3. THE BOURGEOIS-CAPITALIST STATE The bourgeois economic order rests on the possession of capital, the production of commodities, the exploitation of wage-workers and the gaining of profit. The bourgeois state is the organisation of public and legal authority into a mechanism of domination, which ensures the functioning and the success of the bourgeois economic order. All forces and means, in materials as in ideas, that the state has at its disposal stand directly or indirectly at the service of capital. The authority to order the state power lies in the hands of the bourgeois class. It receives the directives for the use of the state authority from economic necessities. In the interest of the highest expediency in its use, the organisation of the state has followed in accordance with these economic necessities. In the capitalist economy the capitalist is master of the process of production. He buys the raw materials, owns the means of production, decides the managing of production, sells the commodities, reaps the profit. He builds the factories, seeks out the markets, takes care of the customers, regulates the circulation of money, pays out the wage. He is commander, representative, supreme court. He has money. He is authority. As in the economy, so in the state. The capitalist demands liberties which the feudal state refuses him : freedom of trade, freedom of occupation, freedom of competition. He needs freedom of movement, liberation from feudal charges and guild barriers, the right to self-determination, the right of personality. He demands the guaranteeing of his title of ownership, the legal protection of the exploitation process, the legitimising of profit, the social sanctioning of his authority. In the state-scientific theory of liberalism are set down all the points and principles according to which the capitalist bourgeois wants to see his state, the bourgeois-capitalist state, organised. All the liberal demands and goals, aimed at obtaining and securing for capitalism the fullest freedom for its development, are here woven into a system. The philosophical anchorage of this system is given in individualism as it has been founded, formulated and completed in England by Locke, Shaftesbury, Hume ; in France by Bayle, Voltaire, Helvetius, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists ; in Germany by Leibnitz, Lessing, Fichte. Begun as 'Enlightenment', this philosophical school came to dominate the political and social provinces first in England, where after the Revolution the track had been cleared for the unfettered development of bourgeois-materialist interests, and finally found its formulation and strongest emphasis in the principle of Manchester liberalism, "Laissez faire, laissez aller". The whole atmosphere of the great French Revolution is dominated by the spirit of bourgeois individualism, where its manifestation resulted in the boldest gestures and most vigorous exaltations as an answer to the heavy pressure of the old state and ecclesiastical situation. In Germany, whose bourgeois class distinguished itself from the beginning by lack of imagination and calculating cowardice, the philosophical thought-content of individualism faded very quickly to an empty egoism, which enjoyed a predominantly materialist life. The bourgeois class also produced no statesmen from its ranks who would have taken care of its business : it entrusted its interests to the Junker Bismarck [6] who -- according to his own words -- saw it as his task to cultivate millionaires. These millionaires symbolise bourgeois-capitalist authority. Thus the bourgeois class, as soon as it has first won power over feudalism, arrives at a state order according to its needs, in its interests, for its use. Its wishes are decisive, its attitude determines. For it is authority. Its state is an authoritarian state. In the capitalist economy all commodities develop the tendency to follow the market in order to be exchanged there. This market can be a shop, a department store, an annual market, a fair or the world market. The market is the point to which the centripetal force of all commodities tends. It is, however, also the point from which the centrifugal force of all commodities pushes apart again as soon as they are exchanged, i.e. fulfilled their capitalist purpose. If the commodity is money, the market is stock exchange or bank. Always the market stands at the middle point of a process working in two directions. The market is the centre. To the law of motion of the capitalist economy corresponds that of the bourgeois state. All the forces of the government collect at one point, there receive their orders and then act back centrifugally. The bureaucracy escalates up to its highest peak, the minister ; the army organisation up to the generalissimo ; there the decision is taken, the command given, the decree proclaimed ; and with the precision of a mechanical apparatus, the organisation functions according to the will of one head, the centre, down to its last errand boy and lowest organ. Only the central office is autonomous : it is the brain and thinks for the whole. Its decision is definitive, it is to be obeyed unconditionally. Strict order and discipline prevail. In the feudal era, when every socage-farm [7] with its copyholders formed a small economic unit, more or less self-contained and self-supporting, the individual's power to give orders did not have much scope. One was situated beside the other and each was to the same extent his own master. The system of organisation in which every part of the whole enjoys its full autonomy is called federalism. The feudal state, then, had been a federal state. The bourgeoisie had gained from the conditions of its capitalist economy the insight that centralism was in many respects superior to federalism. Especially insofar as it united all the dispersed and isolated forces into a whole. They came out in favour of a centralised will and therewith won the ability to do great things. When the capitalist brought the hand-workers together in the factory, went over from domestic industry to co-operation, finally evolved this into manufacture, he went through practical schools of centralism. All the experiences and knowledge thus gained the bourgeois class now utilised in establishing its state structure. It needed a large centralised mechanism that obeyed every finger-touch at the highest point. A mechanism with which it, the small minority, could be the brain, issuing commands, accomplishing its will. And with which the large mass, the proletariat, was subjected to its dominance through strict order and discipline. This mechanism was provided by the centralist system of organisation. It made possible in the best and surest way the domination of few over many. So the bourgeoisie created its