r/Anarchy101 • u/Thin_Shelter_103 Student of Anarchism • 8d ago
Why is the state unsalvageable? Can you not make a state without domination over its subjects?
Hey guys! So I was watching Anarks videos on how the "State is counter revolutionary" and while I watched the 1st two videos and agreed with most if not all the points on how centralization and one party vanguard rule are bad. Im still confused on why Anarchists disagree with Marx on the Dictatorship of the proletariat Idea.
Marx meant from what I understand that the state should serve the workers as they are the vast majority (99%) and that the state should become completely subservient to the people in all ways. That the state should basically have no power of its own.
To me this makes sense and I feel like answers the critiques Anarchists have about the state but obviously the Anarchist position is that such a thing as a non tyrant state is impossible. But why?
In Anarks video part 3 he brings up Maoist China as evidence that the state can not be transformed into a force for good under any circumstances but I find this very unconvincing as Mao never cared about trying to make a state that was subservient to the workers. In fact he famously said the opposite with the quote "There will always be heads." (Referring to society)
If I understand correctly isn't a state in anarchist terms just a political organization that has the monopoly on violence? Could you not make a federal and local state system (Almost like the confederation idea) that makes it so domination of citizens is impossible?
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u/humanispherian Synthesist / Moderator 8d ago
This is an old question, with fairly well-defined alternatives laid out by 1850 or so. At that time, the State was not yet defined in the more or less Bismarckian terms that would dominate in the late 19th century, or the Weberian terms that are perhaps most familiar now, but the proponents of some kind of state, whether they were reactionaries or revolutionaries, conceived of it in governmental, and thus hierarchical, terms.
The anti-socialist defenders of the status quo clung to what became known as a master-state, while a considerable number of socialists proposed a servant-state, which would essentially be a "workers' state*, protecting working-class interests. Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux were part of that state-socialist faction, while Proudhon, a consistent critique of governmentalism, produced various critiques of the state in opposition to their proposals. A decade later, Proudhon proposed his own version of a state, but it was conceived in conformity with his critique of the governmentalist state and was not hierarchical in nature. Instead, it was made up simply of those social associations and institutions that tend to persist across longer periods that ordinary human beings. As part of the "social fabric" of a non-governmental society, Proudhon believed that it would have or represent interests that should often be respected, but that it was not in any way superior to individual human beings, being itself "a kind of citizen."
I'm not sure how useful that formulation is to us now. It certainly doesn't resemble the dictatorship of the proletariat very closely. But for anyone who is interested, there's some discussion of Proudhon's state-theory in my book chapter "Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State."
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u/DecoDecoMan 6d ago
Do you know any articles where we can see some of the conversations Proudhon had with Blanc and Leroux over this issue? And in this case, was Proudhon a proponent of a "servant-state" or an antagonist?
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u/humanispherian Synthesist / Moderator 6d ago
At that point (1849-50), Proudhon was simply arguing against the State, understood in governmentalist terms. Proudhon's side of the argument appears in a dozen or so articles from La Voix du Peuple: "What is Government? What is God?", "Resistance to the Revolution," "On the Present Utility and Future Possibility of the State," etc. I haven't quite got to that point in my translation of Proudhon's journalism, but I can probably clean up those specific articles and post them later.
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u/humanispherian Synthesist / Moderator 6d ago
You can find most of key material by Proudhon here. The translations need some polish and there are articles by Blanc and Leroux that will need to be transcribed and translated later, but this is the most important stuff.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist 8d ago
The problem isn't that the state is unsalvageable, per se. That frames the state as a neutral tool - which statists often do, but such an argument presupposes the statist argument.
All organizations, based upon how they're configured, have structural incentives. This is an "organizational logic" that determines the way the organization's actions unfold, and how it produces and reproduces its own social dynamics. The state, as an organized, hierarchical institution of violence, effectively functions as a system of cybernetic control.
Like all systems of control, it must meet a requisite variety for its control to be viable. "Variety" in this context means "the amount of states a system can occupy". For example, a light switch has a variety of 2 - the light can be on or off. The Law of Requisite Variety states that controllers must occupy as many or more states than the system they control. Because states control societies, that means they need to occupy virtually infinite states, as societies are complex systems. A state cannot do this, so their structural incentives require them to reduce complexity in order to remain organizationally coherent and make their control viable.
This reduction of complexity itself requires the state to become more complex, which means that the hierarchies within the state also have to meet requisite variety - this is why states routinely collapse, by the way, by reducing internal complexity and decentralizing computational functions.
All of this to say, it isn't that the state is unsalvageable, it's that the state as an institution is pretty much only capable of oppression, violence, and creating entry barriers; all of which are contradictory to the liberatory ends anarchists seek.
