“In his Letters from Geneva, Saint-Simon lays down the proposition that “all men ought to work”. In the same work he also recognised that the Reign of Terror was the reign of the propertyless masses.
“See,” he calls out to them, “what happened in France at the time when your comrades held sway there; they brought about a famine.”
But to recognise the French Revolution as a class struggle (and not simply as one between nobility, bourgeoisie, and those without any property, was, in the year 1802, a discovery of the greatest genius.” (p 332)
At the time of Saint-Simon, “the propertyless” was mostly the petty bourgeoisie and urban proletariat. The petty-bourgeoisie and peasantry overwhelmingly predominated over the industrial proletariat, as, indeed, was the case in Russia in 1917, as Lenin describes in “Left-wing Childishness”. Today, however, the industrial proletariat forms the majority in all developed economies. It constitutes around 70% of the population, but that means that around 30% is still constituted by the petty-bourgeoisie, and its size has grown by 50% since he 1980's. With the working-class bereft of any Marxist leadership, it has, as social-democracy, inevitably, failed, led to the advance of the petty-bourgeoisie. It is reactionary, even compared to the bourgeoisie, but its numbers, and appeal to simplistic solutions, based on lies, and a focus only on what it is against, has consolidated it electorally, and enabled it to draw behind it the other backward social layers of society.
Brexit has not yet led to “famine”, as Saint-Simon described in relation to France, or as occurred under Stalin, Mao and others, but it has led to a significant deterioration in Britain's economy, with a consequent effect on its poorest, who are the biggest contingent of those that voted for it. As the petty-bourgeois nationalists, be it Farage, Badenoch or Starmer continue to cling to their Brexitism, in the face of that reality, the more they resort to Bonapartism and authoritarianism. If Burnham fails to break with Brexitism, he will be led down the same path, and his support for reactionary policies such as regionalism, already place him on that path.
In the US, the same is seen with Trump, the global figurehead of that petty-bourgeois nationalism. Despite the huge advantages of the US economy, and its continued inertial force, Trump's idiotic policies of economic nationalism, protectionism, tariffs and so on, are creating a similar chaos in the US. Only the capitalist state is mitigating its effects, and slowing the progress of that chaos.
Engels continues.
“In 1816, he declared that politics was the science of production, and foretold the complete absorption of politics by economics. Although the knowledge that economic conditions are the basis of political institutions appears here only in embryo, what is already very plainly expressed is the transition from political rule over men to the administration of things and the guidance of the processes of production — that is to say, the “abolition of the state”, about which there has recently been so much noise.” (p 332-3)
As Engels set out in The Origin, the state only arises as a consequence of class society. In all previous society, there are bodies comprising the whole of the society or clan. Even with the AMP, the body that, eventually, becomes the state, after a very long period of time, begins not as a state, but, merely, as an administrative, bureaucratic, technocratic body serving the interests of the whole society. The state arises only at that point at which the productive forces have sufficiently developed that a section of society can separate itself into a separate class or caste, whose ownership or control over the means of production gives them a qualitatively different share in the distribution of society's output, and, also, enables them to utilise it, to employ its own bodies of armed men to guarantee its continued position in that regard. Often, these are people it recruits from outside the given society to fulfil that function.
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