An exposition of the state by Lenin

[Red Student]

Summary of The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University by Lenin

First paragraph:
1. The question of the state is a "complex and difficult one".

2. It has been "confused by bourgeois scholars, writers and philosophers".

3. "Anybody who desires to study it seriously and master it independently must attack it several times".

4. "Because it is such a fundamental, such a basic question in all politics".

5. You will always return, in different contexts, to the question: "what is the state, what is its nature, what is its significance".

6. "Only when you learn to find your way about independently in this question may you consider yourself sufficiently confirmed in your convictions and able with sufficient success to defend them against anybody and at any time."


Third paragraph:
1. "You are not likely to find another question which has been so confused, deliberately and unwittingly, by representatives of bourgeois science, philosophy, jurisprudence, political economy and journalism, as the question of the state"

2. "To this day it is very often confused with religious questions"

3. They "claims that the state is something divine, something supernatural, that it is a certain force by virtue of which mankind has lived"

4. "This doctrine is so closely bound up with the interests of the exploiting classes, so serves their interests, has so deeply permeated all the customs, views and science of the gentlemen who represent the bourgeoisie, that you will meet with vestiges of it on every hand".

5. "This question has been so confused and complicated because it affects the interests of the ruling classes more than any other question".

6.  "The doctrine of the state serves to justify social privilege, the existence of exploitation, the existence of capitalism"

7. Do not expect impartiality on this question, even from those who claim to be scientific.

8. In the question of the state, you will always discern the struggle between different classes.

9. This struggle is reflected or expressed in a conflict of views on the state, in the estimate of the role and significance of the state.


Fourth paragraph:
1. To study this question scientifically we must look at the "history of the state, its emergence and development".

2. "The most important thing if one is to approach this question scientifically is not to forget the underlying historical connection".

3. We must examine it from the standpoint of how it arose in history and what were the principal stages in its development.

4. Then "from the standpoint of its development", we "examine what it has become today".


Fifth paragraph:
1. In studying the question of the state you will acquaint yourselves with Engels' book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

2. "This is one of the fundamental works of modern socialism".

3. "Not all the parts of this work have been expounded in an equally popular and comprehensible way; some of them presume a reader who already possesses a certain knowledge of history and economics."

4. You should not be troubled if on reading this work you do not understand it at once.

5. This book gives the correct approach to the question.

6. "It begins with a historical sketch of the origin of the state".


Sixth paragraph:
1. "The state has not always existed".

2. "It appears wherever and whenever a division of society into classes appears, whenever exploiters and exploited appear."


Seventh paragraph:
1. Before the division of society into classes, there existed the patriarchal family.

2. "Definite races of these primitive times have survived in the life of many primitive peoples".

3. "You will always come across more or less definite descriptions, indications and recollections of the fact that there was a time...when the division of society into slave-owners and slaves did not exist".

4. "And in those times there was no...special apparatus for the systematic application of force and the subjugation of people by force".

5. "It is such an apparatus that is called the state."


Eighth paragraph:
1. In primitive society there were no signs of the existence of a state.

2. Then people lived in small family groups and were still at the lowest stages of development, in condition approximating to savagery.

3. That epoch is separated from modern civilised human society by several thousand years.

4. That society was characterized by predominance of custom, authority, respect, power of the elders.

5. Some of the power was accorded to women; then they were not downtrodden and oppressed as the women of today [1919, or third world's women today!].

6. "But nowhere do we find a special category of people set apart to rule others".

7. "Who, for the sake and purpose of rule, systematically and permanently have at their disposal a certain apparatus of coercion, an apparatus of violence".

8. This apparatus is represented today by armed groups of men, prisons and other means of subjugating the will of others by force; these constitute the essence of the state.


Tenth paragraph:
1. If we get away from religious teachings, from opinions advanced by bourgeois scholars and try to get at the real core of the matter, "we find that the state amounts to such an apparatus of rule, which stands outside society as a whole".