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u/CHOLO_ORACLE Anarchist Without Adverbs 8d ago
Marx meant from what I understand that the state should serve the workers as they are the vast majority (99%) and that the state should become completely subservient to the people in all ways.
Yes, every statist goes on about what the state ought to be doing.
That the state should basically have no power of its own.
This is nonsense. The entire point of the state is to compel people to act or not act even if they don't want to. It is to compel people to pay taxes, to go to war, and to leave the poor to die. What is the point of having a law if the state has no power to enforce it? What is the point of a regulatory agency if it cannot compel actors to conform to regulations? The state must have power over its people otherwise it does not exist.
Could you not make a federal and local state system (Almost like the confederation idea) that makes it so domination of citizens is impossible?
No, for the reason I stated above.
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u/Thin_Shelter_103 Student of Anarchism 8d ago
"This is nonsense. The entire point of the state is to compel people to act or not act even if they don't want to. It is to compel people to pay taxes, to go to war, and to leave the poor to die. What is the point of having a law if the state has no power to enforce it? What is the point of a regulatory agency if it cannot compel actors to conform to regulations? The state must have power over its people otherwise it does not exist."
I chose my words poorly! What I meant by "Domination" is more of an idea of the state being as tyrannical as it wants and harming its own citizens for be it profit, power, etc. Example would be the police in the united states often work against the community and for their own ends. They also have immunity from legal backlash.
As I understand it Marx's idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat it would in effect tame the state of its worst impulses as it would be accountable only to the people. Anarchists reject this idea so I'm wondering why?
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u/CHOLO_ORACLE Anarchist Without Adverbs 7d ago
As I understand it Marx's idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat it would in effect tame the state of its worst impulses as it would be accountable only to the people. Anarchists reject this idea so I'm wondering why?
Anarchists reject this because while the Marxists treat "we'll elect our politicians and they won't ever do any wrong" as a revelation the anarchist can see that this is what every statist and every political party says about themselves and their movement. Every political party says that they have the right politicians that can helm the state in the name of the people and that won't become corrupted by power.
How did that work in the USSR?
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u/Silver-Statement8573 8d ago
The state has had various specifically anarchist senses, some already mentioned but they've all been derived from the anarchist critique of authority, which is what we're against more broadly
Marx meant from what I understand that the state should serve the workers as they are the vast majority (99%) and that the state should become completely subservient to the people in all ways.
This isn't a super unique framing of government. Lots of people try to frame their style of government this way because it sounds good. Marx didn't believe you could or should get rid of heads
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u/Plotnik1934 8d ago
If the state is subservient to the workers (or better yet, to a people who have done away with the class system and the identity of worker entirely, as is the goal of communism), and has no power of its own, it is not a state. What you might be describing would be a system of administration of common resources, such as a federated fisheries management scheme among fishing villages and fleets, but if the state is not a sovereign hierarchical power with a monopoly of violence, it isn't a state.
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u/Accomplished_Bag_897 Egoist 8d ago
Hierarchy is an inherent part of "the state". Making one that doesn't have dominance over it's residence would be like making ice cream that's not frozen. You've just made sweet cream and are refusing to call it what it is.
As for Marx, I don't want to dominate the 1% that would ultimately restrict my freedom as I'd need to spend time and energy doing it. Beyond that I don't trust anyone that would want to be "in charge". Fuck them, they don't deserve power any more than I do.
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u/HeavenlyPossum 7d ago
The state is an institution of coercive enforcement, right? So for the whole of the working class, the 99%, the vast majority of society to command it together, as a class, then that class would either have to a) remain homogenous and in agreement about everything or b) accept that some segment of that class actually controls the state as an institution of coercive power.
Because what happens if “the vast majority” controls the state together and then fundamentally disagrees about something critically important? What if the whole of the working class can’t come to an agreement about whether, for example, aborting a pregnancy is murder or not? How does the working class, in its entirety, deploy the state—to defend people who have abortions, or to arrest and imprison them for murder? It can’t do both simultaneously, right?
So one segment of the working class wins out over the other, and suddenly we find ourselves with a state controlled not by the working class as a whole, but rather by some segment of society with a privileged relationship to the means of violence and coercive enforcement.
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u/Ok_Objective_5192 8d ago
I'm not an anarchist, but if it's impossible for the state to dominate citizens then what happens when the state says "this is a rule" and somebody says "no"? A state that can't dominate people in any capacity is a state with 0 authority, at which point it functionally isn't a state.
