Commentary: Lenin's State and Revolution Today by Thomas Riggins, PhD

S&R Preface

It's been 97 years since Lenin first wrote what has since become a "classic" of Marxism:The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, hereafter referred to as SR. I propose to discuss the significance of this work for today (the beginning of the 21st Century) and so will not spend a lot of time discussing its relevance to the world of 97 years ago. 

Therefore, the tasks of the working class in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 will only be touched upon and I will concentrate instead on the Marxist theory of the state. Lenin and the Bolsheviks successfully applied this theory in their day and were able to overthrow the capitalist ruling class and its supporters in Russia and surrounding areas and to found the Soviet Union in 1922. How should we understand this theory today as we struggle to advance the interests of working people around the world in their effort to free themselves from capitalist exploitation and oppression (including the workers of the former socialist countries)?

I will begin with a few remarks about Lenin's "Preface" to the first edition of SR. First, Lenin's characterization of the state is as accurate today as it was when he wrote his preface: The "oppression of the working people by the state which is merging more and more with the all- powerful capitalist associations, is becoming increasingly monstrous."  

Capitalist states have by now practically completed the merge. In the US  the present economic depression initiated, among other reasons, by fraudulent lending practices and other illegal activities by banks and big corporations has seen the state bailing out the big capitalist firms while leaving the working people, the victims of the depression, to fend for themselves. The state has recently cut food stamps and unemployment  insurance benefits for the working people while giving subsidies to big agricultural and energy interests. There is no doubt whose interest the state serves. 

In European countries the state is either imposing regimes of extreme austerity on the working population in order to extract wealth to be turned over to bond holders and banks or pushing through measures to revamp the labor laws and retirement plans of the workers to their disadvantage in order that the corporations may more easily fire people and will not have their taxes increased to support social programs. 

In the Third World from Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Indonesia, to Mexico, Haiti and Africa , and points in between, we see the state allied with commercial interests and using its police and military to break up strikes and work stoppages in support of the owners of capital. 

Lenin also pointed out that those who claim to be champions of the working class, especially so-called "socialist" leaders have sided with the capitalist class against the workers of their own countries, but also internationally. The French socialist government, for example, openly supports the most reactionary elements of the US ruling class in its international quest to dominate Third World countries. This is in line with Lenin's observation that "the majority of the so-called Great Powers have long been exploiting and enslaving  a whole number of small and weak nations." Is the world any different today?

One of the most effective ways the capitalist class keeps the workers in thrall and off balance is by appeals to patriotism (USA! USA!) and by pitting the workers of one country against those of another ("Buy made in America!"). The idea that the state is somehow class neutral or can be made to champion the workers against the financial and industrial interests is seen by Lenin as an obstacle to mobilizing the working people to struggle for THEIR interests rather than the interests of the exploiters. Lenin uses the term "opportunism" to describe working class leaders who work to achieve narrow short term and temporary gains at the expense of the long term interests of the working class. Opportunism is not the same as reformism which brings about substantive long term changes under capitalism which will strengthen working class consciousness (such as the struggle for civil and political rights.) 

Struggles for reform increase class consciousness in the working class, while opportunism decreases it. This is why Lenin thinks understanding the nature of the state is of vital importance. "The struggle to free the working people from the influence of the bourgeoisie in general, and the imperialist bourgeoisie in particular, is impossible without a struggle against opportunistic prejudices concerning the 'state'".

Up to this point I think the ideas expressed by Lenin in his preface are still applicable today. However, there are three issues that I now turn to which have questionable merit today. 1. "The world proletarian revolution is clearly maturing." This was an overly optimistic, if understandable, position in 1917. But subsequent events actually led to the derailment of the "world proletarian revolution" which shows no sign of getting back on tract anytime soon. However, events in North America and Europe, Cuba and South America, as well as Africa and the Middle East are indicative of a general malaise of the international capitalist order the outcome of which is not now predictable. 2. While there are many lessons to be learned from the Russian Revolution, Lenin was incorrect, I think, in seeing it as the first link in a chain of revolutions which would overthrow capitalism. Capitalism ultimately overthrew it, hopefully for the nonce. 3. The emphasis on refuting the ideas of Karl Kautsky, while essential in the era of WWI, are no longer as relevant as they were in light of the developments in Marxist theory attributable to Gramsci, Trotsky, Mao and others.

Finally, Lenin ends the preface with the following words regarding the understanding of the nature of the state and its relation to the struggle for socialism which he says "is a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny." Well, it's a long time since Lenin's "before long" but the problem is still urgent and the explanation must still be made.

Coming up-SR Chapter One "Class Society and the State"

State and Revolution  Chapter One "Class Society and the State".

1. "The State-- A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms"

Lenin begins by remarking that the great leaders of oppressed humanity are reviled and hated by the rulers of the day but after their deaths attempts are made "to convert them into harmless icons." Martin Luther King was reviled in his day as a trouble maker because of his civil rights work and as a traitor because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. Now he has schools named after him and his birthday is a national holiday. His fiery rhetoric against racism and  imperialism forgotten. Malcolm X has suffered a similar fate. Once hated by the establishment and mass media he now has streets and housing projects named in his honor and his image graces postage stamps. His ideas virtually forgotten. 

Just recently we have seen the arch "terrorist" and communist agent Nelson Mandela rechristened as the grandfatherly "Madiba" an advocate of nonviolence-- his call for the oppressed to arm themselves and fight for their liberation lost among the platitudes of the world figures who rushed to his funeral to heap praises on the man they tried for so many years to undermine and destroy.

Just so was the fate of Karl Marx according to Lenin. Many left wing politicians and labor leaders of Lenin's day praised Marxism and even called themselves Marxist-- along with university professors and public intellectuals (then as now their name is Legion)-- but their real purpose was "to omit, obscure or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul." 

Lenin wants to reverse this trend-- which is even more prevalent today than in Lenin's time-- at least on the socialist left and among those he called "petty bourgeois intellectuals." He sees the main purpose of his book "is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state." My purpose is to establish what Lenin actually thought Marx's teaching was-- not decide on its correctness or the truth or falsity of the teaching --at least we will be able to tell the difference between those who only give lip service to Marxism and those who take it it more seriously.

Lenin's procedure is to look up the passages that Marx and Engels devoted to the state and to clearly present them so that, he thinks, no one can be confused about what their ideas really where. He starts off with passages from "the most popular of Engels's works"-- namely The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Popular as this book may be, I don't think it is today Engels's most popular work-- I doubt if, outside of the socialist left, any of Engels's works are considered "popular."

In any event, in this work Engels tells us that the state appears at a particular time in the history of social development. It is not present in bands of hunter gatherers, or in clan or tribal societies but arises when social development has led to specialization of functions in city states where there are food producing peasants, and a ruling upper strata has evolved with professional armed "peace keepers" at their disposal. What has appeared are "classes" of people with different economic functions who find their interests are not always harmonious and they are often in conflict with each other. These developments began during the late new stone age (the Neolithic Revolution) as a result of the creation of agriculture which allowed for the production of a surplus food supply which called for management and storage.

In order for the society in question to maintain social peace and not tear itself apart a power needed to be created that could enforce "order" or social peace and, Engels says, "this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state." 

But why was it that social peace was disrupted by the creation of an agricultural surplus? Because the management and distribution of the surplus was delegated to a group of individuals who were relieved from the daily work of actual production. In times of scarcity conflicts arose between the actual producers and those responsible for distribution of the surplus. These two groups each had one important goal in mind-- group survival-- and thus  ultimately found themselves at loggerheads over the distribution of the social surplus. This resulted in an irreconcilable contradiction between the classes and is the basis for the proposition enunciated in the Communist Manifesto that history, as we know it, is a history of class conflicts.

"The state," Lenin writes, " is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled."  According to Lenin this fundamental  Marxist principle means that where we have state power-- that is wherever we find societies based on classes -- we will find that the education system, the mass media, and the political system in general is dedicated to the view that "the state is an organ for the reconciliation of classes." The class in power knows better but, at least in modern times, their pundits, press, and propagandists preach this doctrine incessantly.

 "According to Marx," however,  "the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another." No harmonious society here. If you have ever wondered why the government can't (or won't) control the banks and big corporations, why it doesn't end  fracking, why it won't act on climate change or really protect the environment, why food companies and restaurant chains can sell us junk to eat, why women, workers, immigrants, minorities and the poor always get the short end of the stick, the cops always bust up the strikers and protestors demonstrating for their rights, why the interests of the 99% can't democratically get anywhere with respect to the interests of the 1% and whistleblowers go to jail and hypocrites to the state house all you need remember is that it's the 1%'s state not the 99%'s. 

"That the state," says Lenin, "is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand." If Lenin is correct this could have long term implications for left-center unity. The left could make tactical alliances with the center on definite issues but how could the left make long term strategical alliances with people who will never be able to understand what's really going on? This is a question we will hopefully get back to later.

Lenin ends this section by referring to Kautsky's views which are relevant here. There are some who, like Kautsky, agree in theory with what Lenin has explained is Marx's theory of the state but they distort it and do not draw the proper conclusions in practice which are, according to Lenin, "that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment" of the "alienation"  of the state from the society it dominates.

Well this is indeed a radical conclusion which cannot  be drawn from  the evidence Lenin has so far put forth from the quotes he has produced from Marx and Engels.  Lenin is aware that he has jumped the gun here and tells us that he will demonstrate the truth of the above conclusions later in his work. We shall see. One of the laws of dialectics is the  unity and reconciliation of opposites so it will be interesting to see why this does not apply to the organ of one class and its "antipode."

SR Chapter One will continue.

Chapter One Sections 2 & 3.

2. "Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, ETC."

Still basing himself on Engel's Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,

Lenin points out that the state is the first form of society exclusively to base itself on a given territory as opposed to tribal societies and bands which can move about and change locations while searching for food and shelter. This is the first innovation of the state.

The second is that the state sets up a source of power independent of the general population. The Roman state, for example, maintained an army as opposed to  tribal societies such as the Gauls and Germans in which all the able bodied men were warriors. The public power of the state includes prisons, courts, an educational system and, Engels says "institutions of coercion of all kinds." However, Lenin stresses that, "A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power." Today we can see that while the bulk of the armed forces and police are recruited from the 99%, they are controlled by, and serve the the interests of the 1%.

This is the case because every state "is split into antagonistic, and moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes" so that the dominant class must control the instruments of state power to remain in control. This is denied, of course, by all the ruling class factions. In the US the Republicans accuse the progressives, especially progressive Democrats, of wanting to foment "class war" when they try to put forth new taxes on the rich or criticize the right of trying to curtail voting rights of the poor. The Democrats vehemently deny that there is "class war" and that they only want fairness for the "middle class" and to help the poor advance themselves via the "American dream." Meanwhile both parties support the National Security Agency's keeping tabs on every single American citizen (as well as those of other countries) in order protect the security of the state (i.e., class rule).

This is the context in which Lenin maintains that the "exploited class," or to use the metaphor currently in use, the 99 %, must create a new type of state "capable of serving the exploited instead of the exploiters."

3. "The State -- An Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class."

The representatives of the state demand special immunities, honors and privileges above and beyond those accorded to regular members of society. Special honor is accorded to judges to underscore the importance of the laws enacted by the dominant class. The police and military can often literally get away with murders and brutalities that would subject regular citizens to extreme state punishment. Rampant police brutality and lawlessness is well known throughout the United States as well as military atrocities carried out abroad that amount to war crimes. Breaking up strikes of working people and clamping down on protesters are regular features of the police function. 

Lenin will answer the following question: "what is it that places them above society?" He quotes Engels to answer this question. "Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict between these classes." Because the state is the tool of the economically dominant class this class also becomes the politically dominant class. In the U.S. it is no accident that with the rise of progressive political movements the Supreme Court in the Citizens United ruling opened the flood gates so that unlimited amounts of money could inundate the electoral arena and allow the 1% to literally position itself to buy elections and asphyxiate the democratic aspirations of regular citizens. This is nothing new. Engels long ago remarked that "the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital." In face of the consensus of economists, for example, that in the U.S. a living wage would come to $15.00 an hour the most the government is willing to push for is $10.10 per hour. A fine illustration of Engels' point.

