What Is The State?

Thomas Cook workers occupied the Grafton Street store back in 2009 to protest redundancy. After a few days the Guards came, smashed in the front door and took the workers out. The same thing happened to the Debenhams workers’ strike when they held effective pickets to stop stock being removed from the shops. The riot squad turned up to break the picket line.

One of the key dividing lines on the left is the issue of the state machine. Some say you can use it to bring about change. Sinn Féin, Labour, the Social Democrats and Greens all believe they can steer the machine. But working class revolutionaries have always pointed out that the state is not neutral. The machine is made to serve the bosses.

There’s also a middle position held by parties like People Before Profit who say you can tell the public you’d join a government under capitalism while preparing to walk out of any future government talks. This is trying to have your cake and eat it too. We should tell our class the truth.

The history of the state shows how the machine developed and what its role is under capitalism today. When humans lived as hunter gatherers there was no state. We lived in extended family groups that hunted and gathered cooperatively. At some point we learned to grow crops and we settled down. This led to an explosion of population. It also made sense to have a small number of people who didn’t work in the fields so they could look after a store of grain that was above and beyond immediate needs.

As farming techinques developed and the grain store grew this idle class, who at first played a positive role, began to develop into a ruling class. You can see the pattern in all early class societies - at first the idle class mapped the stars and helped develop knowledge like bookkeeping until they reached a point where they put their own luxury lifestyle ahead of everyone else and then feared knowledge as it threatened their power.

The weapons they held to defend the grain surplus from outsiders could be turned on their own people. Soon the storehouses became great pyramids and palaces and the ruling classes developed religions and legal codes to defend their power. But from the very start the state developed as a tool of the parasitic classes to maintain their control over the productive class.

In the Middle Ages the state was a machine that defended aristocrats who ruled over peasants. The growth of capitalism within the old society gave huge economic power to merchants and businessmen who resented the political power of the old Lords over them. The Crown in many countries could balance between the Lords and the capitalists to assume dictatorial control over all classes. But eventually the capitalists got sick of that too.

Revolutions broke out in England in 1648 and in France in 1789 that saw the capitalists take hold of the state machine. Once in power they used this repressive machine to clear peasants off the land and into their factories. They inflicted savagery on new colonies to steal raw materials and resources. They went to war with each other.

The modern capitalist state became a perfected machine of violence hidden behind a veil created by the myth of state neutrality and the ideal of the indifferent state bureaucrat. At the dawn of the workers’ movement we had no votes. There was a property qualification for votes. It took mass movements like the British working class Chartist movement to eventually win the right to vote.

The capitalists responded by making sure that while votes could change the composition of a governmental cabinet the machine that lay behind it was left untouched. The unelected machine remained no matter who was voted in or out. You still don’t get to vote on who runs the civil service, the top judges, the heads of the Guards or the Army.

The Irish state emerged from the war of independence as a machine in the hands of millionaires like William Cosgrave and reactionaries like Kevin O’Higgins. They shot people without trial, banned books and used the army to force workers out of occupied factories. They copied British laws wholesale and built a replica state machine.

Fianna Fáil came to power in the 1930s promising change but they weren’t anti-capitalist, they simply coalesced with the same machine. Soon DeValera was writing a consitution with Archibishop McQuaid. The Irish rich had seen Irish workers rise during the war of independence and they wanted to make sure that never happened again. Two brutal regimes grew on this island, a reactionary Catholic state in the South and nasty Orange regime in the North. They were mirror images of each other.

The idea that socialists could use the state has been put to the test many times. In Chile in 1973 the left wing President Salvador Allende was elected. He had illusions in the state. While Chilean workers formed their own “Cordones”, mass assemblies of workers to coordinate struggle from below, Allende wheeled and dealed with the likes of General Pinochet, even offering Pinochet a seat at the government table. The result? Pinochet sensed Allende’s weakness and with CIA backing launched a coup murdering 30,000 workers.

Raising a red flag over the capitalist state machine doesn’t change the machine and those who’ve thought so have either ended up dead like Allende or become the walking dead like the Greek Syriza government. They were elected after the financial crash of 2008 and promised to use the state to change Greece. They ended up implementing vicious austerity budgets. This wasn’t just a personal failing but a failure to understand the machinery of state and the cost of coalescing with that machine.

The state is a violent machine. It acts in the interests of the ruling class and holds down the working class. Socialists differ from anarchists in that we think you should stand in elections and use that platform to point out the true nature of the state. We also believe that you need some kind of democratic state structure after a rebellion.

If the Irish economy collapsed and there were mass protests and strikes by workers we would be best able to conduct that struggle if we elected worker delegates to workplace and industry wide worker assemblies. That’s not only the best way to push a struggle forward but also would lay the basis for a new kind of democracy where delegates are recallable, accountable and rooted in the working class.

If the struggle escalated the old state would mobilise the Guards to clear workers out of occupied factories and offices. There would be “dual power” - two systems side by side battling for control over society. Revolution is when the dual power dilemma is solved by workers kicking out the old government, dismissing the top civil servants and disbanding the Gardaí, replacing them all with democratically accountable alternatives.

Does that mean rejecting a possible left government in Ireland? Not at all. We’d like to see Fianna Fáil and Fine Fael humiliated. But a Sinn Féin led government running the same old capitalist machinery of state will eventually lead to compromise and demoralisation. Then the old parties just smugly come back to power or something worse develops.

That’s why we’ve always said if we had a Red TD they’d only support a Sinn Féin government externally and case by case. That way you can support anything positive they can get for the working class, fight any compromise and speak openly about the true nature of the state and the need for a working class alternative to a machine that holds us down.

The capitalists have many bases of power. They have economic power and can threaten to take a chuck of the economy down, or sack workers. They control the unelected parts of the state machine. They control the media. They would use them all against any left party in power. That’s why the left in power across the world is a long list of betrayals and disappointments.

A future revolution can only win if there are worker leaders in every workplace who know the score and are willing to steer any future rebellion in a direction that favours the working class. Without a network of fighters linked across workplaces and communities other forces, like union bureaucrats, will redirect future movements back into the hands of the system.

The road to a new kind of state starts the day you join the Reds!