State
and Revolution, Part 5
Paris, February 1848
Eighteen-Forty-Eight
Lenin
spends the first five of the six existing chapters of “The State and
Revolution” tracing the development of the thought of Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels. In Chapter 2 (attached), he sweeps through their accounts of the period
of bourgeois revolutions in mid-nineteenth-century Europe that started in
1848.
Marx and
Engels had good timing. Engels had witnessed Manchester in the early
1840s in the full bloom of its emergence as the first great
industrial-capitalist city of the world. He had also, with Marx, engaged in
literary disputes with the Young Hegelians in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany,
and other disputes with the anarchists of the time. They had also corresponded
with the Chartists. They had spent time organising the working class in Paris
and in Brussels.
Berlin, March 1848
Then they
found themselves on the crest of the extraordinary revolutionary wave of 1848,
and so they were well-positioned to record it and to learn its lessons, just as
they were with later crucial episodes, notably the Paris Commune of 1871.
In the
first line of Chapter 2 Lenin describes “The Poverty of Philosophy” (together
with the Communist Manifesto), written in 1847 when Marx was still in his
twenties, as “the first mature works of Marxism.” The book was written as a
polemic against one, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. of several anarchists that Marx
had to contend with. These anarchists tested and tempered Marx’s and Engels’
resolve, in hard debate.
Lenin moves
on to the Communist Manifesto, where he immediately derives the term
“dictatorship of the proletariat” from the equally direct words of the Marx and
Engels in the Manifesto, namely: “the state, i.e. the proletariat
organised as the ruling class”.
“The state is a special organization
of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class.”
The
proletariat will use the state to suppress the bourgeois class.
Chartist rally,
Kennington, London, 1848
Lenin then
turns on the reformists. Later, in Chapter 3, Lenin calls the anarchists and
the petty-bourgeois opportunists “twin brothers”.
Here in
Chapter 2 he writes:
“The petty-bourgeois democrats,
those sham socialists who replaced the class struggle by dreams of class
harmony, even pictured the socialist transformation in a dreamy fashion — not
as the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but as the peaceful
submission of the minority to the majority which has become aware of its aims.
This petty-bourgeois utopia, which is inseparable from the idea of the state
being above classes, led in practice to the betrayal of the interests of the
working classes.”
The chapter
proceeds to touch “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”. It returns to
Marx on the dictatorship of the proletariat, this time in those very terms, in
a letter written in 1852; and Lenin says: “Only he is a Marxist who
extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the
dictatorship of the proletariat.”
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: State
and Revolution, Chapter 2, The Experience of 1848-1851, Lenin.
