‘Withering away of the state’ is a common phrase that gets thrown around within leftist spaces a lot, an important statement always misunderstood and/or taken out of context.

Before we go into details to properly dissect what this means, we need to first understand that the state exists in two forms:

• Bourgeois State
• Proletariat State Semi-State

The Bourgeois State

The bourgeois state exists for a sole purpose: put simply, to protect private property and manage class contradictions. The bourgeois state in all of its forms enacts policies and laws that benefit private individuals while ignoring the needs of the working class.

As Engels explained, the state arose historically as a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms. When society became divided into classes with opposing economic interests, a power seemingly standing above society became necessary to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of “order.” This power is the state, and in capitalist society, it serves the interests of the capitalist class.

The bourgeois state maintains its dominance through a monopoly on violence. The police, military, and prison system exist primarily to protect private property and suppress working class resistance. Alongside this stands a legal system that, despite presenting itself as neutral, codifies capitalist power relations through property rights and labour regulations.

The African Context: Neocolonial Laws Protecting Capital

In Africa, the bourgeois state takes a particularly insidious form through neocolonialism. Post-independence African states inherited colonial legal frameworks designed to facilitate extraction, and these have been maintained and reinforced to serve both local comprador bourgeoisie and international capital.

Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs): Imposed by the IMF and World Bank, these programmes forced African states to privatise public assets, cut social spending, remove trade protections, and open markets to foreign capital. Laws were rewritten to guarantee “investor confidence,” a euphemism for protecting the profits of multinational corporations at the expense of African workers and peasants.

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs): These agreements allow foreign corporations to sue African governments in private arbitration courts if policies threaten their expected profits. When Tanzania attempted to renegotiate mining contracts, when South Africa sought to implement Black Economic Empowerment, when Nigeria tried to regulate its oil sector, all faced legal threats from corporations using these treaties.

The CFA Franc Zone: Fourteen African nations remain trapped in a monetary system controlled by the French Treasury. Their reserves are held in Paris, their monetary policy decided by Europeans, and their economies structured to benefit French capital. The legal architecture of the CFA zone is the bourgeois state in its most naked colonial form: African labour producing wealth that flows directly to the colonizer.

Land Laws: Colonial land ordinances, still on the books in many African countries, dispossess peasants and concentrate agricultural land in the hands of agribusiness. In Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and across the continent, the legal system protects the property of settlers and corporations while criminalising those who resist dispossession.

These laws exist not because African states are “corrupt” or “poorly governed”, the favourite explanations of Western liberals but because they function exactly as bourgeois states are designed to function: protecting capital accumulation and suppressing resistance from the exploited classes.

The Proletariat State (Semi-State)

The proletariat state, or what Marx and Engels referred to as a “semi-state,” emerges following the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Unlike the bourgeois state, which exists to oppress the majority in the interests of the few, the proletarian state inverts this relationship: it is the organised power of the working class used to suppress the former exploiters and prevent counter-revolution.

This is what Marx meant by the “dictatorship of the proletariat”: not dictatorship in the sense of tyranny, but in the classical sense of class rule. Just as the bourgeois state represents the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, the proletarian state represents the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. The crucial difference is that while the former oppresses the vast majority, the latter suppresses only a small minority of former exploiters.

Engels called this formation a “semi-state” because it is a state that begins to negate itself from the moment of its creation. The bourgeois state maintains and reproduces class divisions; the proletarian state works to abolish them. As the material conditions of class society are dismantled (private ownership of the means of production eliminated, class distinctions erased, and socialist relations of production established), the very need for a coercive state apparatus diminishes.

Withering away of the state vs Eradication of the state vs Abolition of the state

The major discourse in leftist spaces is how to dismantle the bourgeois state.

The Marxist argument has to do with the proletariat state dismantling the bourgeois state through an armed revolution and seizing the means of production, forming a workers’ state and making production state property.

