Bentham and Marx

For the English utilitarians of the 19th century, the state was an artificial means of producing a unity of interest and a device for maintaining stability. This benign but mechanistic view proposed by Jeremy Bentham and others set a precedent for the early communist thinkers like Karl Marx for whom the state had become an “apparatus of oppression” determined by a ruling class whose object was always to maintain itself in economic supremacy. He and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, wrote in The Communist Manifesto that, in order to realize complete freedom and contentment, the people must replace the government first by a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which would be followed by the “withering away of the state,” and then by a classless society based not on the enforcement of laws but on the organization of the means of production and the fair distribution of goods and property.

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