DJP wrote:
Looked up who it was who came up with the ‘state as monopoly on violence’ idea thinking it was one of the anarchists, but seems that one comes from Weber, the godfather of sociology and enemy of socialism.
I thought that before that Engels had defined the state as “armed bodies of men” defending private property but on checking can’t find this, only that this is what Lenin and Trotsky said he said. Not that it’s necessarily wrong (just a bit summary) or that Engels wouldn’t have said it. It’s just that he doesn’t seem to have done. At least I couldn’t find it.The early French Marxist Gabriel Deville defined the state in a talk on The State and Socialism in 1895 as:
Quote:
the public power of coercion, created and maintained in human societies by their division into classes, and which, having force at its disposal, makes laws and levies taxes.
Surely this pre-dates Max Weber’s definition of the state as an entity which successfully claims a “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence” (even if this isn’t a bad definition).The Socialist Party inherited Deville’s definition. As, for instance, we said in our pamphlet Questions of the Day (http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/questions-day):
Quote:
The State is the public power of coercion. It arose out of the early division of society into classes, and developed with the development of class conflicts. It is the result of the desire to ‘keep order’: order, that is, in the interests of the class that is supreme; order to allow the ruling class to protect its property ownership and exploit the rest of the population. Through the ages the State has been controlled, as a rule, by the class that has been economically the most important. Through its control of the State and its power to levy taxes a class that has outgrown its economic importance can often continue for a time to control social affairs.
