We shall discuss the ideas of Marx, in particular his ideas for the tendency for a revolution within society. This will be contrasted to liberals’ ideas on the state and civil society. Marxism has developed through a dialogue with liberalism, and we shall explore the ideas of Lenin, Gramsci and Poulantzas.

Class refers to social stratification and hierarchy, and is an abstract concept of class in relation to means of production – there are other classes other than proletariat and bourgeoisie – such as petty bourgeois, the unemployed, the scums, etc.

Economic processes shape society’s politics, religious ideas and education

This is a form of economic determinism.

There are competing political groups based on real differences in class.

State serves the interest of the capitalists.

While the state welds considerable power, it is limited to serve and operate within capitalist interests.

This sustains the rule of capitalists. It is false consciousness (e.g., ‘the American Dream’). But in reality, sustaining capitalism is based on material conditions (extracting surplus value).

There are three sets of mechanisms that give rise to revolution:

i) overabundance of commodities (arises due to the lust and greed of capitalists)

This tends to an economic crisis, which threatens the existence of bourgeois society.

ii) centralisation of capital (i.e., monopoly capitalism)

This is both a source and a fact of oppression that become more visible.

Centralisation tends to proletarisation of educated and wealthy bourgeois that allows for fresh elements of enlightenment and progress in the proletariat camp.

iii) ‘increasing misery’ becomes greater evident by displaced workers, falling wages, mental degradation and physical brutality.

Yet, this is offset by higher productivity, collective bargaining, trade unions and the welfare state.

i) urbanisation

Workers gather together in urban centres, employed in factories and living in densely housing areas. Thus, workers are able to relate their experiences, and effectively organise themselves.

ii) communication

Effective means of communication tends to the formation of revolutionary movements, based on similarity of experience and common belief.

iii) politicisation of the working class

Through the efforts of revolutionaries and trade unions, workers become more aware of the sources of their misery and actions to be taken.

There is an important distinction between class-in-itself and class-for-itself. Political organisations play a major role in the formation of class-consciousness.

However, there is some disagreement about the role of trade unions: are they reformists or revolutionaries.

Liberalism is an agency-based theory. For liberals, the state is a necessary evil that serves civil society, and which is accountable to citizens through political representation the state’s functions are primarily to maintain internal social order and to protect civil society from external threats to its security. The state is portrayed as a neutral arbiter between conflict interests. Instead, the state pursues policies that maximise individual liberty.

In liberal societies, the state is a site of formal equality between all citizens. Civil society, in contrast, is characterised by freedom, social diversity and competition in the market place that results in material inequalities. Such competition promotes general prosperity through individual innovation. This benefits the whole of society by improving the general performance of the economy. Within civil society, individuals are free to pursue their own desires, as long as this does not encroach upon the liberty of others. Liberals argue for equality of opportunity and meritocracy.

Marxism is a society-centred theory, or rather class-based theory. It has concentrated upon how the inequalities of civil society shape the imperatives of the state. The development of industrial capitalism is the main driving force behind social change. Individuals’ political actions are understood in terms of their relationship to the capitalist mode of production, as members of a social class, rather than as citizens of the state. Capitalist societies are necessarily divided, and defined by class struggle.

For Marx, the state is ultimately a servant of the dominant interest in civil society. The particular form that the state takes is determined in the last analysis by the prevailing mode of production. The discrepancies between equal citizenship of the state (in the formal sense) and the inequalities between social classes become acute. The increasing transparency of the state’s contradictions ensures that class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is inevitable. When this is resolved in the interests of the proletariat, the state will become redundant and civil society transcended. The ruling class uses the state as an instrument to suppress the working class. Once class disappears under communism, so must the state. In a post-capitalist world, the divisions of civil society are replaced by a collectivist community society where the community will own property, and all individuals will be equally empowered.

All Marxists point to how the structures of power within civil society based on class divisions rooted in property ownership prevent the development of the creative potential of all human beings (i.e., the working class lack access to education, health and security, and the capitalist class is rooted to the greed of capital accumulation). These inequalities render any formal equality individuals have as citizens impotent and useless, since such political equality is divorced from people’s everyday needs. Marxists reject the abstract individualism of liberalism, and instead understand human behaviour in its societal context, whereby people’s actions are shaped by their place in the economic system. The state must either promote their divisions, or attempt to reconcile them in the interests of the long-term continuation of capitalism.

However, Marx allows for the possibility that under certain circumstances the state can have complete independence from capitalist class, and Marxists have considered the state’s relative autonomy.