How does the 1% actually exercise control by the use of wealth? Lenin gives a couple of examples after quoting Engels---i.e., "direct corruption of officials" (America) and "alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange" (France, America). Imperialism and the banks working together have perfected the methods of both direct and indirect control of the state. Democratic republics, such as the U.S. and many others as well, are the best forms of government for the capitalists. "The reason why the omnipotence of 'wealth' is more

certain in a democratic republic," Lenin says, "is that it does not depend on individual defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capitalism has gained possession of this very best shell it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it." This may be why "No we can't" is a more realistic political slogan than "Yes we can" for workers under the control of a bourgeois democracy (but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try!).

Elections are important and voting is important in a bourgeois-democratic republic such as the U.S. Participation in elections is an important educational tool and helps working people understand the nature of bourgeois democracy and leads to greater class consciousness. Nevertheless, Lenin insists that we "note that Engels  is most explicit in calling universal suffrage an instrument of bourgeois rule."

Knowing how elections actually work, how they are corrupted by money, how the nature of bourgeois democracy is objectively structured to keep the working class under control, Lenin thinks socialists (i.e., real socialists not the phony social democrats) should not reinforce "the false notion that universal suffrage 'in the present-day state' is really capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realisation." Well, the accuracy of this depends on what the meaning of what "present" means in "present-day state." Is Lenin out of date here, or not? In any event, Lenin is in favor of the struggle for universal suffrage but he is under no illusion that it will solve the problems of working class people.

We will finish off Chapter One next time with a discussion of the "Withering Away" of the state.

Lenin on the "Withering Away'' of the State and Violent Revolution

Thomas Riggins

Lenin discusses these two topics in section four of chapter one of The State and Revolution (1917). This section begins with a long quote from Engels' 1870s work Anti-Dühring. The quote begins with " The proletariat seizes state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms  and abolishes the state as state."

There is a problem with this formulation. Article 11 of the Soviet Constitution (1977) clearly stated "State property, i.e. the common property of the Soviet people, is the principal form of socialist property." This was the basis of the Soviet system (there were other forms of property-- individual, collective, etc., but this was the basis). Also in Cuba about 90% of the economy is under state control. The problem is that in no country in which the working class actually came to power and turned the means of production into state property did it also abolish itself as a class as well as abolish the state as state. On the face of it this quote from Engels seems not to be correct.

Lenin, of course, in 1917 could not foresee the future course of events in the development of socialism. Nevertheless his reasons for accepting the truth of the above quote and his defense of Engels' views are both interesting and pertinent to the ongoing  struggle for socialism today.

Lenin agreed with Engels position that "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."

This can only make sense if we have a particular definition of "the state" in mind. This definition includes the notion that a "state" is an organ used  to "hold in subjection" another social class or classes. The "state" is therefore a "special coercive force."  For Engels, when the productive forces of society are taken from the capitalists and turned into social property the capitalists cease to exist as a separate class distinguished by its ownership of the means of production. This ex-class is so tiny compared to the working people that it will in effect disappear and there will be no need for a "special coercive force" to hold down and exploit another class. Khrushchev's imaginary "state of the whole people" will be a reality and the state as state will gradually melt ("wither") away as the the self governing people create new forms of association based on the common ownership of the means of production.

Engels realized all this would take time.  He never thought this would take place overnight. "The state is not 'abolished'," he says. "It withers away." We should note that Engels was basing his views on the assumption that the socialists would come to power in the most advanced capitalist states where production and class consciousness of the working people were fully developed. His views were directed not only at the so-called anarchists  (who were demanding "the state be abolished overnight" but also, Lenin points out, at opportunists who used the "withering away" concept to argue that the state could slowly evolve into socialism without the sturm und drang of revolution.

We have just reviewed Lenin's introductory remarks to this section. He now wants to emphasize five major themes that were mentioned above. First: Engels said that when the workers take power they abolish "the state as state."  Lenin tells us , "it is not done to ponder over the meaning of this."  Socialist leaders in Lenin's day (and ours) would rather forget about this comment--- attributing it to an "Hegelian weakness" in Engel's thought.

This won't do. Lenin says  these words sum up "one of the greatest proletarian revolutions"-- i.e., the 1871 Paris Commune. Lenin will discuss the meaning of the Paris Commune in Chapter Three. For now he wants to stress that what Engels was saying  was that when the workers seize [or otherwise get hold of] the power of the bourgeois state the first thing they do is abolish it! A bourgeois state has no raison d'être in a worker's society. The state ("or semi-state") that withers away is the worker's state after the completion of the socialist revolution. No socialist revolution has ever matured to this extent.

Second: Lenin extols the "utmost lucidity" and "profound definition" of the bourgeois state given by Engels-- i.e.,  as  "the 'special coercive force' for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie." It is the mechanism by which the 1% holds the 99% in thrall. This coercive force must be replaced by its opposite so that the 99% can keep the 1% from oppressing it. Lenin says the bourgeois dictatorship over working people (whatever its guise) will be replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" over the bourgeoisie (i.e., a working people's state). The word "dictatorship" appears to present a problem to some nervous Nellies on the left, so I propose an acceptable alternative term might be "worker's super-democracy." Socialism will replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with worker's super-democracy (ceteris paribus ).

Three: Super-democracy is a concept fully in accord with Lenin's ideas. He refers to the socialist state as "the most complete democracy." This is not "Hegelian weakness" on Lenin's part even though it may seem paradoxical to equate the dictatorship of the proletariat with the most complete democracy. "Dictatorship equals democracy" only appears Orwellian to those unfamiliar with Hegelian dialectical logic.

 Another consequence that Lenin thinks "never enters the heads of opportunists" is that democracy itself will disappear under socialism. A charge all to familiar coming from the right and the bourgeoisie who only think of "democracy" in bourgeois terms. But when Engels talks of the "withering away" and "the dying down of itself" of the socialist state we must remember that "democracy" is a state form and it also dies away "when the state disappears." We will leave it to a future generation to figure out what a post-democratic socialist world will look like, only noting that it will be one without human exploitation and free of the tortured political definitions and concepts of the bourgeois era.

Fourth: Engels statements are directed at both the opportunists and the anarchists, but especially against the opportunists. From Lenin's point of view the opportunists are always harping about the benefits of engaging in bourgeois politics and down playing the revolutionary aspects of Marxist theory, especially when it comes to educating working people about socialism. "We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism," Lenin writes. "But," he adds, "we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic."

Fifth: Lenin emphasizes what he calls Engels' "panegyric on violent revolution." He points out that none of the socialist leaders (outside of the Bolsheviks) ever mention this aspect of Marxist theory "and it plays no part whatever in their daily propaganda and agitation among the people" even though it is part and parcel of the theory of the withering away of the state.  Mutatis mutandis the same is true today as then.

Lenin was living in a revolutionary period of history-- indeed a violent revolution had just brought him and his party to power in Russia-- so it is natural that he should have been very keen on this aspect of Marx and Engels thinking. While the period of history we are currently living through is fraught with injustice, crimes against humanity, the resumption of neocolonial wars and occupations, state repression, racial profiling, voter suppression, enforced austerity measures against the working people, official corruption, and high crimes and misdemeanors of every imaginable kind perpetrated by bourgeois states from America to Zimbabwe, we are, I don't know why, not living in a revolutionary period anywhere near the intensity of Lenin's time, although the handwriting is on the wall (just as cursive is being dropped in the U.S.).

Lenin not only supports violent revolution but believes it is "inevitable." He quotes Engels (Anti-Dühring) on the role of violence that "in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead fossilized political forms." However, Engels goes on to say that in Germany it may so happen that violence will "be forced on the people."

 But "may be" and "inevitable" are not the same concepts. Engels in no way shied away from the notion of revolutionary violence but Lenin may not be justified, at least from the quote he reproduces in this chapter of State and Revolution, in drawing the conclusion that violence is "inevitable." It is possible for the workers to be so overwhelmingly organized and prepared to assume power that the bourgeoisie will be prevented from violently  resisting (cf. Lenin quote at end of article). If they do resist and there is violence and the workers fight back it is a violence of self defense and not due to some inevitable Aristotelian necessity (ανάγκη).

In questioning the inevitability of violent revolution I don't want to be accused of replacing dialectics with eclecticism. I am just trying to interpret Engels and Lenin by considering the logical implications of their comments. Lenin himself, right after stating that a violent revolution is inevitable says the bourgeois state "cannot  be superseded by the proletarian state (the dictatorship of the proletariat [or worker's super-democracy]) through the process of "withering away", but, as a general rule, only through a violent revolution."

But a "general rule" means "usually," or "for the most part" and allows for an exception-- it does not entail "inevitability." Yet Lenin goes on to say that violent revolution is inevitable  and "the necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of the entire theory of Marx and Engels."

This is fine for 1917 but how could we preach this to "the masses" today when a quarter of the workers in the U.S. vote Republican and we don't even have sufficient class consciousness to form a Labor Party.  Would a party trying to "imbue" the working class with this outlook in the present circumstances  not be accused of ultra-leftism, of suffering from an infantile disorder? In fact, in 1920, when Lenin realized there was no world proletarian revolution on the horizon coming to save Soviet Russia, he changed his tune, at least with regard to practice, in his work "Left Wing" Communism An Infantile Disorder.

Indeed theory is one thing and practice is another. These two works by Lenin, State and Revolution and "Left Wing" Communism should not be seen as contradicting one another, or if they are they should be viewed as parts of a greater whole expressing the synthesis and unity of opposites-- they are not isolated stand alone works. The theoretical concerns of the first need not be stressed to the detriment of the practical considerations of the everyday practice of class struggle and the social, economic and political realities dealt with by the second.

Lenin realizes that so far he has only made general claims and will now proceed to back up his assertions by a "detailed and concrete elaboration" of the views of Marx and Engels on this topic as they expressed them by analyzing the two greatest European revolutionary events of the 19th century-- namely the uprising of 1848 and the Paris Commune. Their historical analysis is "undoubtedly the most important part of their theory" of revolution.

But before taking leave of this section, I want to quote Lenin himself presenting a non-violent transition to power of the the working class in Russia-- just to point out how views fluctuate on this issue. Here is Lenin on June 4, 1917 speaking to the First All-Russia Congress of Soviets: "You know that revolution is not made to order, that revolutions in other countries were made by the hard and bloody method of insurrection, and in Russia there is no group, no class, that could resist the power of the Soviets. In Russia, this revolution can, by way of exception, be a peaceful one [CW:25:23]."

This was June 1917-- three months before Lenin started to write State and Revolution. Lenin changed his mind, obviously, but revolutions are not made to order and there may always be an exception to a general rule.

Next up is Chapter II of S & R-- "The Experience of 1848-51". 

In  Chapter Two of State and Revolution Lenin discusses the lessons of the European revolutionary movement of 1848-51 There are three sections to this chapter. The first section is entitled:

1.) The Eve of the Revolution

 Lenin points out that the first "mature" works of the Marxist world view were created on the "eve" of the 1848 upheaval-- namely Marx's 1847 work The Poverty of Philosophy  and Marx and Engel's joint work The Communist Manifesto. Every educated person has read the latter work but the former may not be so well known.

It was composed by Marx to confute the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) whose Philosophy of Poverty appeared in 1846 and put forth an anarchist program for the working class: the class should abstain from politics and concentrate on economic struggles leading to the abolition of the state. However, this is not the place for a discussion of this work by Marx and I will only reproduce the quote that Lenin uses to illustrate Marx's first "mature" view on the state: "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 proper, since political power is precisely the official expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society."

I don't think Proudhon would disagree with this even though he and Marx had deep disagreements about how to bring this about. The Communist Manifesto came out in November of the same year (1847) that Marx's book did. Here Lenin quotes from it that after the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie by a worker's revolution the workers will "raise the proletariat to a position of a ruling class" this will allow it "to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hand of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class."

This quote Lenin calls an expression of one of the central tenets of Marxism. i.e., the concept of "the dictatorship of the proletariat " ["worker's super democracy" for the queasy]. The term itself was coined by Joseph Weydemeyer (1818-1866 a supporter of Marxism and a colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War) and adopted by Marx and Engels to describe the Paris Commune of 1871. Lenin says this formulation of workers control from the Communist Manifesto "is a slap in the face for the common opportunist prejudices and philistine illusions  about the 'peaceful development of democracy.'"  Well, it didn't work too well in Chile, the peaceful development that is, and Venezuela is currently going through a rough patch. What conclusions did Lenin draw from these quotes? There are four.

