Published as a pamphlet in 1918
by Zhizn i Znaniye Publishers, Petrograd
From Collected Works, Volume 25, pp.381-492
Transcribed for the Internet by [email protected] in March 1993
Preface to the first edition
Preface to the second edition
Chapter 1: Class and society and the state
Chapter 2: The state and revolution. The experience of 1848-51.
Chapter 3: The state and revolution. Experience of the paris commune of 1871. Marx's analysis
Chapter 4: Continuation. Supplementary explanations by Engels.
Chapter 5: The economic basis of the withering away of the state
Chapter 6: Vulgarization of Marxism by the opportunists
Chapter 7: The experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917
Postscript to the first edition
The question of the state is now acquiring particular importance both in theory and in practical politics. The imperialist was has immensely accelerated and intensified the process of transformation of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism. The monstrous oppression of the working people by capitalist associations, is becoming increasingly monstrous. The advanced countries -- we mean their hinterland -- are becoming military convict prisons for the workers.
The unprecedented horrors and miseries of the protracted was are making the people's position unbearable and increasing their anger. The world proletarian revolution is clearly maturing. The question of its relation to the state is acquiring practical importance.
The elements of opportunism that accumulated over the decades of comparatively peaceful development have given rise to the trend of social-chauvinism which dominated the official socialist parties throughout the world. This trend -- socialism in words and chauvinism in deeds (Plekhanov, Potresov, Breshkovskaya, Rubanovich, and, in a slightly veiled form, Tsereteli, Chernov and Co. in Russia; Scheidemann. Legien, David and others in Germany; Renaudel, Guesde and Vandervelde in France and Belgium; Hyndman and the Fabians in England, etc., etc.) -- is conspicuous for the base, servile adaptation of the "leaders of socialism" to the interests not only of "their" national bourgeoisie, but of "their" state, for the majority of the so-called Great Powers have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole number of small and weak nations. And the imperialist war is a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty. The struggle to free the working people from the influence of the bourgeoisie in general, and of the imperialist bourgeoisie in particular, is impossible without a struggle against opportunist prejudices concerning the "state".
First of all we examine the theory of Marx and Engels of the state, and dwell in particular detail on those aspects of this theory which are ignored or have been distorted by t he opportunists. Then we deal specially with the one who is chiefly responsible for these distortions, Karl Kautsky, the best-known leader of the Second International (1889-1914), which has met with such miserable bankruptcy in the present war. Lastly, we sum up the main results of the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and particularly of 1917. Apparently, the latter is now (early August 1917) completing the first stage of its development; but this revolution as a whole can only be understood as a link in a chain of socialist proletarian revolutions being caused by the imperialist war. The question of the relation of the socialist proletarian revolution to the state, therefore, is acquiring not only practical political importance, but also the significance of a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny.
The Author
August 1917
The present, second edition is published virtually
unaltered, except that section 3 had been added to Chapter II.
The Author
What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the
course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary
thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation.
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes
constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage
malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of
lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them
into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their
names to a certain extent for the "consolation" of the oppressed
classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same
time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting
its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and
the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of
Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this
theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol
what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the
social-chauvinists are now "Marxists" (don't laugh!). And more and
more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists
in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the "national-German"
Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so
splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!
In these circumstances, in view of the unprecedently wide-spread
distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to re-establish what Marx
really taught on the subject of the state. This will necessitate a
number of long quotations from the works of Marx and Engels themselves.
Of course, long quotations will render the text cumbersome and not help
at all to make it popular reading, but we cannot possibly dispense with
them. All, or at any rate all they most essential passages in the
works of Marx and Engels on the subject of the state must by all means
be quoted as fully as possible so that the reader may form an
independent opinion of the totality of the views of the founders of
scientific socialism, and of the evolution of those views, and so that
their distortion by the "Kautskyism" now prevailing may be
documentarily proved and clearly demonstrated.
Let us being with the most popular of Engels' works, The Origin of
the Family, Private Property and the State, the sixth edition of
which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 1894. We have to
translate the quotations from the German originals, as the Russian
translations, while very numerous, are for the most part either
incomplete or very unsatisfactory.
Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says:
(pp.177-78, sixth edition)
It is on this most important and fundamental point that the distortion
of Marxism, proceeding along two main lines, begins.
On the one hand, the bourgeois, and particularly the petty-bourgeois,
ideologists, compelled under the weight of indisputable historical
facts to admit that the state only exists where there are class
antagonisms and a class struggle, "correct" Marx in such a way as to
make it appear that the gate is an organ for the reconciliation of
classes. According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor
maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes. From what
the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists say, with
quite frequent and benevolent references to Marx, it appears that the
state does reconcile classes. According to Marx, the state is an organ
of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it
is the creation of "order", which legalizes and perpetuates this
oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion
of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the
reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by
another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not
depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of
struggle to overthrow the oppressors.
For instance, when, in the revolution of 1917, the question of the
significance and role of the state arose in all its magnitude as a
practical question demanding immediate action, and, moreover, action on
a mass scale, all the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks descended
at once to the petty-bourgeois theory that the "state" "reconciles"
classes. Innumerable resolutions and articles by politicians of both
these parties are thoroughly saturated with this petty-bourgeois and
philistine "reconciliation" theory. That the state is an organ of the
rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode
(the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats
will never be able to understand. Their attitude to the state is one
of the most striking manifestations of the fact that our
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks are not socialists at all (a
point that we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petty-bourgeois
democrats using near-socialist phraseology.
On the other hand, the "Kautskyite" distortion of Marxism is far more
subtle. "Theoretically", it is not denied that the state is an organ
of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what
is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of
the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing
above society and "alienating itself more and more from it", it is
clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only
without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the
apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and
which is the embodiment of this "alienation". As we shall see later,
Marx very explicitly drew this theoretically self-evident conclusion on
the strength of a concrete historical analysis of the tasks of the
revolution. And -- as we shall show in detail further on -- it is this
conclusion which Kautsky has "forgotten" and distorted.
Engels continues:
This division seems "natural" to us, but it costs a prolonged
struggle against the old organization according to generations or
tribes.
"The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public
power which no longer directly coincides with the population
organizing itself as an armed force. This special, public power is
necessary because a self-acting armed organization of the
population has become impossible since the split into classes....
This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of
armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions
of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile [clan] society knew
nothing...."
We are justified in speaking of special bodies of armed men, because
the public power which is an attribute of every state "does not
directly coincide" with the armed population, with its "self-acting
armed organization".
Like all great revolutionary thinkers, Engels tries to draw the
attention of the class-conscious workers to what prevailing
philistinism regards as least worthy of attention, as the most habitual
thing, hallowed by prejudices that are not only deep-rooted but, one
might say, petrified. A standing army and police are the chief
instruments of state power. But how can it be otherwise?
From the viewpoint of the vast majority of Europeans of the end of the
19th century, whom Engels was addressing, and who had not gone through
or closely observed a single great revolution, it could not have been
otherwise. They could not understand at all what a "self-acting armed
organization of the population" was. When asked why it became
necessary to have special bodies of armed men placed above society and
alienating themselves from it (police and a standing army), the
West-European and Russian philistines are inclined to utter a few
phrases borrowed from Spencer of Mikhailovsky, to refer to the growing
complexity of social life, the differentiation of functions, and so
on.
Such a reference seems "scientific", and effectively lulls the ordinary
person to sleep by obscuring the important and basic fact, namely, the
split of society into irreconcilable antagonistic classes.
Were it not for this split, the "self-acting armed organization of the
population" would differ from the primitive organization of a
stick-wielding herd of monkeys, or of primitive men, or of men united
in clans, by its complexity, its high technical level, and so on. But
such an organization would still be possible.
It is impossible because civilized society is split into antagonistic,
and, moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes, whose "self-acting"
arming would lead to an armed struggle between them. A state arises, a
special power is created, special bodies of armed men, and every
revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, shows us the naked class
struggle, clearly shows us how the ruling class strives to restore the
special bodies of armed men which serve it, and how the oppressed class
strives to create a new organization of this kind, capable of serving
the exploited instead of the exploiters.
In the above argument, Engels raises theoretically the very same
question which every great revolution raises before us in practice,
palpably and, what is more, on a scale of mass action, namely, the
question of the relationship between "special" bodies of armed men and
the "self-acting armed organization of the population". We shall see
how this question is specifically illustrated by the experience of the
European and Russian revolutions.
But to return to Engel's exposition.
He points out that sometimes -- in certain parts of North America, for
example -- this public power is weak (he has in mind a rare exception
in capitalist society, and those parts of North America in its
pre-imperialist days where the free colonists predominated), but that,
generally speaking, it grows stronger:
Engels' could, as early as 1891, point to "rivalry in conquest" as one
of the most important distinguishing features of the foreign policy of
the Great Powers, while the social-chauvinist scoundrels have ever
since 1914, when this rivalry, many time intensified, gave rise to an
imperialist war, been covering up the defence of the predatory
interests of "their own" bourgeoisie with phrases about "defence of the
fatherland", "defence of the republic and the revolution", etc.!
The maintenance of the special public power
standing above society requires taxes and state loans.
Another reason why the omnipotence of "wealth" is more certain in a
democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the
political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A
democratic republic is the best possible political shell for
capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this
very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and
Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change
of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic
republic can shake it.
We must also note that Engels is most explicit in calling universal
suffrage as well an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage,
he says, obviously taking account of the long experience of German
Social-Democracy, is
Here, we can only indicate this false notion, only point out that
Engels' perfectly clear statement is distorted at every step in the
propaganda and agitation of the "official" (i.e., opportunist)
socialist parties. A detailed exposure of the utter falsity of this
notion which engels brushes aside here is given in our further account
of the views of Marx and Engels on the "present-day" state.
Engels gives a general summary of his views in the most popular of his
works in the following words:
Engel's words regarding the "withering away" of
the state are so widely known, they are often quoted, and so clearly
reveal the essence of the customary adaptation of Marxism to
opportunism that we must deal with them in detail. We shall quote the
whole argument from which they are taken.
(Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science
[Anti-Duhring], pp.301-03, third German edition.)
Such an "interpretation", however, is the crudest distortion of
Marxism, advantageous only to the bourgeoisie. In point of theory, it
is based on disregard for the most important circumstances and
considerations indicated in, say, Engels' "summary" argument we have
just quoted in full.
In the first place, at the very outset of his argument, Engels says
that, in seizing state power, the proletariat thereby "abolishes the
state as state". It is not done to ponder over over the meaning of
this. Generally, it is either ignored altogether, or is considered to
be something in the nature of "Hegelian weakness" on Engels' part. As
a matter of fact, however, these words briefly express the experience
of one of the greatest proletarian revolutions, the paris Commune of
1871, of which we shall speak in greater detail in its proper place.
As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletariat revolution
"abolishing" the bourgeois state, while the words about the state
withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian state after
the socialist revolution. According to Engels, the bourgeois state
does not "wither away", but is "abolished" by the proletariat in the
course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is
the proletarian state or semi-state.
Secondly, the state is a "special coercive force". Engels gives this
splendid and extremely profound definition here with the utmost
lucidity. And from it follows that the "special coercive force" for
the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of millions of
working people by handfuls of the rich, must be replaced by a "special
coercive force" for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the
proletariat (the dictatorship of the proletariat). This is precisely
what is meant by "abolition of the state as state". This is precisely
the "act" of taking possession of the means of production in the name
of society. And it is self-evident that such a replacement of one
(bourgeois) "special force" by another (proletarian) "special force"
cannot possibly take place in the form of "withering away".
Thirdly, in speaking of the state "withering away", and the even more
graphic and colorful "dying down of itself", Engels refers quite
clearly and definitely to the period after "the state has taken
possession of the means of production in the name of the whole of
society", that is, after the socialist revolution. We all know that
the political form of the "state" at that time is the most complete
democracy. But it never enters the head of any of the opportunists,
who shamelessly distort Marxism, that Engels is consequently speaking
here of democracy "dying down of itself", or "withering away". This
seems very strange at first sight. But is is "incomprehensible" only
to those who have not thought about democracy also being a state and,
consequently, also disappearing when the state disappears. Revolution
alone can "abolish" the bourgeois state. The state in general, i.e.,
the most complete democracy, can only "wither away".
Fourthly, after formulating his famous proposition that "the state
withers away", Engels at once explains specifically that this
proposition is directed against both the opportunists and the
anarchists. In doing this, Engels puts in the forefront that
conclusion, drawn from the proposition that "the state withers away",
which is directed against the opportunists.
One can wager that out of every 10,000 persons who have read or heard
about the "withering away" of the state, 9,990 are completely unaware,
or do not remember, that Engels directed his conclusions from that
proposition not against anarchists alone. And of the remaining 10,
probably nine do not know the meaning of a "free people's state" or why
an attack on this slogan means an attack on opportunists. This is how
history is written! This is how a great revolutionary teaching is
imperceptibly falsified and adapted to prevailing philistinism. The
conclusion directed against the anarchists has been repeated thousands
of times; it has been vulgarized, and rammed into people's heads in the
shallowest form, and has acquired the strength of a prejudice, whereas
the conclusion directed against the opportunists has been obscured and
"forgotten"!
The "free people's state" was a programme demand and a catchword
current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies. this
catchword is devoid of all political content except that it describes
the concept of democracy in a pompous philistine fashion. Insofar as
it hinted in a legally permissible manner at a democratic republic,
Engels was prepared to "justify" its use "for a time" from an
agitational point of view. But it was an opportunist catchword, for it
amounted to something more than prettifying bourgeois democracy, and
was also failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in
general. We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of
state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to
forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most
democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a "special
force" for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every
state is not "free and not a "people's state". Marx and Engels
explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.
Fifthly, the same work of Engels', whose arguments about the withering
away of the state everyone remembers, also contains an argument of the
significance of violent revolution. Engels' historical analysis of its
role becomes a veritable panegyric on violent revolution. This, "no
one remembers". It is not done in modern socialist parties to talk or
even think about the significance of this idea, and it plays no part
whatever in their daily propaganda and agitation among the people. And
yet it is inseparably bound up with the 'withering away" of the state
into one harmonious whole.
Here is Engels' argument:
(p.193, third German edition,
Usually the two are combined by means of eclecticism, by an
unprincipled or sophistic selection made arbitrarily (or to please the
powers that be) of first one, then another argument, and in 99 cases
out of 100, if not more, it is the idea of the "withering away" that is
placed in the forefront. Dialectics are replaced by eclecticism --
this is the most usual, the most wide-spread practice to be met with in
present-day official Social-Democratic literature in relation to
Marxism. This sort of substitution is, of course, nothing new; it was
observed even in the history of classical Greek philosophy. In
falsifying Marxism in opportunist fashion, the substitution of
eclecticism for dialectics is the easiest way of deceiving the people.
It gives an illusory satisfaction; it seems to take into account all
sides of the process, all trends of development, all the conflicting
influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it provides no integral
and revolutionary conception of the process of social development at
all.
