Marx says states were created by capitalists to protect private property...

Marx says states were created by capitalists to protect private property. How can this be true when states existed before capitalism?

A feudal kingdom does the same thing you retard

How?

Adam Smith said that.

The modern nation state is as old as capitalism.

Depending on the definition you use, feudal states can be states as well, but they aren't modern nation states because they are of a conglomerate of legal relationships between individuals, instead of instutionalized structures like the nation state with ministries, police, etc.

Marx didn't say the state was invented by Capitalists, he pointed out that a.) the State is always defined by the oppression of one class over another, like slaves and masters, lords and serfs, etc. and b.) that under Capitalism the class antagonism articulated by the State was that of the contradiction between the Bourgeoise and the Proletariat.

the modern capitalist nation-state is very different from states under feudalism.

Also this. The modern nation-state as we know it today is a very modern invention. "States" did exist in the past but they were far looser and more decentralized, lots of lords and aristocrats holding pockets of land and various byzantine tributary systems. Hardly the concrete "states" of today. Most European nations didn't exist till the mid-1800's. Italy didn't exist as a nation till 1861. Think about that for a second. The birthplace of Fascism and they weren't even a nation will 1861.

/thread

I got the first post of this thread and it was an ebin win but it fucking vanished, so here it is again:

t. illiterate and stupid OP

OP here. I still don't understand how states evolved out of capital.

Can anybody actually explain?

When did Marx say there was no state before capitalism?

Where's the confusion? Various posters have pointed out that the state didn't come out of Capitalism.

when capitalism developed it led to the creation of a more centralized state so that the commons could be privatized and labor could be properly disciplined.

Sure. So before capitalism states did exist, but they had an entirely different function. The state as we understand it in contemporary society is deeply connected to the capitalist mode of production. Fines, property rights, police, etc. don't make sense without capitalism.

So states correspond to property interests?

Small property = smaller decentralised states
Big property = big centralised states

private property cannot exist without state violence to enforce it, yes.

It doesn't matter the size, states came about because of capitalist private property in general

States correspond to the mode of production of the society they're a part of. So
globalized capitalism = states with little power over capitalist firms
Local capitalism = protectionist states with a lot of power over (local) capitalist firms
Feudalism = feudal states with lots of power over serfs
Etc.

Not exactly. The State exists to exert the will of the ruling class, it's exists to monopolize violence for the sake of political rule. The reason States were so inefficient in the past was simply because the modes of production they ran under were shitty and inefficient in a way that Capitalism is not. Now mind you, Capitalism is plenty inefficient, but not like Feudalism. Under Capitalism you have endless reinvestment into the means of production for the sake of ever expanding the reach of Capital, and as Capital expands so must the State and it's various apparatuses. Under Feudalism all you really needed were a handful of goons in armor with spears, under Capitalism you need the intricate police state and surveillance society that we've come to view as "normal" today.

Fines - punishment for breaking the law
Property rights - to protect fundamental rights of citizens
Police - to enforce the law

You can understand states without capitalism.

But that's exactly what I want explained. You're just restating the OP.

Hey retard, there are things that are unique capitalist states. Capitalist property rights are very different than Feudal property rights. Fines are monetary penalties for breaking laws. And so on.

OP>Reading Lenin's Imperialism might help you:
States mainly are there to protect the property of the ruling classes. When the Capitalists (and merchants) became the ruling classes in many nations, they also invented a new form of state to suit their needs.
Like educating all children, to work in factories and serve in war, or building public hospitals, to collectivise costs of keeping their workers healthy.

The very nature of its organisation: a state is top down where the state de jure owns the land. In Feudalism, the land is owned by a lord who pledges allegiance to another, higher lord. Feudalism is about the allegiance of men, the state is an organisation.

Rally mooks yoo thonk

He said that states arise out of class society for the purposes of maintaining class divisions. This applies to slave and feudal societies as well as capitalism, since all three have distinct economic classes governed by the relationship to property and the MoP.

OK. So basically the state always exists as an instrument of the ruling class but as the ruling class changes from Master to Lord to Capitalist, the *nature* of the state changes too?

I don't get this.

The state also enforces other fundamental rights too. Like the right not to get assaulted.

Pls,,,,,,,,,,,,,, read user

Read Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality for a more in depth examination, but basically in a hunter gatherer society, private property doesn't really exist. This is because resources are taken directly from nature, but not in large enough quantities to justify excluding others from its use. It is in a weird way post scarcity, since anybody who can hunt or gather berries has their own MoP. With the advent of agriculture, months planning and effort go into food production on a specific plot of land, meaning that this land will be the target of thieves. Compare this to a hunter gatherer, who can just move on to another part of the forest with no real loss. Once the need to defend property arises, people come together collectively to do this as effectively as possible, however laws protecting property obviously only protect people who have property. Therefore they are meaningless to those that do not own property, except insofar as they bar them from taking away the property of the rich. Hence why people like Marx or Smith write that governments essentially exist for the protection of the rich against the poor.

I don't disagree with any of that. My question was about states before capitalism. The only answer I seem to have got in this confusing thread is that states just serve the ruling class regardless of the mode of production. Then the ruling class adapts the state as it sees fit. All the other answers seem to be for different questions.

Can anybody add any more?

