请翻译成通顺、自然、准确的汉语，It is important to emphasize that it is on this basis that this particularization of the state as an entity ‘alongside and outside’ bourgeois society occurs, that is to say on the internally contradictory basis of capitalist production. The actual particularization on the basis of this contradiction then leads to conceptions that are ‘inverted’, ‘mystical’, idealist (these terms are continually used by Marx). According to these conceptions, the state is independent from and opposed to society, it is the true subject whose object is ‘society’ (as a whole). Marx criticizes this view in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. (This essentially already contains, although in abstract form, the critique of the revisionist theory of the state, which although it pays lip-service to the primacy of society, to the antagonism of wage-labour and capital, nevertheless by asserting that the state can regulate the social contradiction, elevates the state to a subject). Readers of Capital can easily understand this development of the state as a ‘particular entity alongside and outside civil society’ by recalling the dialectical development of the value-form, and then the moneyform, from the contradiction between value and use-value contained in the commodity. Embodied in the dual character of the product of labour as a commodity, this contradiction can only become apparent if it is expressed by a particular commodity, the money-commodity. The value-form of the commodity, which cannot be expressed in its own use-value-form, becomes expressed by the use-value-form of a particular commodity which thus becomes money. Money now appears as an independent thing, and the socio-historic character of value becomes attached to it, either as a natural characteristic of it, or by virtue of a supposed common agreement between people. The same ‘fetishism’ can be seen in the form of the state. According to the bourgeois conception, either the state has always existed since man is ‘by nature a creature of the state’, or else the state is indispensible for social (i.e. bourgeois) life, or again it was established consciously by social contract.11 The fact that it is the particularization of a specific mode of production (capitalism) is turned on its head. This reification and autonomization of the state is a necessary illusion resulting from the bourgeois mode of production just as much as are the forms of money, capital, wage-labour, profit, factors of production or revenues. These illusions are forced upon the agents of production by the particular mechanism of this form of production, and it is these which really determine their activity.
It is for this reason that the state is not the 'real collective capitalist’, but the ‘ideal’, ‘fictitious collective capitalist’.12 Capital’s interest in maintaining the basis of its existence can only develop subsequently, and in face of a threat to the very foundation of this mode of production. The most important relationship, the one that determines the real behaviour of capital, is the relationship of the individual capital to its source of surplus-value, the workers it exploits (cf. Grundrisse p. 419 f). 'What could possibly show better the character of the capitalist mode of production than the necessity that exists for forcing upon it, by Acts of Parliament, the simplest appliances for maintaining cleanliness and health?' (Capital vol. 1, p. 452).13 The process of thus gradually ‘forcing upon it’ these requirements, mediated by catastrophes and conflicts, victories and defeats, establishes the ‘welfare state’, the ‘interventionist state’, etc., as a particular coercive power in which capital externally confronts itself. This process also first engenders the struggles of different ‘interest groups’ which consolidate positions in the institutions of the state itself and of the approaches to it; this constitutes the ‘formation of the political will’ (which is then turned into the object of political science, but as a phenomenon uprooted from its original source). Since any intervention in the immanent compulsion to capital valorization must be forced upon capital as an immanent law by an institution external to itself, this institution must be equipped with supervisory jurisdiction and effective sanctioning powers; in short, a giant and growing bureaucratic apparatus of coercion. The mere existence of this ‘state apparatus’ again reinforces the illusion that the state is ‘autonomous’, that it is able to ‘intervene’ in ‘the economy’. But the fact that this apparatus exists does not mean that it really can effectively intervene (quite apart from the systematic establishment of counter-apparatuses for evading or resisting this coercive power — businessmen’s associations and lobbies, taxation ‘advice’ bureaux, etc.).