We have already said above, and shall show more fully later, that the
theory of Marx and Engels of the inevitability of a violent revolution
refers to the bourgeois state. The latter cannot be superseded by the
proletarian state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) through the
process of 'withering away", but, as a general rule, only through a
violent revolution. The panegyric Engels sang in its honor, and which
fully corresponds to Marx's repeated statements (see the concluding
passages of The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist
Manifesto, with their proud and open proclamation of the
inevitability of a violent revolution; see what Marx wrote nearly 30
years later, in criticizing the Gotha Programme of 1875, when he
mercilessly castigated the opportunist character of that programme) --
this panegyric is by no means a mere "impulse", a mere declamation or a
polemical sally. The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses
with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the
root of the entire theory of Marx and Engels. The betrayal of their
theory by the now prevailing social-chauvinist and Kautskyite trends
expresses itself strikingly in both these trends ignoring such
propaganda and agitation.
The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is
impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the
proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except
through the process of "withering away".
A detailed and concrete elaboration of these views was given by Marx
and Engels when they studied each particular revolutionary situation,
when they analyzed the lessons of the experience of each particular
revolution. We shall now pass to this, undoubtedly the most important,
part of their theory.
The first works of mature Marxism -- The Poverty
of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto -- appeared just on the
eve of the revolution of 1848. For this reason, in addition to
presenting the general principles of Marxism, they reflect to a certain
degree the concrete revolutionary situation of the time. It will,
therefore, be more expedient, perhaps, to examine what the authors of
these works said about the state immediately before they drew
conclusions from the experience of the years 1848-51.
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote:
(p.182, German edition, 1885)
"... We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by
the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling class to win the battle of democracy.
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by
degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all
instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the
proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the
total productive forces as rapidly as possible."
(pp.31 and 37, seventh German edition, 1906)
This definition of the state has never been explained in the prevailing
propaganda and agitation literature of the official Social-Democratic
parties. More than that, it has been deliberately ignored, for it is
absolutely irreconcilable with reformism, and is a slap in the face for
the common opportunist prejudices and philistine illusions about the
"peaceful development of democracy".
The proletariat needs the state -- this is repeated by all the
opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure us that
this is what Marx taught. But they "forget" to add that, in the first
place, according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is
withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither
away immediately, and cannot but wither away. And, secondly, the
working people need a "state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the
ruling class".
The state is a special organization of force: it is an organization of
violence for the suppression of some class. What class must the
proletariat suppress? Naturally, only the exploiting class, i.e., the
bourgeoisie. The working people need the state only to suppress the
resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat can direct this
suppression, can carry it out. For the proletariat is the only class
that is consistently revolutionary, the only class that can unite all
the working and exploited people in the struggle against the
bourgeoisie, in completely removing it.
The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation,
i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the
vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule
in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests
of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant
minority consisting of the modern slave-owners -- the landowners and
capitalists.
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, as was shown, for example, by the history of
the French revolutions of 1848 and 1871, and by the experience of
"socialist" participation in bourgeois Cabinets in Britain, France,
Italy and other countries at the turn of the century.
All his life Marx fought against this petty-bourgeois socialism, now
revived in Russia by the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties.
He developed his theory of the class struggle consistently, down to the
theory of political power, of the state.
The overthrow of bourgeois rule can be accomplished only by the
proletariat, the particular class whose economic conditions of
existence prepare it for this task and provide it with the possibility
and the power to perform it. While the bourgeoisie break up and
disintegrate the peasantry and all the petty-bourgeois groups, they
weld together, unite and organize the proletariat. Only the
proletariat -- by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale
production -- is capable of being the leader of all the working and
exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush,
often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are
incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation.
The theory of class struggle, applied by Marx to the question of the
state and the socialist revolution, leads as a matter of course to the
recognition of the political rule of the proletariat, of its
dictatorship, i.e., of undivided power directly backed by the armed
force of the people. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be achieved
only by the proletariat becoming the ruling class, capable of crushing
the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of
organizing all the working and exploited people for the new economic
system.
The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force,
an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the
exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population -- the
peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians -- in the work
of organizing a socialist economy.
By educating the workers' party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the
proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to
socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the
teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people
in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the
bourgeoisie. By contrast, the opportunism now prevailing trains the
members of the workers' party to be the representatives of the
better-paid workers, who lose touch with the masses, "get along" fairly
well under capitalism, and sell their birthright for a mass of pottage,
i.e., renounce their role as revolutionary leaders of the people
against the bourgeoisie.
Marx's theory of "the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the
ruling class", is inseparably bound up with the whole of his doctrine
of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The
culmination of this rule is the proletarian dictatorship, the political
rule of the proletariat.
But since the proletariat needs the state as a special form of
organization of violence against the bourgeoisie, the following
conclusion suggests itself: is it conceivable that such an organization
can be created without first abolishing, destroying the state machine
created by the bourgeoisie for themselves? The Communist Manifesto
leads straight to this conclusion, and it is of this conclusion that
Marx speaks when summing up the experience of the revolution of
1848-51.
Marx sums up his conclusions from the revolution
of 1848-51, on the subject of the state we are concerned with, in the
following argument contained in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte:
"This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military
organization, with its vast and ingenious state machinery, with a
host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of
another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes
the body of French society and chokes all its pores, sprang up in
the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal
system, which it helped to hasten." The first French Revolution
developed centralization, "but at the same time" it increased "the
extent, the attributes and the number of agents of governmental
power. Napoleon completed this state machinery". The legitimate
monarchy and the July monarchy "added nothing but a greater
division of labor"....
"... Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the
parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along
with repressive measures, the resources and centralization of
governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead
of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination
regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal
spoils of the victor."
(The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
pp.98-99, fourth edition, Hamburg, 1907)
This conclusion is the chief and fundamental point in the Marxist
theory of the state. And it is precisely this fundamental point which
has been completely ignored by the dominant official Social-Democratic
parties and, indeed, distorted (as we shall see later) by the foremost
theoretician of the Second International, Karl Kautsky.
The Communist Manifesto gives a general summary of history, which
compels us to regard the state as the organ of class rule and leads us
to the inevitable conclusion that the proletariat cannot overthrow the
bourgeoisie without first winning political power, without attaining
political supremacy, without transforming the state into the
"proletariat organized as the ruling class"; and that this proletarian
state will begin to wither away immediately after its victory because
the state is unnecessary and cannot exist in a society in which there
are no class antagonisms. The question as to how, from the point of
view of historical development, the replacement of the bourgeois by the
proletarian state is to take place is not raised here.
This is the question Marx raises and answers in 1852. True to his
philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx takes as his basis the
historical experience of the great years of revolution, 1848 to 1851.
Here, as everywhere else, his theory is a summing up of experience,
illuminated by a profound philosophical conception of the world and a
rich knowledge of history.
The problem of the state is put specifically: How did the bourgeois
state, the state machine necessary for the rule of the bourgeoisie,
come into being historically? What changes did it undergo, what
evolution did it perform in the course of bourgeois revolutions and in
the face of the independent actions of the oppressed classes? What are
the tasks of the proletariat in relation to this state machine?
The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came
into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions
most characteristic of this state machine are the bureaucracy and the
standing army. In their works, Marx and Engels repeatedly show that
the bourgeoisie are connected with these institutions by thousands of
threads. Every worker's experience illustrates this connection in an
extremely graphic and impressive manner. From its own bitter
experience, the working class learns to recognize this connection.
That is why it so easily grasps and so firmly learns the doctrine which
shows the inevitability of this connection, a doctrine which the
petty-bourgeois democrats either ignorantly and flippantly deny, or
still more flippantly admit "in general", while forgetting to draw
appropriate practical conclusions.
The bureaucracy and the standing army are a "parasite" on the body of
bourgeois society -- a parasite created by the internal antagonisms
which rend that society, but a parasite which "chokes" all its vital
pores. The Kautskyite opportunism now prevailing in official
Social-Democracy considers the view that the state is a parasitic
organism to be the peculiar and exclusive attribute of anarchism. It
goes without saying that this distortion of Marxism is of vast
advantage to those philistines who have reduced socialism to the
unheard-of disgrace of justifying and prettifying the imperialist war
by applying to it the concept of "defence of the fatherland"; but it is
unquestionably a distortion, nevertheless.
The development, perfection, and strengthening of the bureaucratic and
military apparatus proceeded during all the numerous bourgeois
revolutions which Europe has witnessed since the fall of feudalism. In
particular, it is the petty bourgeois who are attracted to the side of
the big bourgeoisie and are largely subordinated to them through this
apparatus, which provides the upper sections of the peasants, small
artisans, tradesmen, and the like with comparatively comfortable,
quiet, and respectable jobs raising the holders above the people.
Consider what happened in Russia during the six months following
February 27, 1917. The official posts which formerly were given by
preference to the Black Hundreds have now become the spoils of the
Cadets, Mensheviks, and Social-Revolutionaries. Nobody has really
thought of introducing any serious reforms. Every effort has been made
to put them off "until the Constituent Assembly meets", and to steadily
put off its convocation until after the war! But there has been no
delay, no waiting for the Constituent Assembly, in the matter of
dividing the spoils of getting the lucrative jobs of ministers, deputy
ministers, governors-general, etc., etc.! The game of combinations that
has been played in forming the government has been, in essence, only an
expression of this division and redivision of the "spoils", which has
been going on above and below, throughout the country, in every
department of central and local government. The six months between
February 27 and August 27, 1917, can be summed up, objectively summed
up beyond all dispute, as follows: reforms shelved, distribution of
official jobs accomplished and "mistakes" in the distribution corrected
by a few redistributions.
But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is "redistributed" among the
various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties (among the Cadets,
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the case of Russia), the
more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at their
head, become of their irreconcilable hostility to the whole of
bourgeois society. Hence the need for all bourgeois parties, even for
the most democratic and "revolutionary-democratic" among them, to
intensify repressive measures against the revolutionary proletariat, to
strengthen the apparatus of coercion, i.e., the state machine. This
course of events compels the revolution "to concentrate all its forces
of destruction" against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not
of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.
It was not logical reasoning, but actual developments, the actual
experience of 1848-51, that led to the matter being presented in this
way. The extent to which Marx held strictly to the solid ground of
historical experience can be seen from the fact that, in 1852, he did
not yet specifically raise the question of what was to take the place
of the state machine to be destroyed. Experience had not yet provided
material for dealing with this question, which history placed on the
agenda later on, in 1871. In 1852, all that could be established with
the accuracy of scientific observation was that the proletarian
revolution had approached the task of "concentrating all its forces of
destruction" against the state power, of "smashing" the state machine.
Here the question may arise: is it correct to generalize the
experience, observations and conclusions of Marx, to apply them to a
field that is wider than the history of France during the three years
1848-51? Before proceeding to deal with this question, let us recall a
remark made by Engels and then examine the facts.
In his introduction to the third edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire,
Engels wrote:
(p.4, 1907 edition)
Let us, however, cast a general glance over the history of the advanced
countries at the turn of the century. We shall see that the same
process went on more slowly, in more varied forms, in a much wider
field: on the one hand, the development of "parliamentary power" both
in the republican countries (France, America, Switzerland), and in the
monarchies (Britain, Germany to a certain extent, Italy, the
Scandinavia countries, etc.); on the other hand, a struggle for power
among the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties which
distributed and redistributed the "spoils" of office, with the
foundations of bourgeois society unchanged; and, lastly, the perfection
and consolidation of the "executive power", of its bureaucratic and
military apparatus.
There is not the slightest doubt that these features are common to the
whole of the modern evolution of all capitalist states in general. In
the last three years 1848-51 France displayed, in a swift, sharp,
concentrated form, the very same processes of development which are
peculiar to the whole capitalist world.
Imperialism -- the era of bank capital, the era of gigantic capitalist
monopolies, of the development of monopoly capitalism into state-
monopoly capitalism -- has clearly shown an unprecedented growth in its
bureaucratic and military apparatus in connection with the
intensification of repressive measures against the proletariat both in
the monarchical and in the freest, republican countries.
World history is now undoubtedly leading, on an incomparably larger
scale than in 1852, to the "concentration of all the forces" of the
proletarian revolution on the "destruction" of the state machine.
What the proletariat will put in its place is suggested by the highly
instructive material furnished by the paris Commune.
In 1907, Mehring, in the magazine Neue Zeit
(Vol.XXV, 2, p.164), published extracts from Marx's letter to
Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852. This letter, among other things,
contains the following remarkable observation:
It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's theory is
the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very
often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its
falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the
theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the
bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to
the bourgeoisie. those who recognize only the class struggle are not
yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of
bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the
theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it,
reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a
Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the
recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what
constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the
ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on
which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be
tested. And it is not surprising that when the history of Europe
brought the working class face to face with this question as a
practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all
the Kautskyites (people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism)
proved to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats
repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky's pamphlet,
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, published in August 1918, i.e.,
long after the first edition of the present book, is a perfect example
of petty-bourgeois distortion of Marxism and base renunciation of it in
deeds, while hypocritically recognizing it in words (see my pamphlet,
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Petrograd and
Moscow, 1918).
Opportunism today, as represented by its principal spokesman, the
ex-Marxist Karl Kautsky, fits in completely with Marx's
characterization of the bourgeois position quoted above, for this
opportunism limits recognition of the class struggle to the sphere of
bourgeois relations. (Within this sphere, within its framework, not a
single educated liberal will refuse to recognize the class struggle "in
principle"!) Opportunism does not extend recognition of the class
struggle to the cardinal point, to the period of transition from
capitalism to communism, of the overthrow and the complete abolition of
the bourgeoisie. In reality, this period inevitably is a period of an
unprecedently violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms,
and, consequently, during this period the state must inevitably be a
state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletariat and the
propertyless in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the
bourgeoisie).
Further. The essence of Marx's theory of the state has been mastered
only by those who realize that the dictatorship of a single class is
necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the
proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the
entire historical period which separates capitalism from "classless
society", from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form,
but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form,
in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly
bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms,
but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few
months before the Commune, Marx warned the paris workers that any
attempt to overthrow the government would be the folly of despair. But
when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the workers and
the accepted it, when the uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the
proletarian revolution with the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of
unfavorable auguries. Marx did not persist in the pedantic attitude of
condemning an "untimely" movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade
from marxism, Plekhanov, who in November 1905 wrote encouragingly about
the workers' and peasants' struggle, but after December 1905 cried,
liberal fashion: "They should not have taken up arms."
Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of the
Communards, who, as he expressed it, "stormed heaven". Although the
mass revolutionary movement did not achieve its aim, he regarded it as
a historic experience of enormous importance, as a certain advance of
the world proletarian revolution, as a practical step that was more
important than hundreds of programmes and arguments. Marx endeavored
to analyze this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and
re-examine his theory in the light of it.
The only "correction" Marx thought it necessary to make to the
Communist Manifesto he made on the basis of the revolutionary
experience of the paris Commune.
The last preface to the new German edition of the Communist
Manifesto, signed by both its authors, is dated June 24, 1872. In
this preface the authors, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, say that the
programme of the Communist Manifesto "has in some details become
out-of-date", and the go on to say:
Thus, Marx and Engels regarded one principal and fundamental lesson of
the paris Commune as being of such enormous importance that they
introduced it as an important correction into the Communist
Manifesto.