 First, while socialists can participate in electoral struggles and parliaments they cannot be ministers in bourgeois governments. 

Second, only that part of the working class engaged in large-scale production (the proletariat proper) "is capable of being the leader of all the working people" since workers scattered about in small scale works "are incapable of waging an independent  struggle for their emancipation."

Third, Marxism is the educational tool by which the worker's party is educated to become the "vanguard of the proletariat" which can lead the workers to their true liberation once they take power.

 Fourth, opportunism is a tendency in the working class which actually represents "the better-paid workers, who loose touch with the masses, [and] 'get along' fairly well under capitalism." The leaders of this tendency renounce revolution and "sell their birthright for a mess of potage." Lenin will now move on to the second section this chapter.

2.) The Revolution Summed Up

Marx summed up his conclusions about the revolutionary upheaval of 1848-51 in a work entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in 1852. The title refers to the date in the French Revolutionary calendar when Louis Bonaparte's uncle Napoleon seized power in a coup d'etat-- 18th Brumaire, Year VIII of the Republic--i.e., November 9, 1799. 

Lenin thinks this work made a great theoretical advance on the  Communist Manifesto written five years previously. What this means practically is that the Manifesto must be read in conjunction with the Eighteenth Brumaire if we are not to be led astray and end up misunderstanding Marxism.

Here is  the advance. In the Manifesto, Lenin says, Marx and Engels showed that the workers must get state power into their hands if they are ever to get rid of the capitalists and put an end to exploitation, but they did not explain how to do this. "The question as to how, from the point of view of historical development, the replacement of the bourgeois by the proletarian state is to take place is not raised here" (i.e., in the Manifesto).

The question of "how to" is answered by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire. The short answer is to "Smash the State." This is a catchy slogan misappropriated today by anarchists of all stripes and I do not intend to discuss their use of it. Lenin explains that after careful study of the actual course of the revolutionary events of 1848-51 and how the workers were deceived by the bourgeoisie and the methods by which the revolutionary advances were commandeered by the bourgeoisie to strengthen their class position at the expense of the workers (Lenin also uses examples from the history of the Russian Revolution) Marx concluded that the workers could not use the bourgeois state to attain their objectives.

In revolutionary situations, such as 1848 Marx held, Lenin says, that the workers would be compelled to use the destructive power of the revolution, "to concentrate all its forces of destruction" in Marx's words, "against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it." 

Lenin arrived at the same conclusion by studying the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, not only the period 1905-07, but especially the six months he had just lived through covering 27 February to 27 August 1917. He stresses that these conclusions are not "logical deductions" made from Marxist theory but the result of empirical observations of the actual on going historical process.

We come now to an extremely important question asked by Lenin. He asks if it is proper to generalize Marx's conclusions regarding his study of the French revolutionary experience of 1848-51. We can go further now and ask if we can generalize Lenin's own conclusions based on his experience of conditions in Russia. What gives us the right to take conclusions based on the specific  historical conditions obtaining in these two European states and conclude that all socialist revolutions must eventuate in a violent establishment of a proletarian dictatorship?

Lenin himself criticized Engels view of France as the "classical" model of revolution. Engels' comment that in France "the struggle of the upward-striving proletariat against the ruling bourgeoisie appeared here in an acute form unknown elsewhere " is considered  "out of date" since the revolutionary struggled in France has been in "a lull" since 1871 (some 46 years from Lenin's perspective.)  Yet, Lenin thinks that Engels might be correct in the long term as this lull does not "preclude the possibility that in the coming proletarian revolution France may show herself to be the classic country of the class struggle to the finish."

Well, the "coming proletarian revolution" didn't come and today the French workers don't seem to be able to come up with anyone better than François Hollande-- a sorry excuse for a socialist let alone a "revolutionary." And if the French workers were in a revolutionary lull in 1917, what can we say about the Russian proletariat of today who put up with the homophobic nationalist Putin?

Do these examples nullify the conclusions of Marx and Lenin (we will have more to say about Engels later) regarding the role of violence in establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat? In the case of Marx Lenin didn't think so and his reasons, pari passu, can also be applied to his own case. Here is what he had to say. 

Lenin says that when we look over not just the developments that Marx noted in France, but the development of the bourgeois state in all the "advanced countries"-- he lists France, America, Switzerland, Britain, Germany and somewhat in Italy and Scandinavia, we see, in slower motion than in France, the development described by Marx and that "There is not the slightest doubt that these features are common to the whole of the modern evolution of all capitalist states in general."

What are these features?  These states are outwardly democratic but they are based on the powers bestowed on two basic institutions-- the standing army and a enlarged state bureaucracy. Democratic parliaments become increasing weaker and dysfunctional leading to the growth of the power of the executive branch of the government. The state apparatus functions under the control of, and to further the interests of,  the big capitalist national and multi-national corporations and banks leaving the working people more and more at the mercy of economic events out of their control. The state-apparatus claims to be representative of all the people and especially appeals to the middle classes by providing them with jobs and a living standard above the average of most working people. At the bottom are the workers whose productivity and creation of surplus value are responsible for all the wealth skimmed off by the capitalists at the top and grudgingly shared with segments of the middle class. Without organizing and socialist consciousness raising within the working class this situation will more or less tend to perpetuate itself. 

This is a rough description of the capitalist world of a hundred years ago at the beginning of the 20th century, according to Lenin. His theories and interpretation of Marxism are based on this world view. Leninism today is as relevant as is the description given above to picture the capitalist world of the beginning of the 21st century.

What will the working people put in place of capitalism? Lenin says the Paris Commune gave us a basic outline. Of course we have the model of the Soviet Union and other "socialist" countries to also look at. But Lenin's book was written before the October Revolution. Chapter Three of State and Revolution is devoted to the Commune, but I will end this paper with Lenin's short section 3 ("The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852") of Chapter Two before we go on to that chapter. Lenin added this section to the 2nd edition of his book (1918) it was not in the first edition of 1917.

Lenin begins this section with some quotes from a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer from Karl Marx dated March 5, 1852. Marx says that he himself deserves no credit for the theory of class struggle. "Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes."  Marx, however, does take credit for three things. 1.) Noting that classes only appear in history when certain specific modes of production have developed. 2.) That the class struggle "necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat." 3.) That the dictatorship is merely a transitional phase on the road to a classless society.

Lenin says it is a mistake to think that Marxism is basically just about class struggle. The bourgeoisie knows perfectly well that they are engaged in a class struggle against the working people. Here is a quote from multi-billionaire Warren Buffett stating there is "class warfare all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning" (New York Times November 26, 2006). It doesn't take Marxism to tell workers about the class struggle.

But it does take Marxism to tell workers what to do about it. Lenin puts it this way: "Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat [AKA' workers super democracy'--for the faint of heart]. This 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."

Lenin stresses that this is not an anti-democratic position. Many progressives today balk at the word "dictatorship" making a fetish out it and thus preventing them from understanding what Lenin is saying. To abolish capitalism the working people, the vast majority of the population, must gain political power, do away with capitalist institutions (including the capitalist state) and build new institutions representing humanity at large. They must have a worker's state to guide them along the way of the transition to a classless society. This new state "must inevitably," Lenin says, "be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletariat and the propertyless in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the bourgeoisie)." 

We must remember that bourgeois rule takes many forms but in essence even the most democratic bourgeois state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (of the 1% over the 99% as it were). Until we arrive at a classless society we have only two kinds of state to live in-- both of them class dictatorships, one of the 1% over the 99%, the other of the 99% over the 1%-- there is no third, so in the words of the old song "Which side are you on?"

This is Lenin's basic theory of the State according to Marxism. It in no way precludes mass democratic reform struggles within the capitalist system, participation in elections, or another practical methods to improve conditions on the ground for the working class under capitalism. But it does make us keep our eyes on the prize and maybe that baby in the bath water as well.

Chapter Three of S&R will be the next part of this series.

Chapter Three of State and Revolution is devoted to Lenin's commentary on Marx's analysis of the 1871 Paris Commune. It is divided into five parts. This article deals with the first part of the chapter:

1. What Made the Communards Attempt Heroic?

The Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 and led to the downfall of Louis Napoleon (Emperor Napoleon III) and the Second Empire. The German army surrounded Paris and France was forced to surrender. The war ended on May 10, 1871. The working people of Paris became radicalized during this period, repudiated the legitimacy of the bourgeois government,  and started a revolution to establish a socialist commune in Paris. The government fled to Versailles. The commune lasted from March 18 to May 28, 1871 when the French Army reimposed bourgeois rule in Paris by means of a blood bath.

From his vantage point in London Marx was a keen observer of what was happening in France. In late 1870, with revolution in the air, Marx warned the workers of Paris NOT to start a revolution to overthrow the French government. Lenin says Marx thought it would be the "folly of despair." The over all balance of forces was extremely unfavorable.

However, in March of 1871 the French government began to take measures against the workers that forced them to fight back and the die was cast. Even though he was pessimistic concerning the outcome, once the workers took up arms, Marx became one of the most ardent supporters of the Commune. The heroic failure of the workers, in Marx's words, "to storm heaven" was not in vain.

Although defeated their experience provided invaluable lessons for the working classes throughout the world, as Lenin put it. In the same way the experience of the Soviet Union and its ultimate defeat has left a trove of lessons for the working class of the twenty first century and will make the future (far future I fear) world socialist state immeasurably stronger and more stable due to the lessons learned (if learned) and errors not repeated.

In 1872 Marx and Engels wrote a new introduction to the Communist Manifesto  in which they said that their famous work had become "in some details out-of-date." They thought the experience of the Commune had shown that the working class could not just take control of the "ready-made" bourgeois state and then use it to create socialism. Lenin thinks that probably 99% of the people who read the Manifesto don't get the meaning of this conclusion by Marx and Engels. [They must have been very unclear!]

Due to opportunistic and revisionist leadership in the working class, Lenin says, most people now think Marx and Engels meant the workers can't just violently overthrow the state all at once but must gradually reform it part by part until it has become a socialist state. After all, the communards got wiped out when they violently seized power in Paris!

Lenin held that Marx (and Engels) meant just the opposite. The workers can't just "lay hold" of the state-- they must bust it up and make a new kind of state. Marx thought the communards were in the process of trying to do just that when they were overcome by the superior strength of the French state and the regular army.

It was not the attempt to "smash the state" that led to their defeat-- but it was a premature attempt from an initial position of weakness and that the armed struggle was forced upon them before they were ready for it. Lenin cites Marx's letter to Kugelmann of April 12, 1871 to support his interpretation. In that letter Marx says that "to smash" (zerbrechen ) the state "is the precondition for every real people's revolution on the Continent."

It is interesting to point out that Marx implies that a successful  uprising, the government being overthrown and a new government installed does not constitute a  real revolution-- no matter what it is called- coup, rebellion, revolt, uprising, etc.,  it is not a revolution. A revolution takes place AFTER the overthrow of the government and only after the state has been "smashed" (destroyed).  This is the "precondition" of the revolution which consists in the construction of a new kind of state-- a worker's (or worker's and peasant's) state. Thus, for example neither the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, of Mubarak in Egypt, nor of Yanukovych in Ukraine, were revolutions in the Marxist sense-- but merely the replacement of one form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by another form. They were intra class coups. A "people's revolution" on the contrary, Lenin says, is one in which the vast majority of the people, including the lowest social groups, "come out actively, independently, with their own political demands."

Lenin notes that Marx limited his remarks to the European "Continent"-- not including the UK or the USA (never mind the rest of the world). Lenin says this was ok for 1871, when Marx wrote his letter, because at that time in the UK and the USA there was still possible a peaceful revolution not involving smashing and bashing the state.

This is because they were fully developed capitalist states without fully developed military-bureaucratic cliques controlling them. This was changed by WWI and "the last representatives of Anglo-Saxon 'liberty'" are now run by such cliques and need a good smashing as well.

