Marx and Human Emancipation: The Destruction of the State, Transition, and Class Abolition—Marx Against Engels

Marx and Human Emancipation: The Destruction of the State, Transition, and Class Abolition—Marx Against Engels

Preface

The questions of the state and the transition to communism remain among the most heavily debated issues within the communist movement. While most socialist and communist forces agree that communism entails the abolition of classes and the disappearance of the state, they differ profoundly on the historical process through which this transformation occurs. Throughout the twentieth century, Leninist, Trotskyist, Maoist, and social-democratic currents generally argued that a distinct socialist stage must intervene between capitalism and communism, characterized by a workers' state or dictatorship of the proletariat.
This conception is frequently presented as a direct continuation of Marx's own theory. Yet Marx's writings raise a more fundamental question: does the transition to communism require a new state form, or does it involve the destruction of the state as a distinct political power?
To answer this question, it is necessary to trace the historical development of Marx's critique of the state itself.

Marx: From the Critique of Religion to the Critique of Politics

Marx's critique of the state emerged within a broader transformation of European political thought. Beginning with thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza, political theory increasingly separated itself from moral philosophy and theology—although politics in general did not abandon ethics. Politics came to be treated as an autonomous sphere governed by power rather than ethical principles.

As Marx observed: "Starting with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bodinus and others of modern times... might has been represented as the basis of right. Thereby the theoretical view of politics was freed from morality."
This intellectual shift laid the groundwork for Marx's own historical study, which he described as the movement "from the critique of heaven to the critique of earth, from the critique of religion to the critique of politics."
Against theories that grounded law and political authority in power or abstract principles, Marx sought the material foundations of political life. In The German Ideology he argued that the real basis of the state lies not in ideas or political constitutions but in the material conditions of society:
"The material life of individuals, which by no means depends merely on their 'will', their mode of production and form of intercourse... is the real basis of the state."
The state, therefore, could not be understood independently of the social and political relations that produced it, nor can its historicity be grasped without the contradiction between political emancipation and human emancipation.

Political Emancipation and Human Emancipation

Marx's earliest critique of the modern state centered on the distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation. The rise of constitutional government, secularism, and democratic rights represented a significant historical advance over feudal and religious forms of rule. Yet Marx argued that political liberation did not necessarily entail human emancipation.
In his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx noted that the content of the state remained fundamentally the same regardless of whether it appeared in republican or monarchical form:
"The entire content of law and the state is, with small modifications, the same in North America as in Prussia."
For Marx, the problem was not merely religion, monarchy, or a particular constitutional arrangement. The state could become secular and democratic while continuing to reproduce social domination. This insight led him to argue: "The recognition of the rights of man by the modern state has no other meaning than the recognition of slavery by the state of antiquity."—Marx, The Holy Family
Consequently, political emancipation remained limited by the very framework of human rights. The state's protection of these individual rights serves to preserve the material conditions that generate private property, social conflicts, and human alienation.

The State and Private Property

Marx's critique of the state deepened as he developed his materialist conception of history. In The German Ideology (1846), he argued that the state exists only in relation to the social divisions created by private property. He rejected the notion that transforming private property into state property would abolish class domination. Such conceptions merely elevated the state into a universal owner while leaving alienated social relations intact.
Marx criticized those who confused political institutions with humanity itself:
"Herr Bruno, who confuses the state with humanity, the rights of man with man, and political emancipation with human emancipation..."
The state, for Marx, was not the embodiment of universal human interests. Rather, it was a social form arising from historically specific relations of production. Indeed, Marx argued that the modern state exists to preserve these relations: "The state exists only to protect private property."
"If the state attempted to abolish the private sphere upon which it rested, it would abolish the very conditions of its own existence."—Marx, Critical Notes on the Article: The King of Prussia and Social Reform

The Proletariat and the Abolition of Class Society

Before examining Marx's conception of revolutionary transformation, it is necessary to consider the concept most frequently invoked in debates over the transition to communism: the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marx's most frequently cited formulation appears in his letter to Joseph Weydemeyer and Statement to the Editor of the Neue Deutsche Zeitung, 1850
"The class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat... This dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."
"In your newspaper’s article of June 22 this year, you reproached me for advocating the rule and dictatorship of the working class, while you proposed, in opposition to my stance, the abolition of class distinctions in general. I fail to understand this critique… You are well aware that I defended the same viewpoint in my Misère de la philosophie against Proudhon, prior to February 1848."
Yet Marx consistently emphasized that the dictatorship of the proletariat possessed no independent historical purpose. Its significance lay entirely in the abolition of classes themselves.
This point is already evident in The Holy Family, 1845: "When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite."
The proletariat does not emancipate itself by becoming a permanent or temporary ruling class. Its historical role consists in abolishing the social relations that generate both classes and class domination.