Most characteristically, it is this important correction that has been
distorted by the opportunists, and its meaning probably is not known to
nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine-hundredths, of the readers of the
Communist Manifesto. We shall deal with this distortion more fully
farther on, in a chapter devoted specially to distortions. Here it
will be sufficient to note that the current, vulgar "interpretation" of
Marx's famous statement just quoted is that Marx here allegedly
emphasizes the idea of slow development in contradistinction to the
seizure of power, and so on.
As a matter of fact, the exact opposite is the case. Marx's idea is
that the working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state
machinery", and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune, Marx wrote to
Kugelmann:
(Neue Zeit, Vol.XX, 1, 1901-02, p.709.)
As for Marx's reference to The Eighteenth Brumaire, we have quoted
the relevant passage in full above.
It is interesting to note, in particular, two points in the
above-quoted argument of Marx. First, he restricts his conclusion to
the Continent. This was understandable in 1871, when Britain was still
the model of a purely capitalist country, but without a militarist
clique and, to a considerable degree, without a bureaucracy. Marx
therefore excluded Britain, where a revolution, even a people's
revolution, then seemed possible, and indeed was possible,
without the precondition of destroying "ready-made state
machinery".
Today, in 1917, at the time of the first great imperialist war, this
restriction made by Marx is no longer valid. Both Britain and America,
the biggest and the last representatives -- in the whole world -- of
Anglo-Saxon "liberty", in the sense that they had no militarist cliques
and bureaucracy, have completely sunk into the all-European filthy,
bloody morass of bureaucratic-military institutions which subordinate
everything to themselves, and suppress everything. Today, in Britain
and America, too, "the precondition for every real people's revolution"
is the smashing, the destruction of the "ready-made state machinery"
(made and brought up to the "European", general imperialist, perfection
in those countries in the years 1914-17).
Secondly, particular attention should be paid to Marx's extremely
profound remark that the destruction of the bureaucratic-military state
machine is "the precondition for every real people's revolution". This
idea of a "people's" revolution seems strange coming from Marx, so that
the Russian Plekhanovites and Mensheviks, those followers of Struve who
wish to be regarded as Marxists, might possibly declare such an
expression to be a "slip of the pen" on Marx's part. They have reduced
Marxism to such a state of wretchedly liberal distortion that nothing
exists for them beyond the antithesis between bourgeois revolution and
proletarian revolution, and even this antithesis they interpret in an
utterly lifeless way.
If we take the revolutions of the 20th century as examples we shall, of
course, have to admit that the Portuguese and the Turkish revolutions
are both bourgeois revolutions. Neither of them, however, is a
people's" revolution, since in neither does the mass of the people,
their vast majority, come out actively, independently, with their own
economic and political demands to any noticeable degree. By contrast,
although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such
"brilliant" successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish
revolutions, it was people, their majority, the very lowest social
groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and
stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own
demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place
of the old society that was being destroyed.
In Europe, in 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of
the people in any country on the Continent. A "people's" revolution,
one actually sweeping the majority into its stream, could be such only
if it embraced both the proletariat and the peasants. These two
classes then constituted the "people". These two classes are united by
the fact that the "bureaucratic-military state machine" oppresses,
crushes, exploits them. To smash this machine, to break it up, is
truly in the interest of the "people", of their majority, of the
workers and most of the peasants, is "the precondition" for a free
alliance of the poor peasant and the proletarians, whereas without such
an alliance democracy is unstable and socialist transformation is
impossible.
As is well known, the paris Commune was actually working its way toward
such an alliance, although it did not reach its goal owing to a number
of circumstances, internal and external.
Consequently, in speaking of a "real people's revolution", Marx,
without in the least discounting the special features of the petty
bourgeois (he spoke a great deal about them and often), took strict
account of the actual balance of class forces in most of the
continental countries of Europe in 1871. On the other hand, he stated
that the "smashing" of the state machine was required by the interests
of both the workers and the peasants, that it united them, that it
placed before them the common task of removing the "parasite" and of
replacing it by something new.
By what exactly?
In 1847, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx's
answer to this question was as yet a purely abstract one; to be exact,
it was an answer that indicated he tasks, but not the ways of
accomplishing them. The answer given in the Communist Manifesto was
that this machine was to be replaced by "the proletariat organized as
the ruling class", by the "winning of the battle of democracy".
Marx subjected the experience of the Commune, meagre as it was, to the
most careful analysis in The Civil War in France. Let us quote the
most important passages of this work.
"The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune." It was the
"specific form" of "a republic that was not only to remove the
monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself."
It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their
resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune; and one
of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not do this with
sufficient determination. The organ of suppression, however, is here
the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the
case under slavery, serfdom, and wage slavery. And since the majority
of people itself suppresses its oppressors, a 'special force" for
suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense, the state begins to
wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged
minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the
majority itself can directly fulfil all these functions, and the more
the functions of state power are performed by the people as a whole,
the less need there is for the existence of this power.
In this connection, the following measures of the Commune, emphasized
by Marx, are particularly noteworthy: the abolition of all
representation allowances, and of all monetary privileges to officials,
the reduction of the remuneration of all servants of the state to the
level of "workmen's wages". This shows more clearly than anything else
the turn from bourgeois to proletarian democracy, from the democracy of
the oppressors to that of the oppressed classes, from the state as a
"special force" for the suppression of a particular class to the
suppression of the oppressors by the general force of the majority of
the people -- the workers and the peasants. And it is on this
particularly striking point, perhaps the most important as far as the
problem of the state is concerned, that the ideas of Marx have been
most completely ignored! In popular commentaries, the number of which
is legion, this is not mentioned. The thing done is to keep silent
about it as if it were a piece of old-fashioned "naivete", just as
Christians, after their religion had been given the status of state
religion, "forgot" the "naivete" of primitive Christianity with its
democratic revolutionary spirit.
The reduction of the remuneration of high state officials seem "simply"
a demand of naive, primitive democracy. One of the "founders" of
modern opportunism, the ex-Social-Democrat Eduard Bernstein, has more
than once repeated the vulgar bourgeois jeers at "primitive" democracy.
Like all opportunists, and like the present Kautskyites, he did not
understand at all that, first of all, the transition from capitalism to
socialism is impossible without a certain "reversion" to "primitive"
democracy (for how else can the majority, and then the whole population
without exception, proceed to discharge state functions?); and that,
secondly, "primitive democracy" based on capitalism and capitalist
culture is not the same as primitive democracy in prehistoric or
precapitalist times. Capitalist culture has created large-scale
production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc.,
and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old "state
power" have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly
simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that they can
be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be
performed for ordinary "workmen's wages", and that these functions can
(and must) be stripped of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance
of "official grandeur".
All officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall at any
time, their salaries reduced to the level of ordinary "workmen's wages"
-- these simple and "self-evident" democratic measures, while
completely uniting the interests of the workers and the majority of the
peasants, at the same time serve as a bridge leading from capitalism to
socialism. These measures concern the reorganization of the state, the
purely political reorganization of society; but, of course, they
acquire their full meaning and significance only in connection with the
"expropriation of the expropriators" either bring accomplished or in
preparation, i.e., with the transformation of capitalist private
ownership of the means of production into social ownership.
"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of
the ruling class was to represent and repress [ver- and zertreten]
the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the
people constituted in communes, as individual suffrage serves every
other employer in the search for workers, foremen and accountants
for his business."
For Marx, however, revolutionary dialectics was never the empty
fashionable phrase, the toy rattle, which Plekhanov, Kautsky and others
have made of it. Marx knew how to break with anarchism ruthlessly for
its inability to make use even of the "pigsty" of bourgeois
parliamentarism, especially when the situation was obviously not
revolutionary; but at the same time he knew how to subject
parliamentarism to genuinely revolutionary proletarian criticism.
To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to
repress and crush the people through parliament -- this is the real
essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-
constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.
But if we deal with the question of the state, and if we consider
parliamentarism as one of the institutions of the state, from the point
of view of the tasks of the proletariat in this field, what is the way
out of parliamentarism? How can it be dispensed with?
Once again, we must say: the lessons of Marx, based on the study of the
Commune, have been so completely forgotten that the present-day
"Social-Democrat" (i.e., present-day traitor to socialism) really cannot
understand any criticism of parliamentarism other than anarchist or
reactionary criticism.
The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of
representative institutions and the elective principle, but the
conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into
"working" bodies. "The Commune was to be a working, not a
parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time."
"A working, not a parliamentary body" -- this is a blow straight from
the shoulder at the present-day parliamentarian country, from America
to Switzerland, from France to Britain, Norway and so forth -- in these
countries the real business of "state" is performed behind the scenes
and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries, and General
Staffs. parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of
fooling the "common people". This is so true that even in the Russian
republic, a bourgeois-democratic republic, all these sins of
parliamentarism came out at once, even before it managed to set up a
real parliament. The heroes of rotten philistinism, such as the
skobelevs and tseretelis, the Chernovs and Avksentyevs, have even
succeeded in polluting the Soviets after the fashion of the most
disgusting bourgeois parliamentarism, in converting them into mere
talking shops. In the Soviets, the "socialist" Ministers are fooling
the credulous rustics with phrase-mongering and resolutions. In the
government itself a sort of permanent shuffle is going on in order
that, on the one hand, as many Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks
as possible may in turn get near the "pie", the lucrative and honorable
posts, and that, on the other hand, the "attention" of the people may
be "engaged". meanwhile the chancelleries and army staffs "do" the
business of "state".
Dyelo Naroda, the organ of the ruling Socialist-Revolutionary Party,
recently admitted in a leading article -- with the matchless frankness
of people of "good society", in which "all" are engaged in political
prostitution -- that even in the ministeries headed by the "socialists"
(save the mark!), the whole bureaucratic apparatus is in fact
unchanged, is working in the old way and quite "freely" sabotaging
revolutionary measures! Even without this admission, does not the
actual history of the participation of the Socialist-Revolutionaries
and Mensheviks in the government prove this? It is noteworthy, however,
that in the ministerial company of the Cadets, the Chernovs, Rusanovs,
Zenzinovs, and other editors of Dyelo Naroda have so completely lost
all sense of shame as to brazenly assert, as if it were a mere
bagetelle, that in "their" ministeries everything is unchanged!!
Revolutionary-democratic phrases to gull the rural Simple Simons, and
bureaucracy and red tape to "gladden the hearts" of the capitalists --
that is the essence of the "honest" coalition.
The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of
bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and
discussion does not degenerate into deception, for the parliamentarians
themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have
themselves to test the results achieved in reality, and to account
directly to their constituents. Representative institutions remain,
but there is no parliamentarism here as a special system, as the
division of labor between the legislative and the executive, as a
privileged position for the deputies. We cannot imagine democracy,
even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we
can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism, if criticism of
bourgeois society is not mere words for us, if the desire to overthrow
the rule of the bourgeoisie is our earnest and sincere desire, and not
a mere "election" cry for catching workers' votes, as it is with the
Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, and also the Scheidemanns and
Legiens, the Smblats and Vanderveldes.
It is extremely instructive to note that, in speaking of the function
of those officials who are necessary for the Commune and for
proletarian democracy, Marx compares them to the workers of "every
other employer", that is, of the ordinary capitalist enterprise, with
its "workers, foremen, and accountants".
There is no trace of utopianism in Marx, in the sense that he made up
or invented a "new" society. No, he studied the birth of the new
society out of the old, and the forms of transition from the latter to
the former, as a mass proletarian movement and tried to draw practical
lessons from it. He "Learned" from the Commune, just as all the great
revolutionary thinkers learned unhesitatingly from the experience of
great movements of the oppressed classes, and never addressed them with
pedantic "homilies" (such as Plekhanov's: "They should not have taken
up arms" or Tsereteli's: "A class must limit itself").
Abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out
of the question. It is a utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic
machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that
will make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy -- this is
not a utopia, it is the experience of the Commune, the direct and
immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat.
Capitalism simplifies the functions of "state" administration; it makes
it possible to cast "bossing" aside and to confine the whole matter to
the organization of the proletarians (as the ruling class), which will
hire "workers, foremen and accountants" in the name of the whole of
society.
We are not utopians, we do not "dream" of dispensing at once with all
administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based
upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are
totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to
postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we
want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people
who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and
accountants".
The subordination, however, must be to the armed vanguard of all the
exploited and working people, i.e., to the proletariat. A beginning
can and must be made at once, overnight, to replace the specific
"bossing" of state officials by the simple functions of "foremen and
accountants", functions which are already fully within the ability of
the average town dweller and can well be performed for "workmen's
wages".
We, the workers, shall organize large-scale production on the basis of
what capitalism has already created, relying on our own experience as
workers, establishing strict, iron discipline backed up by the state
power of the armed workers. We shall reduce the role of state
officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as
responsible, revocable, modestly paid "foremen and accountants" (of
course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees).
This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with
in accomplishing the proletarian revolution. Such a beginning, on the
basis of large-scale production, will of itself lead to the gradual
"withering away" of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an
order -- an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no
similarity to wage slavery -- an order under which the functions of
control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be
performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally
die out as the special functions of a special section of the
population.
A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century
called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system.
This is very true. At the present the postal service is a business
organized on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is
gradually transforming all trusts into organizations of a similar type,
in which, standing over the "common" people, who are overworked and
starved, one has the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of
social management is here already to hand. Once we have overthrown the
capitalists, crushed the resistance of these exploiters with the iron
hand of the armed workers, and smashed the bureaucratic machinery of
the modern state, we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism, freed
from the "parasite", a mechanism which can very well be set going by
the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and
accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all "state" officials in
general, workmen's wages. Here is a concrete, practical task which can
immediately be fulfilled in relation to all trusts, a task whose
fulfilment will rid the working people of exploitation, a task which
takes account of what the Commune had already begun to practice
(particularly in building up the state).
To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service so
that the technicians, foremen and accountants, as well as all
officials, shall receive salaries no higher than "a workman's wage",
all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat -- that
is our immediate aim. This is what will bring about the abolition of
parliamentarism and the preservation of representative institutions.
This is what will rid the laboring classes of the bourgeoisie's
prostitution of these institutions.
"... The few but important functions which would still remain for
a central government were not to to be suppressed, as had been
deliberately mis-stated, but were to be transferred to communal,
i.e., strictly responsible, officials.
"... National unity was not to be broken, but, on the contrary,
organized by the communal constitution; it was to become a reality
by the destruction of state power which posed as the embodiment of
that unity yet wanted to be independent of, and superior to, the
nation, on whose body it was but a parasitic excrescence. While
the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to
be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an
authority claiming the right to stand above society, and restored
to the responsible servants of society."
(Bernstein, Premises, German edition, 1899, pp.134 and 136)
The only thing that does occur to the opportunist is what he sees
around him, in an environment of petty-bourgeois philistinism and
"reformists" stagnation, namely, only "municipalities"! The opportunist
has even grown out of the habit of thinking about proletarian
revolution.
