Karl Marx on Political Obligation

In one line

Marx's answer to "why should I obey the state?" is that the question has been asked the wrong way round: the state is an instrument by which one class holds another down, so there is no general duty to obey it, and the belief that there is one is part of how the arrangement is maintained.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: Marx offers no theory of political obligation but a rejection of the question; since political power is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another, and law and morality form a superstructure serving the class that owns the means of production, obedience to the state is not a moral duty owed by citizens but a condition of class rule, which will disappear along with classes and with the state itself.

Why Marx is not answering the same question

Every other theory in this module takes the question at face value and offers a ground: God, agreement, force, time. Marx does something different, and an answer that misses this misses the point.

He treats the question itself as a symptom. Asking "what obliges me to obey the state?" presupposes that the state is a neutral body standing above society, whose claim on me needs explaining. Marx denies the presupposition. The state is not above society; it is one part of society organised against another. Once that is seen, the question changes from "why must I obey?" to "whose interest does my obeying serve?".

In the vocabulary of chapter 240, Marx does not answer the four problems of generality, particularity, content independence and universality. He denies that there is anything there to be explained, which is why he belongs in a list of theories of obligation while being of a different kind from the rest.

The argument, in four steps

1. The state is an instrument of class rule

The proposition is stated in the Manifesto in the sentence to quote: "The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." And more generally: "Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another."

If that is what political power is, then obedience to it is not a relation between a citizen and a public authority. It is a relation between a subordinate class and the organised power of a dominant one.

2. Law is part of the same apparatus

Law defines and protects property, enforces contracts between parties of very unequal strength, and calls the arrangement freedom. The Manifesto addresses the bourgeois reader directly on this point, saying that his very ideas are products of the conditions of bourgeois production and property, and that his jurisprudence is but the will of his class made into a law for all.