The Role of the State in the Marxist Point of View Essay

The Role of the State in the Marxist Point of View - Essay Example For further clarification and exploration, it will also compare Marx's ideal government with that of the Luddites and utopian socialists. The paper will conclude with its findings. The Communist Manifesto which was published in 1848 documents the struggle of two major opposing social classes-the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. According to Marx (1), bourgeoisie refers to the "class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour" while proletariat refers to the "class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production on their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live." In order to fully understand the role of the government in the societal context of Marx, this paper will first look at the social structure and their implications in the society. The power struggle between these two social classes is justified by their opposing interests. The proletariat is portrayed as a utility maximizing entity because he seeks to maximize the value of his resource, his labor power, in return for higher wages. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is a profit maximizing entity because he seeks to minimize the cost of production by keeping wages for workers low (Marx 2). It should be noted that in Marx society, costs of production are allocated to fixed costs such as rent and interest. Wages, being the most variable and controllable, is kept at minimum. The bourgeoisie also aims to generate the most efficient productivity from the proletariat as this will also increase his profits. In this case, we see an antagonistic and contradictory relationship between the working class and the owners of capital. Therefore, in Marx's definition of proletariat, we see that the working class is portrayed as an exploited segment of the society. The relation ship between the two major classes also documents that power is concentrated on the hands of those who own the means of production. The working class, as implied by the definition of Marx (7), is seen by the bourgeoisie as a factor of production together with land and capital: "He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, the most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him." This view of the society emphasizes the presence of social equality. The bourgeoisie uses their access of capital in order to exploit the proletariat. In this context of Marxist capitalist society, the state appears to be instrumental in preventing the existence of social equality. Marx recognizes that the state is mainly "a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms" (Lenin 2). When the struggle between classes in the society cannot be objectively reconciled, the state is created. Conversely, the existence of the state is a manifestation that the class antagonisms in the society cannot be reconciled. Thus, the state only comes into existence when the society is divided on class lines. As the creation and existence of the state is due to the antagonism between two social classes, the state in the Marxist context is created for a certain function that is, the resolution of the class struggle. It is, then, the utmost goal of the government to serve the interest of both parties and