Ideology and the State

Abstract

‘The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. This famous remark of Marx and Engels (1958: 36) is an essential starting point for any analysis of the role of the state in industrial relations; but it is only a starting point. Marx insisted on the need to fight for democratic political institutions, but was equally insistent that political democracy could not be properly achieved without economic and social democracy. A class which held economic sway in a society could not coexist with genuine popular control of the state, for if it did not subvert democracy then it would be dispossessed. There is no simple ‘Marxist theory of the state’; but central to all that Marx and Engels wrote is the argument that the state has historically always served class interests, and necessarily so.¹ The elaboration of state institutions has been closely associated with the development of antagonistic class interests, and their functions have always included the reinforcement of the system of class rule enshrined in the existing social order by suppressing acts of resistance and revolt by subordinate classes.