Withering Away of the State

Where the Proposition Sits

Engels's argument starts from a definition. The state pretends to be the organisation of society as a whole but is in fact the organisation of whichever class is for the time being the exploiting one, and above all a special repressive force for holding the exploited class down: the state of the slave-owning citizens in antiquity, of the feudal lords in the Middle Ages, of the bourgeoisie in modern times.

It follows that at the moment the state becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. With no class left to hold in subjection, and with the collisions and excesses of anarchy in production removed, nothing remains to be repressed. The first act by which the state takes possession of the means of production in the name of society is at the same time its last independent act as a state. Thereafter state interference in social relations becomes superfluous in one domain after another and dies out of itself: 'the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out.'

Aimed at Both Sides

The sentence is usually quoted as though it were aimed only at the anarchists, and Engels did use it against the demand for abolition of the state out of hand. But the same paragraph turns the other way as well: it gives, he adds, the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free State', both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency. Marx hammered the same slogan in Part IV of the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

In 1917 Lenin pointed out that the balance had not survived transmission: the conclusion against the anarchists had been repeated thousands of times, while the conclusion against the opportunists was forgotten.

Lenin's Correction

Chapter 1 of The State and Revolution takes the misreading head-on. Engels says first that in seizing state power the proletariat 'abolishes the state as state', that is, the bourgeois state does not wither, it is abolished by the revolution. What withers away afterwards is the proletarian state, or semi-state. Replacing one special repressive force with another cannot possibly take the form of withering.

The target of the correction was the reading that turned the proposition into an argument against revolution: if the state withers away in any case, why break it now?

The Reversal of 1939

In the USSR the proposition failed from the other direction. In his report to the 18th Party Congress in March 1939, Stalin asked whether the state would remain under communism and answered that it would, unless capitalist encirclement were liquidated and the danger of foreign military attack had disappeared. Engels's formula, he argued, assumed socialism victorious in all or most countries; for socialism victorious in one country alone the classics 'could not have given an answer'.

Formally this is a concretisation of theory. Its effect was to postpone the withering indefinitely. Far from shrinking toward its own disappearance, the state apparatus reached its greatest extent in exactly those years, and the theory became an instrument for explaining that growth.

How to Read It Now

Three layers, kept apart. Engels's proposition is not a prophecy of the state's disappearance but a characterisation of what a state is: a conditional statement that an instrument of class rule loses its ground when classes go. Lenin's correction is a warning that the conditional grants no exemption from revolution. And the answer of 1939 is a case study in how a theory bends toward ratifying the present when the condition has not been met.

Lay the three over one another and it becomes visible again why 'state socialism' never worked as a tool of analysis. What the state owns does not change what the state is. The questions are whose state it is, and whether it is moving toward making itself unnecessary.