State
and Revolution, Part 8
Living without a State
“We are not utopians, and do not in the
least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of
individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place,
however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for
this: this will be done by the armed
people themselves”
In “The State and
Revolution”, and especially in Chapter 5 of the work (attached, and
downloadable via the link below), Lenin treats the question of the demise of
the bourgeois state, and of the demise of state in general, as a practical
matter of immediate concern. The state is to be replaced by “the simple organization of the armed
people” and the Russian Soviets of
Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies that already existed at the time of his
writing the book, just before the October Revolution, were examples of such
simple organization, wrote Lenin.
This simple kind of organisation is what we in South Africa
today would call organs of people’s
power. There is a lot in this chapter that bears upon the question of how
to make the revolution permanent, using such principles. The best way to handle
it seems to be to quote quite a lot of it, and then to make a few remarks at
the end. So here goes (quotations are in italics):
… in
capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a
democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the
proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time
create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary
suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of
providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it
will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord.
… under capitalism we have the state
in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression
of one class by another, and, what is more, of the majority by the minority.
Naturally, to be successful, such an undertaking as the systematic suppression
of the exploited majority by the exploiting minority calls for the utmost
ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood,
through which mankind is actually wading its way in slavery, serfdom and wage
labour.
[Now we can] fully appreciate the
correctness of Engels' remarks mercilessly ridiculing the absurdity of
combining the words "freedom" and "state". So long as the
state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no
state.
What is
usually called socialism was termed by Marx the "first", or lower,
phase of communist society. Insofar as the means of production becomes common
property, the word "communism" is also applicable here, providing we
do not forget that this is not complete communism. The great significance of
Marx's explanations is that here, too, he consistently applies materialist
dialectics, the theory of development, and regards communism as something which
develops out of capitalism.
Democracy
means equality. The great significance of the proletariat's struggle for
equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it
as meaning the abolition of classes. But democracy means only formal equality.
And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to
ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labour and wages,
humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing farther,
from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule
"from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
By what stages,
by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim
we do not and cannot know. But it is important to realize how infinitely
mendacious is the ordinary bourgeois conception of socialism as something
lifeless, rigid, fixed once and for all, whereas in reality socialism will only
be the beginning of a rapid, genuine, truly mass forward movement, embracing
first the majority and then the whole of the population, in all spheres of
public and private life.
Democracy is of enormous importance to
the working class in its struggle against the capitalists for its emancipation.
But democracy is by no means a boundary not to be overstepped; it is only one
of the stages on the road from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to communism.
The Road to Freedom
The following statements by Lenin from this chapter spell
out the road from capitalism via socialism to communism:
Democracy
is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized,
systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies
the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to
determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. This, in turn,
results in the fact that, at a certain stage in the development of democracy,
it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against
capitalism - the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off
the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine,
the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy and to substitute for them a
more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape
of armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving the entire population.
Accounting and control - that
is mainly what is needed for the "smooth working", for the proper
functioning, of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are
transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed
workers. All citizens become employees and workers of a single countrywide
state "syndicate". All that is required is that they should work
equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and
control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and
reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations - which any literate person
can perform - of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of
arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.
When the
majority of the people begin independently and everywhere to keep such accounts
and exercise such control over the capitalists (now converted into employees)
and over the intellectual gentry who preserve their capitalist habits, this
control will really become universal, general, and popular; and there will be
no getting away from it, there will be "nowhere to go".
The whole
of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality
of labour and pay.
Easier said than done?
Clearly, the kind
of stateless self-organisation of the armed people envisaged above by Lenin did
not happen in the remaining six years of his lifetime, and still less did it
come to pass in the USSR in the years that followed. It is true that the Soviet
Union was constantly under attack, but this by itself is not an explanation. If
the free organisation of an armed people is a higher form of organisation, then
prima facie it ought to be the best kind of organisation in wartime,
too. The argument that says that there cannot be socialism in one country is a
fallacy to this extent, in the absence of further elaboration.
The history of the
Soviet Union and of the other socialist countries, including China, Vietnam,
DPRK and Cuba today, can never be reduced to a formula. Yet it does seem that
more work of the kind that Lenin was doing on his unfinished book, The State
and Revolution, is needed. Such work could resemble that of our late comrade
Ron Press, in his essay “New Tools for Marxists”,
where Ron Press showed how “Chaos Theory” validates and elaborates the theory
of a society existing without a State. The image above is one of the diagrams
that Ron Press used to illustrate his article. We will return to Ron Press’s
article in the last part of this course.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: State and Revolution, Chapter 5, Economic Basis of Withering Away of the State, Lenin.
