Marxism

Marxism (Marx himself admittedly having given relatively little attention to the state) has either followed the Hegelian approach of identification between individuals and their states, ideally merging the two (an approach not foreign to Rousseau, either), or has treated the state as an ‘apparatus’, merely ‘a committee which manages the common business of the bourgeoisie’. In any event, even one of the few systematic and structured attempts to examine the state under the Marxist toolset has produced few results: (unavoidably) focusing on the functions of the state (and thinking in terms of an Asiatic-Babylonian state, an ancient Greek state, a feudal state and a capitalist state), it concludes that ‘there is no general theory of the State because there can never be one’. For Marxists, the state remains an ‘undecipherable mystery’.

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