The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 22nd March on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.
This is a substantial chapter, divided into six subsections. These are:
- The Housing Question.
- Controversy with the Anarchists
- Letter to Bebel
- Criticism of the Draft Erfurt Programme
- The 1891 Preface to Marx’s The Civil War in France
- Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy
All these sections embody an underlying theme. They cover a lot of ground in drawing more generalised conclusions about the lessons of the Paris Commune and the importance of those lessons for distinguishing genuine socialism – Marxism – from parliamentary opportunism.
It starts off with citing Engles on the Housing Question – about reforms, and the requisition of property. This is by way of a preface to the more substantial sections to come.
Regarding housing, Lenin cites Engels that:
“…one thing is certain: there is already a sufficient quantity of houses in the big cities to remedy immediately all real ‘housing shortage’, provided they are used judiciously. This can naturally only occur through the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses homeless workers or workers overcrowded in their present homes. As soon as the proletariat has won political power, such a measure prompted by concern for the common good will be just as easy to carry out as are other expropriations and billetings by the present-day state.”
And continues to cite Engels:
“It must be pointed out that the ‘actual seizure’ of all the instruments of labour, the taking possession of industry as a whole by the working people, is the exact opposite of the Proudhonist ‘redemption’. In the latter case the individual worker becomes the owner of the dwelling, the peasant farm, the instruments of labour; in the former case, the ‘working people’ remain the collective owners of the houses, factories and instruments of labour, and will hardly permit their use, at least during a transitional period, by individuals or associations without compensation for the cost. In the same way, the abolition of property in land is not the abolition of ground rent but its transfer, if in a modified form, to society.
To summarise, Lenin again cites Engels’ formulated position from that adopted by the Blanquists in France after the Commune:
“… Necessity of political action by the proletariat and of its dictatorship as the transition to the abolition of classes and, with them, of the state….”
This sets the scene for the controversy with the anarchists. This was published in an Italian socialist annual in 1873. It was not published in German until 1913.
Its essence was this:
“If the political struggle of the working class assumes revolutionary form… and if the workers set up their revolutionary dictatorship in place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, they commit the terrible crime of violating principles, for in order to satisfy their wretched, vulgar everyday needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie, they give the state a revolutionary and transient form, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state.” (this appears to be extracted by Lenin)
This is the essence of the Marxist criticism of the anarchists … not for rejecting the state as a supposed norm of society, but for rejecting the special kind of transient state that the communists advocated, the means of crushing the bourgeoisie.
Engels ridiculed the ‘anti-authoritarians’, the Proudhonists and similar, who “repudiated all authority, all subordination, all power” and noted that this implied rejecting revolution itself, in practice:
“Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things: either that anti-authoritarians don’t know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction.”
But this, as Lenin points out, that Social Democrats in his day had never argued against the anarchists as Marxists:
“Social-Democrats, claiming to be disciples of Engels, have argued on this subject against the anarchists millions of times since 1873, but they have not argued as Marxists could and should. The anarchist idea of abolition of the state is muddled and non-revolutionary–that is how Engels put it. It is precisely the revolution in its rise and development, with its specific tasks in relation to violence, authority, power, the state, that the anarchists refuse to see.
“The usual criticism of anarchism by present-day Social-Democrats has boiled down to the purest philistine banality: “We recognize the state, whereas the anarchists do not!” Naturally, such banality cannot but repel workers who are at all capable of thinking and revolutionary-minded. What Engels says is different. He stresses that all socialists recognize that the state will disappear as a result of the socialist revolution. He then deals specifically with the question of the revolution – the very question which, as a rule, the Social-Democrats evade out of opportunism, leaving it, so to speak, exclusively for the anarchists “to work out”. And when dealing with this question, Engels takes the bull by the horns; he asks: should not the Commune have made more use of the revolutionary power of the state, that is, of the proletariat armed and organized as the ruling class?
Then Lenin goes on to deal with Engels’s Letter to Bebel, in March 1875. Engels was criticising the Gotha programme, the earlier draft programme of German social democracy. Taking up the question of the state, Engels wrote:
“The free people’s state has been transferred into the free state. Taken in its grammatical sense, a free state is one where the state is free in relation to its citizens, hence a state with a despotic government. The whole talk about the state should be dropped, especially since the Commune, which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. The ‘people’s state’ has been thrown in our faces by the anarchists to the point of disgust, although already Marx’s book against Proudhon and later the Communist Manifesto say plainly that with the introduction of the socialist order of society the state dissolves of itself disappears. As the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist….”
Indeed, Engels said that the attacks of the anarchists on the social democrats were in part justified “insofar as the ‘people’s state’ was as much an absurdity and as much a departure from socialism as the ‘free people’s state’”
Bebel replied to Engels that he fully agreed with his opinion on the draft programme. And yet, in Bebel’s 1886 pamphlet Our Aims is to be found the following formulation:
“”The state must… be transformed from one based on class rule into a people’s state.”
