Post by dodger on Feb 25, 2014 15:00:21 GMT
imarxman.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/introducing-marxism-3/
This is the third in a series of short articles introducing some key Marxist concepts.
The State
In simple terms, all societies to date have had a small ruling class accumulating its wealth by exploiting the very much larger labouring class. In feudal times it was the king and barons who depended on the labour of peasants.
The present system, capitalism, has a ruling class; capitalists rather than the nobility. They require the majority, the working class, to produce through their labour wealth greater than required to pay the workers. This surplus value is the source of capitalists’ wealth.
This creates a conflict of interests, with the capitalists wanting to maximise the exploitation of the working class, thereby extracting a larger portion of surplus value. Conversely, as the wealth producers, the workers want as much of that value for their own purposes.
Therefore, conflict between capitalists and workers is inevitable. However, there is also competition amongst capitalists trying to profit at the expense of others. Left unregulated, such competition makes the economy, and society, very unstable which is itself a threat to profits.
So, for capitalism to be maintained all such competition, between capitalists and workers and amongst capitalists themselves, has to be managed. This is the function of the state.
The basic role of the state is to curb the economic and political aspirations of the working class. The state therefore is the means by which one class, the ruling or capitalist class, dominates the majority, the working class.
It does this in two basic ways. Firstly, by creating the illusion that workers can address their grievances and aspirations through the state. Frequent elections create an impression of democracy.
In practice this amounts to choosing which team of career politicians will run the day to day government on behalf of the state. Those teams, or parties, are essentially factions of a single administration.
Should a party be elected with the expressed intention of abolishing capitalism and replacing it with socialism, another face of the state, its coercive face, would be revealed. The state is far more than the government and the loyal opposition.
The civil service, backed by the coercive threat of the armed forces, could effectively counter any attempt to radically reform or replace capitalism.
Also, capitalists have the financial control to effectively beggar the country by withdrawing capital. The resultant crisis would become the pretext for the troublesome party’s removal and replacement in government by a pro-capitalist party.
During such a crisis the working class is vulnerable to being drawn towards such a pro-capitalist party offering “easy” solutions, unless there is a clear alternative with sufficient organisation to achieve it.
For example, in 1979, following a decade of economic and industrial turmoil, significant sections of the working class opted to support the Tory Party under Margaret Thatcher. As a result, the organisations created by the working class, the trade unions, were neutered by the state.
Subsequently, over the last three and a half decades, the state has systematically taken back working class gains and handed those resources over to capitalists through privatisation. It did not matter which Party was in power, all followed the same pro-capitalist, anti-working class programme.
The state also acts to maintain as much stability as possible by regulating the interaction of capitalists. As the banking crisis shows, it is not very efficient at doing this.
However, it was able to ameliorate the worst effects of the crisis through huge infusions of wealth, bank bailouts. In effect, the state took wealth away from the working class and handed it over to finance capitalists.
This policy initially was enacted by a Labour government and then maintained by the subsequent ConDem coalition, a good example of how voting actually has little impact on the operation of the capitalist state.
The state is the means by which one class maintains its dominion over another. It cannot, therefore, become the instrument for the exploited class to expropriate the exploiters.
This is the third in a series of short articles introducing some key Marxist concepts.
The State
In simple terms, all societies to date have had a small ruling class accumulating its wealth by exploiting the very much larger labouring class. In feudal times it was the king and barons who depended on the labour of peasants.
The present system, capitalism, has a ruling class; capitalists rather than the nobility. They require the majority, the working class, to produce through their labour wealth greater than required to pay the workers. This surplus value is the source of capitalists’ wealth.
This creates a conflict of interests, with the capitalists wanting to maximise the exploitation of the working class, thereby extracting a larger portion of surplus value. Conversely, as the wealth producers, the workers want as much of that value for their own purposes.
Therefore, conflict between capitalists and workers is inevitable. However, there is also competition amongst capitalists trying to profit at the expense of others. Left unregulated, such competition makes the economy, and society, very unstable which is itself a threat to profits.
So, for capitalism to be maintained all such competition, between capitalists and workers and amongst capitalists themselves, has to be managed. This is the function of the state.
The basic role of the state is to curb the economic and political aspirations of the working class. The state therefore is the means by which one class, the ruling or capitalist class, dominates the majority, the working class.
It does this in two basic ways. Firstly, by creating the illusion that workers can address their grievances and aspirations through the state. Frequent elections create an impression of democracy.
In practice this amounts to choosing which team of career politicians will run the day to day government on behalf of the state. Those teams, or parties, are essentially factions of a single administration.
Should a party be elected with the expressed intention of abolishing capitalism and replacing it with socialism, another face of the state, its coercive face, would be revealed. The state is far more than the government and the loyal opposition.
The civil service, backed by the coercive threat of the armed forces, could effectively counter any attempt to radically reform or replace capitalism.
Also, capitalists have the financial control to effectively beggar the country by withdrawing capital. The resultant crisis would become the pretext for the troublesome party’s removal and replacement in government by a pro-capitalist party.
During such a crisis the working class is vulnerable to being drawn towards such a pro-capitalist party offering “easy” solutions, unless there is a clear alternative with sufficient organisation to achieve it.
For example, in 1979, following a decade of economic and industrial turmoil, significant sections of the working class opted to support the Tory Party under Margaret Thatcher. As a result, the organisations created by the working class, the trade unions, were neutered by the state.
Subsequently, over the last three and a half decades, the state has systematically taken back working class gains and handed those resources over to capitalists through privatisation. It did not matter which Party was in power, all followed the same pro-capitalist, anti-working class programme.
The state also acts to maintain as much stability as possible by regulating the interaction of capitalists. As the banking crisis shows, it is not very efficient at doing this.
However, it was able to ameliorate the worst effects of the crisis through huge infusions of wealth, bank bailouts. In effect, the state took wealth away from the working class and handed it over to finance capitalists.
This policy initially was enacted by a Labour government and then maintained by the subsequent ConDem coalition, a good example of how voting actually has little impact on the operation of the capitalist state.
The state is the means by which one class maintains its dominion over another. It cannot, therefore, become the instrument for the exploited class to expropriate the exploiters.