Political Power

Also known as “state power”. The power of the ruling class to implement its political rule over the ruled class by means of the state machinery, usually ensured by organs of violence such as the army, police, prisons and courts. Sometimes it also refers to the general term for the relevant organs that embody the power of the state and exercise its functions. It is a product and an instrument of class struggle, and has coercive and universally binding nature. State power is the core and main pillar of the social and political structure, i.e., political superstructure, and is the basic setting for the operation of the political system of a country. Politics is the concentrated embodiment of economics, it most directly reflects and serves the economic foundation and acts as a strong constraint on the other parts of the superstructure. By unifying the whole political structure, state power became a powerful apparatus that controls the society and by which whole social life is controlled and administered. State power manifests itself in different forms in different fields. In class society, politics represents the fundamental interests of a definite class in a concentrated manner. Therefore, which class holds power and which class implements its line, guidelines and policies is an important hallmark to distinguish between different superstructures.

State power is a historical category, a political category and a class category. State power is a product of the irreconcilable conflict of class interests, a product and tool of class struggle, and has an obvious class nature. Like the state, state power has multiple functions and diverse tasks, such as suppression and protection, which is determined by the class essence of the state. The nature of state power is distinguished mainly by whom it hold down and whom it protects, and by which class it rules on behalf of the interests of which class. Fundamentally different from the state power of the exploiting classes, the state power of the proletariat must resolutely  maintain and represent the interests of the broad masses of the people.

Marxism holds that the question of political power is the fundamental question of social revolution. Lenin said that the key question of every revolution is undoubtedly the question of state power. Which class holds power decides everything. The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.

The nature and characteristics of the proletarian revolution determine that the proletariat must radically smash the bourgeois state machinery by force and establish a new state power. The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois state machinery and the substitution for it of a new one. Mao Zedong once pointed out that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. The proletariat can only establish the socialist system of the dictatorship of the proletariat by overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie. Marxism holds that through socialist revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, “the Commune—the reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, [they will] form their own force instead of the organized force of their suppression”. After the establishment of the socialist state power, its fundamental task is to rapidly develop the productive forces and improve the material and cultural living standards of the people on the basis of maintaining the national security and the fundamental interests of the people, which is the essential difference between the power of the proletariat and the power of the bourgeoisie.