It is ridiculous. But the remarkable thing is that nobody argued with
Bernstein on this point. Bernstein has been refuted by many,
especially by Plekhanov in Russian literature and by Kautsky in
European literature, but neither of them has said anything about this
distortion of Marx by Bernstein.
The opportunist has so much forgotten how to think in a revolutionary
way and to dwell on revolution that he attributes "federalism" to Marx,
whom he confuses with the founder of anarchism, Proudhon. As for
Kautsky and Plekhanov, who claim to be orthodox Marxists and defenders
of the theory of revolutionary Marxism, they are silent on this point!
Here is one of the roots of the extreme vulgarization of the views on
the difference between Marxism and anarchism, which is characteristic
of both the Kautskyites and the opportunists, and which we shall
discuss again later.
There is not a trace of federalism in Marx's above-quoted observation
on the experience of the Commune. Marx agreed with Proudhon on the
very point that the opportunist Bernstein did not see. Marx disagreed
with Proudhon on the very point on which Bernstein found a similarity
between them.
Marx agreed with Proudhon in that they both stood for the "smashing" of
the modern state machine. Neither the opportunists nor the Kautskyites
wish to see the similarity of views on this point between Marxism and
anarchism (both Proudhon and Bakunin) because this is where they have
departed from Marxism.
Marx disagreed both with Proudhon and Bakunin precisely on the question
of federalism (not to mention the dictatorship of the proletariat).
Federalism as a principle follows logically from the petty-bourgeois
views of anarchism. Marx was a centralist. There is no departure
whatever from centralism in his observations just quoted. Only those
who are imbued with the philistine "superstitious belief" in the state
can mistake the destruction of the bourgeois state machine for the
destruction of centralism!
Now if the proletariat and the poor peasants take state power into
their own hands, organize themselves quite freely in communes, and
unite the action of all the communes in striking at capital, in
crushing the resistance of the capitalists, and in transferring the
privately-owned railways, factories, land and so on to the entire
nation, to the whole of society, won't that be centralism? Won't that
be the most consistent democratic centralism and, moreover, proletarian
centralism?
Bernstein simply cannot conceive of the possibility of voluntary
centralism, of the voluntary fusion of the proletarian communes, for
the sole purpose of destroying bourgeois rule and the bourgeois state
machine. Like all philistines, Bernstein pictures centralism as
something which can be imposed and maintained solely from above, and
solely by the bureaucracy and military clique.
As though foreseeing that his views might be distorted, Marx expressly
emphasized that the charge that the Commune had wanted to destroy
national unity, to abolish the central authority, was a deliberate
fraud. Marx purposely used the words: "National unity was... to be
organized", so as to oppose conscious, democratic, proletarian
centralism to bourgeois, military, bureaucratic centralism.
But there are none so deaf as those who will not hear. And the very
thing the opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy do not want to
hear about it the destruction of state power, the amputation of the
parasitic excrescence.
We have already quoted Marx's words on the
subject, and we must now supplement them.
"... The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social
body all the forces hitherto absorbed by that parasitic
excrescence, the 'state', feeding upon and hampering the free
movement of society. By this one act it would have initiated the
regeneration of France....
"... The Communal Constitution would have brought the rural
producers under the intellectual lead of the central towns of their
districts, and there secured to them, in the town working men, the
natural trustees of their interests. The very existence of the
Commune involved, as a matter of course, local self-government, but
no longer as a counterpoise to state power, now become
superfluous."
All this was written a little less than half a century ago; and now one
has to engage in excavations, as it were, in order to bring undistorted
Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the people. The conclusions
drawn from the observation of the last great revolution which Marx
lived through were forgotten just when the time for the next great
proletarian revolution has arrived.
"Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would
have been an impossibility and a delusion...."
Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism and the political
struggle that the state was bound to disappear, and that the
transitional form of its disappearance (the transition from state to
non-state) would be the "proletariat organized as the ruling class".
Marx, however, did not set out to discover the political forms of this
future stage. He limited himself to carefully observing French
history, to analyzing it, and to drawing the conclusion to which the
year 1851 had led, namely, that matters were moving towards destruction
of the bourgeois state machine.
And when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst
forth, Marx, in spite of its failure, in spite of its short life and
patent weakness, began to study the forms it had discovered.
The Commune is the form "at last discovered" by the proletarian
revolution, under which the economic emancipation of labor can take
place.
The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revolution to smash
the bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form "at last
discovered", by which the smashed state machine can and must be
replaced.
We shall see further on that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917,
in different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the
work of the Commune and confirm Marx's brilliant historical
analysis.
Marx gave the fundamentals concerning the
significance of the experience of the Commune. Engels returned to the
same subject time and again, and explained Marx's analysis and
conclusions, sometimes elucidating other aspects of the question with
such power and vividness that it is necessary to deal with his
explanations specially.
In his work, The Housing
Question (1872), Engels already took into account the
experience of the Commune, and dealt several times with the tasks of
the revolution in relation to the state. It is interesting to note
that the treatment of this specific subject clearly revealed, on the
one hand, points of similarity between the proletarian state and the
present state -- points that warrant speaking of the state in both
cases -- and, on the other hand, points of difference between them, or
the transition to the destruction of the state.
(German edition, 1887, p.22)
(p.68)
Speaking of the Blanquists' adoption of the fundamental position of
Marxism after the Commune and under the influence of its experience,
Engels, in passing, formulates this position as follows:
(p.55)
Marxism has always taught that with the abolition of classes the state
will also be abolished. The well-known passage on the "withering away
of the state in Anti-Duhring accuses the anarchists not simply of
favoring the abolition of the state, but of preaching that the state
can be abolished "overnight".
As the now prevailing "Social-Democratic" doctrine completely distorts
the relation of Marxism to anarchism on the question of the abolition
of the state, it will be particularly useful to recall a certain
controversy in which Marx and Engels came out against the
anarchists.
This controversy took place in 1873. Marx and
Engels contributed articles against the Proudhonists, "autonomists" or
"anti- authoritarians", to an Italian socialist annual, and it was not
until 1913 that these articles appeared in German in Neue Zeit.
(Neue Zeit Vol.XXXII, 1, 1913-14, p.40)
To prevent the true meaning of his struggle against anarchism from being
distorted, Marx expressly emphasized the "revolutionary and transient
form" of the state which the proletariat needs. The proletariat needs
the state only temporarily. We do not after all differ with the
anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We
maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the
instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the
exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is
necessary for the abolition of classes. Marx chooses the sharpest and
clearest way of stating his case against the anarchists: After
overthrowing the yoke of the capitalists, should the workers "lay down
their arms", or use them against the capitalists in order to crush their
resistance? But what is the systematic use of arms by ne class against
another if not a "transient form" of state?
Let every Social-Democrat ask himself: Is that how he has been posing
the question of the state in controversy with the anarchists? Is that
how it has been posed by the vast majority of the official socialist
parties of the Second International?
Engels expounds the same ideas in much greater detail and still more
popularly. First of all he ridicules the muddled ideas of the
Proudhonists, who call themselves "anti-authoritarians", i.e.,
repudiated all authority, all subordination, all power. Take a
factory, a railway, a ship on the high seas, said Engels: is it not
clear that not one of these complex technical establishments, based on
the use of machinery and the systematic co-operation of many people,
could function without a certain amount of subordination and,
consequently, without a certain amount of authority or power?
"Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying
out against political authority, the state? All socialists are
agreed that the state, and with it political authority, will
disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is,
that public functions will lose their political character and
become mere administrative functions of watching over social
interests. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political
state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social relations
that gave both to it have been destroyed. They demand that the
first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of
authority.
"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is
certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act
whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other
part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are
highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain
its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the
reactionaries. Would the paris Commune have lasted more than a day
if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the
bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made
too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things:
either that anti-authoritarians down't know what they are talking
about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or
they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the
proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction."
(p.39)
Against, the most remarkable thing in this argument of Engels' is the
way he states his case against the anarchists. Social-Democrats,
claiming to be disciples of Engels, have argued on this subject against
the anarchists millions of times since 1873, but they have not argued
as Marxists could and should. The anarchist idea of abolition of the
state is muddled and non-revolutionary -- that is how Engels put it.
It is precisely the revolution in its rise and development, with its
specific tasks in relation to violence, authority, power, the state,
that the anarchists refuse to see.
The usual criticism of anarchism by present-day Social-Democrats has
boiled down to the purest philistine banality: "We recognize the state,
whereas the anarchists do not!" Naturally, such banality cannot but
repel workers who are at all capable of thinking and
revolutionary-minded. What Engels says is different. He stresses that
all socialists recognize that the state will disappear as a result of
the socialist revolution. He then deals specifically with the question
of the revolution -- the very question which, as a rule, the
Social-Democrats evade out of opportunism, leaving it, so to speak,
exclusively for the anarchists "to work out". And when dealing with
this question, Engels takes the bull by the horns; he asks: should not
the Commune have made more use of the revolutionary power of the state,
that is, of the proletariat armed and organized as the ruling class?
Prevailing official Social-Democracy usually dismissed the question of
the concrete tasks of the proletariat in the revolution either with a
philistine sneer, or, at best, with the sophistic evasion: "The future
will show". And the anarchists were justified in saying about such
Social-Democrats that they were failing in their task of giving the
workers a revolutionary education. Engels draws upon the experience of
the last proletarian revolution precisely for the purpose of making a
most concrete study of what should be done by the proletariat, and in
what manner, in relation to both the banks and the state.
One of the most, if not the most, remarkable
observation on the state in the works of Marx and Engels is contained
in the following passage in Engels' letter to Bebel dated March 18-28,
1875. This letter, we may observe in parenthesis, was, as far as we
know, first published by Bebel in the second volume of his memoirs
(Aus meinem Leben), which appeared in 1911, i.e., 36 years after the
letter had been written and sent.
Engels wrote to Bebel criticizing the same draft of the Gotha Programme
which Marx criticized in his famous letter to Bracke. Referring
specially to the question of the state, Engels said:
(pp.321-22 of the German original)
What a howl about "anarchism" would be raised by the leading lights of
present-day "Marxism", which has been falsified for the convenience of
the opportunists, if such an amendment of the programme were suggested
to them!
Let them howl. This will earn them the praises of the bourgeoisie.
And we shall go on with our work. In revising the programme of our
Party, we must by all means take the advice of Engels and Marx into
consideration in order to come nearer the truth, to restore Marxism by
ridding it of distortions, to guide the struggle of the working class
for its emancipation more correctly. Certainly no one opposed to the
advice of Engels and Marx will be found among the Bolsheviks. The only
difficulty that may perhaps arise will be in regard to the term. In
German there are two words meaning "community", of which Engels used
the one which does not denote a single community, but their totality, a
system of communities. In Russian there is no such word, and we may
have to choose the French word "commune", although this also has its
drawbacks.
"The Commune was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word" --
this is the most theoretically important statement Engels makes. After
what has been said above, this statement is perfectly clear. The
Commune was ceasing to be a state since it had to suppress, not the
majority of the population, but a minority (the exploiters). It had
smashed the bourgeois state machine. In place of a special coercive
force the population itself came on the scene. All this was a
departure from the state in the proper sense of the word. And had the
Commune become firmly established, all traces of the state in it would
have "withered away" of themselves; it would not have had to "abolish"
the institutions of the state -- they would have ceased to function as
they ceased to have anything to do.
"The 'people's state' has been thrown in our faces by the anarchists".
In saying this, Engels above all has in mind Bakunin and his attacks on
the German Social-Democrats. Engels admits that these attacks were
justified insofar as the "people's state" was as much an absurdity and
as much a departure from socialism as the "free people's state".
Engels tried to put the struggle of the German Social-Democrats against
the anarchists on the right lines, to make this struggle correct in
principle, to ride it of opportunist prejudices concerning the "state".
Unfortunately, Engels' letter was pigeon-holed for 36 years. We shall
see farther on that, even after this letter was published, Kautsky
persisted in virtually the same mistakes against which Engels had
warned.
Bebel replied to Engels in a letter dated September 21, 1875, in which
he wrote, among other things, that he "fully agreed" with Engels'
opinion of the draft programme, and that he had reproached Liebknecht
with readiness to make concessions (p.334 of the German edition of
Bebel's memoirs, Vol.II). But if we take Bebel's pamphlet, Our
Aims, we find there views on the state that are absolutely
wrong.
(Unsere Ziele, 1886, p.14)
In analyzing Marxist teachings on the state, the
criticism of the draft of the Erfurt Programme, sent by Engels to
Kautsky on June 29, 1891, and published only 10 years later in Neue
Zeit, cannot be ignored; for it is with the opportunist views of the
Social-Democrats on questions of state organization that this criticism
is mainly concerned.
We shall note in passing that Engels also makes an exceedingly valuable
observation on economic questions, which shows how attentively and
thoughtfully he watched the various changes occurring in modern
capitalism, and how for this reason he was able to foresee to a certain
extent the tasks of our present, the imperialist, epoch. Here is that
observation: referring to the word "planlessness" (Planlosigkeit), used
in the draft programme, as characteristic of capitalism, Engels
wrote:
(Neue Zeit, Vol.XX, 1, 1901-02, p.8)
But to return to the question of the state. In his letter Engels makes
three particularly valuable suggestions: first, in regard to the
republic; second, in regard to the connection between the national
question and state organization; and, third, in regard to local
self-government.
In regard to the republic, Engels made this the focal point of this
criticism of the draft of the Erfurt Programme. And when we recall the
importance which the Erfurt Programme acquired for all the Social-
Democrats of the world, and that it became the model for the whole
Second International, we may say without exaggeration that Engels
thereby criticizes the opportunism of the whole Second
International.
\
"This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for
the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving
for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences,
this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present may be
'honestly' meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and 'honest'
opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all....
"If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class
can only come to power in the form of the democratic republic.
This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the
proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown...."
On the subject of a federal republic, in connection with the national
composition of the population, Engels wrote:
Approaching the matter from the standpoint of the proletariat and the
proletarian revolution, Engels, like Marx, upheld democratic
centralism, the republic -- one and indivisible. He regarded the
federal republic either as an exception and a hindrance to development,
or as a transition from a monarchy to a centralized republic, as a
"step forward" under certain special conditions. And among these
special conditions, he puts the national question to the fore.
Although mercilessly criticizing the reactionary nature of small
states, and the screening of this by the national question in certain
concrete cases, Engels, like Marx, never betrayed the slightest desire
to brush aside the national question -- a desire of which the Dutch and
Polish Marxists, who proceed from their perfectly justified opposition
to the narrow philistine nationalism of "their" little states, are
often guilty.
Even in regard to britain, where geographical conditions, a common
language and the history of many centuries would seem to have "put an
end" to the national question in the various small divisions of the
country -- even in regard to to that country, Engels reckoned with the
plain fact that the national question was not yet a thing of the past,
and recognized in consequence that the establishment of a federal
republic would be a "step forward". Of course, there is not the
slightest hint here of Engels abandoning the criticism of the
shortcomings of a federal republic or renouncing the most determined
advocacy of, and struggle for, a unified and centralized democratic
republic.