Community, Emancipation, and the End of the State

Marx's conception of emancipation extended beyond the abolition of private property. In The German Ideology, he argued that genuine freedom is possible only within a real human community.
Past forms of collective life, including the state, represented only illusory communities standing above individuals. These institutions appeared as independent powers confronting society.
Marx wrote: "Only in community with others can an individual cultivate their talents in all directions; only within the community is true personal freedom possible."
Human freedom does not require submission to political authority, but rather liberation from it. This perspective underlies one of Marx's most revolutionary statements:
"The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery."
The state exists because society remains divided against itself. As long as class antagonisms persist, political power appears as a separate force standing above society.

Political Power and the Abolition of Classes

Marx developed this argument most clearly in The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847. There he argued that the emancipation of the working class requires the abolition of all classes and all class antagonisms.
Once class antagonisms disappear, political power loses its social foundation:
"The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which excludes classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called."
For Marx, the state is not an eternal feature of human existence. It is the organized expression of class antagonism. The disappearance of classes therefore implies the disappearance of the state in its historical sense. Consequently, Marx's reflections on revolution increasingly focused not merely on the state apparatus itself, but on the state as an extension of the underlying social relations within the whole society.
In Critical Notes on the Article: The King of Prussia and Social Reform, 1844, Marx criticized those who sought merely to replace one form of state with another:
"Even the radical and revolutionary politicians look for the causes of evil not in the nature of the state but in a specific form of the state which they would like to replace with another form of the state."
Thus, analyzing the history of the state—and Marx's view of it—becomes clearer if we begin with Marx himself. The analysis gains even more clarity if we return to Marx and Engels, compare their arguments, and acknowledge without prejudice that Marx's historical materialism and Engels' political theories are fundamentally contradictory from beginning to end. Therefore, to clarify further, we must examine the contradictory conclusions of both Marx and Engels regarding the state between 1847 and 1877.

The State between Marx and Engels

The divergent historical conclusions Marx and Engels reached regarding the state serve as the entry point for a broader debate between Marxists, Anarchists, socialists, and communists. This divergence is especially clear regarding the Communist Manifesto. While traditional scholarship reduces Engels to Marx’s mere assistant, historical reality suggests otherwise. Engels was actually a primary architect of the text's core ideas. He drove the conceptual development of the Manifesto, adapting the material across sequential iterations. This began with his Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, June 1847, which he subsequently revised into a second version titled The Principles of Communism (October–November 1847)—which is also published as a separate pamphlet under the title The Principles of Communism (Originally published in 1847). It was these core principles that laid the direct programmatic foundation for the final formulation of Section II of the Manifesto.
In particular, The Principles of Communism provides an early systematic outline of communist objectives. In Section 18, Engels writes that: “…the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade, taxation, centralization of credit in the hands of the state.”—Engels, The Principles of Communism.
Similarly, in The Communist Manifesto (Chapter II), the programmatic goal is stated as the “…overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, [and] conquest of political power by the proletariat, centralization of all transportation, increase in the number of national factories, equal labor duty for all.”
In the 1872 preface to the Manifesto, the Manifesto is critiqued by Marx and Engels. However, Engels would later summarize his distinct perspective in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:
“The state is not ‘abolished’. It withers away.”
Marx, however, arrived at a fundamentally different historical conclusion through his analysis of revolutions and especially the Paris Commune. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he argued: “All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it.”
He later reaffirmed in his 1871 letter to Ludwig Kugelmann: “The next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer… to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it.”
For Marx, genuine emancipation required not the gradual withering of the existing state machinery but its destruction. Every previous revolution merely transferred control of the state from one class faction to another while preserving bureaucracy, military hierarchy, and centralized political domination. The communist revolution therefore cannot inherit the bourgeois state apparatus; it must abolish it. Thus, contrary to Engels, and based on historical experiences—the Paris Commune—Marx confirmed what he had concluded in his historical and materialist studies from 1843 to 1871.
These contrasting statements reveal a crucial theoretical divergence between Marx and Engels. While Engels envisioned the state gradually dissolving as class antagonisms disappeared, Marx maintained that genuine emancipation required the destruction of the state apparatus itself. According to Marx, every earlier revolution—from 1789 to 1848—merely changed the hands that controlled the state without abolishing its underlying structure: its bureaucracy, standing army, and centralized machinery of power. Therefore, he argued, the proletarian revolution must take the opposite course—not to inherit or reform the existing state, but to abolish it altogether.
In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx writes:
"An oppressed class is the essential condition for any society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class necessarily entails the creation of a new society. For the oppressed class to free itself, it is crucial that the productive forces and the existing social relations are no longer capable of coexisting. Of all the instruments of production, the most powerful productive force is the revolutionary class itself. The organization of revolutionary elements as a class requires the existence of all the productive forces that have been generated within the old society.
But does this mean that after the collapse of the old society, a new class domination will emerge, culminating in a new political power? No.
The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes ... As such, there will no longer be any political power."
The Paris Commune served as the historical laboratory for these conclusions.

