The state is inevitable – refusing to engage it replicates oppresive hierarchies and cedes the political – only engagement gives us methods of resistance

The anarchist critique of Marxist organisational forms is unconvincing, then, because it does not acknowledge the diversity of Marxist approaches and it tends towards a theoreticism that sees a linear, causal, and continuous line from theory to practice. Nonetheless, there are significant differences of strategy between anarchism and Marxism: it is just that these are less to do with organisation as such, and are much more broadly to do with differing attitudes toward politics and the state. Although some (though by no means all) anarchists have supported formal political organisations, with rules, membership criteria, and even internal discipline (Schmidt and van der Walt 2009: 247-263), they have traditionally rejected any engagement with the state – whether it be voting, demanding legal rights or protections, forming political parties, or attempting the revolutionary seizure of government – on the basis that such engagement can only end up replicating the oppressive hierarchies that they are fighting: either it will lead to new forms of dictatorship and bureaucracy (such as developed in the Soviet Union); or it will lead to parliamentary reformism and hence merely reinforce existing structures and relations of power. If Marxists support (qualified) engagement with the state and even the formation of political parties, however, it is not because they think that centralised hierarchies are desirable or inevitable, but because they begin from a different understanding of politics. They argue that the anarchist abstention from state politics denies us the most effective means of political action: we disempower ourselves rather than the state when we refuse to engage with it. Making demands on the state does not necessarily entail an endorsement of the state, any more than the demands that are made by employees during a strike are an endorsement of the employer or of the system of wage-labour (Marx 1988). Anarchists themselves have at least implicitly recognised the efficacy of political engagement by occasionally supporting the policies of certain governments and even participating in elections (Engels 1988; Franks 2012: 216). More than this, abstention from state politics is not a genuine option: whether we like it or not, we are all already involved in state politics, because we are all always already submitted to state power, control, and oppression. Anarchists are concerned that participation in conventional politics will lead to parliamentary reformism. But this concern is itself ultimately premised on a tacit acceptance of the liberal-parliamentary understanding of politics: to claim that we can safely repudiate state politics simply by refusing ever to enter a polling booth is to assume that ‘the state’ stops at the door of Parliament. Marxists, in contrast, have argued that the state apparatus includes educational institutions, the media, churches, the family, and so on (e.g. Althusser 1971): simply in going about our daily lives we are all therefore implicated in state politics. Given our necessary involvement within politics, the question is not whether we engage with it, but how we do so; even libertarian Marxists like Holloway argue that engagement with the state is inevitable (Holloway 2005: 40). In contrast, the anarchist recommendation of disengagement from the state risks a politics of withdrawal and isolation. There are two related reasons why under our current conditions in particular the Marxist willingness to engage in state politics is preferable to an anarchist position. The first is the dominance of neoliberalism today. Given the strength of neoliberalism since the crisis that it created, there is a strong case for a certain pragmatism in our response. A danger of the prefigurative politics favoured by anarchists is that it dogmatically dictates an a priori exclusion of certain forms of political action. For Marxists, on the other hand, political strategies must be decided according to particular conditions and within a certain context. In a context in which private companies are increasingly undertaking tasks previously performed by the state, the active defence of state services and institutions can be viewed as a radical position to adopt: defending welfare provision, public pensions, universal healthcare, and free higher education should be seen not as a reformist compromise with the existing order but as safeguarding the gains of class struggle against capitalist processes of accumulation by dispossession. This leads to the second reason for doubting the refusal of state politics as a viable tactic under current conditions, which concerns the specific role of the state under neoliberalism. The anti-state politics of anarchism may have made sense during eras in which the state could plausibly be presented as the main threat to freedom and equality: during the period of nation-building and imperialistic expansion in the mid- to late-19th century, of the rise of fascism in the early-20th century, or even of the development of welfare capitalism after WWII. But it has far less purchase in an era in which neoliberalism, as both the official ideology and a form of everyday common sense, is anti-statist. Put simply, the attack on state power too easily echoes the rhetoric of neoliberalism itself (Taylor 2013: 735). When government actors themselves are explicitly endorsing the retreat of the state, then anarchist attacks on state power have limited efficacy either as a tactical call to arms or as a convincing analysis of our present conjuncture. In practice, of course, it is true that neoliberalism has not dissolved state power. But nor has the relation between state and capital remained the same under neoliberalism, such that our analyses, strategies, or rhetoric need not alter. The nature of this relationship between state and capital will be examined in the next section.