The particular existence of the state is, therefore, not an obvious matter — not even in a class society. This particular existence of an exclusively political coercive institution; the state, becomes possible and necessary only with the privatization of the sphere of subsistence and maintenance of life, which in pre-capitalist societies was a priori a common social matter, and with the development of private as distinct from communal property. As early as his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (1843), Marx described the bourgeois ‘mysticism’ which turned the ‘actual relation of family and civil society to the state* upside-down, so that ‘the condition is postulated as the conditioned, the determinant as the determined, the producing factor as the product of its product’ (MECW vol. 5, pp. 8—9).14 ‘It is obvious that the political constitution as such is brought into being only where the private spheres [property, contract, marriage, civil society] have won an independent existence. Where trade and landed property are not free and have not yet become independent, the political constitution too does not yet exist. ... In the Middle Ages there were serfs, feudal estates, merchant and trade guilds, corporations of scholars, etc.: that is to say, in the Middle Ages property, trade, society, man are political-, the material content of the state is given by its form; every private sphere has a political character, or is a political sphere.... In the Middle Ages the life of the nation and the life of the state are identical’ (MECW vol. 5, pp. 31—2). These comments by Marx on the Middle Ages apply also to every pre-bourgeois social formation, as he subsequently indicates with reference to the city-states of antiquity and later repeats in the preparatory writings for Capital.13 In the.old ‘communal’ system, that of the ‘clan’, the ‘commonwealth’ or the ‘commune’, the state did not exist as 'a. particular reality alongside the real life of the people’, but rather the ‘political’ organization, e.g. membership of a tribe, was the pre-condition and guarantee of the appropriation of the objective conditions of life through labour.
For such pre-capitalist communities, catastrophes occur either as actual natural calamities, or through clashes with other communities, but not as natural catastrophes of society as is the case in the inverted world of capital. Hence, it is to express a necessary consequence contained in capital that Marx in Capital, after developing the category of absolute surplus value, immediately turns to the description of the catastrophes which the production of surplus value entails for living labour, and from this derives the particularization of the state in the factory legislation. So long as the purpose of labour is the production of use-values, the subsistence of social individuals, there is no need for a particular regulatory and coercive organization which seeks to prevent individuals and society from destroying themselves through an excess of work. Only with capitalist commodity production is this connection broken and the problem of the self-destruction of society created. The concentration of bourgeois society in the form of the state, that is to say its concentration in an institution which appears as external to itself, which appears to float above it as a ‘particular existence’, is necessary because only in this way can the existence of (capitalist) society be assured at all. Since the direct aim of production is not social subsistence but surplus-value production, and since the process of production is therefore driven on by laws which are concealed from the conscious will of individuals and are implemented behind their backs although by means of their own actions, there is a real need for such a particular social institution which confronts productive society. This ex post facto and makeshift supervision by the state of the natural pattern of the social production process is necessary for the maintenance of surplus-value production, which is the particular form of appropriation of the surplus-labour of one class by another class. Therefore this supervision aims to maintain the class character of this society; it is one of the functions which the state must take over in this class society. (The function of direct oppression will not be dealt with in this context, since this is the very aspect which is not thepriwaty element typifying this particular form of society. The misunderstanding of this basic point often leads to a false perspective on the nature and organization of the revolutionary upheaval; see Part V [not reproduced here].)
‘Social policy’ (i.e. state activity intervening ex post facto in society and seeking to resolve its ‘social problems’) thus has the characteristics, down to its smallest details, of a process of paternalistic supervision, control or ‘welfare’ of the producer. (This is felt by every worker who has to wait in the queue to see the medical official, the bureaucrat who certifies him as fit to work, who repairs his labour-power as quickly as possible). Hence, however much state social policy offers individual producers a certain security in the event of their partial or total inability to work, social policy can never provide a conscious and planned care for the maintenance, renewal and improvement of the social working capacity of the collective worker, the associated producers themselves. In a communist society such planned care would necessarily be part of the collective social production process; it would be a public responsibility of society and of its members, as would the rest of social subsistence, and not the object of the abstract bureaucratic activity of a particular political organization.