22
PARTISAN REVIEW
period, the state power is the instrument of the "dominant economic
class" because there is nothing which corresponds to the latter. But
there presumably are bodies, in the transition period, which will
make, interpret and execute laws whose enforcement depends upon
the existence of special bodies of armed men; and once we have defined
the term "state" in this way, and defined socialism as a society in
which there are no economic classes, it is not a matter of definition
but a risky
prediction
to assert that there will be no state under
socialism. Of the state that exists in the transitional period, and -of
the state that will exist under socialism, we can quite definitely say
that it will have other functions than those it has in class societies.
The incidence of state coercion will fall upon people who are workers
in the sense that they do socially useful work; the benefits of coercion
will serve some special group of the population even though we cannot
call them a class in the traditional Marxian sense. It is meaningless
to say, then, as a
universal
sociological proposition that the state
serves the interests of the dominant class except as we apply it only
to past and present class societies or except as we change the meaning
of class so that it extends much further than economically dominant
class.
The upshot of this analysis is that it is either meaningless or
quite definitely false to apply 1viarx's theory of the state to any period
other than capitalism, feudalism or slavery.
As
soon as we apply it to
the transitional period or to socialism, the meanings of "class,"
"worker," and "economically dominant" become radically altered.
The mythology and muddle which attend most discussions of the Rus–
sian state are a direct consequence of a failure to note the semantic
shift in meaning of the Marxian categories- categories which have
a genuine objective reference to present and past class societies and
only
to those societies.
An
indirect way of confirming this is to ask what it means to
say: "The U.S.S.R. is a workers' state." Whoever, in order to find
relevant evidence for this assertion, looks to the mode of economic
production, is thereby indicating that by "state" he
now
means not
a set of
political
agencies but of
economic
ones. He
is
identifying
both in a nominal definition which, as a definition of the
state,
is
incompatible with the definition previously given.
If
by a
workers'
state we mean that the decisions of legal and administrative bodies
are democratically controlled by the working population, then only
a knave or a fool can assert that Stalinist Russia is a workers' state,
no matter how we characterize its economy. Now if the identification
of the state form and economic form is rejected, then, on the original
definition of state, certain
coercive
functions are part of it. But whom
