How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
The state has not always looked like this, and its parts, the standing police, the welfare office, the national bureaucracy, were built at particular moments and for particular reasons. This lens traces that making: the state’s origin in class society, the police invented to control strikes and slaves, the welfare state won and then rolled back, and the two great moments when workers built a different kind of power, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the soviets of 1917. It also asks how fascism captured the state.
Anchor questions
- The state has not always looked like this. Where did the modern state come from?
- Where did the police come from, and who were they first made to control?
- When workers took power, in Paris in 1871, in Russia in 1917, what did they build, and what happened to it?
- How was the welfare state won, and why is it being taken apart?
- What did fascism do with the state, and how did it come to power?
Materials
Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.
Books
- Friedrich Engels (1820 to 1895), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Traces the state to the emergence of classes and property, arguing it is a product of society at a certain stage rather than a natural or eternal institution. Shared with Gender, Reproduction, and the Household. Free: marxists.org
- David Whitehouse, Origins of the Police (2014). A short, accessible history arguing that modern police forces in England and the United States were created between roughly 1825 and 1855 to manage strikes, riots, and slave revolts, not to fight crime. A bridge to Race and Racial Capitalism. Free: libcom.org
- Leon Trotsky (1879 to 1940), Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (writings 1930 to 1940). Analyzes fascism as a mass movement of the ruined petty bourgeoisie mobilized by capital in crisis, and debates how the workers’ movement should respond. Sharply relevant again. Free: marxists.org
- Charles Tilly (1929 to 2008), War Making and State Making as Organized Crime (1985). The classic essay comparing state builders to racketeers who sell protection against dangers they themselves create. A sharp lens on how war and coercion built modern states. Free PDF: bmartin.cc
- Frances Fox Piven (b. 1932) and Richard A. Cloward (1926 to 2001), Regulating the Poor (1971). Argues that relief programs expand to quiet unrest and contract to enforce work, framing the welfare state as a tool of social and labor control. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com. Piven restates the thesis in a free long-form interview: phenomenalworld.org
Primary sources
- Karl Marx (1818 to 1883), The Civil War in France (1871). Marx’s close reading of the Paris Commune as the first workers’ government, and the source of his claim that the working class cannot simply take over the existing state machine but must transform it. The seed of the whole strategy debate. Free: marxists.org
- John Reed (1887 to 1920), Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). Eyewitness reporting on the October Revolution and the soviets, useful for seeing how councils of workers and soldiers actually functioned as organs of power. Free: marxists.org
Films and video
- “Why did the Paris Commune Fail?” (History Matters, 2021). Roughly 5 minutes, about 1.8 million views. A fast animated primer on the 1871 Commune’s rise and fall. An ideal opener before Marx’s The Civil War in France. youtube.com/watch?v=AdGhGX6z8BA
- “The Racist Origins of the U.S. Police Force” (AJ+, 2020). Roughly 7 minutes, about 82,000 views. Traces modern policing to slave patrols, a short visual companion to Whitehouse’s Origins of the Police, shared with the race theme. youtube.com/watch?v=ayUQmnLCHEg
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially histories of the state and of revolutions outside Europe, and of the welfare state’s construction and dismantling.