State and Revolution, Part 10
Completing “State and Revolution”
The MIA endnote to “The State and Revolution”
says, among other things, that “According to Lenin's plan, “The State and
Revolution” was to have consisted of seven chapters, but he did not write the
seventh, "The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and
1917", and only a detailed plan has remained.”
Alas, we do not even have the
“detailed plan” for the seventh chapter. But we can note that “The State and
Revolution”, interrupted as it was by the Great October Revolution, is a work
in progress. Even if the final chapter had been written, this would have been
so. Both the book, and the circumstances of its writing, problematise the
question of revolution.
In “New Tools for Marxists”, attached
and linked below, the late South African revolutionary Ron Press wrote:
‘“…the
standard Marxist idea that society passes in a linear manner from primitive
communism via class struggle to the ultimate victory when the working class
replaces capitalism with a classless society is an unattainable myth. Especially when a classless society was taken
to mean the establishment of order and stability, in fact stasis. The theories
[outlined above] indicate that stasis means the inevitable sudden crossover
into chaos and collapse.
‘Lenin in
State and Revolution continued the work of Engels and Marx in outlining the
parameters which form the basis for the definition of systems indicated by
points (a) and (b). It is interesting that they did not define the form or
structure which socialism will have. Lenin recognised these new structures when
they emerged. He initiated the slogan “all power to the soviets”.’
Ron Press is saying that the
theory of the State, and of the “withering away” of the State, in Marx, Engels
and Lenin is not wrong, yet these three did not have the full theoretical means
to appreciate in full how “stateless” systems can and do work in nature and in
human society.
The revolutionaries of today
have an advantage over those of a century ago. That being the case, we might
imagine a “State and Revolution” for today, that would include not only the
material that Lenin would have included in 1917 if he had had the time, but
also material that Lenin would have included in the intervening period up to
the present time, if he had had the knowledge of it.
Ron Press’s article gives a
good start for that work. Please download it and read it. The two diagrams
above, relating to the “Strange Attractor” of Chaos Theory, are from the article.
The matter sits like this: In
the past, “stateless” ungoverned systems could be postulated but not described
or fully imagined. The “withering away of the state” remained a somewhat
mystical, and to its opponents, ridiculous concept. But now, because of the
theoretical advances that Ron Press shows us, it can be seen that most systems
(both human and natural) operate in fact without a “state” (or king, for that
matter) and that the “state” is the exception, and not the rule. Further, the
imposition of a “state”, far from being the guarantee of order, is, according
to chaos theory, the certain harbinger, not of stasis, but of disorder.
This is an unexpected
vindication of Marxism, but a highly useful one. It means that future
revolutionaries will have the possibility to see much further forward than was
the case in Lenin’s time.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: New tools for Marxists, 1994,
Ron Press.
