ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a preliminary exploration of the role of the state in Capital, and examines some of the questions raised by the overwhelming and favorable presence of government in Karl Marx magnum opus. Marx’s Hegelian approach sets him apart from the earliest British writers on interventionist politics. Marx’s attitude toward government in Capital contrasts strongly with one view both he and Engels expounded throughout their careers. Marx’s focus on factory legislation, and the Hegelian approach he adopted, closely followed the method employed in Engels’s masterpiece The Condition of the Working Class in England. The young Marx poked fun at the Philosophy of Right’s description of public servants as “upright, dispassionate and polite”. The words Marx sarcastically puts in the mouths of partisans of “political indifferentism” are similar to those many commentators bring forward as Marx’s own position on the state.
