Why the capitalist state must be smashed — and what replaces it
The state is not a neutral body standing above society. It is the organised violence of one class against another. Every state in history has been a machine for the oppression of one class by another. The police, the army, the courts, the prisons — these are not institutions of justice. They are instruments of class rule.
Engels defined the state as a product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises precisely because class contradictions cannot be reconciled. It is the power that stands above society and increasingly alienates itself from it.
The capitalist state, no matter how democratic in form, is in essence the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Parliament, elections, constitutions — all serve to disguise the reality that the capitalist class rules through its ownership of the means of production and its control of state power.
The state is not a mediator between classes. It is the organised power of the ruling class to maintain its domination. In capitalist society, the state serves capital — through legislation, policing, military intervention, and ideological control.
Parliamentary democracy under capitalism is democracy for the rich. The working class is permitted to choose every few years which member of the ruling class will misrepresent them. Real decisions are made by capital, not by voters.
The capitalist state machine cannot be taken over and used for socialist purposes. It must be smashed and replaced by new organs of proletarian power — soviets, workers' councils, and the armed people.
After the revolution, the working class must establish its own state — the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is democracy for the vast majority and suppression of the exploiting minority. It is the transitional state on the road to communism.
As classes are abolished and the material basis for exploitation disappears, the state will gradually wither away. The government of persons will be replaced by the administration of things. This is the communist horizon.
The anarchists demand the immediate abolition of the state. This is utopian. So long as classes exist, the proletariat needs its own state to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie. The state withers away — it cannot be abolished by decree.
"So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state."
— V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)The British state is one of the oldest and most refined instruments of bourgeois class rule in the world. The monarchy, the House of Lords, the established church, the City of London — all are relics of centuries of class domination, preserved and adapted to serve modern capital.
The French state, born in revolution but captured by the bourgeoisie, has its own apparatus of repression: the CRS riot police, the centralised prefectoral system, the nuclear arsenal, and the neocolonial military presence across Africa.
Both states are pillars of NATO and instruments of imperialist aggression worldwide. They cannot be reformed from within. They must be overthrown by the organised working class and replaced by workers' states committed to socialist construction.
The first attempt at proletarian state power. The Commune abolished the standing army, made all officials elected and recallable, and paid them no more than a worker's wage. It fell because it did not go far enough — it failed to expropriate the Bank of France and did not march on Versailles. Marx and Lenin drew essential lessons from its defeat.
The Bolshevik Revolution created the first lasting workers' state. Under Lenin and Stalin, the Soviet Union industrialised a backward country, defeated fascism, and demonstrated that socialism could be built. The Soviet state was the dictatorship of the proletariat in practice — imperfect, besieged, but real.
After 1945, workers' states were established across Eastern Europe, Asia, and later Cuba. Each adapted the principles of proletarian state power to its national conditions. Whatever their shortcomings, they proved that the working class can govern.
Understanding the state is essential for every revolutionary. Without this understanding, we are disarmed.