Have you ever heard the expression: “we must smash capitalism?” It’s popular among so-called revolutionists of the Leninist variety It isn’t easy to figure exactly what they mean by it but one gets the impression that the capitalist state, in all of its ramifications, must be destroyed and something brand new — as for example a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” — reared in its place. This attitude is consistent with the views of Lenin, all right, but is completely foreign to the system of thought developed by Marx and Engels, commonly referred to by scientific socialists as Historical Materialism.
In fact, much of Marx' and Engels' lives were taken up with the struggle against anarchist thought and growth which had a considerable development during those times and which was — to some extent — strikingly similar to the theories of Lenin that developed later. True, the anarchist spokesmen did not advocate a “proletarian dictatorship" but the point we wish to make at this time is that they did advocate a "smashing" of the state. And the basis of this theory was a refusal on their part to regard society and the state. Itself, as an evolutionary development. Never mind where it came from, why it still exists, and what should develop out of It in the future. It is here, it acts as an oppressor to the majority of mankind, so we have to smash it completely without even trying to gain control of it. That has been the anarchist position on the state.
The Marxist argument, on the other hand, is that the state developed as a result of the division of peoples into economic classes. Prior to this, society was organised on the basis of kinship, a type of tribal communism. When some individuals began to amass private means and as this became more common it was discovered that kinship had no more relevance in the councils, that the important qualification now had become property ownership. And so the state was born.
We have had different kinds of states throughout written history. There have been chattel slave states, feudal states, and capitalist states. Scientific socialists see the capitalist state as a development brought about by the contradictions of feudal society, contradictions such as the vestment of land ownership in the church and the nobility and the subjection of the serfs and peasants. Capitalism needed the breaking of feudal shackles on land and the creation of a free working class—freed from the means of a livelihood. And so the bourgeoisie ultimately gained control of the feudal states and the necessary legislation was passed.
Marx and Engels saw the working class as a potentially revolutionary class that would organise politically to gain control of the bourgeois, or capitalist state. But not for the purpose of "smashing" it and erecting another state—a one-party dictatorship—in its place. To Marx and Engels, and to the scientific socialists of today, socialism will not be a one-party system but, rather, a no-party system. Once the working class has gained control of the state, wrested it from the capitalist class, both capitalists and workers cease to exist as economic classes. The age of politics and of political parties will come to an end. The state, in its historic capacity as an instrument of a ruling class in the subjugation of ruled classes, will be no more. But it will not be smashed. It will become transformed into an administration over the affairs of man rather than a government over man, himself, as it has always been and still remains. Let's organize, then, not to smash the state but to gain control of it. In this way lies the only real brotherhood of man, world socialism.
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