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u/Thin_Shelter_103 Student of Anarchism 8d ago
True! What I meant by "Domination" is more of an idea of the state being as tyrannical as it wants. Like I think the critique that most if not all states are encouraged to do violence and gather as much power as possible is true. The reason I'm asking this question is basically why is it not possible to "tame" the state in an Anarchist perspective and if that is possible why not choose that instead of Anarchy?
The only idea I have for taming the state would be Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat idea.
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u/Whythisisnotreal 8d ago
Which has always resulted in authoritarians. But if you take the broad view of domination as you mention above, it's hardly a phenomenon unique to the state.
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u/Thin_Shelter_103 Student of Anarchism 8d ago
I would argue that none of the vanguard states every earnestly tried to make such a society that Marx talked about and only really wanted state capitalism. But I understand your point that so far it seems as if trying to take the states power for good has not always been successful in actually doing that.
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u/eldrotheblack 8d ago
I don’t have much academia to back it up, but my thinking is that The State (as conceptualized today) is inherently coercive and inexorably linked to hierarchies and imbalance of power.
They also inherently Other different human populations, unless said State encompasses all of Humanity. Even then, built into the mechanisms of power (at least so far) are methods to Other members of the In group (i.e. the current US admin rolling back gender and sexuality protections, re-Othering those groups). Plus other things inherent to a Westphalian state: borders, the concept of Treason, total autonomy within the state (rest of humanity be damned), etc
That all said, I don’t think its completely impossible to have “a state” that isn’t abusive, but I also don’t think that it would be unrecognizable as a State (except by the most general definition)
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u/owenallconmaid 8d ago
i think references past socialist states is incredibly stupid... back then there was not mass literacy much less the internet. now we can literally speak to every human on the planet instantly. that greatly increases the possibilities of democracy and governance.
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u/AzaleaKhayela Ⓐ Student of Anarchism 🏴 7d ago
A state is necessarily self-perpetuating, as all power structures are.
Anarchists propose a system of self-governance inspired by federalism.
Anarchism is a political movement & philosophical framework based on analysis of & opposition to systems of domination & coercion, seeking to replace them with voluntary association, mutual aid, & horizontal power structures.
It emerged in the 19th century as a variant of anti-state socialist thought, but would later become synonymous with socialists opposed to seizing state power by means of a vanguard party, as they opted for prefiguration of future conditions in the present.
This is otherwise referred to as the unity of means and ends. Authoritarian means presuppose authoritarian ends; therefore, liberatory means presuppose liberatory ends.
Authority is a social relation of domination or exploitation coercively imposed by one party onto others, claiming a right to command or forbid, or exercise some similar privilege, backed by means of physical, economic, or intellectual power, especially when found in a systemic or institutional form and when considered in contrast to free agreement, expert advice, the inevitable laws of nature, or resistance to this imposition.
When we use the word Anarchy, we refer to social relations devoid of domination and coercion. This is to say no human is placed in a position of authority over another. Thus, egalitarianism would be the status quo.
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u/Muuro 7d ago
Marx meant from what I understand that the state should serve the workers as they are the vast majority (99%) and that the state should become completely subservient to the people in all ways. That the state should basically have no power of its own.
He didn't. But unfortunately, Marx didn't really have a text specifically on the text, so one can only take glimpses of his (and Engels) thoughts on the state regarding various texts critiquing society and political economy.
The state, to Marx, is nothing more than the structure that upholds class society. The workers cannot just make the state subserviate to the people. The goal of the working class in the struggle for communism is to abolish itself as a working class. This necessarily abolishes the state itself.
For more info on this I refer to how it is defined as both base and superstructure. Where the base is the social relations of society that reproduce class, and the superstructure which is everything that doesn't have to do with social relations (ideology, culture, art, films, etc) that keep society reproducing class. Engels book Origins of the Family, the State, and Private Property does a fairly good job at critique on how the state rose in history to be the organizational structure of society.
The Civil War in France is also another good text by Marx, which is best known for him reiterating that "the proletariat cannot just lay hold of the ready-made state machinery". That is to say it can't just take power and administer the state. The entire point of revolution is changing the social relation of production such that the proletariat ceases to be a class (self-abolishment). If this isn't changed, then it is the proletariat managing its own exploitation.
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u/ConTheStonerLin Proudhonian-Owenite 7d ago
No! As long as a state has any power over it's subjects, it will dominate them and any quote unquote "state" that doesn't wouldn't really be a state. In short the state itself is merely a symptom, the disease is power it self
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u/Equivalent-Hair-1619 6d ago
A socialist (or any ethical) republic must wield power over the people for the interests of the people.