So, it appears that for all Bebel’s agreement with Engels abstractly, that agreement was negated by the social pressure of the political environment that Bebel and the SPD operated within.
Which brings us on to the section of the Erfurt Programme, the more developed programme of German Social Democracy, adopted in 1891, 8 years after Marx’s death.
Engels criticised this document, for faults on the question of democracy and the state, at several levels. There was opportunism in the SPD, in fear of a reprise of the anti-socialist law (1878-1890).
This was expressed in the SPD’s failure to challenge the legal prohibitions on the demand for a republic, the acceptance of a ‘federal’ constitution in Germany, when what should have been demanded is a unitary republic.
What Engels only touched on was the question of the need to combine legal and illegal work, as the Bolsheviks later did in Russia, with ultimately great success.
He was critical of the SPD thus:
“They push general, abstract political questions into the foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete questions, which at the moment of the first great events, the first political crisis, automatically pose themselves. What can result from this except that at the decisive moment the party suddenly proves helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the most decisive issues reign in it because these issues have never been discussed? …
“This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all….
“If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power in the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown….”
This was not a statement that the advent of a ‘democratic republic’ would be synonymous with the dictatorship of the proletariat, but rather a countering of the opportunism of the SPD for not raising the question of the republic, in a ‘constitutional’ setup that was a ‘fig leaf for absolutism’, as Bebel was reputed to have said.
(For brevity, I am leaving out two questions here. One is Marx’s view, referred to by Engels, that a peaceful overcoming of capitalism might have been possible in late 19th Century Britain, because of the absence then of a bureaucratic state. I think Marx was mistaken here.
The other being the prolonged elaboration of aspects of the national question, of a federal republic as the correct demand in Britain, his support for the autonomy of US states, and similar in Australia, Canada etc. And how ruinous the Swiss canton system was. Lenin links this with his own correct rejection of the dismissive attitude to the national question of some Polish and Dutch Marxists. These are worth discussing, but not really in detail here.)
Which then brings us onto Lenin’s exploration of Engles 1891 Preface to Marx’s The Civil War in France. This summarised the lessons of the Paris Commune thus:
“In France, Engels observed, the workers emerged with arms from every revolution: ‘therefore the disarming of the workers was the first commandment for the bourgeois, who were at the helm of the state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers.’”
Lenin continues, citing Engles about the state in this context:
“”… It was precisely the oppressing power of the former centralized government, army, political parties, bureaucracy, which Napoleon had created in 1798 and which every new government had since then taken over as a welcome instrument and used against its opponents–it was this power which was to fall everywhere, just as it had fallen in Paris.
“From the very outset the Commune had to recognize that the working class, once in power, could not go on managing with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just-gained supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old machinery of oppression previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any time….”
As Lenin remarked:
“Engels emphasized once again that not only under a monarchy, but also under a democratic republic the state remains a state, i.e., it retains its fundamental distinguishing feature of transforming the officials, the ‘servants of society”, its organs, into the masters of society.”
“Engels here approached the interesting boundary line at which consistent democracy, on the one hand, is transformed into socialism and, on the other, demands socialism. For, in order to abolish the state, it is necessary to convert the functions of the civil service into the simple operations of control and accounting that are within the scope and ability of the vast majority of the population, and, subsequently, of every single individual. And if careerism is to be abolished completely, it must be made impossible for “honorable” though profitless posts in the Civil Service to be used as a springboard to highly lucrative posts in banks or joint-stock companies, as constantly happens in all the freest capitalist countries.”
And then he concluded this section by saying:
“Two more remarks. 1. Engels’ statement that in a democratic republic, “no less” than in a monarchy, the state remains a “machine for the oppression of one class by another” by no means signifies that the form of oppression makes no difference to the proletariat, as some anarchists “teach”. A wider, freer and more open form of the class struggle and of class oppression vastly assists the proletariat in its struggle for the abolition of classes in general.
2. Why will only a new generation be able to discard the entire lumber of the state? This question is bound up with that of overcoming democracy, with which we shall deal now.
There is some discussion here of the inadequacy of the name ‘social democrat’ by Engels, and relatedly the name of the Bolshevik Party in Russia. This is worth reading, but it is tangential again, so I will just mention it and encourage comrades to read.
“In the usual argument about the state, the mistake is constantly made against which Engels warned and which we have in passing indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy.”
And Lenin addresses those who might suspect this is being some kind of elitism:
“We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.”
“In order to emphasize this element of habit, Engels speaks of a new generation, ‘reared in new, free social conditions’, which will ‘be able to discard the entire lumber of the state’–of any state, including the democratic-republican state.
In order to explain this, it is necessary to analyse he economic basis of the withering away of the state. Which is dealt with in the next chapter.
