London Marxism Reading Group

Welcome back all! This is the third and final in our three-part series of readings of The State and Revolution, written by Bolshevik leader Vladimir Illyich Lenin in 1916, on the eve of the October Revolution which overthrew the centuries-old Romanov dynasty and established the world's first socialist state in the former Russian Empire.

With this text, Lenin discusses the political role of violence, the nature of state bureaucracies, security forces and intelligence functions, the ideological work ruling classes perform to blunt the revolutionary edge of anti-state thinkers, and the tension between a communist's goal of doing away with states altogether while also defending her revolution from counterrevolutionaries, among much else.

For this first meeting, we'll be covering chapters 5, 6 and the Postscript. These are Chapter V: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State and Chapter VI: The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists.

As ever, find it here:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

The State and Revolution: The Marxist Doctrine of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in Revolution is perhaps the most timeless of Lenin's three most significant works. Drawing on what Marx had written during his lifetime, mostly by way of his all-important case-study on the Paris Commune of 1871 and Engels' writing on the German peasant uprisings, Lenin made it possible for generations hence to see Marx (when his own revolutionary political work had long been eclipsed by his death) as a genuinely political, not merely economistic or sociological, visionary. By developing a Marxist theory of the state and putting elements of it very much into practice, Lenin beat an intellectual path for future exploration of the theme by thinkers such as Althusser, Poulantzas and Therborn, to say nothing of the practical inspiration it provided to revolutionaries across time and the world.

For background:

According to the Marxologist David McLellan, "the book had its origin in Lenin's argument with Bukharin in the summer of 1916 over the existence of the state after a proletarian revolution. Bukharin had emphasised the 'withering' aspect, whereas Lenin insisted on the necessity of the state machinery to expropriate the expropriators. In fact, it was Lenin who changed his mind, and many of the ideas of State and Revolution, composed in the summer of 1917 – particularly the anti-statist theme – were those of Bukharin".

Citing Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Lenin investigates theoretical questions about the existence of the State after the proletarian revolution, addressing the arguments of anti-authoritarians, anarchists, social democrats, and reformists, in describing the progressive stages of societal change—the revolution, establishing “the lower stage of communist society” (the socialist commune), and the “higher stage of communist society” that will yield a stable society where personal freedom might be fully expressed.

Lenin describes the inherent nature of the State as a tool for class oppression, the creation of a social class's desire to control the other social classes when politico-economic disputes cannot otherwise be peacefully resolved; whether a dictatorship or a democracy, the State remains the social-control means of the ruling class. Even in a democratic capitalist republic, the ruling class never relinquish political power, maintaining it via the “behind-the-scenes” control of universal suffrage—an excellent deception that maintains the idealistic concepts of “freedom and democracy”; hence, communist revolution is the sole remedy for such demagogy:

• The anarchists propose the State's immediate abolishment; Lenin counter-proposes that such idealism is pragmatically impossible, because the proletariat would need to crush the bourgeois resistance through a mechanism, and that is the state.
• Were the State immediately abolished, without the “conditions leading to the arising of the State” being abolished as well, a new State would appear, and the socialist revolution would have been for naught.

In the event, the proletariat through the dictatorship of the proletariat would establish a communal State (per the 1871 Paris Commune model), then gradually suppress the dissenting bourgeoisie, in achieving the withering away of the State as its institutions begin to “lose their political character”.

Thus, following Marx's conclusions on the Paris Commune, which Lenin took as his model, Lenin declared that the task of the Revolution was to smash the State. Although for a period under communism, "there remains for a time not only bourgeois right but even the bourgeois State without the bourgeoisie," Lenin believed that after a successful proletarian revolution the state had not only begun to wither, but was in an advanced condition of decomposition ... There was a strong emphasis on the dictatorship of the proletariat: "A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 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 is to be tested."

Take care and happy reading - see you there comrades!