 I would say when discussing the state there are two main arguments that Marxists run into and that you will probably run into and those are first of all the ideas or the arguments of the anarchists who say that we should abolish the state in one go, completely get rid of it overnight almost. On the other side to the argument that you will probably come up against is that of the reformists sy'n fawr i'r drws o'r cyfyniadau yn ymweld, rydym yn fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r fawr i'r eich oedol. Rwy'n ei wneud y dyfodol ar ôl ymddangos, a'r dyfodol ar y rhai. Mae'r Ffart Marks wedi gweld i'r dweud o ddweud eich oedol yma 150 oed. Rydym yn edrych ar gyfer y dynodau yn y Cerddol Rhaidol I sy'n dweud ar hyn. Felly, ar y rhaid y dynodau, rhaid y dynodau ar y rhaid y dynodau in the trade unions in England for a lot of his writings as well. So our understanding of the state, the Marxist understanding of the state, was perfected through these polemics, a lot of the writings that we have were polemics against these other arguments, against these other ideas that were in the labour movement, in the socialist movement and that's how we have come to our scientific understanding of the state today. I mean, during the course of the Russian Revolution is when Lenin wrote his excellent pamphlet, The State in Revolution, which I'm sure many of you will have read, and it was based on the events that he was going through. You'll see that at the end of it, you know, he writes something like, it's better to experience and be a part of this revolution than just to write about it. He's like, I've got to go get back to work, so everything we know is based on that concrete experience. Marx based his understanding and changed his understanding and improved his understanding of the state obviously after the events of the Paris Commune. So Marxists have throughout history scientifically studied the origins of the state and through the experience of the class struggle and then the culmination of the class struggle, so through revolutions, come to conclusions on what we say must take its place instead and what we should do with it. And I would say that this is very different to how anarchists conceive of things and how they conceive of the state. First of all, we have to say you cannot simply reject the state. You cannot just say, no, I'm not going to be a part of this or I'm going to ignore it. Anarchists talk about abolishing the state all in one go and we say that this is utopian. We know that you have to understand the world if you want to change it. And so we have to understand the state first and foremost. We have to understand where it came from. And I say that there are serious consequences that can develop from not understanding the state correctly and not studying its origins. In 1936, the anarchist workers, the most courageous and revolutionary section of the Spanish working class at that time, rose up in an insurrection in Barcelona and they smashed the fascists that were trying to join Franco's rebellion. And in a really short space of time, the workers were in control. Factories were occupied under workers' control. The only power in Barcelona at that time was the power of the armed militias of the CNT, which was an anarchist group and the left wing organisation, the PUM. And as a result of the heroic actions of the anarchist workers in Barcelona at that time, the fascists were smashed. They weren't able to make ground. So you had the situation where you've got workers' control, factories under workers' control, armed militias that were looked towards by the rest of the masses as their kind of key leaders. And the old bourgeois state was there, but it was just kind of hanging in the air with no support. So in reality, power was in the hands of the working class, the armed working class, because they were armed at that time to defeat the fascists and so on. All that was required was for the CNT effectively to arrest the bourgeois government and declare that power was in the hands of the working class to take it and say, this is ours now. We are going to run society. And that fact was even recognised by those who were in power, the president of the generalitat, the bourgeois nationalist government that existed in Catalonia. The president invited the anarchist leaders into his office and he addressed them in the following terms. He said, well, gentlemen, it seems you have the power. You ought to form a government. But the anarchists rejected this because they said they're opposed to governments and they're opposed to that form of power. So there's a lot more that can and should be said about the course of the Spanish Revolution and there was a lot that went on. That was a very short kind of excerpt. But what I'm trying to show is that without a scientific materialist understanding of the state and without the study of revolutions in past periods, which is obviously what we strive to do as Marxists, if you don't have that and if you believe that the state is essentially just this bad thing, because we agree with the anarchists that the bourgeois state is an oppressive force and is a barrier and doesn't act in the interests of the working class. But if you kind of leave it that and just think it needs to be rejected, then in revolutionary situations serious mistakes can happen and did happen and have happened throughout history with anarchists. So it's very important for us to understand where we differ from them on these sorts of things. But I would encourage all the comrades to read more and study that period of the Spanish Revolution because there's a lot that can be said about the anarchists and about the Stalinists and various other forces at that time. So we explained that the state is a product of historical development that emerged through a process of class differentiation. This isn't a lead-off on the origins of the state in its entirety. That deserves a whole other discussion. But for context and for some background, I do think we need to go into it just very briefly. So in brief, where did the state come from? So as the forces of production developed to produce surplus goods, classes of people started to develop. Classes of people became to be recognised on the basis of their relationship to the means of production. And this changed everything. We can't