The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 9th November on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.
Studying this work is of crucial important for a Marxist tendency. We are now entering a period of political activity in a party that offers great promise for the creation, once again, of a mass working class political movement, a party of the working class. That is what Your Party signifies. We have to understand what the Corbyn-Sultana party could mean. It is a result of the failure of Labourism in the face of the ruling class’s neoliberal offensive against the working class in the advanced capitalist – that is, imperialist countries, since the mid-1970s. This had many different manifestations and timings around the world. But the whole point of the neoliberal project was always that the working class in the advanced countries was too powerful for the well-being of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Well-being in two senses. One in that the bourgeoisie feared the social power of the working class in the advanced countries. The second being that that classic phenomenon of capitalist decay, the gradually falling rate of profit, had reached a point that the bourgeoisie was desperately looking for some way to increase its profit rates at the expense of the masses. In Britain, in the early 1970s, the ruling class tried frontal industrial confrontation with the labour movement to try to fundamentally weaken the mass organisations of the working class. Heath’s Industrial Relations Act was partly prefigured by the White Paper In Place of Strife that was floated by the Harold Wilson Labour government in 1969, supported by some who were then supposed to be on the Labour left, such as Barbara Castle and Tony Benn. What this shows is that even some thought on the left were attuned more to ruling class opinion than the interests of the working class, even then.
In reality, this was a product of reformism’s attitude to the state, which Lenin, quoting extensively from Engels, touches upon in this chapter. But the expiring Wilson government of 1969 was hardly suited for a major confrontation with the working class. Though such proposals were the logic of a class collaborationist programme. It was the Heath government who tried to confront the trade unions head on, with their Industrial Relations Act, with its compulsory ballots in strikes, its attempt to ban solidarity action and various forms of picketing, its compulsory ‘cooling off’ periods, etc. And the government took on a powerful trade union movement and lost – to cut a long story short. Heath called a General Election in February 1974 on the slogan “Who rules the country, the government or the unions?” And lost. The Labour Party ended up with more seats than the Tories in the 1974 Election, though the result was very close, and in terms of the popular vote, Heath was very slightly ahead. But its seats that count.
Labour called another election in October 1974, and this time improved its performance, though it only gained an overall majority of 3 seats. It was during the 1974-1979 Labour government that the neoliberal project first, very tentatively, began to be tried out in Britain. Labour’s majority did not last long, and before that issue came centre stage, Harold Wilson resigned as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by James Callaghan. So, from 1976 you had the Liberal-Labour pact, and a series of more insidious attacks on the working class, through cuts in public spending, including in healthcare, and incomes policy where the union bureaucracies held back working-class discontent in the face of high inflation. You had such devices as the incentive scheme in the mining industry, which laid the basis for the divisions among miners that played a major role in dividing the miners later when Thatcher attacked them. So, the Labour government, by then in a semi-coalition with the Liberal Party, came into conflict with the working class, which exploded towards the end of its term in the winter of 1978-9 with the Winter of Discontent’, when all kinds of mainly public sector workers went on strike.
Thatcher won in May 1979, and set about full-throated neoliberalism, attacks on strategic sections of the proletariat through mass redundancies. Steel, docks, miners were the strategic sectors of the working class that had to be defeated. Mass privatisation and the export of jobs to low wage countries is the core of the project. The aim being to seriously weaken the organised working class, not on a temporary basis, as was done in 1926 with pay cuts for the miners provoking a General Strike which the union bureaucracy betrayed, laying the basis for a reign of terror in industry. This was a more serious project of weakening the power of the working class through removing whole strategic sectors from the advanced countries. And since the days of Thatcher, and her ten-year implementation of this reactionary ‘revolution’ in Britain, and a similar strategy implemented in the ‘Reagan Revolution’ in the US, neoliberalism gradually became hegemonic in the imperialist world.
It went hand in hand with the imperialist offensive Thatcher and Reagan symbolised internationally, above all confrontation with the stagnating degenerated workers state of the USSR in the 1980s, which brought it to its knees, It brought about the pro-capitalist liberalisation of the Stalinist regime under Gorbachev, and then the seizure of power by the outright counterrevolutionary leader, Boris Yeltin, who also sprang from the bureaucracy, being originally the chief of the Moscow Communist Party. So that was almost like a different world.
So, what about today? Since those days, social democracy and the old bourgeois liberalism exposed their bankruptcy by becoming thoroughly neoliberal. The British Labour Party is thoroughly neoliberal. In a period where the bosses, driven by the imperative to increase their rate of profit, declares war on every gain of the working class, and seeks to abolish it by privatisation, outsourcing, and the rest, reformism does not work. So, we have had social neoliberalism instead of reformist social democracy for many decades. Going back to the Wilson-Callaghan government. Arguably it even had its prehistory with In Place of Strife.
