State
and Revolution, Part 4
Class Society and the State
V I Lenin
wrote "The State and Revolution" between the February 1917
bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia, and the October 1917
proletarian revolution. The October Revolution dramatically interrupted his
writing, leaving the work unfinished. [Picture: Lenin in 1917]
SACP 1st
Deputy General Secretary Jeremy Cronin once remarked that South Africa is in
some ways stuck “between February and October”, meaning to compare our SA
situation during the 17 years since 1994 with the eight months in 1917 between
the two Russian revolutions.
This is one
reason why it is worthwhile to run all six chapters of “The State and
Revolution” as a course, set or series of the Communist University, now.
In length, they are well suited to the purpose. It is more than likely that
this kind of treatment, and this way of collective study, was exactly what
Lenin had in mind when he wrote the work. He referred to it as a “pamphlet”,
which would tend to mean a text for mass agitational propaganda.
The urgency
of Lenin’s revolutionary purpose is apparent from the first paragraph, as is
the priority that he gives to the understanding of The State as a product of,
and integral to, the exploitative class-divided social system that the
Bolsheviks were determined to overthrow.
Hence the
first words are a definition and a challenge to those who would think
otherwise: “The State: a Product of the Irreconcilability of Class
Antagonisms”
In the
first paragraph Lenin refers to the embracing of “Marxism” by the respectable
bourgeoisie, and their pleasure at the amenability of “the labour
unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory
war!”
The great
1914-1918 war that was raging at the time was more than an incidental
background to the Russian Revolutions of 1917. Like the lethal global
neo-liberalism of recent times, the “First World War” (the Imperialist war) had
seduced the major part of the social-democratic organisations that claimed to
represent the working class. The structures of the working class had turned
against the working class, and the crux of the matter, then as now, was The
State. Lenin is unequivocal:
“The state is a product and a
manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises
where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled.
And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms
are irreconcilable.”
Lenin
proceeds to write that the overthrow of the bourgeois state has to be direct
and forcible, whereas the withering-away of the proletarian state can only be
the indirect consequence of the progressive disappearance of class antagonism
during the transitional period called socialism.
"The
State and Revolution" goes to the heart of the revolutionary theory of
class struggle, sharpens all contradictions, and draws clear lessons that are
still relevant today, especially for South Africa.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: State
and Revolution, C1, Class Society and State, Lenin, 1917.
