Marx's theory of the state

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Marx's theory of the state comprises the political theories developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels concerning the state as an institution, its origins, its development, and its role in society and class struggle. Marx's view of the state evolved throughout his life, moving from a youthful embrace of conventional republicanism to a later critique of the state as an instrument of class rule and ultimately to the conclusion that the state must be abolished. Rather than a single, coherent theory, Marx and Engels's work on the state contains a variety of perspectives that co-exist in an "uneasy and unstable relation", providing the basis for the subsequent diversification of Marxist state theories. The scholarship of political scientist Richard N. Hunt has shown that Marx and Engels's mature thought contains two distinct, though interwoven, theories of the state, developed independently by each man before their later synthesis. Marx first developed a theory of the state as a "parasite"...

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