Marx's theory of the state

Marx's theory of the state comprises the political theories developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concerning the state as an institution, its origins, its development, and its role in society and class struggle. Marx's view of the state evolved throughout his life, moving from a youthful embrace of conventional republicanism to a later critique of the state as an instrument of class rule and ultimately to the conclusion that the state must be abolished. Rather than a single, coherent theory, Marx and Engels's work on the state contains a variety of perspectives that co-exist in an "uneasy and unstable relation", providing the basis for the subsequent diversification of Marxist state theories.

The scholarship of political scientist Richard N. Hunt has shown that Marx and Engels's mature thought contains two distinct, though interwoven, theories of the state, developed independently by each man before their later synthesis. Marx first developed a theory of the state as a "parasite", an alienated social institution separate from society with its own interests. Drawing on his experience as an editor of the Rheinische Zeitung and his critique of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy, Marx saw the state's bureaucracy as its core, an entity that treated the state as its own "private property". Concurrently, Engels, based on his observations of the English political system in Manchester, developed a theory of the state as an instrument of class rule—a "class state" controlled by the propertied classes to oppress the propertyless.

The two men later synthesized these views in The German Ideology, positing that the state is generally an instrument of the ruling class but can, under certain conditions, achieve a degree of independence from all social classes. This "parasite state" model was later applied to historical forms such as absolute monarchy, Bonapartism, and Oriental despotism. In their mature work, Marx and Engels also analyzed the state as a factor of social cohesion, whose function is to moderate class conflict and maintain the social order.

In the transition to communism, Marx and Engels argued for a "dictatorship of the proletariat". For them, this was not a dictatorial regime in the modern sense but rather the democratic rule of the entire working class during a transitional revolutionary period. They sharply distinguished this majoritarian, democratic concept from the Blanquist model of a dictatorship by an elite revolutionary vanguard. In their late careers, Marx and Engels also developed new theories of revolutionary strategy, outlining a path for "legal revolution" in countries with democratic institutions and, conversely, a strategy for "skipping stages" of development in backward, peasant-based countries like Russia. The ultimate goal of communism was the establishment of a stateless society. They argued that the professional, bureaucratic "parasite state" would be transcended by a system of popular self-administration modeled on the Paris Commune—a "democracy without professionals". The coercive "class state" would "wither away" as class conflict ceased.