THE basic Marxist position is that the state is a product of class antagonism, and so with abolition of classes — under communism, that is — it will disappear. Let us explain.

The state is always an instrument in the hands of the ruling class to manage the affairs of society in its own interest and to exploit and hold down the oppressed class. The Indian state, for example, is such an instrument in the hands of big capitalists and landlords. The state does everything in the name of the masses but actually in the interests of these classes alone. Look at the annual budgets and economic “reforms”, look at the way the police and the administration works, and this will be immediately evident. The parliament and the polls, the so-called “Independent” judiciary and all that are nothing but modern devices to conduct this class dictatorship in a veiled manner.

Through the socialist revolution the working class seizes state power and makes itself the ruling class. In the first stage of communism it has to exercise dictatorship over the erstwhile ruling classes which have just been overthrown but not yet annihilated, to crush by force the latter's violent attempts at counter-revolution. Regarding this stage Marx had commented:

“Between capitalist society and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this there is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (From Critique of the Gotha Programme)

The dictatorship does not necessarily mean one-party rule. This form was practised in Russia which had no tradition of parliamentarism, but there may be many other forms — just as bourgeois dictatorship is exercised in so many stale forms. As Lenin had clarified, proletarian power means “not the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies.” In our country, for example, the multi-party system may be retained after revolution, people's power is to be exercised by elected bodies at all levels down to the grassroots, non-elected posts like governors are to be abolished and a whole set of democratic reforms including the right to recall introduced. For along with dictatorship over the counter-revolutionaries, the new slate also has to ensure genuine democracy for all the working people so that they can give full expression to their enormous creative energy for the construction and self management of a new society.

As socialism or the first stage of communism grows into mature communism as described earlier, the whole scenario changes:

“As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same lime, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; ... The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away '(From . Anti-Duhring)

The difference is thus clear. The capitalist state is the exploiting minority's organ for suppressing the toiling majority, the socialist state — just the reverse. The bourgeoisie perfects the state machine to perpetuate its class dictatorship behind the facade of democracy. The proletariat proclaims and exercises dictatorship over the vested interests to extend democracy for the masses and to pave the way for the final dissolution of all classes, all state forms, all dictatorship.