Mike McNair put forward a similar argument to Struve, which denies that the state is the instrument of a ruling class or caste. He put forward the argument in support of the position of Hillel Ticktin that what existed in the USSR was not a mode of production, and there was no ruling class or caste, but there was a state. The discussion also took in consideration of the Asiatic Mode of Production, in which I argued that what begins as purely an administrative body, metamorphoses into a state, alongside the metamorphosis of the members of this body into a ruling caste. McNair, like Struve, objected that not calling the administrative body itself a state was simply a question of self-definition. The response to that is clearly to analyse the nature of the administrative body and of the state from the standpoint of materialism, and class struggle to determine whether these two bodies perform the same or different functions in society, and if so, what is the material basis of this difference. What is missing is any concept of dialectical development of quantity into quality.
I will allow Lenin to respond.
“First of all, he quite wrongly regards coercive power as the distinguishing feature of the state: there is a coercive power in every human community; and there was one in the tribal system and in the family, but there was no state. “An essential feature of the state,” says Engels in the work from which Mr. Struve took the quotation about the state, “is a public power distinct from the mass of the people” (Ursprung der Familie u.s.w., 2te Aufl., S. 84. Russ. trans., p. 109); and somewhat earlier he speaks of the institution of the naucrary and says that it “undermined the tribal system in two ways: firstly, by creating a public power (öffentliche Gewalt) , which simply no longer coincided with the sum-total of the armed people” (ib., S. 79; Russ. trans., p. 105). Thus the distinguishing feature of the state is the existence of a separate class of people in whose hands power is concentrated.” (p 419)
As Lenin says, clearly a community in which the administration of order is the function of all its members cannot be called a state. Lenin's further elaboration is significant for an understanding, too, of the nature of the soviet state. Struve says that the most important feature of the modern state is the organisation of of order, but this is to fail to understand one of the most important aspects of Marx's theory. That is that the material conditions created by the dominant form of property, which leads to the creation of a dominant social class, and the ideas of the dominant social class, dominate society and the state. In the modern state, the bourgeois state, the dominant ideas are bourgeois ideas. The ideas that are embedded in the heads of the state bureaucrats, the university professors, school teachers, church leaders and so on, are bourgeois ideas. And, those that occupy these position are the children of the bourgeoisie.
“The direct and intimate connection between this organ and the bourgeois class, which dominates in modern society, is apparent both from history (the bureaucracy was the first political instrument of the bourgeoisie against the feudal lords, and against the representatives of the “old-nobility” system in general, and marked the first appearance in the arena of political rule of people who were not high-born landowners, but commoners, “middle class”) and from the very conditions of the formation and recruitment of this class, which is open only to bourgeois “offspring of the people,” and is connected with that bourgeoisie by thousands of strong ties.” (p 419-20)
These bureaucrats, like all bureaucrats, attempt to feather their nests, to build their own empires, and this always corrupts the nature of the state, and does so the more they can get away with such kleptocratic behaviour, but it can never change the underlying class nature of the state. The kleptocratic behaviour of such bureaucracies is described by Marx in The Civil War in France, cited by Lenin.
“But it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications “[referring to the bureaucracy] that the material interests of the French bourgeoisie are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profits, interest, rents and honorariums.” (Note *, p 420)
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