underestimate how much of a transformation this was in the way society looked, organised and humans related to each other. All of this was completely different. Because before that there wasn't a state. There wasn't this class differentiation. We haven't always had a state. I'm sure you've heard that said many times. And under primitive communism, essentially, there was no basis for different classes. There was no basis for a material basis for an idle class, a group of people who didn't have to work. There was no point in enslaving somebody else because everyone could only provide for their own needs anyway. They could only live off literally what was in front of them. There was no basis for anything else. But at a certain point in the development of the productive forces and the development of society, at a certain point in this process it did become possible to live off a harvest, to live off a surplus of goods and produce a surplus. This was a marked difference with the existence of the primitive communists and the way that they had lived and organised. And it was the first time that the question also arose who gets this surplus after I die? Is this going to get it? Are we just going to leave it out there? Just kind of out there. And so this is the first time we see the possibility arise for idleness for some people, essentially. And on this basis, class societies began to arise. So this is societies that were divided between labouring, the labouring classes, and those who didn't need to labour, those who lived off the labour of others, those who were possessing classes, who managed to keep this surplus for themselves. And this separating of society into different groups also meant people had to play different roles. This is when we see the division of labour begin to take place. Basically the birth of class struggle is what emerges. And this obviously takes on different forms in different locations. It's not going to look identical in every single point of history that we look at. Based on this contradiction of this new emergence of different classes of hostile classes, because they're hostile to each other, based on that contradiction, that is how society develops, like an engine room, all of these forces suddenly coming together, and it's on that contradiction, the basis of that contradiction, that we see the emergence of the state. The Engel said that the state, in its essence, is armed bodies of men. And how is that linked? How is that linked to what I've just described, this process of early transition from primitive communism into class society? Well, I'd say that this is because as the state arose, and a surplus arose, and new classes were being formed, the minority needed to protect their surplus, right? And this was the minority class that was harvesting it and keeping it. So how could they predict it? Well, they did it with armed force, with organised violence. That is why we say the state, in its essence, is armed bodies of men. Now, clearly the state today is not the same as it has been in the past. It doesn't look like what it did when it first arose in these first states. And it has gone through many different changes. We've had ancient slave states to feudal states to the modern capitalist state that we live under today. But we would say that the role of the state as a weapon for the ruling class to defend its interests has not changed. Its essence has not changed once. But throughout history it has been polished and refined. And we would even say it's become a more effective weapon for each new ruling class that wields it. They have learned over time what is the best form of state, what is the best way to govern. The ruling class also pays attention to history and pays attention to class struggle, the serious wing anyway that wants to stave off class struggle and knows how they should use the state. And so we have to do the same thing. Often when we talk about the state as Marxists, we point to the police, the army, the courts, and all of these are important pillars of the state, the most oppressive pillars of the state in many ways in terms of the most obvious violence that can be inflicted amongst people, amongst the working class. But we would say that it's also much more than that. Your average person, when they think of the state or the government, they don't just think of the police or the army or something like this. Everyone interacts with the state in some kind of capacity, right, as a child in school, if you're in school, you're under the influence of the state, state kind of mandated. As a worker, of course, you have to interact with the state if you're unemployed, if you're an immigrant, if you're a refugee. Essentially, unless you live in a far-off remote location where you can kind of grow your own food and live off the land, you will be interacting with the state. And even if you do, as some indigenous groups still do in society, you still can be confronted with the state, which is constantly trying to expand. You know, there's different examples of indigenous groups in the Amazon rainforest, for example, constantly in battle with the Brazilian state over them trying to, thank you, encroach on their land and then take more away from them. There's plenty of things we can point to. So we can't really escape it. But I think that the way that most people probably think about their interactions with the state and do interact with the state is through things like the NHS and through the benefits system, the Department for Work and Pensions. It's these sorts of things. This is all a part of the state as well. And that's why Engels and Lenin were very careful when they talk about the armed bodies, and they say, yeah, that's its essence. That doesn't mean that it's all that it is. You know, as Marxists, we don't have a fixed answer for what everything is. We take a dialectical approach and we have to look at things in the way that they're related and also in the way that they contradict each other. When we say that the state in its essence is armed bodies of men, what we're saying is that people wouldn't listen to the state if the threat of organised violence wasn't behind it. That's what it comes down to at the end of the day because if you don't do what the state says and if you go against it, then you will be thrown in jail and you can be arrested, and