2. The state appears when a special group of men occupied solely with government.

3. Who in order to rule need a special apparatus of coercion to subjugate the will of others by force.


Eleventh paragraph:
1. There was a time when there was no state.

2. Then general ties, the community itself, were maintained by force of custom and tradition and the authority, or the respect, enjoyed by the elders of the clan.

3. Then there was no special category of persons who were specialists in ruling.

4. History shows that the state is a special apparatus for coercing people.

5. It arises wherever there appears a division of society into classes.

6. This division is into two main groups: those who were permanently in a position to appropriate the labour of others, and others who were exploited.


Twelfth paragraph:
1. "This division of society into classes must always be clearly borne in mind as a fundamental fact of history".

2. The development of all human societies for thousands of years reveals a general conformity to law, a regularity and consistency.

3. First there was a society without classes: Primitive society.

4. Europe has passed through this stage. Slavery ruled supreme two thousand years ago.

5. "The vast majority of peoples of the other parts of the world also passed through this stage."

6. "Traces of slavery survive to this day among the less developed peoples".

7. "The division into slave-owners and slaves was the first important class division."

8. The slave-owners owned all the means of production-the land and the implements-and also owned people.

9. Those who laboured and supplied labour for others were the slaves.

[Red Student]

Thirteenth paragraph:
1. After this form, of class division, came feudalism.

2. "In the great majority of countries slavery in the course of its development evolved into serfdom".

3. "The fundamental division of society was now into feudal lords and peasant serfs."

4. The slave-owners had regarded the slaves as their property; the law had confirmed this view and regarded the slave as a chattel completely owned by the slave-owner.

5. For the peasant serf the oppression and dependence remained, but the feudal lord was not considered the owner of the peasants as chattels.

6. The feudal lord was only entitled to the labour of the peasant. The peasant was obligated to perform certain services to his lord.

7. In practice serfdom in no way differed from slavery.


Fourteenth paragraph:
1. A new class arose within the feudal society, due to trade, the world market and the development of money [money as an exchange and not wealth, a feudal lord might own a 1000 cow but don't have 10 gold coins].

2. This class is the capitalist class.

3. The power of capital was derived from the commodity, the exchange of commodities and the rise of the power of money.

4. "Feudalism was abolished in all the countries of Western Europe." After a series of revolutions from the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century.

5. Russia was the last, European, country to change. In 1861 a radical change took; one form of society was replaced by another: feudalism was replaced by capitalism.

6. The division into classes remained, under capitalism, but fundamentally the division assumed a different form.


Fourteenth paragraph:
1. The owners of capital, the owners of the land and the owners of the factories in all capitalists countries constitute an insignificant minority of the population.

2. They "have complete command of the labour of the whole people".

3. Consequently they command, oppress and exploit the whole mass of labourers.

4. The majority of labourers are proletarians, wage-workers, who procure their livelihood in the process of production only by the sale of their own worker's hands, their labour-power.

5. With the transition to capitalism, the peasants were converted partly (the majority) into proletarians, and partly (the minority) into wealthy peasants who themselves hired labourers and who constituted a rural bourgeoisie.


Fifteenth paragraph:
1. "The transition of society from primitive forms of slavery to serfdom and finally to capitalism" is a fundamental fact.

2. By remembering this fundamental fact, only by examining all political doctrines placed in this fundamental scheme, will you be able properly to appraise these doctrines and understand what they refer to.

3. "Each of these great periods in the history of mankind, slave-owning, feudal and capitalist, embraces scores and hundreds of centuries".

4. And they "presents such a mass of political forms, such a variety of political doctrines, opinions and revolutions".

5. This extreme diversity and immense variety, this change in the forms of class rule, can be understood only by firmly holding to this division of society into classes.

6.  "And from this standpoint examining all social questions-economic, political, spiritual, religious, etc."

7. "Especially in connection with the political, philosophical and other doctrines of bourgeois scholars and politicians".