The ‘withering away of the state’ will happen as a slow process after the revolution, the workers establish a new state (the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”). Lenin calls this a “semi-state” because, unlike previous states, it represents the majority suppressing a minority (the former bourgeoisie). Why it withers: As the means of production are seized and class distinctions are eradicated, the need for a “special repressive force” to hold down a subject class disappears.

Special repressive force has to do with institutions created by the bourgeois state to enforce/protect the policies enacted to benefit the ultra-rich. Such institutions include the police, military, prisons, and courts.

The Result: When there is no longer a class to be oppressed, this proletarian state gradually ceases to function politically and “withers away” into simple administrative management of things.

A critical distinction must be made: the withering away of the state applies only to the proletarian state. The bourgeois state does not ‘wither away’, it must be smashed. Only when class divisions have been completely abolished does the proletarian state begin to fade away.

The ’eradication of the state’ has to do with completely dismantling the bourgeois state and all of its ‘special repressive forces’. The by-product of this eradication is to establish a proletarian state and its own ‘special repressive force’.

The clear reason to have a proletariat ‘special repressive force’ is not to create a new form of oppression after the revolution but to prevent a COUNTER-REVOLUTION and PROTECT the gains of the working class.

Anarchism and the Abolition of the State

The anarchist position calls for the complete dismantling of the bourgeois state and an immediate transition into a stateless society. Anarchists reject any form of transitional state, viewing the state as inherently a tool of domination that will always seek to perpetuate its own power.

This position, while sounding radical, is both idealist and opportunist.

It is idealist because it ignores material reality. The bourgeoisie does not simply vanish after a revolution. They retain wealth, international connections, experience in organising, and powerful allies abroad. History shows that the exploiting class will use every means available (economic sabotage, foreign intervention, civil war) to restore their rule. To abolish the state immediately is to leave the revolution defenceless against counter-revolution. The anarchist dream of instant statelessness assumes the class struggle ends the moment the old regime falls. IT DOES NOT.

It is opportunist because it offers no concrete path to achieving its goals. By refusing to seize state power, anarchists abandon the one instrument capable of suppressing the bourgeoisie and reorganising society. In practice, this has meant either defeat (as in Spain 1936-1939, where anarchist hesitation allowed fascism to triumph) or reliance on other forces to do the difficult work of revolution. Engels accused the anarchists of wanting to “abolish the state overnight,” without understanding that the state can only disappear when the conditions that created it class antagonisms have themselves disappeared.

The Marxist position is not a LOVE FOR THE STATE, but a recognition of necessity. The proletariat needs its own state precisely in order to create the conditions under which all states become unnecessary. Skipping this step does not accelerate liberation, it guarantees defeat.

The Question of Actually Existing Socialism

The anarchist critique becomes even more absurd when applied to actually existing socialist states. Why, they ask, did the Soviet Union not simply dissolve its state apparatus? Why did the DDR maintain a security service? These questions ignore the material conditions these states faced: they existed under constant siege.

The Soviet Union faced immediate foreign intervention after 1917, with fourteen capitalist nations invading to strangle the revolution in its cradle. It endured economic blockades, a Nazi invasion that killed 27 million of its citizens, and decades of Cold War aggression: trillions spent on military encirclement, nuclear threats, and CIA operations designed to destabilise socialist governments from Eastern Europe to Latin America to Afghanistan.

The DDR was particularly vulnerable: a small socialist state sharing a border with the capitalist West, subject to constant brain-drain as West Germany deliberately recruited skilled workers, active infiltration by the BND and CIA, and relentless propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe broadcasting around the clock.

African Socialist States Under Siege

The African continent provides some of the clearest examples of why revolutionary states require robust defensive mechanism.

Burkina Faso under Thomas Sankara (1983-1987): In just four years, Sankara’s revolutionary government vaccinated 2.5 million children, built schools and clinics across the country, redistributed land to peasants, and launched Africa’s most ambitious reforestation programme. He rejected IMF loans and their attached conditions, nationalised land and mineral wealth, and promoted women’s liberation. For this, he was assassinated in a coup backed by France and the CIA, with his former comrade Blaise Compaoré (who immediately reversed socialist policies and welcomed back the IMF) installed as president.

Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah (1957-1966): Nkrumah’s vision of Pan-African socialism and his efforts to industrialise Ghana independently of Western capital made him a target. The CIA worked with local reactionaries to overthrow him in 1966 while he was on a peace mission to Vietnam. Declassified documents confirm US involvement in destabilising his government.

Congo under Patrice Lumumba (1960): Lumumba’s crime was demanding that Congolese resources benefit Congolese people. Within months of independence, Belgium and the CIA orchestrated his overthrow and assassination, installing the dictator Mobutu who would loot the country for three decades while faithfully serving Western interests.

Libya under Muammar Gaddafi (1969-2011): Whatever criticisms one might have of Gaddafi’s governance, Libya under his leadership had the highest Human Development Index in Africa, free healthcare and education, and was using oil wealth to fund African development projects including a proposed pan-African currency that would have challenged Western financial hegemony. NATO’s 2011 intervention, sold as “humanitarian,” destroyed the state entirely, creating a failed state with open slave markets.

Mozambique and Angola: Both FRELIMO and the MPLA faced decades of war waged by South African and US-backed insurgencies (RENAMO and UNITA) specifically designed to prevent socialist development. Millions died, infrastructure was destroyed, and both countries were eventually forced into IMF programmes.

To demand these states simply “abolish themselves” or refrain from defensive measures while facing active subversion is not radical. It is naive at best, and serves the interests of imperialism at worst. The Stasi existed because there were actual fascists, actual NATO agents, and actual saboteurs operating within the DDR. Whether every action was justified is a separate discussion, but to pretend the threat was not real is to ignore history.

The anarchist position essentially asks: “Why didn’t the USSR just let itself be destroyed?” This is not a serious political programme, it is moralism that looks as revolution. It holds socialist states to standards no capitalist state has ever met, while conveniently ignoring the far more extensive surveillance apparatus of the West: COINTELPRO, Five Eyes, NSA mass surveillance, and the systematic crushing of leftist movements from Chile to Indonesia.

Conclusion

The ‘withering away of the state’ is not a utopian slogan or a call to immediately abolish all forms of organisation. It is a scientific prediction grounded in historical materialism: when the material conditions that necessitate the state class antagonisms cease to exist, the state itself becomes redundant and fades into history.

The path to this withering is not through wishful thinking but through revolutionary practice. The bourgeois state, designed to serve capitalism and suppress the working class, cannot wither away, it must be smashed and replaced with a proletarian state. This workers state serves a fundamentally different purpose: not to perpetuate class rule, but to abolish class distinctions entirely. It is, as Engels said, a “semi-state” a state that begins to negate itself from the moment of its creation.

The anarchist demand for immediate statelessness, however well-intentioned, ignores both the persistence of class struggle after revolution and the reality of imperialist encirclement. The history of the twentieth century demonstrates clearly: socialist states that failed to defend themselves were destroyed; those that built robust defensive apparatuses survived to advance the interests of their working classes.

Marxists do not fetishise the state. We recognise it as a necessary instrument in a specific historical period, the transition from capitalism to communism. When classes have been abolished, when production is organised for human need rather than profit, when the old exploiters have been fully integrated into the new society or have passed from the scene, then and only then will the state lose its reason for existence. It will not be abolished by decree. It will simply wither away, replaced by the free association of producers managing their common affairs.

Until that day, the task remains: smash the bourgeois state, build the proletarian state, defend the revolution, and create the conditions for a truly classless society.

Related Readings

Primary Texts

• Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
• Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), particularly Part III on Socialism
• V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)
• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

On African Socialism and Anti-Imperialism

• Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965)
• Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa (1970)
• Thomas Sankara, Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-1987
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
• Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)
• Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches (1973)

On the State and Revolution

• Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970)
• Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, particularly on hegemony
• Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (1969)
• Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (1978)

On Actually Existing Socialism

• Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997)
• Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2007)
• William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (1995)