We should take the religious analogy seriously, because for Marx religion is the paradigm of alienated consciousness, its fetishes the exemplars for fetishes elsewhere. He once famously remarked (in a text contemporary with ‘The Jewish Question') that ‘criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism' (1843d: 175). What he is saying here, I think, amounts to much more than that the state's pretentions to be above classes are to be disbelieved.
Marx's claim is that the institution of the political' state as such is an illusory, ideal community – an ideological fiction – built upon the construction of an equally fictitious social identity for the individual, that of the citizen. Individuals are citoyens only as abstract' individuals – individuals, in other words, divorced from the material circumstances and social relations which concretely make them what they are. The ‘ideal' state is predicated on the ideological denial of real individuality. Real differences between people are submerged in the ascription of unreal universality'. In capitalism, the individual and the community are therefore simultaneously idealized: the bourgeois citizen is an imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty'. We cannot begin to understand Marx's thinking on the state, to my mind, unless we take these words in their literal sense. The state is an ideological representation of bourgeois society, an Erscheinungsform In Philip Abrams's provocative adaptation of Durkheim, it is capitalism's ‘distinctive collective misrepresentation' (1977: 15). And individuals as identified and represented (in all senses) within the community of state are not individuals as they really are.
For ‘The Jewish Question', then, the political state as such is without doubt an ideological form, an ideal superstructure on real relations in the sense argued above. But beyond its references to ‘egoistic individuals', this text offers no material analysis of the social relations which underpin this form. Later writings, however, do – but without sacrificing any of the essential insights of ‘The Jewish Question'. The German Ideology roots the ‘illusory community' of the state (and law) in the particular class relations of bourgeois society, which it in turn sees as based in the division of labour (1846a: 65, 83):
the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interests of the separate individual ... and the communal interests of all individuals ... And out of this very contradiction between the interests of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always based, however, on the real ties . . . and especially . . . on the classés, already determined by the division of labour. (1846a: 44-5)
Specifically, Marx relates the fact that bourgeois power takes the characteristic forms of domination through a political state and the rule of law to the circumstance that the bourgeoisie is the first social group in history truly to rule ‘as a class’.
At first sight, this notion is odd, for did not previous forms of society also have ruling classes: feudal lords, ancient slaveholders, oriental potentates, and so on? Clearly they did, and Marx obviously does not mean to deny that pre-capitalist ruling strata lived off surplus labour. The contrast he has in mind is a narrower one, between social forms of rule; in particular, between rule as a class and rule as an estate (Stand). In this sense, class too is a historical category.12 Rule as an estate, as we saw in chapter 3, is based in personal relations of domination and servitude, as also is slavery. Personalized domination is in fact for Marx the norm in all precapitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, by contrast, rules impersonally - and is the first class in history to do so - in the context of the formal equality of all individuals. The form in which bourgeois social power is embodied is the purely economic' (and specifically alienated) one of its property, in the modern meaning of the word. Control over people (and their labour) is mediated through control over things. The ultimate expression of this impersonal social power is in money - ‘the consumate fetish'. In bourgeois society, according to the Grundrisse:
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IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
IDEAL SUPERSTRUCTURES
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VI