Demanding that the capitalist state – and this applies to those para-state bodies like the UN, IMF and so on – act to protect the weak against the strong is like the turtle asking the scorpion not to sting it. Its not in its nature. The petty-bourgeois reformists adopt this approach because of their own outlook as an intermediate layer. They are, by nature, functionalist and managerialist. They see society as simply a mechanism, and their role within it being to simply make that mechanism work smoothly and efficiently, the state being merely a tool to use for that purpose, a lever to pull to achieve certain ends.
“That is why the “friends of the people” are arch-reactionaries when they say that it is the state’s natural task to protect the economically weak (that is what it should be according to their banal old wives’ morality), whereas Russia’s entire history and home policy testify that the task of our state is to protect only the feudal landlords and the big bourgeoisie, and to punish with the utmost brutality every attempt of the “economically weak” to stand up for their rights. And that, of course, is its natural task, because absolutism and the bureaucracy are thoroughly saturated with the feudal bourgeois spirit, and because in the economic sphere the bourgeoisie hold undivided sway and keep the workers “as quiet as lambs.”” (Note *, p 259)
And, this was the point that Marx had made in his letter to Zasulich. The Russian state had become a capitalist state in the wake of Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, because the Russian ruling class had realised that it could not survive if labour continued to be exploited, in Russia, in the old way. Russia could survive and escape the fate of being conquered and colonised, as other Asian countries like India and China had been, if it modernised, as Germany and Japan had done. And the modernisation, in the actual conditions, existing in Russia, and in Western Europe, could only occur via the development of capitalism.
“Why is it then, most worthy “friends of the people,” that till now—and with particular energy since this very emancipatory Reform—our government has “supported, protected and created” only the bourgeoisie and capitalism? Why is it that such unseemly conduct on the part of this absolute, allegedly supraclass, government has coincided precisely with a historical period characterised in the country’s internal life by the development of commodity economy, commerce and industry? Why do you consider these latter changes in internal life to be the effect and the government’s policy the cause, despite the fact that these changes were so deep down in society that the government did not even notice them and put innumerable obstacles in their way, and despite the fact that this very same “absolute” government, under other conditions of internal life, “supported,” “protected” and “created” another class?” (p 259-60)
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