During the late C20th, neo-Marxists have show interest in the state for three reasons:

• to explain the huge growth in the state’s functions and capacities in capitalist societies after 1945;
• to correct the alleged distortion of Marx’s writings by communist parties in USSR and China; and
• to engage with Gramsci.

Gramsci emphasised the state as an important site of political struggle that appears to allow for a high level of autonomy from the economic structure. This is attractive to Marxists who wish to avoid the accusation of economism – i.e., society is reduced to economic analysis.

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony highlights the importance of ideological manipulation by the ruling class over the working class. Hegemony is a type of communicative power that refers to an ideological justification for the inequities of capitalism. The hegemony operates through such institutions as the media, the church and political parties.

Hegemony of class rule was not through the force of the state alone, but also through public voluntary compliance, individuals freely giving their consent to the hegemony. In addition, this hegemony is highly complex and very diffused.

However, the capitalist hegemony is never complete, thereby allowing for the construction of an alternative hegemony. Gramsci stresses the role of intellectuals in constructing an alternative egalitarian hegemonic project. Gramsci suggests that the mechanisms of liberal democracy can be utilised by the working class to transform and eventually transcend the state. This strategy of war of position is contrasted with the violent strategy of war of manoeuvre, outlined by Lenin.

For Lenin, revolution is not only an economic outcome of class struggle but as a political and theoretical campaign. Revolutionaries have to achieve theoretical innovations to create historical-universal laws; create and mould sentiments of working class; devote fully to political efforts; engage in campaign of agitation; and arouse enthusiasm.

After the revolution, Lenin also discusses how the state can become the revolutionary dictatorship of proletariat. The state is not the oppression of the ruling class. Rather the workers’ state had to take over the reins of power. People from the working class would occupy the workers’ state. The state would become a weapon against the previously dominant ruling class. Indeed, the state would not be democratic, but operate on the behalf of workers.

Following Gramsci, Poulantzas attempts to show the state’s apparent separateness from the direct control of capitalists is functional to the needs of capitalism. Poulantzas suggests that the imperatives of capitalism exercise an indirect control over the state. The state is dependent upon economic growth for its survival (i.e., state expenditure requires tax revenues). The state therefore plays a central role in naturalising the inequalities of capitalism as inevitable and desirable. The state portrays people’s needs (i.e., human welfare) as being identical to the needs of capitalism (i.e., economic growth). Within the structural constraint of capitalism, the state must function to maintain the conditions for capitalist accumulation. These include maintaining social stability, providing infrastructural support and sustaining appropriate labour market.

Nevertheless, the capitalist state can take many forms such as fascist or social democratic, and this form is dependent upon numerous political and social factors.

According to Poulantzas, there are four structures: the ideological, the political, the economic, and the juridical. Each of these structures is separate yet interrelated with each other. Each has equal power, and which structure dominates depends on historical and contingent set of conditions. This is marked contrast to the vulgar Marxism that emphasises that economic determinism of society.

That is, the state is relatively autonomous. It is independent, and does intervene necessarily to support the interests of one class over the other, but for social cohesion. Furthermore, the state becomes the site for class struggle.

Yet, Poulantzas’s theory has been criticised for functionalism, as the state is functional for capitalism in its role as the reconciler of class conflict.

Furthermore, there is a contradiction in Marxists’ claims about the state. On the one hand, Gramsci, Poulantzas and others suggest that the state is itself a site for class struggle (i.e., not necessarily controlled by the ruling class). On the other hand, the state is structured by the needs of capitalism. The problem is how these two mutually exclusive points can be reconciled in a convincing theory of the transition to communism.

Marx’s ambiguity concerning the role of the state led Lenin to perceive the state as an object to be captured by the Bolshevik party, who would repress the people in the interest of the working class.

These theoretical problems are due to the failure amongst Marxists to identify the state as an actor in its own right, with resources and imperatives of its own that cannot be reduced to economic factors. Marxists need to pay attention to questions such as the potential for the state to be as repressive as economic inequality. Nor class this repressive potential of the state be understood purely in class terms. That is, the state is not an oppressive organ of one class, but is an oppressive organ per se. This point is made forcefully made feminist critics and writers of ethnicity who argue that the state plays an important role in both reflecting and promoting inequalities in civil society.

To be sure, without a developed theory of governance, distinct from a critique of capitalism, Marx and Marxists laid the seeds for highly repressive states in which a key aim was an end to politics, which is implicitly understood to be relevant only to class-based societies. The problems of governance (i.e., government and management of society) would not wither away, even in the stateless society.