Sixteenth paragraph:
1. If you examine the state from the standpoint of this fundamental division, you will find that before the division of society into classes no state existed.

2. "As the social division into classes arose and took firm root, as class society arose, the state also arose and took firm root."

3. The history of mankind knows scores and hundreds of countries that have passed or are still passing through slavery, feudalism and capitalism. In each of these countries, you will always discern the emergence of the state.

4. The state "has always been a certain apparatus which stood outside society and consisted of a group of people engaged solely, or almost solely, or mainly, in ruling."

5. "People are divided into the ruled, and into specialists in ruling, those who rise above society and are called rulers, statesmen".

6. "This apparatus, this group of people who rule others, always possesses certain means of coercion, of physical force, irrespective of whether this violence over people is expressed in the primitive club, or in more perfected types of weapons".

7. "The methods of violence changed, but whenever there was a state there existed in every society a group of persons who ruled, who commanded, who dominated "

8. In order to maintain their power, the rulers, possessed an apparatus of physical coercion, an apparatus of violence.

9. "By examining these general phenomena, by asking ourselves why no state existed when there were no classes, when there were no exploiters and exploited"

10. "Only in this way shall we find a definite answer to the question of what is the nature and significance of the state."


Seventeenth paragraph:
1. "The state is a machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another."

2. When there were no classes in society, when people laboured in primitive conditions of greater equality, a special group of people whose function is to rule and to dominate the rest of society, had not and could not yet have emerged.

3. Then the productivity of labour was still at its lowest, and when primitive man could barely procure the wherewithal for the crudest and most primitive existence.

4. Only when the first form of the division of society into classes appeared, only when slavery appeared, does a state appear.

5. This is conditioned by concentrating the crudest forms of agricultural labour, the slaves could produce a certain surplus, and this surplus was not absolutely essential for the most wretched existence of the slave and passed into the hands of the slave-owner


Eighteenth paragraph:
1. The slave-owning state was an apparatus which gave the slave-owners power and enabled them to rule over the slaves.

2. "Both society and the state were then on a much smaller scale than they are now, they possessed incomparably poorer means of communication"

3. "Mountains, rivers and seas were immeasurably greater obstacles than they are now, and the state took shape within far narrower geographical boundaries."

4. "A technically weak state apparatus served a state confined within relatively narrow boundaries and with a narrow range of action."

5. "Nevertheless, there did exist an apparatus which compelled the slaves to remain in slavery, which kept one part of society subjugated to and oppressed by another"

6. "It is impossible to compel the greater part of society to work systematically for the other part of society without a permanent apparatus of coercion."

7. "So long as there were no classes, there were no apparatus of this sort".

8. "When classes appeared there also appeared a special institution-the state."

9. "The forms of state were extremely varied"

10. "A monarchy is the power of a single person, a republic is the absence of any non-elected authority; an aristocracy is the power of a relatively small minority, a democracy is the power of the people"

11. "All these differences arose in the epoch of slavery. Despite these differences, the state of the slave-owning epoch was a slave-owning state, irrespective of whether it was a monarchy or a republic, aristocratic or democratic."


Nineteenth paragraph:
1. In every course on the history of ancient times you will hear about the struggle that was waged between the monarchical and republican states.

2. The fundamental fact is that the slaves were not regarded as human beings-not only were they not regarded as citizens-they were not even regarded as human beings.

3. Roman law regarded slaves as chattels. The law of manslaughter did not extend to slaves. It defended only the slave-owners, who were alone recognised as citizens with full rights.

4. "Whether a monarchy was instituted or a republic, it was a monarchy of the slave-owners or a republic of the slave-owners".

5. "All rights were enjoyed by the slave-owners, while the slave was a chattel in the eyes of the law."

6. "Not only could any sort of violence be perpetrated against a slave, but even the killing of a slave was not considered a crime."

7. "Slave-owning republics differed in their internal organisation, there were aristocratic republics and democratic republics."