But Engels did not at all men democratic centralism in the bureaucratic
sense in which the term is used by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
ideologists, the anarchists among the latter. His idea of centralism
did not in the least preclude such broad local self-government as would
combine the voluntary defence of the unity of the state by the
"communes" and districts, and the complete elimination of all
bureaucratic practices and all "ordering" from above. Carrying forward
the programme views of Marxism on the state, Engels wrote:
It is extremely important to note that Engels, armed with facts,
disproved by a most precise example the prejudice which is very
widespread, particularly among petty-bourgeois democrats, that a
federal republic necessarily means a greater amount of freedom than a
centralized republic. This is wrong. It is disproved by the facts
cited by Engels regarding the centralized French Republic of 792-98 and
the federal Swiss Republic. The really democratic centralized republic
gave more freedom that the federal republic. In other words, the
greatest amount of local, regional, and other freedom known in history
was accorded by a centralized and not a federal republic.
Insufficient attention has been and is being paid in our Party
propaganda and agitation to this fact, as, indeed, to the whole
question of the federal and the centralized republic and local
self-government.
In his preface to the third edition of The Civil
War in France (this preface is dated March 18, 1891, and was
originally published in Neue Zeit), Engels, in addition to some
interesting incidental remarks on questions concerning the attitude
towards the state, gave a remarkably vivid summary of the lessons of
the Commune. This summary, made more profound by the entire experience
of the 20 years that separated the author from the Commune, and
directed expressly against the "superstitious belief in the state" so
widespread in Germany, may justly be called the last word of Marxism on
the question under consideration.
Tsereteli's historical speech of June 11 will, of course, serve every
historian of the revolution of 1917 as a graphic illustration of how
the Social-Revolutionary and Menshevik bloc, led by Mr. Tsereteli,
deserted to the bourgeoisie against the revolutionary proletariat.
Another incidental remark of Engels', also connected with the question
of the state, deals with religion. It is well-known that the German
Social-Democrats, as they degenerated and became increasingly
opportunist, slipped more and more frequently into the philistine
misinterpretation of the celebrated formula: "Religion is to be
declared a private matter." That is, the formula was twisted to mean
that religion was a private matter even for the party of the
revolutionary proletariat!! It was against this complete betrayal of
the revolutionary programme of the proletariat that Engels vigorously
protested. In 1891 he saw only the very feeble beginnings of
opportunism in his party, and, therefore, he expressed himself with
extreme caution:
The future historian of the German Social-Democrats, in tracing the
roots of their shameful bankruptcy in 1914, will find a fair amount of
interesting material on this question, beginning with the evasive
declarations in the articles of the party's ideological leader,
Kautsky, which throw the door wide open to opportunism, and ending with
the attitude of the party towards the "Los-von-Kirche-Bewegung" (the
"Leave-the-Church" movement) in 1913.
But let us see how, 20 years after the Commune, Engels summed up its
lessons for the fighting proletariat.
Here are the lessons to which Engels attached prime importance:
"From the very outset the Commune had to recognize that the working
class, once in power, could not go on managing with the old state
machine; that in order not to lose again its only just-gained
supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with
all the old machinery of oppression previously used against it
itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own
deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception,
subject to recall at any time...."
Engels, however, did not make the mistake some Marxists make in
dealing, for example, with the question of the right of nations to
self- determination, when they argue that is is impossible under
capitalism and will be superfluous under socialism. this seemingly
clever but actually incorrect statement might be made in regard to any
democratic institution, including moderate salaries for officials,
because fully consistent democracy is impossible under capitalism, and
under socialism all democracy will wither away.
This is a sophism like the old joke about a man becoming bald by losing
one more hair.
To develop democracy to the utmost, to find the forms for this
development, to test them by practice, and so fort -- all this is one
of the component tasks of the struggle for the social revolution.
Taken separately, no kind of democracy will bring socialism. But in
actual life democracy will never be "taken separately"; it will be
"taken together" with other things, it will exert its influence on
economic life as well, will stimulate its transformation; and in its
turn it will be influenced by economic development, and so on. This is
the dialectics of living history.
Engels continued:
Two more remarks.
1. Engels' statement that in a democratic republic, "no less" than in
a monarchy, the state remains a "machine for the oppression of one
class by another" by no means signifies that the form of oppression
makes no difference to the proletariat, as some anarchists "teach". A
wider, freer and more open form of the class struggle and of class
oppression vastly assists the proletariat in its struggle for the
abolition of classes in general.
2. Why will only a new generation be able to discard the entire lumber
of the state? This question is bound up with that of overcoming
democracy, with which we shall deal now.
Engels came to express his views on this subject
when establishing that the term "Social-Democrat" was scientifically
wrong.
In a preface to an edition of his articles of the seventies on various
subjects, mostly on "international" questions (Internationales aus
dem Volkstaat), dated January 3, 1894, i.e., written a year and a
half before his death, Engels wrote that in all his articles he used
the word "Communist", and not "Social-Democrat", because at that time
the Proudhonists in France and the Lassalleans in Germany called
themselves Social-Democrats.
Perhaps some wit would console us Bolsheviks in the manner of Engels:
we have a real party, it is developing splendidly; even such a
meaningless and ugly term as "Bolshevik" will "pass muster", although
it expresses nothing whatever but the purely accidental fact that at
the Brussels-London Congress of 1903 we were in the majority. Perhaps
now that the persecution of our Party by republicans and
"revolutionary" petty-bourgeois democrats in July and August has earned
the name "Bolshevik" such universal respect, now that, in addition,
this persecution marks the tremendous historical progress our Party has
made in its real development -- perhaps now even I might hesitate to
insist on the suggestion I made in April to change the name of our
Party. Perhaps I would propose a "compromise" to my comrades, namely,
to call ourselves the Communist Party, but to retain the word
"Bolshevik" in brackets.
But the question of the name of the Party is incomparably less
important than the question of the attitude of the revolutionary
proletariat to the state.
In the usual argument about the state, the mistake is constantly made
against which Engels warned and which we have in passing indicated
above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the
state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of
the state means the withering away of democracy.
At first sight this assertion seems exceedingly strange and
incomprehensible; indeed, someone may even suspect us of expecting the
advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination
of the minority to the majority will not be observed -- for democracy
means the recognition of this very principle.
No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority
to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the
subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization
for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one
section of the population against another.
We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all
organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people
in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in
which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority
will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are
convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the
need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of
one man to another, and of one section of the population to another,
will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing
the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without
subordination.
In order to emphasize this element of habit, Engels speaks of a new
generation, "reared in new, free social conditions", which will "be
able to discard the entire lumber of the state" -- of any state,
including the democratic-republican state.
In order to explain this, it is necessary to analyze he economic basis
of the withering away of the state.
Marx explains this question most thoroughly in his
Critique of the Gotha Programme (letter to Bracke, May 5, 1875, which
was not published until 1891 when it was printed in Neue Zeit,
vol.IX, 1, and which has appeared in Russian in a special edition).
The polemical part of this remarkable work, which contains a criticism
of Lassalleanism, has, so to speak, overshadowed its positive part,
namely, the analysis of the connection between the development of
communism and the withering away of the state.
From a superficial comparison of Marx's letter to
Bracke of May 5, 1875, with Engels' letter to Bebel of March 28, 1875,
which we examined above, it might appear that Marx was much more of a
"champion of the state" than Engels, and that the difference of opinion
between the two writers on the question of the state was very
considerable.
Engels suggested to Bebel that all chatter about the state be dropped
altogether, that the word "state" be eliminated from the programme
altogether and the word "community" substituted for it. Engels even
declared that the Commune was long a state in the proper sense of the
word. Yet Marx even spoke of the "future state in communist society",
i.e., he would seem to recognize the need for the state even under
communism.
But such a view would be fundamentally wrong. A closer examination
shows that Marx's and Engels' views on the state and its withering away
were completely identical, and that Marx's expression quoted above
refers to the state in the process of withering away.
Clearly, there can be no question of specifying the moment of the
future "withering away", the more so since it will obviously be a
lengthy process. The apparent difference between Marx and Engels is
due to the fact that they wealth with different subject and pursued
different aims. Engels set out to show Bebel graphically, sharply, and
in broad outline the utter absurdity of the current prejudices
concerning the state (shared to no small degree by Lassalle). Marx
only touched upon this question in passing, being interested in another
subject, namely, the development of communist society.
The whole theory of Marx is the application of the theory of
development -- in its most consistent, complete, considered and pithy
form -- to modern capitalism. Naturally, Marx was faced with the
problem of applying this theory both to the forthcoming collapse of
capitalism and to the future development of future communism.
On the basis of what facts, then, can the question of the future
development of future communism be dealt with?
On the basis of the fact that it has its origin in capitalism, that it
develops historically from capitalism, that it is the result of the
action of a social force to which capitalism gave birth. There is no
trace of an attempt on Marx's part to make up a utopia, to indulge in
idle guess-work about what cannot be known. Marx treated the question
of communism in the same way as a naturalist would treat the question
of the development of, say, a new biological variety, once he knew that
it had originated in such and such a way and was changing in such and
such a definite direction.
To begin with, Marx brushed aside the confusion the Gotha Programme
brought into the question of the relationship between state and
society. He wrote:
"Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilized
countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have
this in common, that they are based on modern bourgeois society,
only one more or less capitalistically developed. The have,
therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In
this sense it is possible to speak of the 'present-day state', in
contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois
society, will have died off.
"The question then arise: what transformation will the state
undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions
will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state
functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and
one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold
combination of the word people with the word state."
The first fact that has been established most accurately by the whole
theory of development, by science as a whole -- a fact tat was ignored
by the utopians, and is ignored by the present-day opportunists, who
are afraid of the socialist revolution -- is that, historically, there
must undoubtedly be a special stage, or a special phase, of transition
from capitalism to communism.
Marx continued:
Previously the question was put as follows: to achieve its
emancipation, the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeoisie, win
political power and establish its revolutionary dictatorship.
Now the question is put somewhat differently: the transition from
capitalist society -- which is developing towards communism -- to
communist society is impossible without a "political transition
period", and the state in this period can only be the revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat.
What, then, is the relation of this dictatorship to democracy?
We have seen that the Communist Manifesto simply places side by side
the two concepts: "to raise the proletariat to the position of the
ruling class" and "to win the battle of democracy". On the basis of all
that has been said above, it is possible to determine more precisely how
democracy changes in the transition from capitalism to communism.
In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable
conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic
republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits
set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in
effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes,
only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about
the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the
slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the
modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot
be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the
ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is
debarred from participation in public and political life.
The correctness of this statement is perhaps mot clearly confirmed by
germany, because constitutional legality steadily endured there for a
remarkably long time -- nearly half a century (1871-1914) -- and during
this period the Social-Democrats were able to achieve far more than in
other countries in the way of "utilizing legality", and organized a
larger proportion of the workers into a political party than anywhere
else in the world.
What is this largest proportion of politically conscious and active wage
slaves that has so far been recorded in capitalist society? One million
members of the Social-Democratic Party -- out of 15,000,000
wage-workers! Three million organized in trade unions -- out of
15,000,000!
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich -- that
is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into
the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty"
-- supposedly petty -- details of the suffrage (residential
qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the
representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of
assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely
capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., -- we see
restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions,
exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially
in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been
inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine
out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians
come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions
exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active
participation in democracy.
Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in
analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are
allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives
of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!
But from this capitalist democracy -- that is inevitably narrow and
stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and
false through and through -- forward development does not proceed
simply, directly and smoothly, towards "greater and greater democracy",
as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us
believe. No, forward development, i.e., development towards communism,
proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do
otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be
broken by anyone else or in any other way.
And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the
vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of
suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of
democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which
for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the
people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the
proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the
oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in
order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be
crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy
where there is suppression and where there is violence.
Engels expressed this splendidly in his letter to Bebel when he said, as
the reader will remember, that "the proletariat needs the state, not in
the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and
as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such
ceases to exist".
Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force,
i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the
people -- this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition
from capitalism to communism.
Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have
disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no
distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to
the social means of production), only then "the state... ceases to
exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom". Only then will a
truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy
without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to
wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist
slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of
capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to
observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been
known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book
maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force,
without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus
for coercion called the state.
The expression "the state withers away" is very well-chosen, for it
indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process.
Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see
around us on millions of occassions how readily people become accustomed
to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no
exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes
protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression.
And so 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.
In other words, 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 labor.
Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism
suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the
exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a
special machine for suppression, the "state", is still necessary, but
this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper
sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by
the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy,
simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than
the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it
will cost mankind far less. And it is compatible with the extension of
democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the
need for a special machine of suppression will begin to disappear.
Naturally, the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a
highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can
suppress the exploiters even with a very simple "machine", almost
without a "machine", without a special apparatus, by the simple
organization of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers' and
Soldiers' Deputies, we would remark, running ahead).
Lastly, only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for
there is nobody to be suppressed -- "nobody" in the sense of a class,
of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population.
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, as simply and
as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society,
interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being
assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of
excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social
intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their
poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will
inevitably begin to "wither away". We do not know how quickly an din
what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their
withering away the state will also wither away.
Without building utopias, Marx defined more fully what can be defined
now regarding this future, namely, the differences between the lower and
higher phases (levels, stages) of communist society.
In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx
goes into detail to disprove Lassalle's idea that under socialism the
worker will receive the "undiminished" or "full product of his labor".
Marx shows that from the whole of the social labor of society there
must be deducted a reserve fund,a fund for the expansion of production,
a fund for the replacement of the "wear and tear" of machinery, and so
on. Then, from the means of consumption must be deducted a fund for
administrative expenses, for schools, hospitals, old people's homes,
and so on.
Instead of Lassalle's hazy, obscure, general phrase ("the full product
of his labor to the worker"), Marx makes a sober estimate of exactly how
socialist society will have to manage its affairs. Marx proceeds to
make a concrete analysis of the conditions of life of a society in which
there will be no capitalism, and says:
The means of production are no longer the private property of
individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society.
Every member of society, performing a certain part of the
socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the
effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with this
certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a
corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the
amount of labor which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore,
receives from society as much as he has given to it.
"Equality" apparently reigns supreme.
But when Lassalle, having in view such a social order (usually called
socialism, but termed by Marx the first phase of communism), says that
this is "equitable distribution", that this is "the equal right of all
to an equal product of labor", Lassalle is mistaken and Marx exposes the
mistake.
"Hence, the equal right," says Marx, in this case still certainly
conforms to "bourgeois law", which,like all law, implies inequality.
All law is an application of an equal measure to different people who in
fact are not alike, are not equal to one another. That is why the
"equal right" is violation of equality and an injustice. In fact,
everyone, having performed as much social labor as another, receives an
equal share of the social product (after the above-mentioned
deductions).
But people are not alike: one is strong, another is weak; one is
married, another is not; one has more children, another has less, and so
on. And the conclusion Marx draws is:
The vulgar economists, including the bourgeois professors and "our"
Tugan, constantly reproach the socialists with forgetting the inequality
of people and with "dreaming" of eliminating this inequality. Such a
reproach, as we see, only proves the extreme ignorance of the bourgeois
ideologists.