But of course, the working class had not always taken kindly to being shafted. We have had left movements within the Labour Party. The paler one being Bennism in the 1980s. We have had attempts by fragments of Labour to resist this politically, sometimes with the aid of parts of the far left. The SLP of Arthur Scargill in 1996-8. Respect in 2004 – 2009. And other smaller projects like the Socialist Alliance, and Left Unity. But the big one was Corbyn in 2015. That was when popular anger at neoliberalism briefly took control of the Labour Party through a mass influx of new and many former members. And the neoliberal right, imbued with Zionist politics, weaponising pro-Zionist ‘anti-semitism’ scares and right-wing nationalism over Brexit, manoeuvred furiously to defeat Corbyn’s leadership and drive this massive left constituency out of the Labour Party.
But they won a pyrrhic victory. They got rid of the left, drove them into exile, and even managed to create the most openly reactionary, bordering on far right, ‘Labour’ government in history, a recruiting sergeant for the real far right. The mass base of the Corbyn-led revolt against neoliberalism merely went into exile and bided its time until the opportunity emerged to create a new party. Your Party. Created in a sense by the bold initiative of Zarah Sultana in resigning from Labour and pushing Corbyn to get a move on in creating the new party. The problem is that the revolt against the neoliberalism of Labour is being waged under the banner of left social democracy. But the cause of the crisis that gave birth to this is the bankruptcy of social democracy. That is a fertile contradiction for communists to engage with.
This is good reason why communists should join the new party and encourage both our comrades, and Your Party’s militants, to study Lenin, and other Marxist material. So, moving on to this introductory chapter, what are its central points? State and Revolution was written for a socialist movement in flux, after the betrayal of all the anti-war and socialist promises of the Socialist Parties, including the British, the French and the most developed politically, the German, into chauvinism. The whole point of the work is to delve into how Social Democracy, particularly in Germany, had mangled the approach of Marxism to questions involving the State, and to correct those problems. This was written in 1917, in the face of the developing workers’ revolution. Though we are in not in a developing revolution, many of the issues dealt with are not that different from the problems that militants in Your Party face. We need programmatic answers on the question of the state, which is central.
“What is the state?”, asks Lenin, and draws upon Engels in such works as Anti-Duhring, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The state is an expression of the fact that society has split into irreconcilably warring classes. It is a weapon of the economically dominant class to keep in check the struggles of the subordinate, oppressed classes, and prevent the society from being overwhelmed by the struggles between classes. The state, then, is a weapon of the economically dominant, that is, the ruling, class in any given society. In succeeding societies, as Engels says:
“The ancient and feudal states were organs for the exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both…. Such were the absolute monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in Germany.” (Origin…)
Under primitive communism, before human society split into contending classes, there was no special armed repressive organisation separate from the population, only the population itself as a “self-acting armed organisation” able to defend itself collectively as and when the need arose. The state is a special armed organisation, separate from society, and closed off from the mass of the population. Lenin quotes Engels:
““The … distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible since the split into classes…. This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew nothing….” (ibid)
And he continues to concretise this, as the state arose from the split of society into irreconcilable classes, so as such class rule becomes obsolete:
“The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.” (ibid)
And then Lenin goes on to talk about this question, of the “withering away of the state”, and the necessity for a violent revolution to overthrow the rule of the possessing classes, i.e., the bourgeoisie:
“Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labour).…
“When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ’abolished’. It withers away.” (Anti-Duhring)
The crucial point in this, is the question of the “withering away” of the state. Lenin is quoting this for a highly specific purpose, to combat the distortion of this concept by reformists and centrists such as Karl Kautsky, in the camp of Germany Social Democracy. The crucial point is that the reformists had long mystified and elided this question with their activities in the existing state. They propagated the myth that, superintended by reformists like themselves, the repressive forms of the bourgeois state, would “wither away”.
But that is not what Engels, or Marx for that matter, had projected at all. It is the opposite. For these revolutionary leaders, the precondition for the state, that is, a workers’ state, to “wither away”, was the prior, violent overthrow and destruction, disbanding and dispersal of the bourgeois existing state, its special bodies of armed men, its prisons, etc. Only after such a revolutionary overturn could a new state be created, a state where instead of the mass of the exploited and oppressed population being forcibly kept in their place by the state of their class enemies, you would have the exploiting minority losing their power and being kept in their place, that is suppressed, by the population armed and organised against them. The workers state, would only then be in a position to “wither away”.
That polemic was therefore directed not only against the anarchists, who believed it was simply possible to abolish the state straight away, but more so against the reformists, who believed that under their superintendence, the existing, bourgeois state could somehow “wither away”, without a violent social overturn of the existing order. We will continue to study this as we go through the book.
