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Unit 12: Karl Marx: Class Struggle and Social Change and Theory of Surplus Value

Hegel described, a “march of God on earth”, but an instrument of the dominant economic class Notes
exploiting and oppressing the other sections of society. Marx rejected the dichotomy between civil
society and the state in Hegelian philosophy, and concluded that the state and bureaucracy did
not represent universal interests.
Marx regarded the state, regardless of the forms of government, as an evil, because it was a
product of a society saddled with irreconcilable class struggles. It belonged to the realm of the
superstructure, as it was conditioned and determined by its economic base. In the course of
history, each mode of production would give rise to its own specific political organization, which
would further the interests of the economically dominant class. In a capitalist society, the state, as
defined in the Manifesto, was “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”.
Unlike Hegel, who had worked out the details of a modern state by his distinction of the realm of
the state and the realm of civil society, Marx’s account was sketchy. This was in spite of Marx’s
professed aim to provide for an alternative to the Hegelian paradigm as outlined in his Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The alternative that Marx envisaged was a classless, stateless society of
true democracy and full communism, in which the political state disappeared.
For Marx and Engels, the state expressed human alienation. It was an instrument of class exploitation
and class oppression, for the economically dominant class exploited and oppressed the economically
weaker class. The state apparatus served the ruling class, but acquired independence and became
autonomous when the adversary classes were in a state of temporary equilibrium. This phenomenon
was described as Bonapartism. In such a situation, the dictator, with the support of the state
apparatus, became its guardian.
In the Anti Duhring (1878), Engels regarded the state as an unnatural institution arising when
society was divided into “two irreconcilable and antagonistic classes”. In such a situation, a state
could not be democratic, for a true democratic society would have to be both classless and stateless. The
instruments of the state, like law, government, police and bureaucracy, served the interests of the
dominant economic class, and not the whole of society as contended by the liberals.
Bonapartism
In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx denounced the bureaucratic and all-
powerful state advising the proletariat to destroy it. His views on the state were determined
largely by his perceptions and analyses of the French state, the Revolution of 1848 and the coup
d’etat of Napoleon III. As a result, Marx advocated a violent revolutionary seizure of power and
the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, in countries with democratic
institutions, the transition from capitalism to socialism could be peaceful. In 1872, Marx noted
such a possibility in America, England and Holland, where the state was not as highly centralized
and bureaucratic as in France.
In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx and Engels referred to Bonapartism as a regime in a capitalist
society in which the executive branch of the state, under the rule of one individual, attained
dictatorial power over all other parts of the state and society. Bonapartism was an extreme
manifestation of what, in recent Marxist writings, was described as relative autonomy of the state.
An example of such a regime during Marx’s lifetime was that of Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of
Napoleon I, who became Napoleon III after his coup d’etat of December 2, 1851. Engels found a
parallel with Bismarck’s rule in Germany.
Bonapartism was the result of a situation where the ruling class in capitalist society was no longer
in a position to maintain its rule through constitutional and parliamentary means. Neither was the
working class able to wrest control for itself. It was a situation of temporary equilibrium between
the rival warring classes. In the Civil War in France (1871), Marx described Bonapartism as a “form
of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class
had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation”.

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