The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 23rd November on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.
Lenin’s work that we are using here is a major primer on the Marxist theory of the state and goes through the various stages of the development of that theory pretty comprehensively.
In hindsight, it probably would have been better to have studied this before taking on Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, as this gives a grounding in some very basic Marxist concepts that are invaluable to understanding that later work.
But this chapter makes a very clear start on what we are addressing here.
In part 1, Lenin talks of Marx and Engels’s views on the state on the eve of the continent-wide revolutionary crisis of 1848.
In particular, he homes in on Marx’s formulations in The Poverty of Philosophy, his initial polemic against Proudhon, the proto-anarchist thinker. Here he wrote about the destiny of class society to disappear:
“”The working class, in the course of development, will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power groups, since the political power is precisely the official expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society.”
So, the idea that the state will disappear as a consequence of proletarian revolution is to be found in the earliest works of mature Marxism.
Then he highlights the way this is dealt with by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
“… In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat….
“… We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
And it is that formulation, that the state after the revolution will be “the proletariat organised as the ruling class” that had been, not accidentally, omitted in the various treatises on the state and socialism in the Second International:
“This definition of the state has never been explained in the prevailing propaganda and agitation literature of the official Social-Democratic parties. More than that, it has been deliberately ignored, for it is absolutely irreconcilable with reformism, and is a slap in the face for the common opportunist prejudices and philistine illusions about the ‘peaceful development of democracy’.
“The proletariat needs the state — this is repeated by all the opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure us that this is what Marx taught…. “
But then he clarifies:
“But they ‘forget’ to add that, in the first place, according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away. And, secondly, the working people need a ‘state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class’”.
So, what is this about? The state, as we touched on in chapter 1, is a special organisation of force for the suppression of one class by another. What class must the proletariat, in power, supress? Obviously, the bourgeoisie. But in what way?
“The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners — the landowners and capitalists.”
And Lenin points out that the social democrats did away with this with dreams of class harmony, pictured their version of ‘socialism’ as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority.
Lenin called this a “petty bourgeois utopia” and pointed out that it led to ‘socialist’ participation in bourgeois cabinets in Britain, France, Italy at the turn of the century.
He also speaks of the role of the working class in leading intermediate layers:
“Only the proletariat — by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production — is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.”
So, he summaries that:
“Marx’s theory of ‘the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class’, is inseparably bound up with the whole of his doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The culmination of this rule is the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat.”
And then he asks the question:
“…is it conceivable that such an organization can be created without first abolishing, destroying the state machine created by the bourgeoisie for themselves?”
Which leads straight to the conclusions Marx drew from 1848-51. Lenin cites Marx’s later work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Noting Napoleon III’s coup of December 1851, Marx wrote:
“’This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, … this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten.’ The first French Revolution developed centralization, ‘but at the same time’ it increased ‘the extent, the attributes and the number of agents of governmental power. Napoleon [I] completed this state machinery’ … the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with repressive measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power “
And he quoted the conclusion:
“All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”
Lenin noted that here:
“Marxism takes a tremendous step forward compared with the Communist Manifesto… all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.”
And:
“This is the question Marx raises and answers in 1852. True to his philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx takes as his basis the historical experience of the great years of revolution, 1848 to 1851. Here, as everywhere else, his theory is a summing up of experience, illuminated by a profound philosophical conception of the world and a rich knowledge of history.”
And this brings us to the beginning of the three-cornered polemic against reformism (and centrism) on the one hand, and anarchism, which recurs in this work. Lenin writes:
“The bureaucracy and the standing army are a “parasite” on the body of bourgeois society–a parasite created by the internal antagonisms which rend that society, but a parasite which “chokes” all its vital pores. The Kautskyite opportunism now prevailing in official Social-Democracy considers the view that the state is a parasitic organism to be the peculiar and exclusive attribute of anarchism. It goes without saying that this distortion of Marxism is of vast advantage to those philistines who have reduced socialism to the unheard-of disgrace of justifying and prettifying the imperialist war by applying to it the concept of “defence of the fatherland…”
And he notes what happened after the Russian Revolution of February 1917 in that regard:
“Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following February 27, 1917. The official posts which formerly were given by preference to the Black Hundreds have now become the spoils of the Cadets, Mensheviks, and Social-Revolutionaries. Nobody has really thought of introducing any serious reforms. Every effort has been made to put them off “until the Constituent Assembly meets”, and to steadily put off its convocation until after the war! But there has been no delay, no waiting for the Constituent Assembly, in the matter of dividing the spoils of getting the lucrative jobs of ministers, deputy ministers, governors-general, etc., etc.!”
Leading to the conclusion, similar but on a much higher historical place, to what Marx and Engels had discovered in 1948:
“But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is “redistributed” among the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties (among the Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the case of Russia), the more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at their head, become of their irreconcilable hostility to the whole of bourgeois society. … This course of events compels the revolution “to concentrate all its forces of destruction” against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.”
And on the question of what the working class will put in its place, Lenin touches on that, but it will be explored more in later chapters:
“What the proletariat will put in its place is suggested by the highly instructive material furnished by the Paris Commune.”
One final point regarding this is Lenin’s emphasis and expansion of a point Marx himself made, about his own distinctive contribution to politics. He quotes Marx:
“And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”
And Lenin expands on that in a devastating criticism of opportunism, both reformist and centrist:
“It is often said and written that the main point in Marx’s theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie…. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe brought the working class face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism) proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
And finally, to emphasise matters:
“Further. The essence of Marx’s theory of the state has been mastered only by those who realize that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from “classless society”, from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