Paris Commune as a Historical Laboratory

Concerning the Commune, in the first draft of The Civil War in France, Marx famously noted:
"This was, therefore, a revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican or imperialist form of State power. It was a revolution against the State itself..."
The Commune suggested a form of social organization in which associated producers could consciously regulate production and social life without the mediation of a separate state authority.
Thus, Marx's historical thesis of the state is, in fact, the most important chapter in his historical materialist studies. Marx views the state as a political machine that maintains political society and the political being who has lost all basis for his human freedoms. Therefore, the emancipation of this being from political society is what signifies his liberation and return to his communal life. Ultimately, human emancipation—rather than political liberation—stands as the definitive goal of the communist revolution, through which the transition to communism becomes a historical reality.

The Transition from Capitalism to Communism

From all the above historical arguments, the transition to communism cannot be understood as the construction of a new form of permanent or temporary political power. For Marx, the communist revolution is the self-emancipation of the proletariat, and this emancipation requires the abolition of the social conditions that generate both classes and the state. This precise process of structural dismantling defines Marx's historical concept of transition.
From this perspective, the dictatorship of the proletariat does not represent a new political order. It is merely a moment within the process through which class distinctions are abolished. The victory of the communist revolution is realized precisely through this historical process. This victory entails nothing less than the disappearance of classes, the dissolution of the economic foundation of political power, and the ultimate cessation of the state as a separate political institution.
The experience of the Paris Commune reinforced this conclusion: human emancipation requires more than a change in rulers; it requires the disappearance of the social relations that make rule necessary.

Communism

The central issue in the transition concerns the persistence or abolition of value relations. Capitalist society is governed by commodity production, money, and exchange. These forms are not eternal features of human existence but historically specific social relations. The transition from capitalist to communist relations of production is based on new socio-economic foundations, beginning with the disappearance of market exchange (money). This initiates the historical process of erasing value relations, which ultimately paves the way for overcoming 'equal right' in favor of distribution based on human need.

As Marx writes in Capital:
"In the case of socialized production, the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labor-power and means of production to the different branches of production."
The abolition of money does not result from administrative decree but from the transformation of production itself. Once production ceases to operate through exchange between independent commodity producers, money loses its historical function. He therefore adds:
"The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labor-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate."—Marx, Capital, Volume II, Chapter 18
These labor certificates neither circulate as capital nor mediate exchange between independent producers. They function merely as administrative instruments within collective production. The essential issue is therefore not the technical form of money but the social relations embodied within it.
Money is not just a physical object (like a coin or paper bill) or a technical tool; it is a social relation that arises only when independent, private producers exchange commodities. When private production is replaced by collective production, the social relation of "value" disappears, rendering money obsolete.
Communism abolishes the domination of capitalist production by market forces and subjects production to conscious social regulation. Production is reorganized according to human need rather than exchange value or profit. Under capitalism, distribution appears through wages, profits, rent, and interest. Under communism, where wage labor itself has been abolished, distribution ceases to take the form of capital's categories and becomes a consciously organized social process. The mode, principles, and tools of distribution are determined by society itself in accordance with its level of material and social development.
"But", As Marx writes, "before distribution means distribution of products, it is first, a distribution of the means of production, and second ... a distribution of the members of society among the various kinds of production."
"The distribution of products is manifestly a result of this distribution, which is bound up with the process of production and determines the very organization of the latter."—Marx, Introduction (1857), in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

From Exchange Value to Human Needs

As specified above, the transition from capitalism to communism requires that the market laws of supply and demand disappear entirely. By abolishing market exchange relations, this transition transforms production from a system driven by competition, value, and profit into a process dedicated solely to meeting human needs.
This definition puts us in a decisive contradiction with the Critique of the Gotha Programme, there we read:
"Equal right here is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of producers is proportional to the labor they supply; equality consists in measurement by an equal standard—labor."
This formulation has often been interpreted as evidence that socialism constitutes a lower stage governed by labor-time accounting, equal exchange, and the persistence of right under a proletarian state. Yet, this appears difficult to reconcile with Marx's broader critique of value production. Any society that continues to organize production through value relations remains confined within categories inherited from capitalism, including the principle of distribution according to labor performed instead of human needs. This is precisely what Marx strongly criticized and described as the principle of distribution of the reactionary socialists.

