Workers World, Vol. 9, No. 25, December 16, 1967
What is most crucial in the relation of the basic classes in society is their political attitude toward the state. As on so many occasions in past decades, it has taken a political and social upheaval to reveal this once again.
The state used to be an object of philosophical speculation and its true character was hidden from the masses by centuries of class domination, exploitation and oppression. Almost half a century after Marx had written his celebrated “Civil War in France” and analyzed the Paris Commune as a dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx’s teaching on the state as an instrument of class domination was still basically hidden from the masses as an integral part of his doctrine of proletarian revolution.
It took Lenin to once again, as he himself put it, “revive and resuscitate Marx’s teaching on the state” as the “product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms,” as “an instrument of class domination,” and as “organized violence” used by one class to maintain its domination over another.
Furthermore, and this is the most crucial teaching of Marx as developed by Lenin, he showed that the proletariat could not simply lay hold of the ready-made machinery of the state but must shatter it in order to achieve its own class emancipation from the rule of the bourgeoisie.
Still a half century later – after Lenin’s “State and Revolution,” two world wars and several proletarian revolutions, one would think that the attitude of Marxists to the state, especially to that colossus known as the government of the United States, would be clear.
On the contrary, it is more obscured than ever.
After every great struggle, Marx explained in his monumental analysis of the Paris Commune, the “repressive character of the state apparatus” stands out in “bolder and bolder relief.”
If anything is clear in the recent experiences of the American people, and those people abroad who suffer under the heel of U.S. finance capital and its predatory war machine, it is the growing “repressive character of the state,” its unrestrained use of force and violence.
The existence of the U.S. imperialist system and the ravages it visits upon all the peoples abroad, and the increasing degree to which it uses violence at home on ever larger sections of the population, should really make Marx’s analysis of the state self-evident, rather than a point of contention. For if the state structure of the U.S. is not really as Lenin put it, “an instrument of organized violence for the purpose of perpetuating the class rule of the bourgeoisie,” the ruling class would find it impossible to maintain the system for any length of time.
All of this is pertinent today, when one considers the attitude of various political groups who call themselves Marxist-Leninists – particularly their attitude to the state in the current war crisis of U.S. imperialism that arises from its mad adventure in Vietnam.
Has not U.S. imperialist intervention in Santo Domingo, in the Congo, in Lebanon and in the recent Mideast crisis, as well as in Vietnam, revealed the true class character of the bourgeois state as “organized violence”? Had not the unmitigated use of the most barbarous violence as practiced in Watts, Newark, Detroit, Philadelphia and a dozen other cities put the state apparatus in “bolder and bolder relief” as an “instrument of organized violence” for the perpetuation of the rule of the master class? Should not all this make clear to the various Marxist groups and their leaders that the extension of the use of force to the white civil population which resists the imperialist war is an absolutely inevitable fact?
No, this not at all clear to them! And to the extent that it is clear, they seek to forget it, rather than to utilize the opportunity furnished by the imperialist war to educate and enlighten the masses on the true character of the capitalist state. They seek to obscure the role of the state and its congenital use of violence on an ever growing scale. Not only do they seek to obscure it, but while doing so, they also seek to entice the youngest, most resolute and most determined sections of the anti-war movement to reconcile themselves with the state and try to avoid the inevitable conflict.
The Vietnam war has offered an opportunity to develop what is already visible to many observers as the beginning of a potentially revolutionary movement that can shake the very structure, the rotting edifice on which the piratical rule of monopoly capital rests. This, of course, entails resolute determination to come to grips with the imperialist colossus, and not merely to dissent from its criminal conduct.
More than anything, it is necessary to unmask the pacifism of the bourgeois leaders in the anti-war movement, and especially the neo-pacifists, meaning those Marxists who have abandoned the revolutionary teachings of Marx and Lenin on the state as organized violence against the masses, in favor of conciliation with the state.
Fifty years after the October Revolution, and in the midst of a barbarous war against an oppressed people 10,000 miles away, people who call themselves Marxist-Leninists see only the possibility of a “peaceful,” so-called “Constitutional” response by the masses as the only means of stopping the war, which has been unleashed, it must be repeated, by the organized use of violence on an unheard-of scale.
