Against the state and against Marxism: is the state a specific instrument of domination that a revolutionary 'workers' state' will only entrench, rather than dissolve?

Peter Kropotkin, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The state is not the eternal form of human society, nor a neutral tool that good hands may turn to good ends. It is a definite historical growth, born in the sixteenth century out of the alliance of the military chief, the judge, the priest, and later the capitalist, and it grew precisely by destroying the free cities, the guilds, the village communes — the whole dense fabric of mutual aid and self-government that men had built from below.¹²

Its essential function is not the common good but domination: concentrating power and wealth and defending them. From this the cardinal error of the state socialists follows plainly. They propose to capture the state, to seize its machinery and wield it for the workers, confident that it will afterward wither away. It will not wither. Power concentrated does not dissolve itself; the men who hold it acquire interests in holding it, a bureaucracy forms around it, and the revolutionary government becomes a new ruling class more total than the old, because it claims to act in the people's name.

I said this against Marx in the International, and I lived to see it. A society worth having cannot be handed down by a dictatorship; it must be built from below, by free federation of communes and associations, replacing the authority of the state with the voluntary coordination that nature and history show to be possible.³ You do not reach the abolition of authority by way of a stronger authority.⁴⁵

Sources

Slowly the primitive tribe elaborated its institutions and reached the village commune. It re- mained at that stage till the twelfth century. Then rose the Republican cities which produced the glorious expansion of the human mind, at- tested by the monuments of architecture, the grand development of arts, the discoveries that laid the basis of natural sciences. But then came the State...
The State, Its Historic Role
In the sixteenth century, the long work of the two conspirator ia already in full force. A king already rules over the barons, his rivals, and that force will alight on the free cities to crush them in their turn. Besides, the towns of the sixteenth century were not what they were in the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. They were born out of a libertarian revolution.
The State, Its Historic Role
TKt State: Itt Historic M'U. We see in it an institution developed in the history of human socie- ties to hinder union among men,,f local initiative, to crush existing liberties and; ration. Arid we kno~w that an institution, which has a whole past dating some thousands of years back, cannot lend itself to a function opposed to the one for which it was developed in the course of history.
The State, Its Historic Role
Is it less true for that? And shall we allow our belief in the State to survive the host of prejudices we have already sacrificed for our eman ciption? It is not my intention to criticise to-night the State. That has been done and redone so often, and I am obliged to put off to another lecture the analysis of the historical part played by the State. A few general remarks will suffice.
Anarchism, Its Philosophy and Ideal
It is therefore of consequence, after having so often criticised the pre- sent State, to seek the cause- of its appearance, to investigate the part played by it in the past, to compare it with the institutions which it superseded. Let us first agree as to what we mean by the word State. There is, as you know, the German school that likes to confuse the State with Society.
The State, Its Historic Role

Where the argument is made

The State: Its Historic Role (1897, on the state as the historical alliance of soldier, judge, and priest that destroyed the medieval free cities and communes)
'Law and Authority' (1886)
Modern Science and Anarchism
the sustained critique of state socialism and of the Marxist doctrine of the conquest of state power and the dictatorship of the proletariat
the Memoirs and the late writings on the Russian Revolution

How the argument was received

Kropotkin's critique of the state and of Marxist state-socialism is his most historically vindicated political claim. The anarchist wing of the First International (Bakunin, then Kropotkin) warned that the Marxist conquest of state power would produce not the withering-away of the state but a new despotism of officials — a warning the trajectory of the Soviet Union is widely taken to confirm. Kropotkin's own last years, in opposition to the Bolshevik dictatorship and the Red Terror, dramatize the prophecy. The position anchors the libertarian- socialist and anarchist traditions (Colin Ward's practical anarchism, Murray Bookchin's libertarian municipalism, James C. Scott's critique of the high-modernist state) and remains the central fault line between anarchism and Marxism.