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 (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.