Today we call this "clique" the military-industrial complex-- it is international in nature- and wherever it dominates a peaceful revolution would not be possible according to Lenin. But is it possible to weaken the power of the military-industrial complex by people's struggles to such an extent that it is no longer dominant? Is this just wishful thinking and we really are on the darkening plain?

In trying to adapt Marx, Engels and Lenin's ideas to today we must remember, as Lenin pointed out, that in 1871 the proletariat was not the majority in any country of  continental Europe and the "people" was represented by the workers and peasants together. Marx thought the bourgeois state machine had to be "smashed" as that was the only way the workers and the poor peasants (i.e., the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie) could have a free alliance and, Lenin says, "without such an alliance democracy is unstable and socialist transformation is impossible." Is such a characterization still valid with regard to workers and the lower and middle strata of the petty bourgeoisie  in the 21st century? Just what was supposed to replace the "smashed" bourgeois state? We will consider the answer in the next article.

Chapter Three of State and Revolution is devoted to Lenin's commentary on Marx's analysis of the 1871 Paris Commune. It is divided into five parts. This article deals with the parts 2 -5 of the chapter:

2. What Is To Replace The Smashed State Machine?

According to Lenin Marx and Engels had no answer to this question when they wrote the Manifesto. Marx thought the experience of the working class would provide the answer.  He summed up that experience in his work The Civil War in France on the Paris Commune and, although Lenin says that experience was "meager", came to conclusions thought by Lenin to be valid some 45 years later when he wrote State and Revolution. Leaving aside the question whether Marx's conclusions are still valid after almost a century of further experience by the working class, I will only deal with Lenin's interpretation.

The form of state prevalent in the developed capitalism of the time of the Commune (on the continent and later on more widespread) was a state that functioned to support the bourgeoisie in its war against the working class. It was ultimately based jointly on the police and the military, whatever outward form it may have taken (constitutional monarchy or democratic republic), and ruled my means of a vast development of public workers (state employees) organized along bureaucratic lines and controlled at the top by people representing the interests of the big industrial conglomerates.

This was the type of state confronting the Paris Commune. The FIRST DECREE that the Commune promulgated, Marx says, "was the suppression of the standing army, and its replacement  by the armed people."  The leaders of the commune were elected by universal (male) suffrage and subject to recall if the people became dissatisfied with them.

Next, the police were depoliticized and put at the service of the Commune and the courts were also subjected to the rule of the people with their "sham" independence replaced by elected justices subject to recall. All this was, according to Lenin, an example of advanced democracy with the Commune representing the interests of the masses of people while  the previous bourgeois state (now smashed) represented the interests of the minority  of the landlords and capitalists.

One of the outstanding accomplishments of the Commune, which so impressed Marx, was that all the servants of the new state were paid no more than the average wages of working people. The Commune was not a "special force" serving the interests of a small class against the majority but was a "general force" serving the vast majority against their oppressors. 

For the  conservatives and ultra-rightists of today who rail against government spending the model of the Commune should be most enlightening  as Marx pointed out that the Commune "made that catchword of bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by abolishing the two greatest sources of expenditure-- the army and the officialdom." Those Americans truly concerned to slash federal spending should welcome those initiatives.

3. Abolition of Parliamentarism 

This year, 2014, is an election year in the US and there is great concern for how the House of Representatives and the Senate will be constituted--i.e., which of the two bourgeois parties will be in control. Lenin, following Marx, maintains the real meaning of the election (and it is the same in every bourgeois democracy) is to "decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people." 

If we understand that we can get over certain illusions about bourgeois democracy and it's relation to working class interests. While it is important to try to minimize "the crushing"  whichever party intends for you, it is also important to keep in mind the only remedy to being crushed at all. There should be no conflict between these two goals. The way elections are conducted today, the very existence of the House and Senate, the separation of powers between legislature and executive powers are inimical to working class interests and the workers, while struggling for positive and realistic reforms, should constantly keep this in mind.

The way to escape the trap of bourgeois democracy, according to Lenin, "is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from 'talking' shops into working bodies." This is what the Commune did. In Marx's words, "The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time."

Today, in the US, or any another bourgeois democracy, the people have no idea how their government works. It takes an Edward Snowden or a Chelsea Manning to pull back just a part of the cover of secrecy, lies, and trickery that the government employs against the people to keep them ignorant and prevent them from finding out how everything is loaded to favor the 1% and to keep the masses down. And woe to anyone who pulls back that cover of secrecy: President and Congress, the courts and the military, the bourgeois party leaders and their supporters in the press are aligned to condemn and destroy all who expose the truth to the people. Real democracy cannot exist in ignorance and secrecy. 

Lenin puts it more succinctly: "Take any parliamentary country … the real business of 'state' is performed behind the scenes and is carried out by the departments, chancelleries and General Staffs. Parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the 'common people.' "

The elected representatives in the Commune not only enacted the laws but also were personally involved in putting them into practice. They were not "representatives" enacting laws and leaving it up to the executive to execute them.

They combined both functions within themselves and thus abolished "parliamentarism" as it is practiced in bourgeois "democracies." 

 Lenin says, "The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society institutions  in which freedom of opinion and discussion does not degenerate into deception,  for the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have themselves to test the results achieved in reality, and to account directly to their constituents." 

Lenin admits that it is "utopian" to believe that it is possible to eliminate the old state  bureaucracy over night, in one fell swoop. But he does believe that the Commune gave an example of what could be done. It began immediately to construct a new kind of state bureaucracy to replace the old one. The new one would gradually replace the functions of the old one and the old one would gradually go out of existence. For Lenin, the commencement of this change over "is the direct and immediate task of the revolutionary" forces."

Why do we need any state at all? Why not just abolish the bourgeois state by fiat and be done with it? Because, as Lenin puts it elsewhere, there is no Chinese Wall between the ideas and attitudes of working people and those, determined largely by the ruling class, of society at large. All sorts of backward notions (racism, jingoism, homophobia, sexism, etc.,) permeate bourgeois society and also the brains of working people who can only learn to correct these ruling class attitudes by practice and learning in the struggle for socialism. Just struggling for higher wages and benefits will not cut it.

If the workers are going to legislate and execute the laws of the new society they will have to learn how to manage and supervise the institutions of society without being subordinate to bourgeois rule. They cannot wait to be given a new education before taking political power. They have to learn by doing. Lenin says, "we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control and 'foremen and accountants.'" 

The class conscious vanguard will lead the way and in the replacement of the old state with the new the workers at large will learn from the experience of socialist construction that they can be their own foremen and accountants. [At least that was the plan. It was a good plan if the difficulties of execution presented by a hostile social environment (internally and externally) didn't doom it.]

4. The Organisation of National Unity

The Commune only lasted two months and did not have time to implement any long term program. The plan was, however, to have all of France organized into communes-- every city and village. These would then elect representatives who would be in the national commune in Paris. Marx supported this long term program because it would destroy all of the negative features of the bourgeois state, its special organs for the repression of the masses-- the courts , army, and police, as well as the state bureaucracy,  and have these functions carried out by the masses themselves via their representatives in the local and national communes-- popularly elected and subject to immediate recall if they did not perform as expected.

This aspect, popular mass democracy, has, Lenin says, been played down and avoided by the opportunist non-communist left-- i.e., the social democrats who have abandoned revolutionary Marxism. The prime example, cited by Lenin, of the top party person taking the capitalist road within the German socialist party was Eduard Bernstein with his 1899 book Evolutionary Socialism [ Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie ]. 

Bernstein rejects the view that the first step of a revolutionary government should be the creation of the sort of democratic communal organisation Marx ascribed to the Commune, but rather the creation of a federal type of constitution of the kind proposed by Proudhon which, Bernstein says, is really the type of revolutionary government Marx had in mind-- not one making such a clean sweep as proposed by the Commune.

Lenin thinks it "monstrous" for Bernstein to misrepresent Marx's views to such an extent and confuse his ideas with those of the anarchist Proudhon. "Marx was a centralist" not a federalist with respect to government. While it is true that Marx agreed with Proudhon, and Bakunin, in wanting to see the bourgeois state destroyed, he was not at all sympathetic with the anti-state rhetoric of the anarchists  and their views on 'federalism'.  Lenin says only petty bourgeois Anarchists could confuse Marx's views on the destruction of the capitalist state with the destruction of centralism.

Lenin asks, "will it not be centralism if the proletariat and the poorest peasants take the power of the state in their own hands, organize themselves freely into communes, and unite all the action of  the communes into striking at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, in the transfer of private property in railways, factories, land, and so forth, to the entire nation, to the whole of society?" This is the goal of any people's revolution, to unify a country to create "conscious, democratic, proletarian centralism" and destroy "bourgeois, military, bureaucratic centralism."

5. Destruction of the Parasite-State

What was the great lesson of the Commune? Lenin says that Marx understood it but the socialists (non Bolsheviks) of his day have either forgotten it or have abandoned it. "its true secret was this," Marx wrote in The Civil War in France: "It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour." You can talk about democracy all you like but true democracy (rule of the people) can only be brought about with the abolition of the appropriating class (the capitalists). Minimum programs are fine as long as that goal is never lost sight of or played down for opportunistic reasons. This is where the synthesis of State and Revolution and Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder begins.

The Utopians, according to Lenin, were busy inventing socialist forms of government,  the Anarchists rejected political forms, and the Opportunists stopped with bourgeois 

democracy with its congresses and parliaments: "they broke their foreheads praying before this idol."

The next chapter we will discuss is Chapter 4 (dealing with Engels).

This is a review of Chapter IV of Lenin's State and Revolution (1917, 1918). The chapter is entitled "Supplementary Explanations by Engels" and is divided into six parts. These parts build on Marx's definitive analysis of the Commune and are based on later observations made by Engels which Lenin discusses separately.

1. The Housing Question

This question deals with the provision of housing for all members of society. In reflecting on how the Commune dealt with this problem Engels explains how a working people's state differs from the bourgeois state on this issue. The capitalist state relies on "supply and demand" to take care of the housing problem and as a result some have no housing and others have greater housing resources than their needs.

Engels maintains that any large city already has the housing space necessary to solve any housing shortage-- if only it were used "rationally." Since "people before profits" is a motivational axiom of a people's (socialist) state the rational solution for such a state would be the expropriation of all housing space and its redistribution on the basis of need.  A bourgeois state would be incapable of such an action.

The worker's state would own the housing stock [and all other major instruments of labour] and, at least during the transition period to full socialism (i.e., communism) would set reasonable and fair rents. Thus Engels wrote that, "The actual taking possession of all instruments of labour by the working people therefore by no means excludes the retention of rent relations" (The Housing Question, 1872).

This contrasts with anarchist views (Proudhon) that suggest that the workers will become individual owners of capitalist housing stock rather than owning it as a class through their state (again, at least in the transitional period).  Free housing (housing without rent) will have to await the "withering away of the state." Marxism has always maintained that the abolition of classes and the abolition of the state are concurrent processes.

2. Polemic Against the Anarchists

The definitive position of Marx and Engels  on the state with respect to the anarchists, Lenin says, took place in 1873 in a series of articles published in the Italian press. Die Neue Zeit got around to publishing them in 1913. They are still relevant today.

Marx did not disagree with the anarchists (Proudhonists and others) about the need to abolish the state along with the abolition of classes. It was the timing that was at issue. The anarchists wanted to abolish the state practically overnight the day after the revolution, while Marx and Engels thought the state still had a role to play during the transition from capitalism to socialism and then to communism. Marx, according to Lenin, did not think "the workers should deny themselves the use of arms, the use of organized force, that is, the use of the state, for the purpose of 'breaking down the resistance of the bourgeoisie.'" The Communists and the Anarchists have the same aim-- but the Communists want the use of the state "for a while."

The problem of the transition is exceedingly difficult. The Soviets had the use of the state for over 70 years and yet were overthrown. The lessons of how they were able to last so long and how they were overthrown have yet to be learned.

