels stressed state control and so the assertion “the state had to extend democracy into every sphere of organisation” is meaningless, a vague aspiration undermined by the means favoured. Not so Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc. who recognised that genuine popular empowerment cannot be achieved by means of any state and so looked to popular organs of self-management as both the means to resist oppression and exploitation today and the means of building a free socialist society tomorrow (see section I.2.3).
Second, “in the usual democratic way” is not uttered by Engels for his system but rather those he was criticising:
Nor has the maintenance of economically unproductive functions at the expense of the labour product been overlooked by the other labour money Utopians. But they leave the workers to tax themselves for this purpose in the usual democratic way, while Rodbertus, whose whole social reform of 1842 is geared to the Prussian state of that time, refers the whole matter to the decision of the bureaucracy, which determines from above the share of the worker in his own product and graciously permits him to have it. (Collected Works 26: 289)
Third, the “usual democratic way” means what, precisely? In current society, it is the election of representatives every few years who govern on behalf of the masses. Surely we can aim for better than the “usual democratic way”? Hence, for example, Proudhon’s use of the term “labour democracy” to differentiate between two radically different notions of what constitutes a genuine democracy.
Fourth, it should be noted that Proudhon – regardless of assertions by Marx and repeated here by Engels – did not advocate “labour money” and so should be excluded from the critique. Likewise Gray advocated central planning. So this is wrong:
The other Utopians of this tendency, from Gray to Proudhon, rack their brains to invent social institutions which would achieve this aim. (Collected Works 26: 285)
Engels then explains the role of market forces in determining prices and supply, which is echoing Proudhon’s market socialist arguments. Engels, moreover, does not even sketch the “social institutions” needed for his central planning, which is assumed to be simple. So the problems Engels notes in terms of calculating “labour money” values can and should be applied to his and Marx’s notions of central planning.
Then there is this by Pateman:
Engels also repudiated those who thought that liberal democracy could emancipate the workers. When the French reformists became enamoured with this ‘republican state socialism’, he called attention to their error. Engels reminded them that a democratic republic could never be socialist so long as it assumed the institutional form of liberal democracy. By design, this ensured the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The workers needed to smash this republic and establish their own proletarian democratic state, such as the one established by the 1871 Paris Commune
This is the same Engels who argued in a letter – which Pateman quotes from! – that a “republic, in relation to the proletariat, differs from a monarchy only in that it is the ready-made political form for the future rule of the proletariat”? He did warn against the “gratuitous illusion” of seeking to “to entrust it, whilst it is dominated by the bourgeoisie, with socialist tasks” which is not what quite what Pateman asserts. Moreover, Engels clearly implies that socialist tasks could be entrusted to the state once it is dominated by the proletariat (in the shape of a socialist party majority in the chamber). This was, significantly, simply repeating his 1891 critique of the draft of the Erfurt programme of the German Social Democrats:
If one thing is certain it is that our Party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. (Collected Works 27: 227)
This reflected the recommendations Engels made to socialists in America made a few years previously:
And with true American instinct this consciousness led them at once to take the next step towards their deliverance: the formation of a political workingmen’s party, with a platform of its own, and with the conquest of the Capitol and the White House for its goal. (Collected Works 26: 435)
Needless to say, Lenin did not quote this passage (or the many similar ones) in The State and Revolution. Engels, significantly, also linked this vision to the rise of Social-Democracy in Europe:
For, as I said before, there cannot be any doubt that the ultimate platform of the American working class must and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by the whole militant working class of Europe, the same as that of the German-American Socialist Labor Party. (Collected Works 26: 440)
However, the consistency with Engels comments from 1847 should be noted and the contrast with Pateman’s claims of Engels seeking to “smash th[e] republic”. The obvious paradoxes are easily explained once we understand the difference between “the State” and “the State machine” in the eyes of Marx and Engels, a difference obscured by Lenin and repeated by Pateman.
To conclude.
Engels indeed attacked those who equated any form of state intervention or ownership with “socialism” but was happy to use the state as a means of creating socialism. That he called the former “state socialism” (sometimes) does not mean he was against state socialism – far from it, given the role the state played in creating socialism in his ideas. As such, Pateman’s article obscures the reality of Engels ideas by generalising a partial definition to mean something very much at odds with what most people would consider to be “state socialism”.
In other words, Engels was most definitely a state socialist even if he rejected calling ownership or intervention by a state dominated by the bourgeoisie “socialist” (even if such acts could be demanded by Marxists). For a state captured and appropriately transformed by a socialist party, then the state had to be used to affect a socialist revolution (however long it would take). The former would have similarities to the later insofar as state ownership and control, like the state itself, cannot help to have similarities regardless of who is nominally in charge of it.
The ironic thing is that Engels’ preferred tactics – electioneering by workers’ parties – helped ensure that “state socialism” in the reformist sense he attacked became synonymous with socialism. The many proclamations on the need to get a socialists elected and the importance of a socialist majority in the chamber meant that the reformism of the tactics seeped into the vision of the goal – and the need for the state machinery to be smashed was forgotten for the far more practical view of utilising that machine to introduce “socialist” measures. Rhetoric cannot withstand reality and as Bakunin correctly predicted, electioneering generates reformism by its very nature:
The social theory of the anti-state socialists or anarchists leads them directly and inevitably towards a break with all forms of the State, with all varieties of bourgeois politics, and leaves no choice except a social revolution. The opposite theory, state communism…, attracts and confuses its followers and, under the pretext of political tactics, makes continuous deals with the governments and various bourgeois political parties, and is directly pushed towards reaction. (Bakunin on Anarchism [Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980], 332)
Pateman’s article, then, is the usual collection of myths, selective quoting and question begging we come to expect of most Marxists. Any elements of truth in it are undermined by these and an unwillingness to link denounced future developments with the tactics which Engels advocated which laid the foundations for them.