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 in Britain. 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 create a 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.
