Examine the conception of the State in the ideologies of Fascism and Marxism. (2014, 15 Marks)
Fascism and Marxism both reject the liberal view of the state as a neutral umpire, but from opposite directions. For fascism the state is the highest ethical reality and an end in itself. For Marxism it is a product of class division, a coercive instrument with an expiry date. Opposite in theory, they converged in practice.
Fascism: The State as Ethical Absolute
- Roots. G. W. F. Hegel (Philosophy of Right, 1820) made the state the actuality of ethical life, where freedom is realised within the state. Fascism kept this exaltation but discarded Hegel’s law-bound constitution.
- Giovanni Gentile‘s ethical state made the state the citizen’s own higher self, so coercion becomes self-correction. The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) held that the state creates the nation: whoever says liberalism says the individual; whoever says fascism says the state.
- Benito Mussolini‘s 1925 formula, everything within the State, nothing outside it, nothing against it, abolished the private sphere. Alfredo Rocco treated rights as revocable grants.
- The state is permanent and totalitarian. Duties come before rights, and class conflict is dissolved into state-run corporations.
Marxism: The State as Class Instrument
- Friedrich Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) traced the state to private property and class antagonism. The Communist Manifesto (1848) called its executive but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
- Karl Marx‘s Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), and later Antonio Gramsci‘s hegemony, refined this crude instrumentalism by allowing the state relative autonomy.
- The bourgeois state must be smashed. A transitional dictatorship of the proletariat follows, and then the state withers away (Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1878).
| Criterion | Fascism | Marxism |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | Spiritual end in itself | Instrument of class rule |
| Relation to society | Creates the nation | Created by class division |
| Individual | Fulfilled only in the state | Emancipated from it |
| Class | Transcended by corporatism | Expressed by the state |
| Duration | Permanent | Transitional; withers away |
The Paradox of Practice
- V. I. Lenin‘s transitional state hardened into a permanent party-state. Joseph Stalin argued in 1930 that state power must first be strengthened to the utmost before it could die out, and no socialist state ever withered.
- Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) grouped Nazism and Stalinism as totalitarian.
- Yet the two differ in purpose. Marxism tolerates the state as a means to universal emancipation, which gave its critics an internal standard: Leon Trotsky condemned the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state. Fascism worships the state as an end.
- The paradox persists. China’s Communist Party wrote into its constitution in 2017 that the Party leads everything. In India, communists governed Kerala through elections from E. M. S. Namboodiripad‘s 1957 ministry, working within the liberal state they had expected to replace.
Conclusion
Fascism deified the state; Marxism expected to abolish it. In practice both produced unlimited states. Aristotle held that the state exists for the sake of the good life. Constitutional democracy serves that end by keeping the state necessary but limited.