Marx not only most scrupulously takes account of the inevitable
inequality of men, but he also takes into account the fact that the mere
conversion of the means of production into the common property of the
whole society (commonly called "socialism") does not remove the defects
of distribution and the inequality of "bourgeois laws" which continues
to prevail so long as products are divided "according to the amount of
labor performed". Continuing, Marx says:
However, it persists as far as its other part is concerned; it persists
in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of
products and the allotment of labor among the members of society. The
socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already
realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products
for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is
not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which
gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal)
amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.
This is a "defect", says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase
of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not
think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to
work for society without any rules of law. Besides, the abolition of
capitalism does not immediately create the economic prerequisites for
such a change.
Now, there are no other rules than those of "bourgeois law". To this
extent, therefore, there still remains the need for a state, which,
while safeguarding the common ownership of the means of production,
would safeguard equality in labor and in the distribution of products.
The state withers away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists,
any classes, and, consequently, no class can be suppressed.
But the state has not yet completely withered away, since thee still
remains the safeguarding of "bourgeois law", which sanctifies actual
inequality. For the state to wither away completely, complete communism
is necessary.
Marx continues:
The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is such
a high state of development of communism at which the antithesis
between mental and physical labor disappears, at which there
consequently disappears one of the principal sources of modern social
inequality -- a source, moreover, which cannot on any account be
removed immediately by the mere conversion of the means of production
into public property, by the mere exploitation of the capitalists.
This expropriation will make it possible for the productive forces to
develop to a tremendous extent. And when we see how incredibly
capitalism is already retarding this development, when we see how much
progress could be achieved on the basis of the level of technique
already attained, we are entitled to say with the fullest confidence
that the expropriation of the capitalists will inevitably result in an
enormous development of the productive forces of human society. But how
rapidly this development will proceed, how soon it will reach the point
of breaking away from the division of labor, of doing away with the
antithesis between mental and physical labor, of transforming labor into
"life's prime want" -- we do not and cannot know.
That is why we are entitled to speak only of the inevitable withering
away of the state, emphasizing the protracted nature of this process and
its dependence upon the rapidity of development of the higher phase of
communism, and leaving the question of the time required for, or the
concrete forms of, the withering away quite open, because there is no
material for answering these questions.
The state will be able to wither away completely when society adopts the
rule: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs", i.e., when people have become so accustomed to observing the
fundamental rules of social intercourse and when their labor has become
so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their
ability. "The narrow horizon of bourgeois law", which compels one to
calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked
half an hour more than anybody else -- this narrow horizon will then be
left behind. There will then be no need for society, in distributing
the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will
take freely "according to his needs".
From the bourgeois point of view, it is easy to declare that such a
social order is "sheer utopia" and to sneer at the socialists for
promising everyone the right to receive from society, without any
control over the labor of the individual citizen, any quantity of
truffles, cars, pianos, etc. Even to this day, most bourgeois "savants"
confine themselves to sneering in this way, thereby betraying both their
ignorance and their selfish defence of capitalism.
Ignorance -- for it has never entered the head of any socialist to
"promise" that the higher phase of the development of communism will
arrive; as for the greatest socialists' forecast that it will arrive, it
presupposes not the present ordinary run of people, who, like the
seminary students in Pomyalovsky's stories, are capable of damaging the
stocks of public wealth "just for fun", and of demanding the impossible.
Until the "higher" phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the
strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labor
and the measure of consumption; but this control must start with the
expropriation of the capitalists, with the establishment of workers'
control over the capitalists, and must be exercised not by a state of
bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers.
The selfish defence of capitalism by the bourgeois ideologists (and
their hangers-on, like the Tseretelis, Chernovs, and Co.) consists in
that they substitute arguing and talk about the distant future for the
vital and burning question of present-day politics, namely, the
expropriation of the capitalists, the conversion of all citizens into
workers and other employees of one huge "syndicate" -- the whole state
-- and the complete subordination of the entire work of this syndicate
to a genuinely democratic state, the state of the Soviets of Workers'
and Soldiers' Deputies.
In fact, when a learned professor, followed by the philistine, followed
in turn by the Tseretelis and Chernovs, talks of wild utopias, of the
demagogic promises of the Bolsheviks, of the impossibility of
"introducing" socialism, it is the higher stage, or phase, of communism
he has in mind, which no one has ever promised or even thought to
"introduce", because, generally speaking, it cannot be "introduced".
And this brings us to the question of the scientific distinction between
socialism and communism which Engels touched on in his above-quoted
argument about the incorrectness of the name "Social-Democrat".
Politically, the distinction between the first, or lower, and the higher
phase of communism will in time, probably, be tremendous. But it would
be ridiculous to recognize this distinction now, under capitalism, and
only individual anarchists, perhaps, could invest it with primary
importance (if there still are people among the anarchists who have
learned nothing from the "Plekhanov" conversion of the Kropotkins, of
Grave, Corneliseen, and other "stars" of anarchism into social-
chauvinists or "anarcho-trenchists", as Ghe, one of the few anarchists
who have still preserved a sense of humor and a conscience, has put it).
But the scientific distinction between socialism and communism is clear.
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.
Instead of scholastically invented, "concocted" definitions and
fruitless disputes over words (What is socialism? What is communism?),
Marx gives an analysis of what might be called the stages of the
economic maturity of communism.
In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully
mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of
capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its
first phase retains "the narrow horizon of bourgeois law". Of course,
bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably
presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing
without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of
law.
It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only
bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!
This may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum of which
Marxism is often accused by people who have not taken the slightest
trouble to study its extraordinarily profound content.
But in fact, remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in
life at every step, both in nature and in society. And Marx did not
arbitrarily insert a scrap of "bourgeois" law into communism, but
indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society
emerging out of the womb 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 labor and wages, humanity will
inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing father, 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 only socialism will 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 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.
Here "quantity turns into quality": such a degree of democracy implies
overstepping the boundaries of bourgeois society and beginning its
socialist reorganization. If really all take part in the administration
of the state, capitalism cannot retain its hold. The development of
capitalism, in turn, creates the preconditions that enable really "all"
to take part in the administration of the state. Some of these
preconditions are: universal literacy, which has already been achieved
in a number of the most advanced capitalist countries, then the
"training and disciplining" of millions of workers by the huge, complex,
socialized apparatus of the postal service, railways, big factories,
large-scale commerce, banking, etc., etc.
Given these economic preconditions, it is quite possible, after the
overthrow of the capitalists and the bureaucrats, to proceed
immediately, overnight, to replace them in the control over production
and distribution, in the work of keeping account of labor and products,
by the armed workers, by the whole of the armed population. (The
question of control and accounting should not be confused with the
question of the scientifically trained staff of engineers, agronomists,
and so on. These gentlemen are working today in obedience to the wishes
of the capitalists and will work even better tomorrow in obedience to
the wishes of the armed workers.)
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 becomes
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 nd 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 more
important functions of the state are reduced to such accounting and
control by the workers themselves, it will cease to be a "political
state" and "public functions will lose their political character and
become mere administrative functions" (cf. above, Chapter IV, 2,
Engels' controversy with the anarchists).]
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 labor and pay.
But this "factory" discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating
the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters, will extend to the
whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal. It is
only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the
infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further
progress.
From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority,
have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work
into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant
capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their
capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly
corrupted by capitalism -- from this moment the need for government of
any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the
democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more
democratic the "state" which consists of the armed workers, and which is
"no longer a state in the proper sense of the word", the more rapidly
every form of state begins to wither away.
For when all have learned to administer and actually to independently
administer social production, independently keep accounts and exercise
control over the parasites, the sons of the wealthy, the swindlers and
other "guardians of capitalist traditions", the escape from this popular
accounting and control will inevitably become so incredibly difficult,
such a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift
and severe punishment (for the armed workers are practical men and not
sentimental intellectuals, and they scarcely allow anyone to trifle with
them), that the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of
the community will very soon become a habit.
Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first
phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the
complete withering away of the state.
The question of the relation of the state to the
social revolution, and of the social revolution to the state, like the
question of revolution generally, was given very little attention by
the leading theoreticians and publicists of the Second International
(1889-1914). But the most characteristic thing about the process of
the gradual growth of opportunism that led to the collapse of the
Second International in 1914 is the fact that even when these people
were squarely faced with this question they tried to evade it or
ignored it.
In general, it may be said that evasiveness over the question of the
relation of the proletarian revolution to the state -- an evasiveness
which benefited and fostered opportunism -- resulted in the distortion
of Marxism and in its complete vulgarization.
To characterize this lamentable process, if only briefly, we shall take
the most prominent theoreticians of Marxism: Plekhanov and Kautsky.
Plekhanov wrote a special pamphlet on the relation
of anarchism to socialism, entitled Anarchism and Socialism, which
was published in german in 1894.
In treating this subject, Plekhanov contrived completely to evade the
most urgent, burning, and most politically essential issue in the
struggle against anarchism, namely, the relation of the revolution to
the state, and the question of the state in general! His pamphlet falls
into two distinct parts: one of them is historical and literary, and
contains valuable material on the history of the ideas of Stirner,
Proudhon, and others; the other is philistine, and contains a clumsy
dissertation on the theme that an anarchist cannot be distinguished from
a bandit.
It is a most amusing combination of subjects and most characteristic of
Plekhanov's whole activity on the eve of the revolution and during the
revolutionary period in Russia. In fact, in the years 1905 to 1917,
Plekhanov revealed himself as a semi-doctrinaire and semi-philistine
who, in politics, trailed in the wake of the bourgeoisie.
We have now seen how, in their controversy with the anarchists, marx and
Engels with the utmost thoroughness explained their views on the
relation of revolution to the state. In 1891, in his foreword to Marx's
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Engels wrote that "we" -- that is,
Engels and Marx -- "were at that time, hardly two years after the Hague
Congress of the [First] International, engaged in the most violent
struggle against Bakunin and his anarchists."
The anarchists had tried to claim the paris Commune as their "own", so
to say, as a collaboration of their doctrine; and they completely
misunderstood its lessons and Marx's analysis of these lessons.
Anarchism has given nothing even approximating true answers to the
concrete political questions: Must the old state machine be smashed? And
what should be put in its place?
But to speak of "anarchism and socialism" while completely evading the
question of the state, and disregarding the whole development of Marxism
before and after the Commune, meant inevitably slipping into
opportunism. For what opportunism needs most of all is that the two
questions just mentioned should not be raised at all. That in itself is
a victory for opportunism.
Undoubtedly, an immeasurably larger number of
Kautsky's works have been translated into Russian than into any other
language. It is not without reason that some German Social-Democrats
say in jest that Kautsky is read more in Russia than in Germany (let us
say, in parenthesis, that this jest has a far deeper historical meaning
than those who first made it suspect. The Russian workers, by making
in 1905 an unusually great and unprecedented demand for the best works
of the best Social- Democratic literature and editions of these works
in quantities unheard of in other countries, rapidly transplanted, so
to speak, the enormous experience of a neighboring, more advanced
country to the young soil of our proletarian movement).
Besides his popularization of Marxism, Kautsky is particularly known in
our country for his controversy with the opportunists, with Bernstein at
their head. One fact, however, is almost unknown, one which cannot be
ignored if we set out to investigate how Kautsky drifted into the morass
of unbelievably disgraceful confusion and defence of social-chauvinism
during the supreme crisis of 1914-15. This fact is as follows: shortly
before he came out against the most prominent representatives of
opportunism in France (Millerand and Jaures) and in Germany (Bernstein),
Kautsky betrayed very considerable vacillation. The Marxist Zarya,
which was published in Stuttgart in 1901-02, and advocated revolutionary
proletarian views, was forced to enter into controversy with Kautsky and
describe as "elastic" the half-hearted, evasive resolution, conciliatory
towards the opportunists, that he proposed at the International
Socialist Congress in paris in 1900. Kautsky's letters published in
Germany reveal no less hesitancy on his part before he took the field
against Bernstein.
Of immeasurably greater significance, however, is the fact that, in his
very controversy with the opportunists, in his formulation of the
question and his manner of treating it, we can new see, as we study the
history of Kautsky's latest betrayal of Marxism, his systematic
deviation towards opportunism precisely on the question of the state.
Let us take Kautsky's first important work against opportunism,
Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Programme. Kautsky refutes
Bernstein in detail, but here is a characteristic thing: Bernstein, in
his Premises of Socialism, of Herostratean fame, accuses Marxism of
"Blanquism" (an accusation since repeated thousands of times by the
opportunists and liberal bourgeoisie in Russia against the revolutionary
Marxists, the Bolsheviks). In this connection Bernstein dwells
particularly on Marx's The Civil War in France, and tries, quite
unsuccessfully, as we have seen, to identify Marx's views on the lessons
of the Commune with those of Proudhon. Bernstein pays particular
attention to the conclusion which Marx emphasized in his 1872 preface to
the Communist Manifesto, namely, that "the working class cannot simply
lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own
purposes".
This statement "pleased" Bernstein so much that he used it no less than
three times in his book, interpreting it in the most distorted,
opportunist way.
As we have seen, Marx meant that the working-class must smash, break,
shatter (sprengung, explosion -- the expression used by Engels) the
whole state machine. But according to Bernstein it would appear as
though Marx in these words warned the working class against excessive
revolutionary zeal when seizing power.
A cruder more hideous distortion of Marx's idea cannot be imagined.
How, then, did Kautsky proceed in his most detailed refutation of
Bernsteinism?
He refrained from analyzing the utter distortion of Marxism by
opportunism o this point. He cited the above-quoted passage from
Engels' preface to Marx's Civil War and said that according to Marx
the working class cannot simply take over the ready-made state
machinery, but that, generally speaking, it can take it over -- and that
was all. Kautsky did not say a word about the fact that Bernstein
attributed to Marx the very opposite of Marx's real idea, that since
1852 Marx had formulated the task of the proletarian revolution as being
to "smash" the state machine.
The result was that the most essential distinction between Marxism and
opportunism on the subject of the tasks of the proletarian revolution
was slurred over by Kautsky!
(p.172, German edition)
From 1852 to 1891, or for 40 years, Marx and Engels taught the
proletariat that it must smash the state machine. Yet, in 1899,
Kautsky, confronted with the complete betrayal of Marxism by the
opportunists on this point, fraudulently substituted for the question
whether it is necessary to smash this machine the question for the
concrete forms in which it is to be smashed, and then sough refuge
behind the "indisputable" (and barren) philistine truth that concrete
forms cannot be known in advance!!
A gulf separates Marx and Kautsky over their attitude towards the
proletarian party's task of training the working class for revolution.
Let us take the next, more mature, work by Kautsky, which was also
largely devoted to a refutation of opportunist errors. It is his
pamphlet, The Social Revolution. In this pamphlet, the author chose
as his special theme the question of "the proletarian revolution" and
"the proletarian regime". He gave much that was exceedingly valuable,
but he avoided the question of the state. Throughout the pamphlet the
author speaks of the winning of state power -- and no more; that is, he
has chosen a formula which makes a concession to the opportunists,
inasmuch as it admits the possibility of seizing power without
destroying the state machine. The very thing which Marx in 1872
declared to be "obsolete" in the programme of the Communist Manifesto,
is revived by Kautsky in 1902.