Engels polemicized against the anarchists on the issue of their antiauthoritarianism. Engels used to give arguments such as can a ship's captain be authoritarian when the ship is in danger. Would you obey Sully Sullenberger  if he was your pilot and the airplane was in trouble? These are clearly examples of justified acts of authoritarian behavior. The anarchist response was that  these individuals were given "commissions" by the people not "authority." This led Engels to remark, "These people think that they can change a thing by changing its name." Unfortunately this name changing "magic" is still at work. Secretaries of War have become Secretaries of Defense, yet their job descriptions  have remained the same. Romani ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

Engels said that if the anarchists had been realistic about the need for authority to be given to specialists when in modern industry and production it was inevitably, within limits, needed it would have been possible for the Marxists and anarchists to work together but "they fight passionately against the word." Still in our own day we see political discussions degenerate into fights over words and the concepts at issue lost sight of.

The anarchists want to abolish authoritarianism as the first act of the revolution, Engels says and he asks "Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution?"  Fear, intimidation (terror if you like) and rifles, bayonets and canons are used to impose the will of one class on that of another. The Paris Commune would "not have lasted a day" if had not applied violence and force against the bourgeoisie. Those advocating the abolition of authoritarian measures the day after the revolution either don't know what they are talking about or are spreading confusion: "In either case they serve only the interests of reaction." Lenin says Engels used the experience of the "last revolution" (the Paris Commune) to arrive at his conclusions. That was a long time ago. Have the times changed?

3. Letter to Bebel

In March of 1875 Engels wrote a letter to the German Socialist leader August Bebel in which he criticized the German socialists political document known as the Gotha Program which had been adopted that same year at their founding congress. In this letter, Lenin says, one will find one of the most remarkable observations on the state ever made in any of the works of Marx or Engels. No serious Marxist can ignore it without running the risk of talking nonsense about the nature of the state and the road to take to socialism.

In any transition from capitalism to socialism it is unlikely that the capitalist class will fail to put up resistance to the assumption of power by the working classes. When the workers do come to power the bourgeois state will fall into their hands and they must immediately begin to reshape it to reflect the interests of the working people rather than the exploiters. As socialism grows this state will gradually wither away and while it is doing so it will have a transitional existence.

It must be remembered that the function of any state is to enforce class rule so that the abolition of the state is a function of the abolition of classes. The state does not exist to guarantee freedom but to repress one class in the interests of another. The government of the U.S., for example exists, on the one hand, for the purpose of repressing working people, national minorities, immigrants, women, racial and ethnic minorities, etc., in so far as the interest of these groups coincide with those of labor, and the other hand for enhancing and consolidating the power of the one percent (the leaders of industrial and financial capital, the big corporations, the military industrial complex, those whose income derives from privatization, etc.

Engels said that as long as the working people need to have a state "it needs it not in the interests of freedom, but for the purpose of crushing its antagonists; as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom, then the state, as such, ceases to exist."

Engels further suggests that the word "state" be replaced by the word "community" [Gemienwesen]. Lenin says that the Russian communists (the dreaded Bolshevik bugbears that some of our present day "progressives" appeal to Thomas Piketty to protect us from) are intent in learning from the works of Marx and Engels. Lenin prefers the French word "commune" to Gemienwesen (for technical linguistic reason we need not go into) and says Engels most important comment in his letter is, with reference to the 1871 French Commune: "The Commune was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word." This was because it did not exist to repress the majority of the people  for the benefit of a small minority who exploited them. Questions we can ask today are, Why did the Soviet state become stronger then became so weak it disappeared? Why does the state exist in China?

Here is not the place to try and answer questions such as these.

Bebel wrote back to Engels, who was living with Marx in London at the time, and expressed his agreement with the ideas expressed by Engels. But he must have had a relapse because in 1886 he wrote "The state must be transformed from one based on class domination into a people's state." But a state is an instrument of class domination! A state of the whole people is a Marxist oxymoron. The state must be replaced by a socialist commune.

4. Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme.

The Erfurt Programme was the official policy of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which was adopted at a congress of the party in 1891. Its main thesis was that there could be a peaceful transition to socialism, that capitalism would ultimately fall due to its own contradictions, and that the party should concentrate on trying to better the conditions of the workers here and now and eschew revolutionary activity. August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky were the three socialist leaders behind the program.

In 1891 Engels sent a letter to Kautsky criticizing this program. However, Engels views were not made public until twenty years later, in 1911 when the party theoretical journal, Die Neue Zeit, finally published it.

Lenin says that Engels makes three important statements about the nature of the state: "first, as regards a republic; second, as to the connection between the national question and the form of state; and third, as to local self government."

We must keep in mind that Engels was discussing conditions prevailing

in the German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the 1890s and that we are living in very different circumstances in the early 21st Century. I will  try, however, to see if any of Engels' or Lenin's views are à propos  today.

The first point that Engels makes it that talk of a peaceful transition under the German constitution is ridiculous. Germany had no republican tradition and the Riechstag was only a cover for an undemocratic dictatorial regime headed by the Kaiser. Lenin sides with Engels and holds that the Erfurt Programme was fundamentally opportunistic and not a real socialist program. Lenin says Engels said "just because of the absence of a republic and freedom in Germany, the dreams of a 'peaceful' path were perfectly absurd."

This argument would not apply to contemporary conditions even in Germany which, like the U.S. is a democratic republic. It is even more democratic than the U.S. since it is a parliamentary democracy with a ceremonial head of state and an executive directly responsible to the parliament as opposed to our presidential system which combines the powers of head of state with those of the executive power only indirectly responsible to the parliament (Congress) which has impeachment power.

Today citizens have a sense of personal freedom and the ability to participate in the government by means of elections and freedom of speech (however illusory this may be). I therefore conclude that this first reason for rejecting the Erfurt Programme would not be applicable today for the reasons given by Engels.

Engels in fact says that in a republic or other type of free country "one can conceive of a peaceful development towards Socialism." Lenin is skeptical about this but he was writing in a time of world war and social revolution and Engels in a time of relative peace.

But Engels is all for the democratic republic and does not think that the working class can come to power in any other form of government. He  writes "our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic." In fact he even equates "the dictatorship of the proletariat" with the "democratic republic" writing that the democratic republic "is the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat."  Those who reject the concept of the dictatorship of the working class, being innocent of dialectics, unwittingly are rejecting the democratic republic as well. The use of the term, however, is another matter.

To be clear, he is not saying a democratic republic is the dictatorship of the proletariat but that the dictatorship of the proletariat is one species of the genus democratic republic. Lenin points out that a democratic republic can arise under capitalism and this would advance the class struggle which would lead "to such an extension, development, unfolding and sharpening of that struggle that as soon as the possibility arises for satisfying the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses this possibility is realized inevitably and solely in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the guidance of the masses by the proletariat."  "Dictatorship" is not a term that goes over well in the US and there is no good reason to use it since, as the context of Lenin's quote reveals, it is equivalent to "the guidance of the masses" by the working class.

Lenin points out that Engels does not have a one size fits all view of the state and the stages of transition. Engels, according to Lenin, "tries to analyze  with the utmost care the transitional forms, in order to establish in accordance with the concrete historical peculiarities of each separate case, from what and to what the given transitional form is evolving." This is an important point to bare in mind with regard to differences between a unitary and a federal republic.

Engels thought that only the form of a unitary centralized republic was suitable for the use of the working class in a transition to socialism. But the US is not such a republic-- it is a federal republic. The difference is that each state or subdivision of a federal republic has its own government, legal system, and legislature and the federal government has two houses in its legislature-- one elected by the people based on population and the other representing the states making up the federation. The second house (in the US the Senate) is undemocratic in that a little state with a small population has the same voting power as a large state with millions of people. A unitary republic would have one house with representatives based on the population.

However, in 1891 Engels thought a federal republic was a necessity for the US due to its "gigantic territory." However, he noted, that in the more populous and developed Eastern states the federal republic was "already becoming a hindrance." It is even more of a hindrance today seeing how small and/or reactionary states can hinder the implementation of measures beneficial to the vast majority of the working people in the whole country. However, for the foreseeable future the class struggle in the US will be taking place in a federated republic along with agitation to strengthen the centralized powers of the federal government.

However, Engels does not believe in a centralized government that appoints the leadership of the local units. In this respect he lauds the American model and in general the model that exists in English speaking countries as Australia, Canada [and we might add, New Zealand] even though they have a federated structure. As Engels says,  the worker’s  party demands “Complete self-government for the provinces, districts, and local areas through officials elected by universal [male] suffrage. The abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.”

Engels in fact says that history shows that there is a greater amount of freedom and democracy under a centralized republic than under a federated one— as was shown by the example of the French Republic between 1792 and 1798. There is some confusion here as he lauds both the French Revolution (centralized) and the “American model”  (federated). The point is, however, the freedom people have to elect their local leadership from the grassroots up to the top and not have them foisted upon them by the state.

5. The 1891 Preface to Marx’s Civil War in France

This Preface was written in 1891 and presents Engels’ summing up of the lessons to be learned from the Paris Commune of 1871 as to the nature of the bourgeois state. Lenin suggests that it is “the last word of Marxism” on this issue. We should keep an open mind about whether or not this is really the last word and we have learned nothing about the nature of the state since 1891. We should also note that almost all of the arguments against Engels and Lenin on this issue are just warmed over updates of the criticisms leveled at them more than a hundred years ago. Many of the arguments about 21st century socialism have a whiff about them more suggestive of 1914 than 2014.

Engels points out that after every  revolution in France the working class was armed and that the first objective of every bourgeois government that came to power after a revolutionary move by the workers was to disarm the workers. Lenin says the “essence” of the relation of the working class to the state resides in the answer to the question “has the oppressed class arms?” Even in Lenin’s day this was a hot potato! He says, “It is just this essential thing which is most ignored both by professors under the influence of bourgeois ideology and by the petty-bourgeois democrats.” Well, here in the USA the NRA has the  ultra-right locked and loaded, but what about the oppressed class?

Engels also makes some comments about religion in this preface that Lenin wants us to think about. Neither Engels nor Lenin saw religion as a progressive force. It fills the heads of working people with all kinds of nonsense and idiocy. Engels refers to the slogan “Religion is a private matter” and warns the social democrats of his day that it is a ‘private matter” with regard to the state NOT with regard to the worker’s party. While many people who are religious have progressive attitudes religion in and of itself fosters an unscientific and superstitious approach to reality. Any Marxist party worthy of its name must “struggle against the religious opium which stupefies the people.” It is worth considering how much of this outlook is still relevant today, especially considering how religion is used by the ultra-right and the tea baggers to support their reactionary and crypto-fascist agenda.

Lenin now turns to Engels’ summing up of the lessons learned from the Commune twenty years after its downfall. Would that we had a summing up of the lessons to be learned from the downfall of  the Soviet Union from such a keen observer as Engels. Let’s see if his views holdup today.

Lesson One: the actually existing present day  state devised by the bourgeoisie to ensure its political dominance cannot be taken over by the working people and used to defend their interests. The Commune recognized this and in place of the bourgeois state instituted a new one based on the working class. Its two most fundamental characteristics were 1) all the positions were to be filled by elections (no appointed positions) and conditioned by the right of the workers to have instant recall of any elected person the minute the workers lost confidence and trust in his/her job performance; 2) all elected persons— from dog catcher to president were to be paid only the general average wages of the workers themselves.

Lesson Two: the struggle for democracy and the democratic rights of the people is inseparable from the struggle for Socialism. They are not two different stages but one concerted struggle. Lenin points out that Engels here approaches a “boundary” where “consistent democracy” becomes “transformed into Socialism” and where it “demands the introduction of Socialism.”

Thus, Lenin says, one of the basic functions involved in the struggle to bring about the social revolution is to “develop democracy to its logical conclusion, to find the forms for this development [and] to test them by practice.” A revolutionary party of advanced democracy that does not include Socialism in its platform is a contradictio in terminis.

Engels certainly would not be supportive of any view that idealized the state as a democratic institution just waiting to be put at the service of the working people as a result of free and fair elections. Electoral struggle is important as it can unify and educate the workers as to the true nature of the society and  the social system in which they find themselves. Nevertheless, “In reality,” Engels says, “the state is nothing more than a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and in deed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil, inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worse sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, at the earliest possible moment will have to lob off, until such a time as a new generation, reared under new and free social conditions, will be able to throw on the scrap-heap all this state rubbish.”

