When Marxists speak of the state, they do not mean it the way many people in the U.S. do — not the state of New York, Ohio or California. They mean the repressive apparatus of government: the courts, the prisons, the police and the military. The state is wielded by the government, part of the superstructure of capitalist, or bourgeois, society, and it exists to keep social relations as they are, shielding the propertied few from the exploited and oppressed masses.
The state has not always existed
Has the state always existed? The question can be partly answered by posing another: have there always been classes? To see where the need for the state comes from, we have to look at history materialistically.
Human beings have existed on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years, but the state has ruled for only about the last 5,000. If you measured all of human history with a yardstick, the stretch in which the state has existed would take up less than an inch.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings lived in societies that had no state — no cops, no jails, no armies. Disputes were handled through social mediation and pressure.
The state arose with classes
The first states came into existence about 5,000 years ago, around 3000 BCE. Before that, people lived communally, sharing what there was. As the ability to produce grew, societies began to turn out a surplus — more than was needed to survive from one day to the next. The surplus was hoarded and made the private property of a few, while the majority had none. Out of this came the split of humanity into classes: those with property and those without.
An apparatus — the state — grew out of the antagonism between the propertied and the property-less: specially trained and armed people who protect the few owners of wealth against the great majority kept in poverty. Out of these conditions ancient slave society emerged, in which human beings themselves became the property of the wealthy. As Engels put it:
The increase of production in all branches — cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts — gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. … prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.
— Frederick Engels
Slave society and the feudal state
The Roman Empire of the first and second centuries CE was a slave society. Of its 50 to 60 million people, perhaps a fifth were enslaved — and in Italy itself, closer to a third. Its ruling class kept a standing army of hundreds of thousands to conquer new territory and hold down the enslaved, who rose in revolt again and again — most famously under Spartacus in 73–71 BCE, in the era of the Republic before the empire.
The Western Roman Empire, a typical slave state, collapsed in the fifth century CE. It was eventually replaced by the feudal state, where serfs toiled on land owned by feudal lords. The lords’ wealth came from the serfs, who handed over the great majority of what they produced and kept only a meager portion to sustain themselves and their families. The armies of feudal society were kept and paid by the lords, who used them to put down serf uprisings.
Serfs were tried in the castle courtyard. We still use the word “court” today for the place of trial.
The capitalists built their own state
Beginning in the 1600s and 1700s, another class began to challenge the feudal lords for power. This attack on the landed aristocracy came from the capitalist class, whose wealth was based not on land but on commerce and trade — and later on industry and banking. In one country after another, the capitalists overthrew the feudal states of Europe in bloody civil wars, and set up states that served their needs in a way the feudal states could not.
The capitalist states that arose in Europe, and later in the U.S., used vast armies to subdue the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas, to exploit them and their natural resources. By the beginning of the 20th century, all the capitalist states had become imperialist.
The state today
Most peoples around the world had lived under earlier forms of the state, or with no state at all — among them many of the peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean. The imperialist nations of Europe and the U.S. have built the state up to huge proportions, with immense armies, enormous budgets and high-tech weaponry that can destroy whole cities.
The state, and the reason it exists, becomes clearer as more and more oppressed and exploited people in the U.S. and around the world fight back against the conditions imposed on them.
Additional reading
- The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — by Frederick Engels (1884). The classic Marxist account of how surplus, private property and class divided society and gave rise to the state — the source of the passage quoted above.
- Man Makes Himself — by V. Gordon Childe (1936). The Marxist archaeologist on the Neolithic and Urban revolutions — how farming, surplus and the first cities gave rise to classes and the state.
- The State and Revolution — by V.I. Lenin (1917). The state as a product of class antagonism and an instrument of class rule — and what the working class must do about it.
- Return to What is Marxism?