8. "In an aristocratic republic only a small number of privileged persons took part in the elections; in a democratic republic everybody took part but everybody meant only the slave-owners, that is, everybody except the slaves."

9. "This fundamental fact must be borne in mind, because it throws more light than any other on the question of the state and clearly demonstrates the nature of the state."


Twentieth paragraph:
1. "The state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another, a machine for holding in obedience to one class other, subordinated classes."

2. "There are various forms of this machine."

3. "The forms of government varied extremely"

4. "The essence was always the same: the slaves enjoyed no rights and constituted an oppressed class; they were not regarded as human beings. "

[Red Student]

Twenty-first paragraph:
1. "The change in the form of exploitation transformed the slave-owning state into the feudal state"

2. "In slave-owning society the slave enjoyed no rights whatever and was not regarded as a human being; in feudal society the peasant was bound to the soil."

3. The chief distinguishing feature of serfdom was that the peasants were considered bound to the land-this is the very basis of "serfdom".

4. "At that time the peasants constituted the majority; the urban population was still very small"

5. "The peasant might work a definite number of days for himself on the plot assigned to him by the landlord; on the other days the peasant serf worked for his lord."

6. "The essence of class society remained-society was based on class exploitation."

7. "Only the owners of the land could enjoy full rights; the peasants had no rights at all."

8. "In practice their condition differed very little from the condition of slaves in the slave-owning state."

9. "Nevertheless, a wider road was opened for their emancipation, for the emancipation of the peasants, since the peasant serf was not regarded as the direct property of the lord."

10. "With the wider opportunities for the development of exchange and trade relations the feudal system steadily disintegrated and the scope of emancipation of the peasantry steadily widened"

11. "Feudal society was always more complex than slave society."

12. "There was a greater development of trade and industry, which even in those days led to capitalism."

13. "In the Middle Ages feudalism predominated. And here too the forms of state varied, here too we find both the monarchy and the republic"

14. "But always the feudal lord was regarded as the only ruler. The peasant serfs were deprived of absolutely all political rights."


Twenty-second paragraph:
1. "Neither under slavery nor under the feudal system could a small minority of people dominate over the vast majority without coercion."

2. "History is full of the constant attempts of the oppressed classes to throw off oppression"

3. Civil wars, "attempts of the oppressed classes to throw off oppression", mark the whole history of the existence of class society.

4. Example from slavery: The uprising of Spartacus [73 BC]. Example from feudalism: The Peasant War in Germany [1525 AD].


Twenty-third paragraph:
1. The feudal state was an apparatus by which the feudal lords could maintain their rule.

2. By which "they could unite under their subjugation a vast number of people and subordinate them to certain laws and regulations".

3. "All these laws fundamentally amounted to one thing-the maintenance of the power of the lords over the peasant serfs"

4. This state differed in form: it was either a republic or a monarchy.

5. "When the state was a monarchy, the rule of one person was recognised"

6. "When it was a republic, the participation of the elected representatives of landowning society was in one degree or another recognised"

7. "Feudal society represented a division of classes under which the vast majority-the peasant serfs-were completely subjected to an insignificant minority-the owners of the land."


Twenty-forth paragraph:
1. "The development of trade, the development of commodity exchange, led to the emergence of a new class-the capitalists"

2. "Capital took shape at the close of the Middle Ages, when a world trade developed enormously"

3. "When silver and gold became the medium of exchange, because the quantity of precious metals increased"

4. "Money circulation made it possible for individuals to possess tremendous wealth"

5. "The economic power of the landowning class declined and the power of the new class-the representatives of capital-developed."

6. After the decline of the feudal class society was reconstructed.

7. The reconstruction was such that all citizens seemed to be equal.

8. All were regarded as equal before the law; whether they owned land as private property, or were poor who owned nothing but there labour-power.