state for itself as a centralised state. In the capitalist economy the production of commodities soon becomes mass production. But the absorption capacity of the existing market is quickly sated. New, bigger selling outlets become necessary. Capitalism develops a drive to expand, which threatens to burst the boundaries of the state. Thus every young capitalist state seeks, through wars, conquest, colonial acquisitions, etc., to become a bigger state. This requires a certain mental and spiritual preparation and influencing of the citizens -- a certain ideology which interprets the pressure towards expansion and extension in the interest of profit as the expression of imaginary forces and needs, and lyingly converts warlike conquests into achievements for the common good. This ideology invents the concept nation, exploits sentiments about home and fatherland and misuses them for class-interested purposes of enrichment. It deals in national interests, national honour, national duties and national responsibility, until it gets involved in the national war, which is falsified into a war of national defence. To wage the war a national army has been provided, the schools have been made into abodes of national incitement ; in national politics a special national phraseology has been cultivated which furnishes every war, however notoriously for plunder and conquest, with the requisite intellectual and moral justification. When the SPD defended the world war from 1914 to 1918 as a national war, when the KPD, during the collapse of the Ruhr, joined in supporting the national defence of the Ruhr zone alongside Schlageter, then both parties proved their character as national auxiliary organs of the bourgeois state, which is always a national state. [8] The capitalist economy, once it has entered the arena of large-scale enterprises and beyond that, the formation of stock companies, has created for itself a complicated apparatus of management, very appropriate for its requirements. In it all forces are well weighed up against each other, all functions cleverly distributed, all individual actions bound into an exact collective action. The technology of the machine is its model. In broad outline, the management structure of a modern large factory looks like this : nominal owners and with them actual interested parties, and so the real beneficiaries of the capitalist large-scale concern are the shareholders. These come together in the shareholders' meeting which passes important resolutions, exercises control, calls in reports, relieves and appoints officials, and concedes wages. From the shareholders' meeting issues the board of directors, which supervises the management, comes to final decisions, constitutes the supreme court in all the vital questions of the works, but is still responsible vis-à-vis the shareholders' meeting. An image of this large-scale industry's machinery is the bourgeois state. There the bearers of a mandate from the electorate sit in the parliament, a large meeting of shareholders entitled to vote who, discussing and resolving, equipped with important powers, decide about the weal and woe of the state as a whole. From its midst issues the board of directors, the Cabinet, which has the task of looking after, with special care and heightened vigilance, the interests served by the functioning of the state machinery. The Cabinet members (ministers) represent the state at its highest point ; they supervise the work of the management bureaucracy placed under them, make the big contacts within the competing firms abroad, i.e. the capitalist foreign states, but always they stay dependent on Parliament and responsible to it ; by it they are appointed and recalled. As in the assembly of shareholders, so too in Parliament questions and proposals often manage to be carried through and dismissed which already are foregone conclusions and are only put to the vote for form's sake. They have already been put forward and decided on in another place, whose importance more or less strongly controls the vote of the shareholders' meeting or the parliament. This other place is identical with the offices of the great banks or of the captains of industry. Here, where the most significant decisions of the capitalist economy come down, the decisive resolutions of bourgeois politics are passed. And indeed by the same people in the same case. For politics is nothing other than struggle for the legal protection of economic interests -- is the defence of profit with the weapons of paragraphs in law, the securing of the capitalist system of exploitation with the means of state authority. With tirelessness and zeal the bourgeoisie has worked at the construction of its state form and at the development of its legislature. For this it found its most reliable tool in Parliament, which in turn found its auxiliary organs in the parties. Today, having reached the highest peak of capitalist development, big capital feels the power of Parliament and parties as burdensome. It avoids it by Enabling Acts [9] , military dictatorship, and shifting important authority and decisions to other bodies in which the representatives of capital and economic concerns have the upper hand (state economic council). Open antagonism towards Parliament and parliamentarism is no longer at all concealed in big-capitalist circles ; in fact attacks directed against parliament and parliamentary government are debated quite openly without inhibition. The slave, Parliament, has done his duty. When the idea of a Directory was being discussed in the bonapartist tendency, Herr Minoux was selected as the supreme holder of power. Herr Minoux the General Director of Stinnes. [10] Footnotes [6] The junkers were the powerful militaristic landowning class whose political interests and initiatives formed the backbone of German unification in the nineteenth century. [7] Common feudal form of small-scale land tenure based upon reward for service. [8] This refers to the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 by French troops as a consequence of the default in German reperations payments. Various reactionaries, including Schlageter who was a Freikorps member executed by the French, organised resistance. The KPD lent its support to joint work with the rightists under the slogan `National Bolshevism'; this party position was also known as `the Schlageter line'. (The Freikorps were small illegal right-wing nationalist armed groups who played an active counter-revolutionary role in Germany after the war.) [9] Equivalant of government by decree under Emergency Powers. [10] One of Germany's largest heavy industry magnates in the Weimar period. He had large industrial interests in the Ruhr and actively financed the Freikorps in the period under discussion. He later financed Hitler. |