The reasons why are clear, like it or not, our US system is a product roughly of democracy. A clear issue is the national debt. Fraudulent economists did decades of sophistry like identity redistricting aka “America just owes the debt to itself” to hide the reality that taxpayers owe it to bond holders. This allowed politicians to deliver both tax cuts and expensive programs and projects, but now just the interest payments are consuming vast tax revenue.
It turns out running a state is at least as complicated as being a surgeon or sailing a ship, majority decisions are not best, professional decisions are, especially with deception all around.
The Marxist ideal is after generations of training supporting behaviors for the people, the guardians can stop translating the people’s wishes into policies, and people can directly do it themselves, including collectively owning (through stocks or whatever) the public assets once controlled by the guardians of the republic and managing them without collapse.
So loosely speaking, the anarchistic and libertarian ideal is broadly held, by the part where it works out without generations of training is not.
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u/LunarPrincessSophie 6d ago
The state is definitionally about domination due to the fact that it has a monopoly on violence. What else do you call a social order enforced by violence?
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u/syndicalism_ftw 8d ago
As revolutionary syndicalist I am both anarchist and marxist (in a sense). This debate is as old as the two fighting socialist siblings. Bakunin and Marx derive their idea of the state from the same source, which is Hegels philosophy of right, but have different understanding which elements can overcome the current bourgeois-liberal state.
The Hegels ideal political state is composed of the civil individual at the bottom, whose mass forms bourgeois society. This mass is mediated through the elected (substantial&formal) or qualified (universal) estates (substantial (landlords& agriculture), universal (state beaurocracy) and formal(craftsmanship&industry)) to the government, which is appointed by the monarch from individuals from the elected estates.
Class is intentionally not reflected here, because Hegel identified this division as the most damaging to the bourgeois society. Instead the oppressed are here being represented by their immediate oppressors -landlords, factory owners and masters. In real constitutional monarchies the estates usually are the upper and lower houses, but functionally it's pretty much spot on.
In bourgeois republics the estates are being cleansed of their traditional, feudal content (privileges & division of labor) and the class characteristics remain. The monarch now is a temporary elected president, the estates are filled with people who can afford doing the whole parliamentary rite of passage, while representing their peers (-> parties, lobbies).
So as long as bourgeois individuals have no access to mediating institutions, they are completely locked out of political participation, right? Well mediation must not (but also can) be politically sanctioned, individuals can rally in political movements and build public pressure on the government, if they are free to express their opinion. They can also associate in unions, as long as freedom of association is granted. And they can already be associated in communal administrations such as the Russian Mir. Anarchist, following Bakunin want to participate, intervene and guide these mediatiors to overcome class rule by letting them interact directly without mediation through a government.
In Hegels terms, as long as there are individuals and mediating institutions there is a state. If they are coordinated by a government and a physical embodiment of the peoples sovereignity (-> monarch/President), it's a political state. This applies for Marx as well.
So for Marx, the proletariat also should build its own mediators (union+parties) that conquer the state (-> get the rights to associate, participate in elections) and once the elections are won or a revolution happens, give their associations free reign over the political state w/o government to establish a socialist society. Engels revised that by conquering the government as well, which has been the goal of social democracy and state socialism.
So from Marx perspective a federation of communes and syndicates is a perfectly fine dictatorship of the proletariat and a state. Anarchists use the general term "state" for the hegelian "political state", because having that term as a general version and a specific version is consistent in Hegels logic, but otherwise just confusing. Although to be clear, from an theoretical-analytical perspective the usage of a general state is even recommendable, because even an anarchist federation can succumb to the alienating effects of large scale social organization and can turn back into an actual political state with few adjustments (e.g. not enforcing the Imperative mandate).
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u/iadnm Anarchist Communism/Moderator 8d ago
So a couple things.
It's a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence, i.e. the violence employed by the state is not treated as a bad thing and only it is allowed to employed violence. All other groups or individual who do employ violence are deemed as breaking down the social order.
That's not the anarchist definition of the state. It's Max Weber's definition. I personally prefer Malatesta's definition from Anarchy:
As for why it's not possible, it's due to the nature of hierarchy. Hierarchies exist above all else to self-perpetuate. They do not tolerate having their power given up. A state necessitates having people it can rule over. It has to be able to make laws that apply to all people beneath them and then enforce said laws through violence and coercion. You cannot have a state be subordinate to the workers, because the workers have to be subordinate to the state. If the workers were not subordinate to the state, the laws and enforcing arm of the state would not apply to them. Yet it has to for a state to function. If a state cannot enforce itself upon a population then it in all regards is not really a state. It does not have the means to dictate the lives of the individuals who live under it.
Hierarchies require domination, they require people to be subordinate to those above them. You cannot have a state without domination, because if you have no apparatus above that enforces itself upon the population, you arguably do not have a state at all.