Lenin, shortly after
the Revolution
The State
This part of our course on “The State and Revolution”
comprises Lenin’s lecture, “The State” (download linked below).
This lecture was given in July, 1919, two years after the writing of “The State
and Revolution”, and less than two years after the Great October 1917
revolution. It can help us to revise quickly the main considerations of the
State and what that thing really is, as a partial preparation for study of the
earlier work, which ranges much wider.
In “Bourgeois and Proletarians”,
the first section of the Communist Manifesto,
Karl Marx wrote:
“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
In other words: The modern State is the executive committee
of the ruling bourgeois class, of which there is not, and cannot be, any other
such ruling executive committee or totalising authority.
The State manifests itself in many ways. Not only is it
Legislature, Executive and Judiciary, but it also includes the “Special Bodies
of Armed Men” (police, intelligence and military), the “sovereign document” of
the Constitution, the State Owned Enterprises, and “Delivery” departments like
Education, Health, Public Works; and others.
Concerning the state, in his speech to the COSATU Central
Committee on 28 July 2011, SACP General Secretary Dr Blade Nzimande said:
“There is a distinction but very close
relationship between ‘government’ and the ‘state’. Government represents the
highest most concentration of the power of the state, but government does not
constitute the entirety of the state. The state is made up of its executive arm
(Cabinet and the bureaucracy), the legislature(s) and the judiciary, as well as
other organs of state. As to who the executive arm of the state and the
composition of parliament is largely determined through electoral means, but
the totality of the character and nature of the state is not principally
determined by elections, but instead by the balance of class forces in broader
society. It is therefore possible, as I will illustrate later in the speech,
that a particular party can win elections, but at the same time its views and
interests not be the dominant ones in the state. In 1994 we inherited an
apartheid state apparatus, that we have not smashed entirely, and key
components of the apartheid state still reflects itself in the bureaucracy, the
judiciary and in various other areas of the state, not least the ideological
orientation of the state organs.”
As communists we hold fast to the concept of the State as
the instrument of class power that enforces and perpetuates bourgeois class
dictatorship in our country. We do not believe that the State is neutral, or
above class struggle. The State is the principal instrument of class struggle
on behalf of the ruling bourgeois class.
We intend that there should as soon as possible be no class
division and therefore that the State as we know it would become redundant and
give way to social self-management, or in other words, to communism – true
freedom.
Yet the term “State” is nowadays used in other, less strict
senses, and we as political people who must communicate with others, do also
use the word in other senses than the above. For example, we sometimes use the
phrase “Developmental State”, which even if we ourselves would qualify its
meaning, is nevertheless widely understood as meaning a State that is equally
beneficial to all classes (i.e. is a “win-win”, or classless, or neutral
state).
We are fortunate to have the lecture that Lenin [pictured]
gave to students in Moscow in 1919 on this topic, wherein Lenin asks “what
is the state, how did it arise and fundamentally what attitude to the state
should be displayed by the party of the working class, which is fighting for
the complete overthrow of capitalism - the Communist Party?”
Lenin
referred his audience to Engels’ “Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State”. This book of Engels’ sweeps through
the whole human story and explains the fall of the women, as well as class
struggle and the state. We will take it as our next part, and then, for the fuller treatment from Lenin, there is
the extraordinary work that he produced between the two Russian revolutions of
February and October, 1917: “The State and Revolution”,
Chapter 1 of which will be our fourth part.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Lecture on The State, 1919,
Lenin.