9. "The law protects everybody equally"

10. "It protects the property of those who have it from attack by the masses who, possessing no property"

11. Those "possessing nothing but their labour-power, grow steadily impoverished and ruined and become converted into proletarians"


Twenty-fifth paragraph:
1. The capitalist society advanced attacked serfdom, attacked the old feudal system, under the slogan of liberty

2. "But it was liberty for those who owned property"

3. When feudalism was shattered the feudal state was then superseded by the capitalist state.

4. The capitalist state "proclaims liberty for the whole people as its slogan"

5. The capitalist state "declares that it expresses the will of the whole people and denies that it is a class state"

6. The socialists, who are fighting for the liberty of the whole people, struggle against the capitalist state.


Twenty-sixth paragraph:
1. "To understand the nature of the capitalist state, we must remember that when the capitalist state advanced against the feudal state it entered the fight under the slogan of liberty."

2. "The abolition of feudalism meant liberty for the representatives of the capitalist state and served their purpose"

3. "The capitalist state protected property irrespective of its origin, because the state was founded on private property"

4. "The peasants became private owners in all the modern, civilised states."

5. The capitalist state fully preserved private property, and accorded it every support and protection.

6. "The state recognised the property rights of every merchant, industrialist and manufacturer."

7. "This society, based on private property, on the power of capital, on the complete subjection of the property-less workers and labouring masses of the peasantry, proclaimed that its rule was based on liberty."

8. "Combating feudalism, it proclaimed freedom of property and was particularly proud of the fact that the state had ceased, supposedly, to be a class state"


Twenty-seventh paragraph:
1. "Yet the state continued to be a machine which helped the capitalists to hold the poor peasants and the working class in subjection."

2. "In outward appearance it was free"

3. "It proclaimed universal suffrage, and declared through its champions, preachers, scholars and philosophers, that it was not a class state"

4. The question of the state has acquired the greatest importance and has become the focus of all present-day political questions and political disputes.


Twenty-eighth paragraph:
1. "Nearly all political disputes, disagreements and opinions now centre around the conception of the state"

2. Is the state in a capitalist country, in a democratic republic-especially an expression of the popular will, the sum total of the general decision of the people, the expression of the national will, and so forth?

3. "Or is the state a machine that enables the capitalists of those countries to maintain their power over the working class and the peasantry?"

4. "That is the fundamental question around which all political disputes all over the world now centre."

5. In order to answer the question, what is the state, properly we must critically examine all theories and views created in defence of the capitalist state.

Twenty-ninth paragraph:
1. Engels' book [see above] says The following:

2. "Every state in which private ownership of the land and means of production exists, in which capital dominates, however democratic it may be, is a capitalist state".

2. That the capitalist state is a "machine used by the capitalists to keep the working class and the poor peasants in subjection."

3. And that "universal suffrage, a Constituent Assembly, a parliament are merely a form, a sort of promissory note, which does not change the real state of affairs"

[Red Student]

Thirtieth paragraph:
1. "The forms of domination of the state may vary"

2. "Capital manifests its power in one way where one form exists, and in another way where another form exists"

3. The essence of the capitalist state is that the "power is in the hands of capital".

4. The more democratic the capitalist state is, the cruder and more cynical is the rule of capitalism.

5. "One of the most democratic republics in the world is the United States of America, yet nowhere is the power of capital, the power of a handful of multimillionaires over the whole of society, so crude and so openly corrupt as in America"

6. "Once capital exists, it dominates the whole of society, and no democratic republic, no franchise can change its nature."