Lenin makes two final points based on this quote: 1) the fact that the state is an organ of ruling class oppression whether it is democratic or dictatorial (monarchical ) is not a matter of indifference to the working people (the Anarchist view)— the more freedom available in a democratic state makes the class struggle of the workers easier to conduct; 2) why a new generation will be required to finally junk the state entirely will be discussed in the next, and final, section of this chapter— to wit:

6. Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy

In 1894 Engels published some interesting remarks not the least of which was his view that the term “Social-Democrat” was unscientific when applied to the political views of Marx and himself. Engels had never used that term in his writings and used “Communist” instead. He and Marx did not write “The Social-Democratic Manifesto.”

Nevertheless, by the time Engels wrote this reflection the Social-Democratic Party of Germany was the world’s largest working class party and, although the name was “unsuitable” he allowed that it might “pass muster” since it now had a different referent than back in the day of Marx and his most creative activity (when it was used by Proudhonists and Lassalleans).

In any case for a party whose goal and raison d’être does not end with the establishment of Socialism but pushes on to the abolition of the state and democracy as well—i.e., that wants to establish Communism, the term “Social-Democrat” is technically incorrect. Be that as it may, it is hardly worth making a fuss over. Engels remarks, “The names of real political parties are never wholly appropriate; the party develops, while the name persists.” For 21st century Communists to desire to remove “Communist” from their party’s name might raise suspicions that they were developing backwards!

Anyway, Lenin says the party’s name is “incomparably less important” than the relation to the state that the revolutionary working class movement holds. Our real problem is that there is no revolutionary working class movement (to speak of) in the US or Europe right now (not considering the rest of the world) and the relation of the working people to the state is one of impotence and subservience— a relation which Communist parties and their allies must and are working to overcome.

It is important to understand why Engels says Communism overthrows democracy as well as the state. In order to gain this understanding Lenin says we must grasp the economic basis behind the “withering away of the state”. We will do this next when we analyze Chapter Five: “The Economic Base of the Withering Away of the State.”

Lenin: State and Revolution: Chapter 5 - Withering Away the State (Part One)

Thomas Riggins

Chapter 5 of State and Revolution  has a brief introduction and four sections. Lenin opens by telling us that Marx’s major discussion of the withering way of the state is to be found in his Critique of the Gotha Program. The Gotha Program was the founding document of the SPD in 1875. Although Marx wrote it in 1875, it was not published until 1891, eight years after his death.

1. Formulation of the Question by Marx

Lenin makes some very interesting comments in this section-- relevant to our understanding of socialism and the transition from capitalism in the twenty-first century. First, as opposed to those who maintained that Marx and Engels had different views on the nature of the state, i.e., that the Letter to Bebel and the Critique of the Gotha Program are incompatible, Lenin says that they were actually in complete agreement on the state. The two works dealt with different aspects of the state and it is only by misinterpreting these works that any so-called incompatibility arises. Engel's letter dealt with the issue of what the state is under capitalism and the incorrect notions held of its role after the socialist revolution. Marx was interested in discussing  the transition from socialism to communism. Marx was dealing with the evolution of communism. "The whole theory of Marx," Lenin says, is an application of the theory of evolution ... to modern capitalism." This raises a couple of interesting points. 

For instance, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) has been criticized for trying to apply the theory of evolution to modern capitalism and developing what came to be called "Social Darwinism" (although this term was not used to describe Spencer's views until the twentieth century).  Darwin's theory is based on "natural selection" as applied to biological organisms and Social Darwinism has been attacked for making a category mistake, applying language appropriate to one group of things (e.g., biological organisms) inappropriately to a different group of things (e.g., non-biological social institutions.)

This critique basically did in Spencerism and so, it would seem, Lenin's characterization of Marxism as the theory of evolution applied to modern capitalism should also be rejected. But Lenin did not, as Spenser did, use Darwinian terminology (natural selection, survival of the fittest - coined by Spenser) when he discussed evolution. He did not see Marxism as a subdivision of Darwinism. He used the term "evolution" in a more general sense to describe systematic changes in any type of organization such that any time 2 could be understood as a result of causative factors at work at time1 for any system biological or social. Darwinism and Marxism would both be species of the genus "evolution." The terminology of one could not be mechanically applied to the other, hence Lenin did not, while Spencer did, commit a category mistake.

So, what was the question formulated by Marx? Lenin said it was, "On the basis  of what data can the future evolution of future communism be considered?" Lenin's answer is most important as it contains (although not obviously) the seeds of understanding why the twentieth-century socialist experience has been partially set back and may be temporarily in stasis.  "On the basis of the fact," Lenin wrote, "that it has its origin in capitalism, that it is the result of an action of a social force to which capitalism has given birth."

Marx and Engels had no use for thinking up Utopias based on speculations about a future society. Unfortunately Lenin uses a biological analogy-- Marx is working like a biologist studying a new organism and explaining it in terms his knowledge of other organisms out of which it developed. This is an analogy, however, and not a category mistake.

Lenin also mentions that the concept of a "people's state" was being bandied about by the SPD leadership at this time. This notion was used to justify ideas about keeping the state around under socialism. Marx thought the notion of a "people's state" was ridiculous once one understood what the role of the state was historically and that it had no function to play after the establishment of socialism. Perhaps Khrushchev's views on the USSR as a "state of the whole people" put forth at the 22nd CPSU Congress can be better understood in light of these passages from Lenin. Subsequent events seem to suggest that the concept of "a state of the whole people" was indeed ridiculous considering the actual conditions in the Soviet Union at the time.

2. Transition from Capitalism to Communism

Given Capitalism, Marxists want to end up with Communism— its negation. Marx says there will have to be a long period of transition separating these two systems. What is the role of “democracy” during the transition? Lenin says we can have “more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic.”  But under capitalism the bourgeois democratic republic puts limits on the extent of democratic rights i.e., “democracy is always bound by the narrow framework of capitalist exploitation.” Only the rich fully enjoy democratic freedom while the majority of the population  have the illusion of freedom; it is Lenin says, almost the same as it was in Ancient Greece “freedom for the slave owners.”

Marx held that the workers (“wage-slaves”) are so crushed down by debt and poverty under capitalism that “democracy is nothing to them” and “politics is nothing to them.” Lenin gives examples from his day to back up Marx’s comments. Here are some examples from our own time. Well, there has been some advance in our consciousness since Marx wrote those words (1875). Many working people have become aware of the possibilities of using the limited democratic possibilities of the capitalist state to somewhat improve their conditions of servitude. But many are still in the condition that Marx described. In the US for instance, in midterm elections such as we have in 2014, traditionally only about 40% of the voters bother to cast ballots. 

The working people and their allies have the power in this year’s election to rout the ultra right and put in place less reactionary politicians under whom it is possible to make some gains for the majority in terms of economic and social rights. We will see how well socialists, progressives, and union activists  have succeeded in making the oppressed aware of their stake in elections by the percentage of voters who go to the polls and the extent of the possible rout. I should think we have to have a greater turn out than 40% or we are doing something wrong. [UPDATE 2016: The turn out was 36.8% the lowest in 70 years -- evidence that the center-left tactics are not working: will we learn from this or just muddle along?]

Lenin, following Marx and Engels, understands that wars, human exploitation, and poverty can never be ended until capitalism itself is ended. We have to fight for real democratic change, i.e., worker’s democracy, in order for this to happen. Thus Lenin maintains that the way forward is NOT to start here where we are and fight for “greater and greater democracy”— this is the delusion of “liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists” — the way forward is to fight to establish workers democracy [AKA the dictatorship of the proletariat; this particular choice of words can be debated: "worker's democracy" is a fine substitute as long as the concept is kept -- abolition of the bourgeoisie] which enacts laws that end the exploitation of working people and that deny to the capitalists democratic rights that they now presently enjoy which enable them to exploit other people. 

Lenin stresses the fact that the first REAL democracy, democracy for the poor and oppressed, democracy for the people, is also the restriction of democracy for the rich, the exploiters, the capitalists. Freedom for the 99% can be gained only by restraining the 1%. This is the only way, Lenin says, freedom can  be attained by the masses of people, by using force to destroy the power of the exploiter. This is just the way of the world. Lenin calls it “the modification of democracy during the transition period from capitalism to Communism.”  For those who are less concerned with words than the concepts behind them, the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” can be replaced by “modification of democracy,” or “worker’s democracy” without any change of meaning as long you are clear about  what Lenin thinks is the role of the state in the transition period. Once Communism is reached democracy will fade away along with the state structure itself since democracy is a concept relating to the form of a particular sort of state.

What Lenin means can be understood by examining the logic of a common progressive slogan in use today— i.e., “No Justice, No Peace.” People have an almost innate feeling for justice and fairness (although socially conditioned) and understand quite well when they are not being treated fairly. They will eventually fight back if the unfair treatment becomes too much for them. Since all class societies are based on the the ill treatment of the vast majority by a tiny minority a state is created which keeps the majority in check. Since there is no justice there are many incidences of no peace—  strikes, revolts, riots, uprisings, civil disobedience, rebellions, boycotts, civil wars, colonial wars, wars for economic dominance, demonstrations, marches, revolutions, etc. all of these are more or less calibrated to reflect the level of injustice being imposed by the ruling minority. 

A successful state must keep the majority in check and (with a few exceptions in small societies) “the greatest ferocity and savagery of suppression are required, seas of blood are required, through which mankind is marching in slavery, serfdom, and wage-labour.” With the establishment of socialism a transitional period ensues with a new kind of state, one representing the majority which puts down the exploiting majority and eliminates it as a class, enabling the creation of conditions of justice for all, and thus peace. The end of the transitional period ushers in Communism “which renders the state absolutely  unnecessary  for there is no one to be suppressed”— in the sense of a class trying to exploit others. There will of course be ornery individuals no matter what kind of society you have but they will be dealt with by the people themselves living in communal arrangements.

In the next part of this review we will deal with what Marx thought these two stages of post capitalist society would be like— without being Utopian Lenin says. We will resume with section 3 of chapter 5: “First Phase of Communist Society.”

Chapter 5 of State and Revolution  has a brief introduction and four sections. Part Two of this review covers section three. 

3. First Phase of Communist Society

To avoid confusion it must be pointed out that Marx speaks of two phases of "Communism"-- a lower and a higher. By convention the first or lower phase has become known as "Socialism" and the higher or advanced stage as "Communism"

proper. Except for direct quotations, I shall use the term "Socialism" to denote what Marx calls the first phase of Communism and "Communism" to refer to what Marx calls the second phase of Communism.

In this section Lenin presents  Marx's remarks on the misguided views of Ferdinand Lassalle, one of the early leaders of the German working class, some of whose opinions he thought pernicious. Specifically, he wanted to disprove Lassalle's view that workers living under Socialism would get "the full product of their labour."

The idea here was workers would not be exploited because under Socialism: “to each according to his work’’ meant if  I created $100 of social wealth that’s what society would give back as part of my disposable income. Not so, according to Marx. The Socialist state has to deduct from wages money to put aside as a “reserve fund” to make improvements in production and maintain infrastructure. It also needs to deduct money for a social consumption fund to pay for schools, hospitals, pensions, aid to people who are sick or can’t work, salaries for public employees,  etc. If each fund got $10 then for every $100 of social wealth I created I would get back $80 for my disposable income.

The state, just as the former capitalist, would be taking $20 of the surplus value I created. This accounts for the “social” in Socialism. The difference is the capitalists would not be taking the wealth I created and using it for themselves and living high on the hog while I just made do; the State would be using it to do things for me that I really need but could not provide for myself— medical services, rent subsidies, price controls so that food was cheap and available, the secret police to keep the capitalists from making a comeback, etc. 

In Marx’s words: “What we are dealing with here is not a Communist society which has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, one which is just emerging from capitalist society, and which therefore in all respects — economic, moral and intellectual — still bears the birthmarks from the old society from whose womb it sprung.” This is the lower phase, right after the revolution, of “Communism”, AKA “Socialism.” Socialism covers this whole first phase out of which the second phase true Communism will hopefully emerge. Unfortunately none of the revolutions of the 20th century succeeded in even establishing the first phase, let alone the second phase of this project— although some countries are still trying to figure out how to get the first phase going.

Now, Lassalle thought that there must be a “just distribution” of the social wealth under Socialism— “the equal right of each to an equal product of labour.” There would be no inequality under Socialism (and nothing for Piketty and others to complain about). Marx is interested in this idea of “equal right.”  He agrees that we have in Socialism “equal rights” but we must understand that “rights” presuppose inequality.  I can demand the right to vote only if I don’t have it. What is the point of demanding what I have?