that's where the organised violence comes from. So, as I say, there is the NHS and the benefits system and all these things that supposedly do benefit our lives and school and all this kind of thing. And the reason why that's relevant and the reason why I'm putting so much emphasis on it is because this is part of what gives rise to the reformist approach to the state and reformist arguments on how we should understand the state and interact with it. Social Democrats who see the state as a good thing, they say, the state is good, we need it more in our lives, we need it to help us, we need it to oversee things, we need to just make it better. Let's capture more positions. If we ran the state, we would do it in a better way. We need to capture positions and wield it for our own purposes. But that doesn't work and the reason that that doesn't work is because the state is a tool for the bourgeois class and it is tied by a thousand threads to the ruling class. That's what we have to remember. It's not a separate part of society because that is exactly what the ruling class wants us to think, that it's somehow separate and somehow different to the rest of the ruling class. But that's not true. When Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of the Labour Party, for example, it was a political earthquake, it really shook things and it terrified the ruling class, actually, they were horrified by what they saw. He had a left-wing programme. It wasn't a Marxist revolutionary programme but he had a left-wing programme with good demands and so on. He had plans to make a few changes, you could say, if he came into government. Immediately, as early as 2015, generals in the army came out against him and they said that this is completely unacceptable. A senior serving general warned that Jeremy Corbyn's government could face a mutiny from the army if they tried to downgrade them. This unnamed general, who's obviously been protected, also said that members of the armed forces would begin directly and publicly challenging the Labour leader if he tried to scrap Trident, if he tried to pull out of NATO, or announce, and this is a direct quote, any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces. Now, this is the attitude that different elements, this is proof that you can't just reform that. If the army had come out, and we've seen this in history, by the way, there's other things you can look at, other examples of Labour governments being attacked, or not much, not even as much of a radical programme that the Corbyn was trying to implement. The ruling class isn't just going to sit by when they feel threatened by a figure like Jeremy Corbyn, even just a left reformist, an honest left reformist, which is what he was. The ruling class won't just sit by and say, okay, well, I suppose they elected him. There was a democratic election, so we've just got to let him implement his programme. No, they did everything they could to stop him winning a general election, and they succeeded. There's a lot we can go into and discuss about the successes and failures of the Corbyn movement and the ultimate failure of the Corbyn movement, which is why they lost, which can be the topic for a different time. But it's an important way for us to understand, so I thought it's an important example as to where the reformists get it wrong. That's not something that can be reformed because the state is completely tied up with the bourgeois class by a thousand threads as a constant revolving door between the state and the rest of capitalism, basically, in the capitalist class. So I've given the example of the army, but also, as I said earlier, it's more than this. The state has more kind of elements to it, in particular the civil servants, right? Has anyone seen the show The Thick of It? In The Thick of It, who makes the decisions and gets things done? It's not the MPs, it is the civil servants, right? It's the people working in the offices that are having to direct things and sort things out and all this kind of things. The civil servants play a massive role in upholding the state, and of course they are born into society and generally taken from a section of society that is just bombarded with propaganda and they are completely absorbed by the ideology of the state, which is something I'm going to come on to a bit later, which is how the idea of the state manifests itself. There's another show that's a bit older called Yes Minister, which is also a brilliant example of the role that the civil servants play in government and that and how, even though they're not elected officials in any capacity, but they have massive power and control over what happens in the state. And so I would also say that the reformists end up playing an important role for the ruling class. They're actually quite helpful because they justify the existence of the state with their attitude. They constantly justify it and take part in mystifying it in many ways. The reformists say to the working class, yes, things should be better for you, but don't attack the state. We've got to use the state to get there, right? So they kind of stave off the class struggle by using that process and that's incredibly dangerous because in doing so they justify. In doing so, they buy into the myth that the state is a neutral or impartial arbiter in the class struggle that could then be directed in one way or the other. But as we see from the history of the origins of the state, this is not true. But this myth is important for the ruling class because that is the myth, is the basis for how a tiny minority can justify its rule over the majority of people. Not solely through naked violence, right? We don't, in Britain anyway, live under a military dictatorship in which everything that we do is under the immediate threat of violence, right? That's not what we live under. But because the bourgeois state and the ruling class have learnt over time that it's much easier for them to rule effectively because an oppressive military dictatorship can and will force a reaction at some point, right? Because it's so blatant, it's so naked, the oppression that's taken place. What's much more useful for the ruling class is to mystify it, is to mask it, is to say, you know, you can have an election every five years and vote for one or two capitalist parties and