The state that governs capitalist society is not a structure that can be used to defend the interests of workers. Its institutions, despite internal contradictions and differences, are not “neutral” in their class character. The police, the Armed Forces, the courts, Congress, minister cabinets, all have intimate connections with big business, bankers and the big capitalists. The heads of state apparatuses are often themselves capitalists, and even those who are not, have close ties to the bourgeoisie. Such bonds are reinforced and maintained in countless ways. It is for this reason that Marxism affirms, against the arguments of reformists, that such a capitalist state must be destroyed. This conclusion means that it is not possible to change the character of the state through elections or even with the pressure of a mass movement, but that the workers’ movement must prepare itself for a confrontation in which the institutions of the bourgeoisie are disarmed, deprived of authority and dismembered.
The police, itself one of the central nuclei of the capitalist state, are not composed of workers, but of armed agents of capital, permanently materially and ideologically conditioned to confront the workers and oppressed who revolt against the system. For this reason, Marxists do not support police riots or “strikes” that are for the improvement of the repressive apparatus (better equipment, better conditions, better wages), as this means reinforcing the capitalist state’s conditions of repression against the workers. We are for the expulsion of police officers and their organizations from the workers’ movements.
The Armed Forces can vary in their composition a lot depending on the conjuncture. In situations of national crisis or war, workers who are not previously trained are often recruited. In such a context, agitation to break discipline and underground organization of soldiers and low ranks against top officers becomes possible and even crucial. We do not support the demands of the military in favor of better conditions of repression (more weapons, vehicles, prisons and autonomy) to attack the working class and historically oppressed sectors. But we defend the actions of groups or individuals in the Armed Forces who break the hierarchy by rejecting orders to attack workers, repress popular demonstrations or harass the left, for example.
Trade unions and other workers’ organizations must prepare, at appropriate times, to arm themselves and train their forces for confrontations with the state. Even before decisive revolutionary confrontations, the defence of strikes and the workers movement imposes this as a necessity. This means building workers’ defence guards, or collective defence units. It is a demand that must be raised frequently in trade unions and in the movement to face specific racist or fascist threats, but which takes on another dimension in times of pre-revolutionary crisis.
Marxists reject all expressions of pacifism of those who preach the liberal policy of “disarmament”. We are in favor of arming the population for a revolution where the state apparatus that represents the bourgeoisie is opposed by the organized force of workers. This has nothing to do with the apologia of reactionaries make for the armament of their own groups, linked to the police: armed landowners, right-wing militias, fascist groups and other agents of capital. Arming the population in general never crosses their minds, because it would be tantamount to preparing an element for their own overthrow.
Revolution is nothing more and nothing less than the period of open confrontation between the forces of a bourgeois state in crisis with the emerging organized forces of the proletariat, directing the vast majority of those oppressed by capitalism. Being a revolutionary means preparing the working class for this confrontation.
Marxists obviously wish that this conflict could be resolved peacefully, with the opinion of the majority of the proletariat triumphing against that of the minority of exploiters and parasites. But it has long been clear that the bourgeoisie does not intend to leave power and property peacefully. It instead arms itself in all possible ways, including the use of terrorism, coups, widespread police violence, and slander and defamation campaigns against communists. It is likely inevitable that the destruction of the bourgeois state will take place by means of insurrection, which can also lead to a path of civil war. Marxists consciously recognize these means as necessary, and stress that the pain of the childbirth of a new society will be lessened the stronger and more hegemonic the organized forces of workers are.
Doubts about the task of the proletariat in the revolution were answered historically by the Paris Commune, and then even more decisively by the Russian Revolution of 1917. The proletariat needs to build a “general staff”, an embryo of state power to win the fierce struggle against the bourgeoisie. Those who claim that the proletariat “needs no state”, usually Anarchists or so called “libertarian” socialists, ignore or romanticize the concrete tasks of the revolution. Marx and Engels responded to this in their mature writings: “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875).
The dictatorship of the proletariat, which after the Russian Revolution was commonly called a workers’ state by the Bolsheviks, is the organized and armed power of workers to destroy the bourgeois state and carry out the reorganization of the economy and society in the interests of the workers. Whenever possible, we fight for the regime of such a state to be based on the democracy of the workers’ grassroots organizations. In Russia, such bodies were the workers councils (soviets). This is why, in every moment of crisis, one of the key tasks of revolutionaries is to explain the need for bodies of this type, even though their forms may vary in each location or situation (commune, workers council, neighborhood committees). They are the potential embryos of a proletarian state, self-educating schools of workers in the process of becoming the new ruling class.
Marxists therefore reject the idea that that the bourgeois state can gradually become proletarian, or make the transition to socialism without a revolution that overthrows it and establishes a proletarian state. This is a central difference with those who, in recent years, have been excited about what they claimed was the process of building socialism (or a “Bolivarian revolution”) in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. Many years ago, something similar took place with expectations in the Popular Front of Salvador Allende in Chile. Both experiences thoroughly confirmed the correctness of the Marxist assessment. Marxists remain in opposition to the left-wing bourgeois governments, which frustrate the task of destroying the state and shield the capitalist class, saving their skin in times of crisis.