Thirty-first paragraph:
1. "The democratic republic and universal suffrage were an immense progressive advance as compared with feudalism"

2. It gives a chance to the proletariat that the peasant serfs, not to speak of the slaves, did not have.

3. "The slaves, as we know, revolted, rioted, started civil wars, but they could never create a class-conscious majority and parties to lead the struggle, they could not clearly realise what their aims were, and even in the most revolutionary moments of history they were always pawns in the hands of the ruling classes"

4. "The bourgeois republic, parliament, universal suffrage-all represent great progress from the standpoint of the world development of society"

5. "Mankind moved towards capitalism, and it was capitalism alone which, thanks to urban culture, enabled the oppressed proletarian class to become conscious of itself and to create the world working-class movement"

6. "Without parliamentarism, without an electoral system, this development of the working class would have been impossible"

7. That is why all these things have acquired such great importance in the eyes of the broad masses of people and a radical change seems to be so difficult

8. It is not only the conscious hypocrites, scientists and priests that uphold and defend the bourgeois lie that the state is free and that it is its mission to defend the interests of all

9. Also do a large number of people who sincerely adhere to the old prejudices and who cannot understand the difference between capitalist society and socialism.

10. Defenders of the capitalist state say that their state is free, whereas in reality, as long as there is private property, their state, even if it is a democratic republic, is nothing but a machine used by the capitalists to suppress the workers.

11. "The freer the state, the more clearly is this expressed"

12. Capital dominates, ruling cynically and ruthlessly, in free democratic states like the USA.

13. Every attempt of the workers to achieve the slightest real improvement in their condition is immediately met by civil war

14. Nowhere is this suppression of the working-class movement accompanied by such ruthless severity as in, for example, the U.S.A.

15. Nowhere does the influence of capital in parliament manifest itself as powerfully as in these countries, which are free democratic countries.


Thirty-second paragraph:
1. "Whatever guise a republic may assume, however democratic it may be, if it is a bourgeois republic, if it retains private ownership of the land and factories"

2. If private capital keeps the whole of society in wage-slavery, then this state is a machine for the suppression of some people by others.

3. We must reject all the old prejudices about the state meaning universal equality.

4. As long as there is exploitation there cannot be equality.

5. "The landowner cannot be the equal of the worker, or the hungry man the equal of the full man"

6. "This machine called the state, before which people bowed in superstitious awe, believing the old tales that it means popular rule, tales which the proletariat declares to be a bourgeois lie-this machine the proletariat will smash"

7. The proletariat "shall use this machine, or bludgeon, to destroy all exploitation".

8. "When the possibility of exploitation no longer exists anywhere in the world, when there are no longer owners of land and owners of factories, and when there is no longer a situation in which some gorge while others starve, only when the possibility of this no longer exists shall we consign this machine to the scrap-heap"

9. "Then there will be no state and no exploitation."


Further Reading: The State and Revolution - The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution - by Lenin.

[Daymare17]

Nice summary, the only thing I found questionable is off topic.

Originally posted by Red Student

Eight Paragraph...

5. Some of the power was accorded to women; then they were not downtrodden and oppressed as the women of today [1919, or third world's women today!].

Are you saying that women in the imperialist countries are not downtrodden and oppressed? http://Http://endabuse.org/resources/facts/ has facts about the treatment of women in the dominant imperialist country.

Nearly one-third of American women (31 percent) report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives.
Nearly 25 percent of American women report being raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime.
In the year 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490 women) were victims of nonfatal violence committed by an intimate partner.
Intimate partner violence is primarily a crime against women. In 2001, women accounted for 85 percent of the victims of intimate partner violence (588,490 total) and men accounted for approximately 15 percent of the victims (103,220 total).
While women are less likely than men to be victims of violent crimes overall, women are five to eight times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner.
In 2001, intimate partner violence made up 20 percent of violent crime against women. The same year, intimate partners committed three percent of all violent crime against men.
As many as 324,000 women each year experience intimate partner violence during their pregnancy.
Women of all races are about equally vulnerable to violence by an intimate.

Under capitalism, the sex trade is one of the top 3 industries (along with weapons and drugs) Half a million plus have been forced into sex slavery in Russia alone since capitalism was introduced. Little girls are treated to submissive prostitute role models (listen to any pop song for evidence). The conclusion is obvious: No society has ever oppressed and humiliated women on such a massive scale as senile imperialist society.