In The German Ideology Marx writes:
"One of the most vital principles of communism, a principle which distinguishes it from all reactionary socialism, is its empirical view, based on a knowledge of man’s nature, that differences in brain and intellectual ability do not imply any differences whatsoever in the nature of the stomach and physical needs. Therefore, the false tenet, based on existing circumstances, ‘to each according to his abilities,’ must be replaced, insofar as it pertains to enjoyment in its narrower sense, by the tenet, ‘to each according to his needs.’ In other words, a different form of activity, or labor, does not justify inequality or confer any privileges in terms of possession and enjoyment."
The communist principle therefore points beyond the measurement of individual contribution toward the satisfaction of human needs. The transition consequently raises the question of whether labor-time accounting and equal right represent necessary historical stages or residual bourgeois limitations that the revolutionary process itself must overcome.
Communism is a cooperative mode of production grounded in the collective ownership of the means of production. The communist revolution represents humanity's emancipation from wage labor, value production, and the capitalist relations governing production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. Therefore, the end of political rule is inseparable from the transformation of production itself into communist production and communist relations.
Thus, the exchange must disappear, as labor certificates are not money in the capitalist sense. They neither circulate as capital nor mediate exchange between independent commodity producers. They function merely as administrative instruments within collective production. Consequently, the abolition of exchange relations depends upon abolishing money as capital in all its historical forms—whether metallic currency, paper money, digital payment systems, bank cards, or cryptocurrencies. The essential issue is not the technical form of money but the social relations embodied within it.
Natural differences alone cannot justify unequal living conditions. Even within modern welfare systems, individuals with differing family circumstances are entitled to comparable minimum standards of existence. A society based upon collective ownership cannot restrict consumption according to labor certificates alone if it seeks genuine human emancipation. Collective ownership remains incomplete unless it guarantees subsistence, development, and the realization of human capacities for all individuals. Marx’s economic analysis consistently centers upon socially necessary labor time rather than the isolated superiority of individuals. Production under capitalism is inherently collective; profit arises not from individual productivity, but from the exploitation of collective social labor by total social capital. Why, then, does the Critique of the Gotha Programme appear to preserve "equal right" measured according to labor contribution? Is this truly an unavoidable historical reality and a necessary transitional stage via the proletarian state?
To answer this, we must look at how the capitalist mode of production operates through internal economic laws governed by competition and regulated through the law of supply and demand. This mechanism controls the movement of commodities, labor, and money while generating recurrent crises, overproduction, and social instability. In The German Ideology, Marx explains that market exchange subjects humanity to an alien force resembling ancient fate itself. Technological developments in one country immediately reshape the lives of workers across the globe—a machine invented in England could deprive workers in India or China of bread overnight. Thus, capitalist production acquires a world-historical character while remaining beyond conscious social control. What, then, is the solution of communism? The issue is historical, not theoretical, and the answer will be material, not philosophical. Communism is not a set of intellectual solutions. Therefore, we will not trouble ourselves to answer this question with our own minds, for we are talking about relationships that we find only in the material transformation from competitive capitalist production to co-operative production. As Marx writes in The Civil War in France:
"If united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan... what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism?"

