Alex Snowdon explains the Marxist view of the state as an institution that enforces class rule

The state is generally seen as a neutral set of institutions. It is ‘above politics’. It is impartial. Yet this appearance, argued Karl Marx, is a mask for it being a collection of instruments for class rule and exploitation.

What constitutes ‘the state’ is far from simple. After the Second World War, the term became increasingly associated with nationally coordinated services and provision that benefited working-class people: the ‘welfare state’ of nationalised health care, social security, and so on.

It was an apparently benevolent force. This view was associated primarily with Labour governments, but it had a cross-party consensus underpinned by the long post-war economic boom. This boom allowed scope for lifting working-class standards, partly via state measures from pensions and unemployment benefits to the NHS and social housing.

After Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979, and the pioneering of neoliberalism, it became fashionable to view ‘the state’ as restrictive. We were (so it was argued) over-regulated, over-taxed and over-spending. And the poor were over-dependent upon the state. The state had to be trimmed to liberate market forces and force people to stand on their own two feet.

This was always more rhetoric than reality. Although the state was in some ways re-fashioned, it was very much needed by neoliberal capitalism. The state facilitated the needs of business. There was less emphasis on its benevolent role.

There is, however, an older and rather different conception of ‘the state’ that pre-dates the rise of national welfare systems designed to both alleviate poverty and maintain the labour force necessary for capitalism. This is the notion of a set of institutions required to maintain a modern capitalist nation state.

This includes the administrative functions. The British civil service grew enormously in the nineteenth century to carry out the business of an increasingly centralised state. This was true at the domestic level, but also in the massive expansion of the diplomatic corps needed to run the British Empire.

This might seem politically neutral work, but the reality is different. The most senior civil servants are part of the ruling class and oversee a strictly hierarchical apparatus geared towards preserving the status quo. The 1980s sitcoms Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister wittily satirised the ways in which top civil servants would undermine any efforts by elected politicians to change or reform anything.

There were also the repressive, coercive functions of the state. A properly organised police force developed in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre in 1819 and the protest movements of that period.

Shrewder elements of the ruling class realised that sending in the yeomanry, hired from the ranks of the middle class, to crush demonstrations was deeply unpopular. A supposedly neutral force with more legitimacy was urgently needed.

The police therefore emerged as a response to working-class protest, not primarily as a vehicle for law and order. The armed forces grew into their modern form as part of British imperialism’s expansion, becoming a vital means for the ruling class to pursue its aims in war and military dominance. We could also add the security and intelligence services, the judiciary and the prison system as part of the coercive state.

All of this, of course, was presented as neutral and in service of ‘the national interest’. The administrative and coercive layers were prettified and dignified by the third branch of the state: the ceremonial pomp of monarchy, Lords and Church.

These bodies had little real power. However, they possessed ideological force. They were all re-made for an age of universal suffrage, designed to legitimise the wealth and power of those accustomed to having large amounts of both those things.

Marx argued that the state served the interests of the ruling class. It was therefore an integral part of the system of exploitation of the working class by the ruling class. Yet it had, in order to be seen as legitimate, to be framed as ‘above politics’ and, in a sense, ‘above society’.

In today’s Britain, the links between state institutions and the capitalists are actually more obvious than ever before. There is a revolving door between corporate boardrooms and the upper echelons of the civil service. Privatisation and outsourcing have led to more direct business interference in traditional state functions.

The state is as coercive as ever too. The new authoritarianism is eroding the right to protest. Huge hikes in military spending, boosting the armed forces, are the order of the day.

Challenging the power of the state is essential to socialist politics and activism in today’s world.