A special section in the pamphlet is devoted to the "forms and weapons
of the social revolution". Here Kautsky speaks of the mass political
strike, of civil war, and of the "instruments of the might of the modern
large state, its bureaucracy and the army"; but he does not say a word
about what the Commune has already taught the workers. Evidently, it
was not without reason that Engels issued a warning, particularly to the
German socialists. against "superstitious reverence" for the state.
Kautsky treats the matter as follows: the victorious proletariat "will
carry out the democratic programme", and he goes on to formulate its
clauses. But he does not say a word about the new material provided in
1871 on the subject of the replacement of bourgeois democracy by
proletarian democracy. Kautsky disposes of the question by using such
"impressive-sounding" banalities as:
By avoiding this question, Kautsky in practice makes a concession to
opportunism on this most essential point, although in words he declares
stern war against it and stresses the importance of the "idea of
revolution" (how much is this "idea" worth when one is afraid to teach
the workers the concrete lessons of revolution?), or says,
"revolutionary idealism before everything else", or announces that the
English workers are now "hardly more than petty bourgeois".
As far as the supposedly necessary "bureaucratic" organization is
concerned, there is no difference whatever between a railway and any
other enterprise in large-scale machine industry, any factory, large
shop, or large-scale capitalist agricultural enterprise. The technique
of all these enterprises makes absolutely imperative the strictest
discipline, the utmost precision on the part of everyone in carry out
his allotted task, for otherwise the whole enterprise may come to a
stop, or machinery or the finished product may be damaged. In all these
enterprises the workers will, of course, "elect delegates who will form
a sort of parliament".
The whole point, however, is that this "sort of parliament" will not be
a parliament in the sense of a bourgeois parliamentary institution. The
whole point is that this "sort of parliament" will not merely "establish
the working regulations and supervise the management" of the
"apparatus", but this apparatus will not be "bureaucratic". The
workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic
apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the
ground; they will replace it by a new one, consisting of the very same
workers and other employees, against whose transformation into
bureaucrats the measures will at once be taken which were specified in
detail by Marx and Engels:
(2) pay not to exceed that of a workman;
(3) immediate introduction of control and supervision by all, so that
all may become "bureaucrats" for a time and that, therefore,
nobody may be able to become a "bureaucrat".
Kautsky has not understood at all the difference between bourgeois
parliamentarism, which combines democracy (not for the people) with
bureaucracy (against the people), and proletarian democracy, which will
take immediate steps to cut bureaucracy down to the roots, and which
will be able to carry these measures through to the end, to the complete
abolition of bureaucracy, to the introduction of complete democracy for
the people.
Kautsky here displays the same old "superstitious reverence" for the
state, and "superstitious belief" in bureaucracy.
Let us now pass to the last and best of Kautsky's works against the
opportunists, his pamphlet The Road to Power (which, I believe, has
not been published in Russian, for it appeared in 1909, when reaction
was at its height in our country). This pamphlet is a big step forward,
since it does not deal with the revolutionary programme in general, as
the pamphlet of 1899 against Bernstein, or with the tasks of the social
revolution irrespective of the time of its occurrence, as the 1902
pamphlet, The Social Revolution; it deals with the concrete conditions
which compels us to recognize that the "era of revolutions" is setting
in.
The author explicitly points to the aggravation of class antagonisms in
general and to imperialism, which plays a particularly important part in
this respect. After the "revolutionary period of 1789-1871" in Western
Europe, he says, a similar period began in the East in 1905. A world
war is approaching with menacing rapidity. "It [the proletariat] can no
longer talk of premature revolution." "We have entered a revolutionary
period." The "revolutionary era is beginning".
These statements are perfectly clear. This pamphlet of Kautsky's should
serve as a measure of comparison of what the German Social-Democrats
promised to be before the imperialist war and the depth of degradation
to which they, including Kautsky himself, sank when the war broke out.
"The present situation," Kautsky wrote in the pamphlet under survey, "is
fraught with the danger that we [i.e., the German Social-Democrats] may
easily appear to be more 'moderate' than we really are." It turned out
that in reality the German Social-Democratic Party was much more
moderate and opportunist than it appeared to be!
It is all the more characteristic, therefore, that although Kautsky so
explicitly declared that the era of revolution had already begun, in the
pamphlet which he himself said was devoted to an analysis of the
"political revolution", he again completely avoided the question of the
state.
These evasions of the question, these omissions and equivocations,
inevitably added up to that complete swing-over to opportunism with
which we shall now have to deal.
Kautsky, the German Social-Democrats' spokesman, seems to have declared:
I abide by revolutionary views (1899), I recognize, above all, the
inevitability of the social revolution of the proletariat (1902), I
recognize the advent of a new era of revolutions (1909). Still, I am
going back on what Marx said as early as 1852, since the question of the
tasks of the proletarian revolution in relation to the state is being
raised (1912).
It was in this point-blank form that the question was put in Kautsky's
controversy with Pannekoek.
In opposing Kautsky, Pannekoek came out as one of
the representatives of the "Left radical" trend which included Rosa
Luxemburg, Karl Radek, and others. Advocating revolutionary tactics,
they were united in the conviction that Kautsky was going over to the
"Centre", which wavered in an unprincipled manner between Marxism and
opportunism. This view was proved perfectly correct by the war, when
this "Centrist" (wrongly called Marxist) trend, or Kautskyism, revealed
itself in all its repulsive wretchedness.
In an article touching on the question of the state, entitled "Mass
Action and Revolution" (Neue Zeit, 1912, Vol. XXX, 2), Pannekoek
described kautsky's attitude as one of "passive radicalism", as "a
theory of inactive expectancy". "Kautsky refuses to see the process of
revolution," wrote Pannekoek (p.616). In presenting the matter in this
way, Pannekoek approached the subject which interests us, namely, the
tasks of the proletarian revolution in relation to the state.
(p.544)
"The struggle will cease only when, as the result of it, the state
organization is completely destroyed. The organization of the
majority will then have demonstrated its superiority by destroying
the organization of the ruling minority."
(p.548)
(p.724)
The distinction between Marxists and the anarchists is this:
(2) The former recognize that after the proletariat has won political
power it must completely destroy the old state machine and replace
it by a new one consisting of an organization of the armed
workers, after the type of the Commune. The latter, while
insisting on the destruction of the state machine, have a very
vague idea of what the proletariat will put in its place and how
it will use its revolutionary power. The anarchists even deny
that the revolutionary proletariat should use the state power,
they reject its revolutionary dictatorship.
(3) The former demand that the proletariat be trained for revolution
by utilizing the present state. The anarchists reject this.
Kautsky abandons Marxism for the opportunist camp, for this destruction
of the state machine, which is utterly unacceptable to the
opportunists, completely disappears from his argument, and he leaves a
loophole for them in that "conquest" may be interpreted as the simple
acquisition of a majority.
To cover up his distortion of Marxism, Kautsky behaves like a
doctrinaire: he puts forward a "quotation" from Marx himself. In 1850,
Marx wrote that a "resolute centralization of power in the hands of the
state authority" was necessary, and Kautsky triumphantly asks: does
Pannekoek want to destroy "Centralism"?
This is simply a trick, like Bernstein's identification of the views of
Marxism and Proudhonism on the subject of federalism as against
centralism.
Kautsky's "quotation" is neither here nor there. Centralism is
possible with both the old and the new state machine. If the workers
voluntarily unite their armed forces, this will be centralism, but it
will be based on the "complete destruction" of the centralized state
apparatus -- the standing army, the police, and the bureaucracy.
Kautsky acts like an outright swindler by evading the perfectly
well-known arguments of Marx and Engels on the Commune and plucking out
a quotation which has nothing to do with the point at issue.
(p.725)
The point at issue is neither opposition nor political struggle in
general, but revolution. Revolution consists in the proletariat
destroying the "administrative apparatus" and the whole state machine,
replacing it by a new one, made up of the armed workers. Kautsky
displays a "superstitious reverence" for "ministries"; but why can they
not be replaced, say, by committees of specialists working under
sovereign, all-powerful Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies?
The point is not at all whether the "ministries" will remain, or
whether "committees of specialists" or some other bodies will be set
up; that is quite immaterial. The point is whether the old state
machine (bound by thousands of threads to the bourgeoisie and permeated
through and through with routine and inertia) shall remain, or be
destroyed and replaced by a new one. Revolution consists not in the
new class commanding, governing with the aid of the old state machine,
but in this class smashing this machine and commanding, governing with
the aid of a new machine. Kautsky slurs over this basic idea of
Marxism, or he does not understand it at all.
His question about officials clearly shows that he does not understand
the lessons of the Commune or the teachings of Marx. "We cannot to
without officials even in the party and the trade unions...."
We cannot do without officials under capitalism, under the rule of the
bourgeoisie. The proletariat is oppressed, the working people are
enslaved by capitalism. Under capitalism, democracy is restricted,
cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery, and
the poverty and misery of the people. This and this alone is the reason
why the functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions
are corrupted -- or rather tend to be corrupted -- by the conditions of
capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i.e., privileged
persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.
That is the essence of bureaucracy; and until the capitalists have been
expropriated and the bourgeoisie overthrown, even proletarian
functionaries will inevitably be "bureaucratized" to a certain extent.
According to Kautsky, since elected functionaries will remain under
socialism, so will officials, so will the bureaucracy! This is exactly
where he is wrong. Marx, referring to the example of the Commune,
showed that under socialism functionaries will cease to be
"bureaucrats", to be "officials", they will cease to be so in proportion
as -- in addition to the principle of election of officials -- the
principle of recall at any time is also introduced, as salaries are
reduced to the level of the wages of the average workman, and as
parliamentary institutions are replaced by "working bodies, executive
and legislative at the same time".
As a matter of fact, the whole of Kautsky's argument against Pannekoek,
and particularly the former's wonderful point that we cannot do without
officials even in our party and trade union organizations, is merely a
repetition of Bernstein's old "arguments" against Marxism in general.
In his renegade book, The Premises of Socialism, Bernstein combats the
ideas of "primitive" democracy, combats what he calls "doctrinaire
democracy": binding mandates, unpaid officials, impotent central
representative bodies, etc. to prove that this "primitive" democracy is
unsound, Bernstein refers to the experience of the British trade unions,
as interpreted by the Webbs. Seventy years of development "in absolute
freedom", he says (p.137, German edition), convinced the trade unions
that primitive democracy was useless, and they replaced it by ordinary
democracy, i.e., parliamentarism combined with bureaucracy.
In reality, the trade unions did not develop "in absolute freedom" but
in absolute capitalist slavery, under which, it goes without saying, a
number of concessions to the prevailing evil, violence, falsehood,
exclusion of the poor from the affairs of "higher" administration,
"cannot be done without". Under socialism much of "primitive" democracy
will inevitably be revived, since, for the first time in the history of
civilized society the mass of population will rise to taking an
independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the
everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern
in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.
Marx's critico-analytical genius saw in the practical measures of the
Commune the turning-point which the opportunists fear and do not want to
recognize because of their cowardice, because they do not want to break
irrevocably with the bourgeoisie, and which the anarchists do not want
to see, either because they are in a hurry or because they do not
understand at all the conditions of great social changes. "We must not
even think of destroying the old state machine; how can we do without
ministries and officials>" argues the opportunist, who is completely
saturated with philistinism and who, at bottom, not only does not
believe in revolution, in the creative power of revolution, but lives in
mortal dread of it (like our Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries).
"We must think only of destroying the old state machine; it is no use
probing into the concrete lessons of earlier proletarian revolutions and
analyzing what to put in the place of what has been destroyed, and how,"
argues the anarchist (the best of the anarchist, of course, and not
those who, following the Kropotkins and Co., trail behind the
bourgeoisie). Consequently, the tactics of the anarchist become the
tactics of despair instead of a ruthlessly bold revolutionary effort to
solve concrete problems while taking into account the practical
conditions of the mass movement.
Marx teaches us to avoid both errors; he teaches us to act with supreme
boldness in destroying the entire old state machine, and at the same
time he teaches us to put the question concretely: the Commune was able
in the space of a few weeks to start building a new, proletarian state
machine by introducing such-and-such measures to provide wider democracy
and to uproot bureaucracy. Let us learn revolutionary boldness from the
Communards; let us see in their practical measures the outline of really
urgent and immediately possible measures, and then, following this road,
we shall achieve the complete destruction of bureaucracy.
The possibility of this destruction is guaranteed by the fact that
socialism will shorten the working day, will raise the people to a new
life, will create such conditions for the majority of the population as
will enable everybody, without exception, to perform "state functions",
and this will lead to the complete withering away of every form of state
in general.
(pp.726, 727, 732)
Kautsky will have to achieve his beloved "unity" with the Scheidmanns,
Plekhanovs, Potresovs, Tseretelis, and Chernovs, who are quite willing
to work for the "shifting of the balance of forces within the state
power", for "winning a majority in parliament", and "raising parliament
to the ranks of master of the government". A most worthy object, which
is wholly acceptable to the opportunists and which keeps everything
within the bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic.
We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire
class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight -- not to
"shift the balance of forces", but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to
destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the
type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers'
Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
To the right of Kautsky in international socialism there are trends
such as Socialist Monthly in Germany (Legien, David, Kolb, and many
others, including the Scandinavian Stauning and Branting), Jaures'
followers and Vandervelde in France and Belgium; Turait, Treves, and
other Right-wingers of the Italian Party; the Fabians and
"Independents" (the Independent labor Party, which, in fact, has always
been dependent on the Liberals) in Britain; and the like. All these
gentry, who play a tremendous, very often a predominant role in the
parliamentary work and the press of their parties, repudiate outright
the dictatorship of the proletariat and pursue a policy of undisguised
opportunism. In the eyes of these gentry, the "dictatorship" of the
proletariat "contradicts" democracy!! There is really no essential
distinction between them and the petty-bourgeois democrats.
Taking this circumstance into consideration, we are justified in
drawing the conclusion that the Second International, that is, the
overwhelming majority of its official representatives, has completely
sunk into opportunism. The experience of the Commune has been not only
ignored but distorted. far from inculcating in the workers' minds the
idea that the time is nearing when they must act to smash the old state
machine, replace it by a new one, and in this way make their political
rule the foundation for the socialist reorganization of society, they
have actually preached to the masses the very opposite and have
depicted the "conquest of power" in a way that has left thousands of
loopholes for opportunism.
The distortion and hushing up of the question of the relation of the
proletarian revolution to the state could not but play an immense role
at a time when states, which possess a military apparatus expanded as a
consequence of imperialist rivalry, have become military monsters which
are exterminating millions of people in order to settle the issue as to
whether Britain or Germany -- this or that finance capital -- is to
rule the world.
The subject indicated in the title of this chapter
is so vast that volumes could be written about it. In the present
pamphlet we shall have to confine ourselves, naturally, to the most
important lessons provided by experience, those bearing directly upon
the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution with regard to state
power.