seem like you're having a choice. That is a much more effective way for them to rule and that's what they want and that's why they spend a lot of time promoting these ideas, promoting, you know, they dress the state up in Latin and wigs and gowns and constitutions which I'm also going to come on to talk about because it's more useful for them. And every time a reformist bows to that pressure, they're doing the job of the ruling class for them and they're lying to the working class, they're lying to the masses by suggesting that the state can somehow be on their side when it's not true. So I would say that to fight reformism we must be able to dispel this myth of the neutral state. There are other forms of state power. The media plays a massive role. Clearly, you know, with the media coverage of the RMT strikes recently, it's obvious to see what side the state is on. Also, the education system plays a massive role in continuing to justify the state in many different ways. That's why we ran this campaign, the Tell the Truth campaign in the MSF last year or the year before which was to kind of counteract the lies that we are told in the education system as well. Wasn't the British Empire a good thing and we should be proud of this or that thing. So there are other forms of state power but I would say the main myths surrounding the modern day state arose with the bourgeois revolutions. Oh gosh, my laptop's going to die. OK, so in the Enlightenment period and the 19th century the young and increasingly strong bourgeoisie, the middle class producers, they're on the rise they became more and more critical of the old feudal relations which had kind of kept them bound, had stopped them from living the way they wanted to. So ideas of liberty, of free commerce, of free ownership of the land, the abolition of feudal privilege, natural law, the rights of man, all of these things grew out of the changing social landscape at that time. They were born through the bourgeois revolutions and I think we are all generally familiar with a lot of these ideas. Not because they are innate to the human character and it's a great British love of freedom or anything like this which is how Boris Johnson and these types present it but these ideas are the ideological foundation of the society in which we live that was born through the bourgeois revolutions. So the bourgeois revolutions which smashed the feudal system then ushered into society these ideas that we now currently base ourselves on. But how is it different? We talk about the bourgeois revolutions which were revolutionary and progressive in terms of smashing feudal state but obviously they didn't smash class society as a whole. So the essence of the state actually remained the same. In the origins of the family private property in the state is an excellent book by Engels. Engels writes about the rise of the Athenian state and he says that in terms of the origins of it as long as Athenian production was on a low level you had this gentile constitution which was based on family ties and tribal administration and that was sufficient for a period of time. But again as I said earlier as the forces of production developed there was a surplus of goods, classes of people that suddenly became recognised on the basis of their relationship to the means of production and the values of their tribe we see this transformation take place. Those who were part of the ruling property owning class concentrated wealth and power in their hands they used their wealth to inflict debt bankruptcy and slavery onto the lower classes and then they used this new weapon in their hands the state to sanction all of this through law through legal systems effectively. And so the initial rise of state power in Athens was never anything other than the consolidation of the rule of the rich over the poor. And then this state structure in different forms you had these legal institutions legal systems that are developed and then the question of how to protect those legal systems comes into place. The same thing is true when the state structure was formalised after the invasion of William the Conquer in 1066 for example which was a system where the monarch basically owned all of the land some of which was granted to its nobles who in turn would allow serfs to work on patches of land in return for a life of servitude In all of these systems the point that I'm trying to get at is that this setup was transparently preserved by the armed bodies of men that were available to the feudal lords or whichever system it was to maintain them. So like in Athens the state and its armed bodies of men were openly a weapon of the possessing classes against the non-possessing classes and the reason I'm bringing that up is although the bourgeois revolutions were obviously revolutionary and progressive in terms of smashing the feudal system the essence of the state has stayed the same from the rise of the Athenian state to feudalism to William the Conquer to the modern capitalist state today and that hasn't changed but they try and dress it up as I said earlier they've tried to mystify it and make it seem better in different ways because this naked oppressive rule isn't useful for them so we have things like constitutions and the constitution if you think about it particularly in America there was this is against the constitution in England it's less prevalent the way they talk about the constitution but we have things like the Magna Carta all of these things that were quite significant in the bourgeois revolutions they were a major conquest of the revolutions and they also were the product of the class struggle itself which was to force concessions on the old established order to guarantee certain things but all of it plays a role in continuing to justify the state if you think about bourgeois legal theory regards the state as I said earlier as this impartial arbiter that exists above society and that is what we constantly have to dispel as I said the view is shared by the reformists of many different varieties but it ignores the fundamental fact of the way in which it manifests and what its essence is which is the police, it's the courts and it's this threat of organised violence that stays behind everything that we do it serves the interests of one class in society and that is in the case of capitalism