But no imperialist war has ever really been stopped by mere peaceful methods of protest. The bourgeoisie is willing to agree to “peaceful dissent,” as long as it can continue the unhindered prosecution of the war.
Therein lies the precise problem. Should the imperialist war effort be hindered? Should it not be the duty of working class leaders in and out of the anti-war movement to utilize the opportunity of the imperialist war to promote truly revolutionary methods of struggle?
Revolution? Oh yes. Some of these neo-pacifist leaders, real revolutionaries – on paper – are all for struggle, somewhere else.
But the thought of the use of violent struggle by the masses to counter the barbarous use of violence of the U.S. bourgeois state both at home and abroad, that is strictly “ultra-leftism.” Their “revolution” is only a literary exercise. How else can we explain the hostile attitude of some of the leaders of the anti-war movement to the question of self-defense tactics, now being raised by a growing number of youth?
Reading the report of the New York City anti-draft week by Joel Meyers, in this issue of Workers World, one can clearly see that what is at the bottom of the dispute between the Parade Committee leaders and the youthful activists who are proponents of the “mobile tactic,” is really the question of the capitalist state.
The Parade Committee leaders are at bottom seeking a pacifist rather than a revolutionary struggle against a state which is daily expanding a most counterrevolutionary war. They are not trying to educate the masses as to the true character of the war as a class war, nor do they see the war as a function of the class domination of the bourgeoisie.
They seek to explain it by resort to “morality” and “mistaken policy” and even the “accidental character” of Johnson as President.
This will not help enlighten the masses. It will only help to confuse them, and make them susceptible to the practical politics of the fraudulent two-party, electoral machine.
Preparing the masses for revolutionary struggle means preparing them to properly respond to the violence of the bourgeois state in an organized and disciplined manner. This does not exclude large mass marches, peaceful demonstrations or other means of struggle. But it brings home to the masses the grim reality that the bourgeois state is organized violence.
The state is a machine for the suppression of one class by another class. It is, as Marx called it, an engine of class despotism. And it will not succumb to incantations by leaders with pacifist delusions, who see the most violent struggles launched by the U.S. imperialist colossus abroad, at home, and virtually at their own doorstep, but can only see a peaceful, ritualistic response as the answer.
As the struggle unfolds, however, the masses themselves will see the fallacy involved in these preachments and find other ways and other leaders to carry out their urgent tasks.
The war that U.S. imperialism is waging is an imperialist war. This means, above everything else, that it arises out of the class needs of monopoly capital and is an inevitable product of its system of exploitation and rapine. Its fundamental features are like those of any other of the imperialist wars conducted by the imperialist powers. The strategical line of proletarian struggle against imperialist war was laid down by Lenin more than half a century ago.
It is high time to remind those who lay claim to being adherents of the October Socialist Revolution that one of the fundamental conditions for the victory was the successful application of Lenin’s strategical line on the attitude of the proletariat towards their “own” government during an imperialist war. The defeat of one’s “own” government is a desirable objective on the road to peace through revolutionary struggle. How can one even think in terms of revolutionary defeatism, when the bulk of the so-called anti-war leaders are so spineless that they even retreat from what already has become an acceptable slogan of the movement – to proceed “from dissent to resistance.”
Indeed, mass resistance on an ever larger scale and with a variety and multiplicity of new, dynamic methods which are calculated to defeat the war-machine and the banker-generals who head it is what is most urgently needed. There is need to find imaginative, bold and audacious ways of applying Lenin’s strategical line of revolutionary defeatism during this period of imperialist war waged by the U.S. government against the Vietnamese people.
Now that a section of the youth have awakened to this need, as though instinctively and without the benefit of the knowledge of Lenin’s teachings, it is precisely the so-called Marxists who are doing their damnedest to squelch them, to demoralize them with pacifist illusions, with fine arguments of “now is not the time” and with conjuring up all sorts of fears in order to scare them into submission. In this respect, these so-called Marxists reveal themselves to be the true descendants of the old social democrats in pre-revolutionary Russia, and their like in all other countries. History will accord them the same fate as it did their ancestors.
Last updated: 11 May 2026