Revolution in America: Capitalist Domination and the Means of Resistance

Chapter 2: History of Marxism and the American State.

 The Marxist idea had blossomed in the year 1848, when Marx had finished Misére de la Philosophie (The Poverty of Philosophy) and Manifest der Kommunistichen Partei (The Communist Manifesto), which are considered the first, if not only, works of legitimate Marxism. These two reflect the revolutionary struggle at the time, i.e., the French Revolution, namely in regards to the state.

 In Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote:

"The working class, in the course of development, will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will prelude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power groups, since the political power is precisely the official expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society". (p. 182, online German edition, 1999)

 Let us compare this to some excerpts of The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1847:

"... In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within society up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by decree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible". (pp. 31 & 37, seventh German edition, 1906)

 Here we have both a formulation and a flaw of one of the prime ideas of general Socialism and Communism: the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat". The flaw in this idea lies within having the Proletariat being "organized as the ruling class"; if the Proletariat does such a thing, then the Proletariat will risk becoming a Bureaucracy, like the Soviet Union had. Diverging, the writer will say that the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" will, as we have seen throughout history, distort Socialism and Communism even more than it has been from its formation to its dissolution in Europe, and, therefore, we must apply a new and less risky idea (we will briefly go through this idea later on) to prevent both a Bureaucracy or a distortion of the ideologies.

 Moving on, Marx sums up his conclusions on the state in better detail in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

"But the revolution is throughgoing. It is still journeying through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851 [the day of Louis Bonaparte's coup], it had completed one half of its preparatory work. It is now completing the other half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it is perfecting the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, setting it up against itself as the sole object, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: well grubbed, old mole!

"... Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary power found itself compelled to strengthen, along with its repressive measures, the resources of centralization of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principle spoils of the victor". (pp. 98-99, fourth edition, Hamburg, 1907)

 Rather than "perfecting" the apparatus through a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" or by other means, the state machine, i.e., the components that keep the current apparatus alive (stocks, labour-power, wages, etc.), must be used as tools against said apparatus and then smashed on the eve of revolution (note that this is a criticism towards the American government and American "Communist" groups).