Mary E. Marcy, with her boundless hostility to Capital, making it plain. While she never joined one of the new Communist Parties–her long fight in the S.P had developed a healthy skepticism for all political parties after–it is clear where Marcy’s sympathies lay.

‘The State’ by Mary E. Marcy from the Toiler. No. 178. July 2, 1921.

The state is an organ of the domination of a class. It arose only where classes of exploiters and exploited existed, to protect those who take from the productive classes, and to make them secure in their exploitation. It aimed, and everywhere, save in Russia, still aims to prevent conflict and to coerce the workers into docility, while every system of exploitation renders class struggles inevitable. At such times the powers of the state are employed to subdue the workers.

In a society where there exist no classes the state has no function. There is nothing for it to do, no reason for its appearance.

No capitalist state has ever served or can ever serve to abolish the causes of class struggles and class antagonisms. It pretends to reconcile antagonistic classes while it maintains. an economic system that is based on classes and class interests. It is the great protector of the wages system.

The state springs up with the rise of classes in society, adapting its form to meet the needs of the economically powerful class. The state protected the slave-owning classes and evolved into a state fitted to the requirements of the feudal ruling class. The capitalist state arose to further and maintain the wages system. It protects the capitalist class in its ownership of the means of production, the mines, the factories, mills and shops so that the working class is compelled to sell its labor power for something like one-fifth of the value of its products, in order to live. It protects with laws and courts which speak through armies and policemen.

The proletariat need not look for aid from the capitalist state in its struggles for a release from the profit-system, because the state is the servant, and not the ruler, of the capitalist class. It was constructed to serve this class and cannot function. against it with organs which it does not possess.

Today in some degree the state protects the interests of all property-owning classes. It offers no protection nor security to the working class whose only hope of existence lies in its ability to sell its labor power to al capitalist, for wages.

Thus the proletarians form the only truly revolutionary class in the world today. Possessing nothing, hoping for nothing from the capitalist class or its servant state, they have nothing to lose and turn, inevitably to their own class and revolution.

Democracy.

Capitalist political democracy is not democracy at all. It is the dictatorship of a very small minority of capitalists, over the vast majority–the working class.

To-day Russia possesses the nearest approach to a democracy in the world, expressing itself in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, wherein the majority of the people (the working class) has become the organized ruling class, exercising the powers of the proletarian state to abolish all forms of exploitation and the last remnants of capitalist production.

When the workers of Russia abolish all exploitation, the Russian democracy of the workers–the Proletarian Dictatorship will have no further function to perform and will ultimately disappear as the new society without classes becomes a living fact.

The next step in social evolution in all capitalist countries will be the democracy of the poor, of the majority, of the working class, together with a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which is the only class capable of leading the masses to communism. This can come only through the rise of the proletariat as the organized ruling class, whose purpose will be the abolition of a class society.

When the social slogan has become: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs” there will no longer be need of a state even for the suppression of the oppressors. “The authority of government over persons will be replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production.” Then only shall we enjoy the full flower of communism.

(Read Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and N. Lenin’s State and Revolution.)

The Toiler was a significant regional, later national, newspaper of the early Communist movement published weekly between 1919 and 1921. It grew out of the Socialist Party’s ‘The Ohio Socialist’, leading paper of the Party’s left wing and northern Ohio’s militant IWW base and became the national voice of the forces that would become The Communist Labor Party. The Toiler was first published in Cleveland, Ohio, its volume number continuing on from The Ohio Socialist, in the fall of 1919 as the paper of the Communist Labor Party of Ohio. The Toiler moved to New York City in early 1920 and with its union focus served as the labor paper of the CLP and the legal Workers Party of America. Editors included Elmer Allison and James P Cannon. The original English language and/or US publication of key texts of the international revolutionary movement are prominent features of the Toiler. In January 1922, The Toiler merged with The Workers Council to form The Worker, becoming the Communist Party’s main paper continuing as The Daily Worker in January, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/thetoiler/n178-jul-02-1921-Toiler-rsz-chronAM.pdf