Note
Text of Note
List of topics
The State as an unreal community
The bourgeois Society engenders the political State
Bourgeois society submitted to the State (absolute and parliamentary)
The State as external domineering power and illusory general interest
The modern State as the form of political organization of the bourgeoisie
State laws made for the protection of the ruling class
The end of political power and of the illusions that originate from it
Capitalistic and state centralisation as necessary steps towards the extinction of the state: the illusion and the overcoming of the illusion
Parliamentary cretinism
The State and the Rule of Finance
The State and the Aristocracy of Finance
State debt and the interests of the Bourgeoisie
State interest as the interest of the bourgeoisie
The State as parasite
The State as a machine to extort money
The State as superstructure
The State as an instrument to enslave producers
The bugbear of “socialism” employed by the bourgeoisie in order to impose statism
The transformation-degeneration of socialism into statism
The overcoming of the Bourgeois State
The State dies out
The Paris Commune and the Bourgeois State
Beyond the State
References
The State as an unreal community
The perfect political state is, by its nature, man’s species-life, as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this egoistic life continue to exist in the bourgeois society outside the sphere of the state, but as qualities of the bourgeois society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man – not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life – leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in the bourgeois society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The relation of the political state to the bourgeois society is just as spiritual as the relations of heaven to earth. The political state stands in the same opposition to the bourgeois society, and it prevails over the latter in the same way as religion prevails over the narrowness of the secular world – i.e., by likewise having always to acknowledge it, to restore it, and allow itself to be dominated by it. In his most immediate reality, in the bourgeois society, man is a secular being. Here, where he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality.
(Karl Marx, The Jewish Question, 1844)
The bourgeois Society engenders the political State
The bourgeois Society, in its opposition to the political State, is recognized [by Hegel] as necessary, because the political State is recognized as necessary.
(Karl Marx, The Jewish Question, 1844)
Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense, the members of bourgeois society are not atoms. The specific property of the atom is that it has no properties and is therefore not connected with beings outside it by any relationship determined by its own natural necessity. The atom has no needs, it is self-sufficient., the world outside it is an absolute vacuum, i.e., is contentless, senseless, meaningless, just because the atom has all fullness in itself. The egoistic individual in bourgeois society may in his non-sensuous imagination and lifeless abstraction inflate himself into an atom, i.e., into an unrelated, self-sufficient, wantless, absolutely full, blessed being. Unblessed sensuous reality does not bother about his imagination, each of his senses compels him to believe in the existence of the world and of individuals outside him, and even his profane stomach reminds him every day that the world outside him is not empty, but is what really fills. Every activity and property of his being, every one of his vital urges, becomes a need, a necessity, which his self-seeking transforms into seeking for other things and human beings outside him. But since the need of one individual has no self-evident meaning for another egoistic individual capable of satisfying that need, and therefore no direct connection with its satisfaction, each individual has to create this connection; it thus becomes the intermediary between the need of another and the objects of this need. Therefore, it is natural necessity, the essential human properties however estranged they may seem to be, and interest that hold the members of bourgeois society together; civil, not political life is their real tie. It is therefore not the state that holds the atoms of bourgeois society together, but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination in the heaven of their fancy, but in reality beings tremendously different from atoms, in other words, not divine egoists, but egoistic human beings. Only political superstition still imagines today that civil life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality, on the contrary, the state is held together by civil life.
(Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, 1845, Chapter VI, 3)