The comparison of women's rights with the "uncivilized" countries is a major propaganda jingle of imperialism. Hardly a day goes by without some tabloid exposition of how the Muslim devils treat their women. One US general who served in Afghanistan and Iraq said that the Muslim treatment of women was the main reason why he liked to beat them up (the men, although he probably beats the women too). For this reason (in addition to for the sake of the women themselves, and the unity of the working class) we have to oppose the attempts to white-paint the treatment of women in the present imperialist society.

[Red Student]

Originally posted by Daymare17
Nice summary, the only thing I found questionable is off topic.

Thanks!

Are you saying that women in the imperialist countries are not downtrodden and oppressed?

No I am not saying that. The subject under discussion is the state, I was talking about political rights not economic position. I am well aware of the suffering of women in capitalist states, but they are equale under the law, thus formally they are free and protected by the state, reality is something else.

That is was Lenin is trying to explain it is not enough for the women, the blacks, the workers, etc to have formal political rights under a capitalist state.

At the time of Lenin's lecture not all countries had yet given women the franchise, but now it seems like women have full political rights and there is no reason for revolt anymore, but as you show above that means very little in a capitalist state.

[Red Student]

"I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who on pretence of managing the public only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out."

The above was written by Thomas More in his book Utopia, he clearly sees the class nature of the state, yet some of you will be surprised to hear that this same Thomas More was Lord Chancellor of England (1529–1532), thus effectively the manager of this "conspiracy".

If you read Wikipedias's article about Thomas More you'll find even more contradictions in him to be surprised about. But Thomas More was no idealist who is either against the state or for it, either for the church (and by extension for religion) or an atheist, he was a man with a much more materialist outlook than most hacks who pass for philosophers these days.

To understand More it's useful to note that he was the first layman, not a member of the higher nobility, to become a Lord Chancellor of England! In effect he was the first member of the emerging bourgeoisies to rise to the top of the state.

More was bourgeois, a humanist, and a statesman.

More sees the state for what it is, but he does not reject it; he has no dreams that total freedom and total liberty could result in anything but total chaos and destruction. For him that was quite obvious, it was only in the reign of Henry VII (after More's birth) that nobles were forbidden to have men-under-arm (a state within a state).

More saw the need for the state, but he also could see a future without! More rejections of Henry VIII's church reform are seen as religious piety: It is true that More was pious, but he lived in an age when the Pope sold forgiveness to all kinds of sins, when the monks and the priests were the most corrupt members of society.

More's predecessor, as Lord Chancellor, was Cardinal Wolsey (the highest representative of the church in England) who was an incredibly rich man, he built Cardinal's college in Oxford, and he built one of the most lavish palaces of his time and gave it to king Henry as a personal gift. At the time of his fall he was amassing a fortune to buy the Papacy, what that says about him and the church speaks volumes!

Real pious people at that time became Anabaptists, but More supported the church until his end. To understand this you have to separate the church from religion, More did not support the church because he was pious but because he understood the importance of the church in unifying Europe.

To put it in modern words he was pro-Europe and not pro-church!

To return to the state, as Lenin explains above the state is historically needed and we can't just abolish it, not as long as class divisions remains. Now some libertarians would suggest weakening the state, but the class division has not weakened but, on the contrary, sharpened. Any talk about weakening the state under these conditions means weakening any control on the capitalists.

Marxists while admitting that complete freedom requires no state do not advocate weakening it but on the contrary strengthening it! Now if you are one of those idealist who sees contradictions in Thomas More's beliefs you might demand that 'either one is for the state or against it', that we 'can't argue for freedom if we advocate the strengthening of the state', etc, etc.

If you hear someone talking like this, then know him for an idealist. Why? Because he does not start from the material conditions of society: does society have class division? Which class is in power? Does the state represent a "conspiracy" of the rich to get richer? Or is it a "bludgeon" in the hand of the working-class to smash the capitalists with?

Further reading:
* Thomas More and his Utopia, by Karl Kautsky.
* The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State, chapter 5 from The State and Revolution by Lenin