State and Revolution, Part 0
Lenin’s The State and Revolution
Short General
Introduction
The State and
Revolution is a book of Lenin’s
that was written in the months between the February and October Russian
Revolutions of 1917.
The book is an uncompromising
description of The State and of how it can be revolutionised, written as a
revisit to, and critique of, the writings of Marx and Engels on the one hand,
and of those of various reformist, opportunist and anarchist characters on the
other hand, all the way up to Karl Kautsky.
At the outbreak in 1914 of
the war that was still going on in 1917, Kautsky had been the leading renegade
among the German Social Democrats of the 2nd International. The
split that Kautsky and others caused, allowed the war to happen. If the
proletarian international had remained solid, the war could not have happened.
The war only came to an armistice, in the West, in the following year. Kautsky
continued to be a renegade until his death in 1938.
The State and Revolution is
well worth studying in its entirety of six chapters. In form, it is ideal for
the Freirean method of pedagogy through study circles. Each of the six chapters
is of a suitable length for reading and discussion by a group that meets
weekly. This Communist University course also includes parts of some of the
documents mentioned by Lenin in the book, with other relevant and related
material, and is thereby extended to our standard course-length of ten parts.
One problem that appears in
relation to the State is whether, or to what extent, the State can be treated
as benign, or developmental? In the SACP we do not repudiate Lenin, yet we
still praise state ownership and state “delivery”. How are these things
reconciled?
If the State is benign, then
why would we want it to wither away?
But if the state is but “a committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie” [Marx/Engels, Communist Manifesto], and “an Instrument for the Exploitation of the
Oppressed Class” [Lenin, State and Revolution] then how can it at the same
time be beneficial?
We will reflect on these
matters, among others, as we go through the work.
Lenin realised that the
eventual transition to communism had to be secured in the process of the
transition to socialism. He realised that there would be a moment of danger
when it would be possible that the worker’s state could redevelop the
characteristics of the bourgeois state.
This is what happened in the
Soviet Union under Stalin, and the eventual consequence was the collapse and
break-up of the Soviet Union into a scattering of bourgeois states. The
revolution was not permanent, after all. The undead bourgeois state re-grew
itself like a “Terminator”.
The next post will open the
discussion of Lenin’s The State and Revolution with Lenin’s return to Petrograd
in April 1917, and his declaration, at the Finland Station, of the “April
Theses”.
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