the capitalist class but I would say with historical materialism with the Marxist method we can put the state in its place and say this is what it fundamentally is and this is why we need to overthrow it so Marxist are not in favour of abolishing the state in the way that anarchists suggest nor of reforming it so what are we in favour of well the worker's state essentially so we say that the working class needs its own state but it will be a state that's completely unlike any other state that has ever been seen in history Marxist's theory of the state is inseparably bound up with the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history the culmination of this role is the proletariat in dictatorship the political rule of the proletariat that is first and foremost the essence of the worker's state if you want and the worker's state obviously has to come about through socialist revolution and in that process the raising of consciousness which will be necessary in the development of the class struggle and that process will have thrown up different forms of worker's democracy and that worker's democracy is what is essential to the worker's state as well I think Trotsky said that the worker's state needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen to breathe or something like this or maybe he meant socialism in general and it is through the process of a revolutionary situation that forms of worker's control the kind of embryonic forms that the worker's state will be thrown up I mean even today if you read the book in the cause of labour which is a brilliant history of the class struggle of the trade union movement in the UK it makes the point that trade unions are kind of the embryo they're the most basic form that the working class have and it's an embryo of what the new society of what a socialist society should have because it's the basic way for workers to come together and organise what we should so we already have the small embryonic forms of what a worker's state can and should look like and the best example of these forms of worker's control of course are Soviets now the Soviets they've been Soviets in different times in different periods in history obviously in the Russian Revolution but also what I was describing earlier in terms of the Spanish Revolution effectively Soviets in different places so the Soviets are elected workers councils effectively and they've taken place as I said in different times in which workers participated are elected to run their workplaces localities and regions and we would say that that democratic method is much closer to the working class and the interests of the working class than bourgeois democracy it's completely different because it gives people immediate control over their lives in a way that parliamentary bourgeois democracy doesn't and never can do so if we have a revolutionary situation developed and you see Soviets forming and they might not literally be called Soviets the name isn't important, it's the form it's what is happening if we have bodies of workers of people coming together to implement control over their workplace, their regions under those conditions our slogan is all power to the Soviets which is what Lenin and the Bolsheviks put forward we don't say that right now because Soviets don't exist so it would be a bit silly for us to run out on to the hill shouting all power to the Soviets because there are no Soviets, it wouldn't connect with anyone it would be ultra left we can't declare into existence the Soviets and expect them to appear that's not how it will work and that's not what happened in the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks didn't announce we need Soviets and that's what took place no, the revolutionary situation developed consciousness, developed the struggle the Bolsheviks were born and the Bolsheviks had to win over a majority on the Soviets and they didn't have a majority at the start actually the Mensheviks did and it was through time through the political program that the Bolsheviks put forward that they did then win the confidence of the Soviets and therefore have that democratic mandate to rule so under capitalism as we say the state is a weapon which uses the police and army to maintain its rule but a proletarian state would be different but it would need organisations, defensive organisations a workers army would be necessary especially in a revolutionary situation when we know counterrevolution is guaranteed to take place as we say the ruling class isn't just going to sit back and say okay well they really want this so we're not going to do anything about it the whole might of the capital state all over the world will come on our shoulders and so we need a workers army and we need these defensive organisations which will have elements of the embryonic elements of the workers state democratically elected officers the right of recall all of these things subjected to the discipline of the organised working class that will be necessary in the workers state but the workers state will not be necessary forever it won't always exist and we say that eventually it will wither away now what do we mean by that we say that withering away is only possible once the working class and the ruling class effectively once they have all political rule because as we say the state is the product of the irreconcilable class antagonism that exists in society so if you remove that antagonism by making the working class the ruling class then you're removing the material basis for the state and over time it will wither away so we say that a genuine proletarian state will by its first act begin the process of its own destruction because it won't be necessary to exist over time as socialism develops and the productive forces develop to a stage where there's no kind of remnants of the old of old classes or anything like this in society so just to end then and this was quoted yesterday and it's probably quoted a lot but it's worth remembering the philosopher Hegel said that real freedom does not come from attempting to transcend the laws that govern the world but from understanding them and once they are understood these laws can be harnessed for our own benefit and I would say that Marxism provides us with an understanding of the state its role in society and how we can smash it thank you