Conclusion: The Late Marx and the Rupture with State Socialism

The critical trajectory of Marx’s late writings —like his earlier works— reveals that the transition to communism cannot be understood as the construction of a new, centralized political order. For Marx, the communist revolution is strictly the self-emancipation of the proletariat—a process of structural dismantling that requires the simultaneous dissolution of both classes and the state. It is precisely here that we find the ultimate resolution to the historical contradictions between Marx and Engels. While Engels’ early formulations in The Principles of Communism and Chapter II of The Communist Manifesto heavily prioritized the concentration of capital, transport, and agriculture "in the hands of the state," Marx spent his final years actively dismantling this state-centric paradigm.
This rejection of top-down state management is deeply intertwined with Marx's late-stage view on how a revolution must be executed and who must direct it. Contrary to twentieth-century vanguardist theories that placed the management of the transition in the hands of a specialized political party, Marx adamantly opposed the idea of party-administered power. In a remarkable 1879 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Marx explicitly detached the communist project from the administrative or conspiratorial seizures of power that would later characterize twentieth-century state socialism, declaring:
"No socialist need predict that there will be a bloody revolution in Russia, Germany, Austria, and possibly Italy... But those revolutions will be made by the majority. No revolution can be made by a party, but by a nation."
This programmatic divergence regarding state centralization was explicitly finalized by Marx just two years before his death. In an indispensable 1881 letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, Marx looked back on the transitional demands of The Communist Manifesto—which had been adapted from Engels' early drafts—and delivered a self-critical admission, noting that these state-centric measures "are and must be contradictory in themselves." Critiquing the bourgeois socialist Henry George, who argued that society's evils could be solved if ground rent were paid directly to the state, Marx delivered a warning that effectively anticipated the tragic state-capitalist detours of the twentieth century. He argued that any framework that transforms property into state revenue or state tax while leaving wage labor intact is:
"...simply an attempt, decked out with socialism, to save capitalist domination and indeed to establish it afresh on an even wider basis than its present one."
This late-stage synthesis again brings us face to face with the apparent paradox of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. When orthodox currents interpret the "lower stage of socialism" as a permanent regime governed by state-enforced wage-labor and "equal right," they are merely resurrecting the very state-capitalist trap Marx condemned in his letter to Sorge.
It is structurally vital to recognize that when Marx writes in Capital, Volume II: "In the case of socialized production, the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labor-power and means of production to the different branches of production," he treats "socialized production" and "communist production" as identical synonyms. By using these terms interchangeably to describe a moneyless economy, Marx rejects the reformist and orthodox myth of a distinct, prolonged "socialist" stage where money-capital continues to operate under the custody of a state power. The elimination of the money-form is not a distant goal for a higher stage; it is the immediate, foundational premise of socialized production itself.
This is in direct contradiction to the view of Vladimir Lenin, who argued that market categories must be preserved under the state, just as wage-labor is necessary under "socialism." According to Marx, however, these categories must be abolished from the moment the revolution triumphs, since the victory of the revolution, in reality, means the abolition of the state and wage-labor together at the same time. Lenin wrote:
"It is impossible to abolish money at one stroke... In order to abolish money, it is necessary to arrange the organization of the distribution of products for hundreds of millions of people, an affair of many years."—Lenin, Draft Programme of the R.C.P.(B.), in Collected Works, Vol. 29.
Thus, contrary to the orthodox readings of the Critique of the Gotha Programme and its endorsement as one of the most important works of Marx—an endorsement made without any effort to compare it to Marx's fundamental works, treating it, in other words, as a divine rather than a human document—as well as the political formulations of Engels and Lenin, Marx did not bifurcate the post-capitalist future into two distinct, separated economic systems. Instead, he highlights in Capital, Volume III, that the development of productive forces happens entirely within the capitalist epoch: "Development of the productive forces of social labour is the historical task and justification of capital. This is just the way in which it unconsciously creates the material requirements of a higher mode of production."
Thus, creating the material basis for socialism or communism is the historical function of capital, not the so-called transitional period that takes us back to political economy, which always starts from scarcity.
Ultimately, human emancipation requires an immediate, qualitative break from the metrics of capitalist accounting. The transition to communism cannot be an administrative dictatorship of the clock or a prolonged management of a transitional state. By tracking Marx's thought up to his final interventions in 1879 and 1881, we discover a position fundamentally irreconcilable with Engels' concept of a state that gradually "withers away" after centralizing production. For Marx, the state must be smashed, exchange must be dissolved, and money in all its historical forms must be abolished. However, the dilemma remains suspended between heaven and earth: how can Karl Marx be the author of the Critique of the Gotha Programme if its economic distribution models contradict his foundational economic theses? Across Capital, the Grundrisse, and The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx consistently demonstrates that the victory of the communist revolution is realized only when society throws off the alien forces of competition, wage-labor, value, and political rule. True emancipation requires transforming national production into a common plan managed directly by united, co-operative societies.
By exposing this profound contradiction, we force a decisive choice between the compromises of the Gotha Programme and the uncompromising critique of Capital. While Capital stands as a total, ruthless critique of political economy, the Gotha Programme represents a catastrophic retreat into it—specifically, a regression back to the capitalist ideology of scarcity. When we allow scarcity to dictate the metrics of human existence, we merely resurrect the state-capitalist trap, replacing the private owner with a state bureaucrat and the market with state-managed profit from wage-labor. To break this cycle, we must recognize that creating the material basis for communism is the historical function of capital, not a prolonged transitional period designed to manage scarcity under a red flag—the commune flag. True human liberation is realized only when society completely bypasses the calculations of political economy, directly organizing production for human need. As Marx beautifully summarized in his description of the greatness of the Paris Commune: "What else, gentlemen, would it be but communism?"
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