To demand a “right” is to demand equal standards be applied to all people and people are not really all equal to one another.  In the real world some are smarter, some are richer, some are better educated, some are stronger, etc. In the words of Blake:

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night. (Auguries of Innocence)

Socialism wants to change these morns and nights, but only Communism will bring sweet delight. Marx says we are still haunted by the bourgeois order when we demand rights because rights are under the regime of “bourgeois right.”  As a good dialectician Marx says that equal rights violates the concept of equality and is actually a form of injustice. Lassalle is wrong and under Socialism justice demands “unequal rights.” Huh?

Suppose under Socialism we get equal pay for equal work. Laura and Judy both get paid the same. Laura is single and saves up some of her pay so she has money to go on trips or to buy extra goodies. Judy is a single mother of two and can’t save up money for trips and extra goodies as three people have to live on her pay. Equal pay results in an unequal outcome. This is the regime of from each according to his/her ability to each according to his/her work. 

While there is no capitalist exploitation of human beings (private property in the means of production having been abolished) Lenin nevertheless points out that Socialism “still cannot produce justice and equality.”  This is because under Socialism distribution is governed by  “work performed.”  Real “justice” and “equality” must await the second or higher form of the transition— Communism where distribution will be governed by need.

 “No justice, no peace” is therefore really a temporary slogan limited to the capitalist era since, while under Socialism there is still “no justice” ( in an absolute sense) there is nevertheless peace because “bourgeois right” is completely enforced and people understand that they are working together to achieve a future Communist society in which the bourgeois notions of justice and equality will have no meaning.

In the words of Marx: “These defects are unavoidable in the first phase of Communist society [Socialism], when after long travail, it first emerges from capitalist society. Justice can never rise superior to the economic conditions of society and the cultural development conditioned by them.” Critics of the 20th century failures and successes of the Socialist revolutions and their successor states still pursuing their goals in the 21st should be mindful of this insight given by Marx.

Lenin points out that Marx was aware (not being a Utopian) that with the initial overthrow of capitalism and the beginning of Socialism the only standard of fairness and the sense of what is “right” is what was learned under the old system— “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”, “equal pay for equal work,” “a living wage,” etc. “Bourgeois right” is the only standard they will initially have and “a form of state will be necessary, which while maintaining public ownership of the means of production, would preserve the equality of labour and equality in the distribution of products.” 

The Socialist state, even as it sets in motion its own withering away, functions at this level to protect bourgeois right and enforces actual inequality. Even under Socialism we understand a better world is possible and that world is explained in the last section of Chapter 5: “Higher Phase of Communist Society.”

This will be discussed in part 3 of our review of Chapter 5 of State and Revolution.

Chapter 5 of State and Revolution  has a brief introduction and four sections. Part Three of this review covers section four. 

4. Higher Phase of Communist Society

This is a very important section and should dispel many incorrect notions about the nature of socialism, the level of development towards communism in the former and current socialist states, and the possibility of creating any kind of society that brings freedom and justice to humanity as long as capitalism exists and a state is necessary to regulate social life.

This section is an extended commentary by Lenin on the following quote from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme: “In the higher phase of Communist society, when the enslaving subordination of individuals in the division of labour has disappeared, and with it also the antagonism between mental and physical labour; when labour has become not only a means of living, but itself the first necessity of life; when, along with the all-round development of individuals, the productive forces too have grown, and all the springs of social wealth are flowing more freely— it is only at that stage that it will be possible to pass completely beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois rights, and for society to inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”

Lenin says that in light of this quote we can understand why Engels mocked those who conjoined the notions of “freedom” and “state.” Lenin frankly remarks that: “While the state exists there is no freedom.” There can only be relative degrees of repression. 

Today we are faced with the issue of increasing inequality between the citizens in the various states that presently exist on the world stage.  A recent book by Thomas Piketty (Capital in the 21st Century) has brought this issue to the forefront of political discussion. But nowhere in his discussion  does he deal with one of the major causes of social inequality. This is, Lenin points out “the antagonism between mental and physical labour” which is “one of the principal sources of modern SOCIAL inequality.” 

Under capitalism, as a matter of fact, inequality can never be eliminated. Some will always be “more equal than others.” This is because under capitalism the division of labor cannot be abolished. Nor can it be removed simply by eliminating the capitalists. It is “impossible to remove immediately by the mere conversion of the means of production into public property, by the mere expropriation of the capitalists.”  No one should be surprised  that social inequality existed in the former socialist states and still exists in countries today calling themselves socialist.

These states only provided or still provide the foundations for the possible future social conditions whereby this division could be eliminated. The development of industrial technique must attain a level where a super abundance of social wealth will be available for social distribution and universal education will eliminate the separation between physical and mental labor and the inequality that it breeds. Capitalism retards this growth in technique but the elimination of capitalism presents the possibility for its growth. 

How this future possibility will eventually present itself and exactly when such industrial growth will ever become so developed that all human beings can equally share in its benefits, Lenin informs us “we do not and cannot know.” But we do know there will be no “withering away of the state” before this time comes. One of the points of this  for us is that all criticism of socialist states, past and present, for not bringing about some sort of equalitarian worker’s paradise is based on ignorance of the actual social realities the founders of Marxism discussed  concerning the prospects of a future communist society.

Lenin points out that those bourgeois critics of socialism who sneer at its claims of liberation and label as Utopian dreams the ideals of a society of complete social equality in which people create social wealth according to their abilities and share it according to needs only display “their ignorance and their-self seeking defense of capitalism.”

Lenin calls them ignorant because while this highest stage of Communism has been discussed  by the founders of Marxism as a theoretical possibility “it has never entered the head of any Socialist to ‘promise’ that the highest phase of Communism will arrive.” This phase would require people quite unlike the common run of humanity today— people raised and educated to share and live lives of unselfish devotion to their common humanity as well as developing their individual

talents and abilities with no desires to do so at the expense of other human beings. They would be living in a society capable of producing and sharing social wealth unlike any society of the past or present. Foreseeing this possibility is not the same as “promising” it will ever come about but it is a possible future to keep in mind and for which we can strive.

Until that day comes, when the state as we know it has “withered away,” Lenin says that “Socialists demand the strictest control, by society and by the state, of the quantity of labour and the quantity of consumption.” But this control has to begin not in the present society but with the overthrow of capitalism and the capitalist state— “a state of bureaucrats”— and its replacement by “a state of armed workers” (the Second Amendment will have some use after all).

Lenin has in mind soviets of  workers and soldiers as they appeared in Russia in 1905 and 1917. He thought of these soviets as models of real democracy (and by a dialectical inversion as a “democratic dictatorship”— a term which confounds many socialists today who have forgotten what is “dialectical” in dialectical materialism).

This new post capitalist state will turn all the citizens into workers of one gigantic syndicate or monopoly — “the whole state” — controlled and governed by the workers themselves by means of the soviets. The reality, however, turned out differently from Lenin’s ideas expressed here in chapter five. No actually existing socialist state was ever capable of existing as a state based on the “armed workers” and they all ended up with professional standing armies and administered  by bureaucrats. 

These states were handicapped by developing in industrial backwards, or devastated, areas and were never able to create enough social wealth to advance beyond the most rudimentary socialist beginnings  even though they brought about giant leaps forward in education, economic and social well being, literacy, and health to the populations living in them. The surviving socialist states are still grappling with many of these problems while simultaneously furthering the well being of their citizens.

Lenin wants to be clear on the scientific difference between Socialism and Communism. Socialism is the first and lower phase of Communism-- but it is not full Communism. Socialism has succeeded in turning the means of production, formerly owned and controlled by capitalists, into socially owned public property. This is technically "Communism" but it is not completely evolved mature Communism, hence this lower phase is best dubbed Socialism and the term "Communism" reserved for the more advanced and higher phase into which Socialism will hopefully evolve. 

Marx, basing himself on materialist dialectics, sees Communism evolving out of capitalism via Socialism. The Socialist stage still has many capitalists "taints" associated with it and retains, in Marx's words, "the narrow horizon of bourgeois rights." Bourgeois rights still predominate in the creation and distribution of wealth-- goods and services are dished out, in the main, to each according to his/her work. 

There must still be a state apparatus to ensure that rights are preserved and recognized. In the beginning of the establishment of Socialism then the new state will be charged with defending bourgeois rights-- it will be, in fact, a bourgeois state administered by workers. Lenin puts it this way, "for a certain time not only bourgeois rights but even the bourgeois state remains under Communism [i.e., the first phase--tr], without the bourgeoisie!" Capitalism without the capitalists!-- or least without them in control. There are "socialist" countries today still evolving along these lines.   

Lenin says this view of a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie may look like a paradox but Marx held that it was inevitable “in a society issuing from the womb of capitalism.” Nevertheless, democracy is absolutely necessary for the working class but it is only a stage along the road from feudalism to capitalism and on to Communism.

Democracy is seen by the workers as leading to equality and ''equality'' is “a useful slogan” as long as we remember that we mean by it “the abolition of classes.” But we get only formal not real equality under democracy. We get real equality only under Communism when distribution is ruled by needs not work. 

Lenin admits that“we do not and cannot know” how Socialism will transform itself into this future higher state but it will come after the workers have smashed to bits the current form of the bourgeois state and substituted a higher form of state (still a state) based on a people’s militia of “universal participation.”  [Bill of Rights Socialism based on the Second Amendment ?]

 At this stage quantitative changes will lead to qualitative changes. By this Lenin means that the vast numbers of the formerly oppressed are now directly involved in ruling and administering the economy and the state and this changes the way democracy functions— no longer a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the people but a tool used by the people to take charge of their own lives. The recent midterm elections in the United States, giving control of the Senate to the right wing reactionary Republican party, serves as a reminder of how democracy serves as a tool of the bourgeoisie (not that a Democractic victory would have changed this relationship but it would have appeared less sharply). 

All this depends on the advanced stage that capitalism has reached where universal literacy has been attained (“already realised in most of the advanced capitalist countries”) and the workers and been “trained” in how to operate the vast

complexities of the capitalist industries and factories already “socialised” put presently still owned by the capitalist class. The specialized workers—i.e., trained economists, agronomists, scientists and engineers will, Lenin says, work “even better” for the workers than for the capitalists. 

 I am not so sure how the “specialists” would have reacted to getting “equal” pay with the workers under the new system as Lenin says everyone will be a state employee all of whom will “do their share of work” and “should receive equal pay.”  It is moot anyway as this program never got off the ground as it required revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries to succeed as well as what was going on in Russia. I don’t think Lenin, at this time, thought the Russian Revolution was going to be left high and dry on its own.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what he thought the first stage, the socialist stage, would be like after the revolution. The new socialist state would convert the capitalists into employees and the workers themselves would run all the economic institutions in the state— everyone would be a state employee. The result of this would be that: “The whole of society will have become one office and one factory, with equal work and equal pay.” If this is the practical realistic outlook for the lower stage, the socialist stage, of Communism it is just as well the founders did not engage in “Utopian speculations” concerning what the “higher stage” would be like.

Lenin says that this lower stage of “‘factory’ discipline” is not the ideal goal of the revolution but a necessary foothold to overcome “all the hideousness and foulness of capitalist exploitation in order to advance further.”  Once this first stage has been achieved and the human collective of the new order has learned to work and share without the selfishness, greed, and alienation from its humanity that capitalism fosters and practicing human decency has become a habit, then and only then will it be possible to begin to transition to the higher stage of Communism and the withering away of the state and our motto can truly be Novus ordo seclorum.

Coming up: the sixth and last chapter of State and Revolution—“Vulgarisation of Marx by the Opportunists” ( plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)

 This chapter is a polemic against the "best known theoreticians of Marxism" namely Georgi Plekhanov (1856-1918) and  Karl Kautsky (1857-1938) who were the leading thinkers of the Second International (1888-1914). Basically it is against Kautsky  (13 pages)-- Plekhanov gets 1 page. Lenin thinks the collapse of the Second International was brought about by opportunism (abandoning the long term goals of the party for short term advantages) which was fostered by the evasion of discussion on the relation of the state to the social revolution and vice versa. This "evasion" has persisted to the present day. The well known A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Second Edition) edited by Tom Bottomore, for example, has no entry on "opportunism" and does not even list it in the index. The entry on The State and Revolution does not even mention it.

