Withering away of the state

Based on Wikipedia: Withering away of the state

The State That Dissolves Itself

Here's a revolutionary idea that sounds almost like a paradox: seize control of the government in order to make government disappear. This is the essence of "the withering away of the state," a concept that has shaped—and haunted—socialist movements for nearly two centuries.

The phrase itself comes from Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's longtime collaborator and intellectual partner. In 1878, Engels wrote something that would echo through history:

The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not "abolished," it withers away.

That distinction matters enormously. Not abolished. Withers away. Like a plant that dies when you stop watering it, not one you tear out by the roots.

Why Would Anyone Want to Get Rid of the State?

To understand this idea, you need to understand what Marxists mean by "the state." They don't mean society, or community, or people organizing together. They mean something quite specific: the apparatus of coercion. Police. Armies. Courts. Prisons. The machinery that forces compliance.

In the Marxist view, this machinery exists primarily to protect the interests of those who own things—land, factories, resources. The state, in this analysis, is fundamentally a tool of the owning class to keep workers in line. It enforces property rights, breaks strikes, and maintains the conditions that allow wealth to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands.

If you accept this premise, then the conclusion follows logically: once you eliminate class divisions, once nobody owns the means of production because everyone does collectively, what would you need a coercive state for? People wouldn't need to be forced to cooperate because cooperation would serve everyone's interests naturally.

This is a deeply optimistic view of human nature, or perhaps more accurately, a view that sees human selfishness and conflict as products of economic arrangements rather than inherent features of our species.

The Museum of Antiquities

Engels provided an even more vivid image of this eventual fate in 1884. Writing about the origins of the family and private property, he imagined a future society that would:

Put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.

The spinning wheel. The bronze axe. Technologies that once seemed permanent and essential but that progress rendered obsolete. Engels saw the state the same way—not as a timeless feature of civilization but as a tool suited to a particular phase of human development. Once that phase passed, the state would seem as quaint and unnecessary as a bronze weapon in an age of steel.

From Government to Administration

What would replace the state? Engels drew on ideas from Henri de Saint-Simon, an earlier French thinker who imagined a society run by scientists and industrialists rather than politicians and priests. The key shift was from governing people to administering things.

Think about the difference. Governing people means telling them what to do and punishing them if they don't comply. Administering things means figuring out how to produce and distribute goods efficiently. One requires force. The other requires expertise.

In a socialist society, Engels argued, public organization would concern itself mainly with technical questions. How should we allocate resources? What should we produce, and how much? These are engineering problems, not political ones. They don't require laws and punishments. They require data and planning.

You can see echoes of this thinking in modern technocratic approaches to governance, though few today would take it to Engels's ultimate conclusion.

The Uncomfortable Triangle

The withering away of the state sits at an awkward point between two other political philosophies, belonging fully to neither.

On one side stand the anarchists, who want to abolish the state immediately. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French anarchist theorist, actually influenced Marx and Engels in their early thinking. Proudhon famously declared "property is theft" and rejected all forms of governmental authority. But Marx and Proudhon parted ways in the late 1840s, disagreeing fundamentally about strategy. Proudhon wanted to destroy the state now. Marx believed you needed to capture it first.

On the other side stand the state socialists, who accept that some form of government will always be necessary. They seek to reform the state and use it as a tool for redistribution, but they don't envision it disappearing entirely.

The withering position tries to split the difference. Yes, you need a state—for now. But the goal is to make it unnecessary. The state is a necessary evil that will become unnecessary.

This intermediate position created its own distinctive concept: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Before the state could wither, workers would need to seize control of it. This workers' state would suppress the former ruling class and reorganize society along socialist lines. Only after this transformation was complete could the withering begin.

When Theory Met Reality

Vladimir Lenin believed deeply in this idea. His 1917 book "The State and Revolution," written on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, laid out in detail how the workers' state would function and how it would eventually dissolve. It's one of the great "what if" documents of history—a blueprint that was overtaken by events almost before the ink dried.

The Soviet Union that Lenin founded and Joseph Stalin later dominated turned out to be one of the most powerful states in human history. The withering away of the state became a doctrine honored in theory and ignored in practice.

Stalin's government mentioned the concept occasionally, almost as a ritualistic nod to founding principles. But the actual position was that the world wasn't ready yet. Enemies of socialism surrounded the Soviet Union. Counter-revolutionary elements lurked within. The state needed more power, not less, to defend the revolution until conditions ripened for the next stage.

The conditions never ripened. The state grew stronger. The secret police multiplied. The gulags filled. Whatever else the Soviet experiment proved or disproved about Marxist theory, it demonstrated that a state tasked with withering away might instead choose to flourish.

The Proudhon Problem

This brings us back to that early split between Marx and Proudhon. The anarchist critique was simple and, in retrospect, prescient: if you create a powerful revolutionary state with the intention of later dissolving it, the people running that state will have every incentive to find reasons not to dissolve it.

Power, once concentrated, resists dispersal. Bureaucracies, once established, seek to perpetuate themselves. The dictatorship of the proletariat, whatever its theoretical time limit, creates a class of people—party officials, administrators, secret police—whose position depends on the state continuing to exist.

Proudhon's ideas, interestingly enough, did influence one major historical event: the Paris Commune of 1871. For two months, the working people of Paris governed their city with minimal hierarchy and maximum participation. Then the French army crushed them, killing perhaps 20,000 people in a single week. The lesson Marxists drew was that you needed state power to defend a revolution. The lesson anarchists drew was that the revolution could succeed without waiting for a state to wither.

What Would It Actually Look Like?

Imagine, for a moment, that the theory worked as advertised. What would a post-state society actually be?

It would need to be a society of abundance. Scarcity creates conflict; conflict requires adjudication; adjudication requires authority. The Marxist phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" only works if there's enough to go around. Otherwise, who decides whose needs take priority?

It would need to be a society of agreement—not on everything, but on fundamentals. Without coercive enforcement, what happens when people disagree about how resources should be allocated? Democratic voting only works if everyone agrees to accept the outcome, including the losers.

It would need to be a society where the administration of things really could be separated from the government of people. But decisions about things affect people. Deciding to build a factory here rather than there affects the people who live in both places. Deciding to produce butter rather than guns affects everyone who wants butter or fears invasion. The distinction between technical administration and political governance may be less clear than Engels imagined.

The Dream That Won't Die

Despite its failures in practice, the idea of the withering away of the state refuses to disappear from political imagination. Perhaps because it speaks to something deep in human experience: the frustration of being told what to do, the yearning for a world where cooperation comes naturally, the hope that our current arrangements aren't permanent.

Every society has had to grapple with the problem of power—how to organize collective action without creating tyrants. The withering thesis offers one answer: the problem is temporary. Build the right economic foundation, eliminate the conflicts that arise from scarcity and exploitation, and the need for coercion will fade like morning mist.

It hasn't happened yet. It may never happen. But the question it asks remains vital: Do we need to be governed, or have we simply never tried the alternative?

The spinning wheel sits in the museum now. The bronze axe too. Whether the state will someday join them—or whether Engels fundamentally misunderstood what states are for—remains one of the great unresolved questions of political philosophy.