Like others have said, the nature of the state depends on the mode of production (how society is structured). A state is a system designed to maintain the class structure (worker/boss, lord/serf) through violence. Any class system needs to be maintained through violence.
Take feudalism, for example. The feudal mode of production is defined by land. Feudal lords own a piece of land and the people on that land give taxes to and fight for the lord. The more land the lord has, the richer and more powerful he is. Now, this system can only function through violence, because how else are you gonna make them pay taxes, so the lord hires a bunch of goons called knights, kits them out in expensive armour and weapons, and has them beat the shit out of anyone who doesn't pay taxes. Congrats, you have a state.
Now, it's kinda hard to govern an entire country by riding around and beating people, so lords delegate: Kings give pieces of land to his knights in exchange for service, and these knights then give pieces of land to their knights, and so on.
Now, a country run by feudal contracts is kinda unstable, since lords can always choose to serve another or go independent. So as things develop kings start centralising: instead of knights beating people up for their money you have tax collectors (who beat people up for their money for money), and instead of small warbands paid in land you have large professional armies paid in gold (stolen from America). The king then kicked the lords off their land and took it for himself (absolutism). These absolutist states continued to centralise, and when the kings got their heads chopped off the state remained, this time with a fancy constitution and ruled by a bunch of lawyers and bourgeoisie with even fancier hats. As the industrial revolution kicked off the role of the state changed from protecting the property of the nobility to protecting the property of the bourgeois factory owners. You now have our modern bourgeois state
That should answer your question

He doesn't. Where did you get this understanding of Marx from? The existence of the State in Marx precedes the existence of generalized commodity production (capitalist mode of production) and even the existence of the festering bourgeois middle class under feudalism (the State precedes then even primitive accumulation through usury).

For Marx, and this is apparent if you read texts as basic as German Ideology, the State arises as a necessary construct mediating the division of labour, more precisely the division of labour predicated on the production of commodities (however generalized or not). In that same text, Marx then also logically posits the obvious with regards to the state:
>Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.
We will only truly find a distinguished post-capitalist society in a society where not just the proletariat self-abolishes itself, but by extension also the State, which is representative of and the reproducing symptom and agent of a class of wage-labourers, just like any other class.

Say I'm a capitalist. I'm in competition with other capitalists and with the proles. It would be to my advantage if i can compete better with either of them, so I have a persistent incentive to interfere with the "free market." This applies to commodity, resource, labor, and capital markets, to competition, etc. Every capitalist experiences these incentives in some form or another. The specific actions they point to, and modes of interference, can be different or the same between two capitalists. An individual capitalist can either use direct force himself to do this (muh breaking the NAP, etc) when it has a better cost-benefit tradeoff than its alternatives. But often, several capitalists will have the same interests, or will ally themselves in the name of securing shared interests, and as such cooperate in their coercive activity to benefit in common, and can use shared resources and influence to create complex social structures meant to do so in a more efficient, nuanced way than direct physical force. In the broadest sense, all capitalists share an interest in preserving the stability of the overall system, and the western state in the modern era of "big government" expands to the borders of their largest shared interest, representing all of them in the welfare state and the defense of capitalist property. But the bourgeoisie is not a homogeneous mass, and intra-class conflict, while not the fundamental antagonism, is inevitable, and follows from the material conditions that determine their incentives. As well as direct, violent conflict between two "states" of varying sizes (competing companies' private security divisions, a drug cartel and the nation-state, WWI-style rival blocs of nation-states representing opposing sections of the bourgeoisie with internally shared interests,) we see single, larger "states" grow out of synthesizing the contradiction between more primitive ones as a means of socializing the conflict between the two, becoming not "neutral arbiters" but the preeminent device of class rule, through which intra-class conflict is meant to more efficiently and safely occur, to mutual benefit. The ultimate culmination of the latter is the neoliberal dream of one fully integrated world market and one integrated bourgeoisie.

The most important thing to realize is that all right-libertarianism's complaints about the state result from premises established by class rule, you can always trace a policy down to the "cronies" which it benefits, and view modern national and international politics as an ongoing process of compromise and jockeying for control between different capitalists. The other component is that "one's own interests" as a capitalist are not fully clear at all times, and capitalists disagree often on tactical questions of which policy best responds to the same incentive, the best example of which is the "classical left-right" question concerning the scope of the welfare state and taxation to support it, effectively reflecting individual capitalists' differing subjective valuations of personal stability against collective stability, which are influenced by their material conditions, but not exhaustively or deterministically. Though "in the long run" selective pressures regarding who stays bourgeois and who does not tend to settle policy out onto the "most effective allocation" between the two for the local bourgeoisie regarded as a whole


Most of the bourgeoisie generally very much prefers a decreased risk of getting assaulted over the opportunity to assault someone with impunity. Just consider the cost-benefit analysis. And it's a very easy policy to implement, because many proles do too. But these "fundamental rights" fall away in different contexts, like war and terrorism, and so are hardly universal expressions of universal values.
Climate policy is perhaps a better example. Why are so many """left""" politicians pushing for environmental regulation and green energy? Are they good people that reflect the will of the masses? Or is it possible that they and their bourgeois representatives themselves benefit from it? Is it maybe possible that "these republicans are in the pocket of big oil" and "these democrats are creating and subsidizing 'green' energy boondoggles and undermining oil (for their cronies)" are both correct judgements, and not ones that imply the negation of the other? That this conflict reflects the conflict between different parts of the bourgeoisie,and not the people themselves?

Property Rights=fundamental rights

Private property also existed before capitalism comr8, what do you think serfdom was?