The chapter is divided into three sections: a short one contra Plekhanov and two long ones dealing with Kautsky. This article will deal with the first two sections.

1. Plekhanov's Polemic Against the Anarchists

This section deals with Lenin’s critique of Plekhanov’s 1894 work Anarchism and Socialism.  Lenin says in this work Plekhanov doesn’t even mention the most important issue between these two ‘isms’ — namely the nature of the state and the revolution’s relations to it. The work has two parts: the first, or historical part, Lenin approves of because it has useful information for the history of ideas, especially regarding Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) and Max Stirner (1806-1856). The second, or “literary” part Lenin calls “philistine.” This part is a “clumsy” attempt to equate anarchists with “bandits.”

After the Paris Commune the anarchists had tried to claim that the commune and its history was a vindication of their views. Lenin of course rejects this claim and maintains that the true understanding of the meaning of the Commune is to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels, especially Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme.

Neither the Anarchists, nor Plekhanov in his polemic, have grasped the main issue presented by the history of the Paris Commune i.e., “must the old state machinery be shattered, and what shall be put in its place.”

By completely ignoring this issue Plekhanov, whether he knows it or not, has fallen into opportunism because opportunists want us to forget all about this question and not even discuss it all. It would seem that opportunism flourishes best where the working people are ignorant of Marxist theory and concentrate exclusively on short term goals and struggles.

2. Kautsky’s Polemic Against the Opportunists

Lenin says the most important German opportunist was Bernstein whom Kautsky criticized in his first foray against opportunism: Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm. Bernstein had charged Marxism with “Blanquism” [ Louis Auguste Blanqui, 1805-1881- advocated a coup by a small group who would then turn the government over to the people after they had instated socialism] in his great revisionist opus Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus. Bernstein particularly likes Marx’s conclusion (based on his study of the Paris Commune) that “the working class cannot lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it to its own purposes.” But he has his own interpretation of the meaning of Marx’s dictum which is exactly the opposite of what Marx intended.

Marx meant, according to Lenin (following Engels), that the working class had to destroy the bourgeois state and replace it with a working class state. Bernstein says it means that the working class should cool it after the revolution and try and reform the state rather than getting carried away and trying to smash it. “A crasser and uglier perversion of Marx’s ideas cannot be imagined,” Lenin says.

So, how did Kautsky deal with this crass opportunistic formulation in his critique of Bernstein?   He glosses over it. Kautsky writes: “The solution of the problem of the proletarian dictatorship we can safely leave to the future.” Lenin says the since opportunists want to defer to the future all talk about a working class revolution this is not a real critique of Bernstein but “ a concession to him.” 

Kautsky himself is thus an opportunist and, Lenin points out, as regards Marx’s understanding of how the workers should be educated with respect to a working class revolution and Kautsky’s understanding “there is an abyss.”

In 1902 Kautsky wrote a more mature work, The Social Revolution. Lenin says there is a lot of valuable information in this work but the author still evaded the vital question of the state. Again, Kautsky ends up giving de facto support to the opportunists because he writes about the possibility of the working class taking state power without abolishing the currently existing state. This view, which derives from The Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx had declared “obsolete” in 1872.

Kautsky writes about democracy and that the working class will come to power and “realise the democratic programme” but he never mentions the lessons of the Paris Commune and the conclusions  Marx and Engels drew from them that bourgeois democracy had to be replaced by working class democracy.

Here is a quote from Kautsky: “It is obvious that we shall not attain power under the present order of things. Revolution itself presupposes a prolonged and far-reaching struggle which, as it proceeds, will change our present political and social 

structure.” While this is even too much for some present day “socialists” to stomach, Lenin thought it was as banal and obvious as “horses eat oats.” Lenin wanted this “far reaching struggle” spelled out so that working people would understand the difference between a working class revolution and the non working class revolutions of the past.

Kautsky wars against opportunism in words, Lenin says, but actually promotes it in the way he expresses himself. Here

is an example from The Social Revolution: “In a Socialist society there can exist side by side, the most varied forms of economic enterprises — bureaucratic trade union, trade union, co-operative, private…. There are, for instance, such enterprises that cannot do without a bureaucratic organization: such are the railways. Here democratic organisation might take the following form: the workers elect delegates, who form something in the nature of a parliament, and this parliament determines the conditions of work, and superintends the management of the bureaucratic apparatus. Other enterprises may be transferred to the labour unions, and still others may be organized on a co-operative basis.” Lenin says this quote is not only wrong headed but is a backward step from the ideas Marx and Engels elaborated in the 1870s as a result of their study of the Paris Commune. 

Of course modern industrial production in general, not just railroads, needs to be conducted under rigid work rules and regulation but after the workers come to power they won’t be organized on bureaucratic lines overseen by “something like” the old bourgeois parliaments. There will no bureaucrats as such. The workers will directly control their industries and delegates will be subject to instant recall, no one will earn more than ordinary workers, and the old state will be replaced by a new worker’s state where everyone will gain experience in administration and planning so that “bureaucrats” in the sense used by Kautsky will no longer exist. Kautsky has not paid attention to the words of Marx: “The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.”

Lenin next takes up Kautsky”s short work The Road to Power [ Der Weg zu Macht ]. Lenin thinks this is the best of Kautsky's writings against opportunism, yet it too is found wanting and for the same reason "it completely dodges the question of the state." It is this constant dodging that Lenin thinks weakened the German Social Democrats theoretically, led to the growth of opportunism, and ultimately to the great betrayal of socialist principles: the support of the German imperialists in the Great War.  These three short works of Kautsky came out in 1899, 1902, and 1909 respectively but it was not until 1912 that Kautsky's opportunism became explicitly expressed. We will deal with this in the next and (por fin) last installment of this review, Kautsky's polemic against Pannekoek.

3. Kautsky's Polemic Against Pannekoek

The Pannekoek in question was Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) a Dutch Marxist who in later life became one of the leaders of "Council Communism" a tendency which developed out of the "Left Wing Communism" considered by Lenin to be an infantile disorder.  However, long before this, in 1912, he published an article in Neue Zeit  called "Mass Action and Revolution."  In this article he criticized Karl Kautsky's views on the nature of the state in relation to the coming revolution. He pointed out that workers have to overthrow both the ruling class and their state. "The struggle will not end until, as its final result, the entire state organization is destroyed."

Lenin says Pannekoek's article has defects, is imprecise, and not very concrete  but is clear enough in advocating both the overthrow of the ruling class and the state that it controls replacing it with a working class state. But Lenin is really interested in Kautsky's reply which, he says, betrays Marxism on this issue -- i.e., the fate of the bourgeois state.

Kautsky wrote: "Up till now the difference between Social Democrats and Anarchists has consisted in this: the former wished to conquer the state power while the latter wished to destroy it. Pannekoek wants to do both." Lenin says this distinction is a vulgar distortion of Marxism. Lenin was not always very subtle in his critiques.

Pannekoek is the one who is correct, not Kautsky and for the following three reasons which differentiate Marxists (M) from Anarchists (A):

1. M- the state withers away after the revolution and the creation of Socialism: A- the   

    state is abolished immediately and permanently after the revolution .

2. M- the state that withers away is the new form of the state. based on the Paris   

    Commune, which the workers create after the revolution to replace the bourgeois 

    state: A- the old state is abolished and nothing is put in its place to direct and

    channel the newly won power of the working class-- the dictatorship of the

    proletariat (the necessary first form of worker's power after the fall of the working  

    class) is rejected.

3. M- use the currently existing state (as far as is possible) to educate and train the 

    working people for revolutionary activity: A- reject this notion.

Lenin also objects to Kautsky’s taking quotes out of context from Marx and using them against Pannekoek when they are not at all germane to the argument (a fate all too soon to befall quotes from Lenin himself).

Kautsky talks about the party being in opposition to the capitalist state now and wants to put off discussions about the nature of the state until after the workers come to power. He doesn’t want to talk about the nature of the revolution— which is one of the main features of opportunism.

It’'s all well and good to make general comments about opposition and democratic struggle but we must always be clear about how this struggle must eventuate.  “A revolution must not consist in a new class ruling, governing with the help of the old state machinery, but in this class smashing this machinery and ruling, governing by means of new machinery.”

Kautsky ignores this because he maintains there must be officials and experts just as much after the change of power as before. Lenin agrees but insists, based on the lessons of the Commune, that the officials and experts will be under the direction of the working class and not be responsible to the bureaucratic structures of the old capitalist state which is kept around and is supposedly supervised by the working class.

Capitalism has enslaved the working people and bourgeois democracy, which we may now live under, is, Lenin says, crushed and mutilated by the wages system, poverty and “the misery of the masses.” This fake mutilated pseudo-democracy is the reason why, in our day the Tea Party has such influence and the Republican party can take control of the levers of power in the US.  And, Lenin says, it is the source of corruption in the political parties and the trade unions, and fuels the tendency for the “leaders” of the people to turn into bureaucrats— “i.e., privileged persons detached from the masses, and standing above the masses.” This is just the nature of democracy under capitalism and until capitalism is overthrown even the leaders of the working people “will inevitably be to some extent ‘bureaucratized.’” 

In attacking Pannekoek, Lenin says, Kautsky is only repeating the views of Bernstein (“the ‘old’ views”) as expressed in Evolutionary Socialism. Bernstein had rejected many of Marx’'s positions concerning workers democracy versus bourgeois democracy on the idea that after 70 years or so “in complete freedom” the British union movement had given up on the idea  as “worthless” and had settled on a model based on bureaucracy  and regular parliamentary practice. 

As against this Bernstein-Kautsky assertion Lenin says it is not the case that the British unions have developed “in complete freedom,” but they had rather developed in an atmosphere of “complete capitalist enslavement.”  Of course, in such an atmosphere, it made no sense to try to create a working class democracy  along Marxist lines that had presumed a post- revolutionary environment in which the working class was the new ruling class.

The two great errors we must avoid are: First, thinking we have to just take over the presently existing state machinery by means democratic elections or parliamentary procedures and then employe it to build socialism, and Second, to take the Anarchist position of just smashing the presently existing state and then letting the working people decide what happens next (i.e., no pre-planning for a temporary worker’s state until conditions of socialism are firmly established.)

The Anarchist view is not really taken very seriously within the working class, but Kautsky’s view (or some modern day descendent ) still has its supposititious appeal. Lenin quotes Kautsky: “never, under any conditions can it [a working class victory] lead to the destruction of the state power; it can lead only to a certain shifting of forces within the state power....

 The aim of our political struggle then, remains as before, the conquest of state power by means of gaining a majority in parliament and a conversion of parliament into the master of the government.”''

Lenin says this is an example of “vulgar opportunism” i.e., of abandoning the principles of  Marxism and the real long term interests of the working people and tailoring your program to take ephemeral advantages of historically temporary social and economic conditions. It is a confusion between strategy  [the what, the goal, the end result, socialism] and tactics [the how, what must be done, the present step in the democratic struggle]. 

Of course in the present day and in the non revolutionary conditions temporally instantiated in the US and most of Europe there is no sense in calling for the destruction of bourgeois democracy, of coining a lot of "revolutionary" slogans about the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalists by the armed workers, etc.  "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

Our current struggle is to defeat the ultra-right politically and work with progressive groups and others to build a meaningful coalition of forces able to protect already existing democratic rights and to extend them, and fight for new ones, for the benefit of the working people and their allies.

Nevertheless, in the realm of theory we should not forget the ultimate destiny of the capitalist system and become so blinded by the present transient stage in history that we become as those "socialists," condemned by Lenin, who rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat in theory because it "contradicted" democracy. Lenin thought that ridiculous; it contradicted only the pseudo-democracy used by the ruling class to befool the workers, and of those so-called "socialists," he said there "is really no essential difference between them and the petty-bourgeois democrats."  This may have no sting today, but it may in the nearer than we think future.

State and Revolution ends here and chapter seven, the last ("Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917") was never written. The October Revolution broke out and Lenin wrote: "It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it."

I hope people will find this commentary useful.

New York, January 31, 2015