[Here the manuscript breaks off.]
This pamphlet was written in August and September
1917. I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh
chapter, "The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917".
Apart from the title, however, I had no time to write a single line of
the chapter; I was "interrupted" by a political crisis -- the eve of
the October revolution of 1917. Such an "interruption" can only be
welcomed; but the writing of the second part of this pamphlet ("The
Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917") will probably
have to be put off for a long time. It is more pleasant and useful to
go through the "experience of revolution" than to write about it.
The Author
Petrograd
November 30, 1917
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Moscow
December 17, 1918
Chapter I
CLASS AND SOCIETY AND THE STATE
THE STATE -- A PRODUCT OF THE IRRECONCILABILITY OF CLASS ANTAGONISMS
"The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society
from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical
idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains.
Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of
development; it is the admission that this society has become
entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has
split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to
dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with
conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and
society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power,
seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict
and keep it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen
out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself
more and more from it, is the state."
This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with
regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state
is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class
antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class
antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the
existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are
irreconcilable.
SPECIAL BODIES OF ARMED MEN, PRISONS, ETC.
"As distinct from the old gentile [tribal or clan] order, the
state, first, divides its subjects according to territory...."
Engels elucidates the concept the concept of the "power" which is
called the state, a power which arose from society but places itself
above it and alienates itself more and more from it. What does this
power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men
having prisons, etc., at their command.
"It [the public power] grows stronger, however, in proportion as
class antagonisms within the state become more acute, and as
adjacent states become larger and more populous. We have only to
look at our present-day Europe, where class struggle and rivalry in
conquest have tuned up the public power to such a pitch that it
threatens to swallow the whole of society and even the state."
This was written not later than the early nineties of the last century,
Engel's last preface being dated June 16, 1891. The turn towards
imperialism -- meaning the complete domination of the trusts, the
omnipotence of the big banks, a grand-scale colonial policy, and so
forth -- was only just beginning in France, and was even weaker in
North America and in Germany. Since then "rivalry in conquest" has
taken a gigantic stride, all the more because by the beginning of the
second decade of the 20th century the world had been completely divided
up among these "rivals in conquest", i.e., among the predatory Great
Powers. Since then, military and naval armaments have grown
fantastically and the predatory war of 1914-17 for the domination of
the world by Britain or Germany, for the division of the spoils, has
brought the "swallowing" of all the forces of society by the rapacious
state power close to complete catastrophe.
THE STATE -- AN INSTRUMENTS FOR THE EXPLOITATION OF THE OPPRESSED CLASS
"Having pubic power and the right to levy taxes," Engels writes,
"the officials now stand, as organs of society, above society. The
free, voluntary respect that was accorded to the organs of the
gentile [clan] constitution does not satisfy them, even if they
could gain it...." Special laws are enacted proclaiming the
sanctity and immunity of the officials. "The shabbiest police
servant" has more "authority" than the representative of the clan,
but even the head of the military power of a civilized state may
well envy the elder of a clan the "unrestrained respect" of
society.
The question of the privileged position of the officials as organs of
state power is raised here. The main point indicated is: what is it
that places them above society? We shall see how this theoretical
question was answered in practice by the paris Commune in 1871 and how
it was obscured from a reactionary standpoint by kautsky in 1912.
"Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in
check, but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the
conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most
powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of
the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus
acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed
class...." The ancient and feudal states were organs for the
exploitation of the slaves and serfs; likewise, "the modern
representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor
by capital. By way of exception, however, periods occur in which
the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state
power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain
degree of independence of both...." Such were the absolute
monarchies of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bonapartism of the
First and Second Empires in France, and the Bismarck regime in
Germany.
Such, we may add, is the Kerensky government in republican Russia since
it began to persecute the revolutionary proletariat, at a moment when,
owing to the leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats, the Soviets
have already become impotent, while the bourgeoisie are not yet strong
enough simply to disperse them.
In a democratic republic, Engels continues, "wealth exercises its
power indirectly, but all the more surely", first, by means of the
"direct corruption of officials" (America); secondly, by means of
an "alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange" (France and
America).
At present, imperialism and the domination of the banks have
"developed" into an exceptional art both these methods of upholding and
giving effect to the omnipotence of wealth in democratic republics of
all descriptions. Since, for instance, in the very first months of the
Russian democratic republic, one might say during the honeymoon of the
"socialist" S.R.s and Mensheviks joined in wedlock to the bourgeoisie,
in the coalition government. Mr. Palchinsky obstructed every measure
intended for curbing the capitalists and their marauding practices,
their plundering of the state by means of war contracts; and since
later on Mr. Palchinsky, upon resigning from the Cabinet (and being,
of course, replaced by another quite similar Palchinsky), was
"rewarded" by the capitalists with a lucrative job with a salary of
120,000 rubles per annum -- what would you call that? Direct or
indirect bribery? An alliance of the government and the syndicates, or
"merely" friendly relations? What role do the Chernovs, Tseretelis,
Avksentyevs and Skobelevs play? Are they the "direct" or only the
indirect allies of the millionaire treasury-looters?
"the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and
never will be anything more in the present-day state."
The petty-bourgeois democrats, such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries
and Mensheviks, and also their twin brothers, all the
social-chauvinists and opportunists of Western Europe, expect just this
"more" from universal suffrage. They themselves share, and instil into
the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage "in
the present-day state" is really capable of revealing the will of the
majority of the working people and of securing its realization.
"The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have
been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state
and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which
was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes,
the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now
rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at
which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to
be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production.
They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them
the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize
production on the basis of a free and equal association of the
producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then
belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the
spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
We do not often come across this passage in the propaganda and
agitation literature of the present-day Social-Democrats. Even when we
do come across it, it is mostly quoted in the same manner as one bows
before an icon, i.e., it is done to show official respect for Engels,
and no attempt is made to gauge the breadth and depth of the revolution
that this relegating of "the whole machinery of state to a museum of
antiquities" implies. In most cases we do not even find an
understanding of what Engels calls the state machine.
THE "WITHERING AWAY" OF THE STATE, AND VIOLENT REVOLUTION
"The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of
production into state property to begin with. But thereby it
abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class
distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as
state. Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed
the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting
class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of
production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly
keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression
determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or
bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of
society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation.
But it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class
which itself represented, for its own time, society as a whole: in
ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle
Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our own time, of the bourgeoisie.
When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of
society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no
longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class
rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the
present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses
arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be
held in subjection -- nothing necessitating a special coercive
force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes
forward as the representative of the whole of society -- the taking
possession of the means of production in the name of society -- is
also its last independent act as a state. State interference in
social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous,
and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is
replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of
processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers
away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free
people's state', both as to its justifiable use for a long time
from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate
scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists'
demand that the state be abolished overnight."
It is safe to say that of this argument of Engels', which is so
remarkably rich in ideas, only one point has become an integral part of
socialist thought among modern socialist parties, namely, that
according to marx that state "withers away" -- as distinct from the
anarchist doctrine of the "abolition" of the state. To prune Marxism
to such an extent means reducing it to opportunism, for this
"interpretation" only leaves a vague notion of a slow, even, gradual
change, of absence of leaps and storms, of absence of revolution. The
current, widespread, popular, if one may say so, conception of the
"withering away" of the state undoubtedly means obscuring, if not
repudiating, revolution.
"...That force, however, plays yet another role [other than that of
a diabolical power] in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the
words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is
pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which
social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead,
fossilized political forms -- of this there is not a word in Herr
Duhring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the
possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow
of an economy based on exploitation -- unfortunately, because all
use of force demoralizes, he says, the person who uses it. And
this in Germany, where a violent collision -- which may, after all,
be forced on the people -- would at least have the advantage of
wiping out the servility which has penetrated the nation's
mentality following the humiliation of the Thirty Years' War. And
this person's mode of thought -- dull, insipid, and impotent --
presumes to impose itself on the most revolutionary party that
history has ever known!
How can this panegyric on violent revolution, which Engels insistently
brought to the attention of the German Social-Democrats between 1878
and 1894, i.e., right up to the time of his death, be combined with the
theory of the 'withering away" of the state to form a single theory?
Part II, end of Chap.IV)
Chapter II
THE STATE AND REVOLUTION. THE EXPERIENCE OF 1848-51
THE EVE OF REVOLUTION
"The working class, in the course of development, will substitute
for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude
classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political
power groups, since the political power is precisely the official
expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society."
It is instructive to compare this general exposition of the idea of the
state disappearing after the abolition of classes with the exposition
contained in the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels a
few months later -- in November 1847, to be exact:
"... In depicting the most general phases of the development of the
proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging
within existing society up to the point where that war breaks out
into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the
bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat....
Here we have a formulation of one of the most remarkable and most
important ideas of Marxism on the subject of the state, namely, the
idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (as Marx and Engels began
to call it after the paris Commune); and, also, a highly interesting
definition of the state, which is also one of the "forgotten words" of
Marxism: "the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling
class."
THE REVOLUTION SUMMED UP
"But the revolution is throughgoing. It is still journeying
through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2,
1851 [the day of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat], it had completed
one half of its preparatory work. It is now completing the other
half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be
able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it is
perfecting the executive power, reducing it to its purest
expression, isolating it, setting it up against itself as the sole
object, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction
against it. And when it has done this second half of its
preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly
exclaim: well grubbed, old mole!
In this remarkable argument, Marxism takes a tremendous step forward
compared with the Communist Manifesto. In the latter, the
question of the state is still treated in an extremely abstract manner,
in the most general terms and expressions. In the above-quoted
passage, the question is treated in a concrete manner, and the
conclusion is extremely precise, definite, practical and palpable: all
previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be
broken, smashed.
"France is the country where, more than anywhere else, the
historical class struggles were each time fought out to a finish,
and where, consequently, the changing political forms within which
they move and in which their results are summarized have been
stamped in the sharpest outlines. The centre of feudalism in the
Middle Ages, the model country, since the Renaissance, of a unified
monarchy based on social estates, France demolished feudalism in
the Great Revolution and established the rule of the bourgeoisie in
a classical purity unequalled by any other European land. And the
struggle of the upward-striving proletariat against the ruling
bourgeoisie appeared here in an acute form unknown elsewhere."
The last remark is out of date insomuch as since 1871 there has been a
lull in the revolutionary struggle of the French proletariat, although,
long as this lull may be, it does not at all preclude the possibility
that in the coming proletarian revolution France may show herself to be
the classic country of the class struggle to a finish.
THE PRESENTATION OF THE QUESTION BY MARX IN 1852
"And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the
existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between
them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the
historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois
economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was
new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound
up with the particular, historical phases in the development of
production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Produktion), (2)
that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of
the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes
the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless
society."
In these words, Marx succeeded in expressing with striking clarity,
first, the chief and radical difference between his theory and that of
the foremost and most profound thinkers of the bourgeoisie; and,
secondly, the essence of his theory of the state.
Chapter III
THE STATE AND REVOLUTION.
EXPERIENCE OF THE paris COMMUNE OF 1871.
MARX'S ANALYSIS
WHAT MADE THE COMMUNARDS' ATTEMPT HEROIC?
"... One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that
'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state
machinery and wield it for its own purposes'...."
The authors took the words that are in single quotation marks in this
passage from Marx's book, The Civil War in France.
"If you look up the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you
will find that I declare that the next attempt of the French
Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the
bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to
smash it [Marx's italics -- the original is zerbrechen], and
this is the precondition for every real people's revolution on the
Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in paris are
attempting."
The words, "to smash the bureaucratic-military machine", briefly
express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of the
proletariat during a revolution in relation to the state. And this is
the lesson that has been not only completely ignored, but positively
distorted by the prevailing, Kautskyite, "interpretation" of
Marxism!
(The letters of Marx to Kugelmann have appeared in
Russian in no less than two editions, one of which
I edited and supplied with a preface.)
WHAT IS TO REPLACE THE SMASHED STATE MACHINE?
Originating from the Middle Ages, there developed in the 19th
century "the centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of
standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature." With
the development of class antagonisms between capital and labor,
"state power assumed more and more the character of a public force
organized for the suppression of the working class, of a machine of
class rule. After every revolution, which marks an advance in the
class struggle, the purely coercive character of the state power
stands out in bolder and bolder relief." After the revolution of
1848-49, state power became "the national war instruments of
capital against labor". The Second Empire consolidated this.
What was this "specific" form of the proletarian, socialist republic?
What was the state it began to create?
"The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of
the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed
people."
This demand now figures in the programme of every party calling itself
socialist. The real worth of their programme, however, is best shown
by the behavior of our Social-Revolutionists and mensheviks, who, right
after the revolution of February 27, refused to carry out this
demand!
"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by
universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible
and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were
naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the
working class. [...] The police, which until then had been the
instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political
attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times
revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all
other branches of the administration. From the members of the
Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen's
wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the
high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high
dignitaries themselves. [...] Having once got rid of the standing
army and the police, the instruments of physical force of the old
government, the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument
of spiritual suppression, the power of the priests.... The
judicial functionaries lost that sham independence... they were
thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable."
The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state
machine "only" by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all
officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact
this "only" signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by
other institutions of a fundamentally different type. This is exactly
a case of "quantity being transformed into quality": democracy,
introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is
transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from the state
(= a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into
something which is no longer the state proper.
"The Commune," Marx wrote, "made the catchword of all bourgeois
revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by abolishing the two
greatest sources of expenditure -- the army and the officialdom."
From the peasants, as from other sections of the petty bourgeoisie,
only an insignificant few "rise to the top", "get on in the world" in
the bourgeois sense, i.e., become either ell-to-do, bourgeois, or
officials in secure and privileged positions. In every capitalist
country where there are peasants (as there are in most capitalist
countries), the vast majority of them are oppressed by the government
and long for its overthrow, long for "cheap" government. This can be
achieved only by the proletariat; and by achieving it, the proletariat
at the same time takes a step towards the socialist reorganization of
the state.
ABOLITION OF PARLIAMENTARISM
"The Commune," Marx wrote, "was to be a working, not a
parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same
time....
Owing to the prevalence of social-chauvinism and opportunism, this
remarkable criticism of parliamentarism, made in 1871, also belongs now
to the "forgotten words" of Marxism. The professional Cabinet
Ministers and parliamentarians, the traitors to the proletariat and the
"practical" socialists of our day, have left all criticism of
parliamentarism to the anarchists, and, on this wonderfully reasonable
ground, they denounce all criticism of parliamentarism as "anarchism"!!
It is not surprising that the proletariat of the "advanced"
parliamentary countries, disgusted with such "socialists" as the
Scheidemanns, Davids, Legiens, Sembats, Renaudels, Hendersons,
Vanderveldes, Staunings, Brantings, Bissolatis, and Co., has been with
increasing frequency giving its sympathies to anarcho-syndicalism, in
spite of the fact that the latter is merely the twin brother of
opportunism.
ORGANIZATION OF NATIONAL UNITY
"In a brief sketch of national organization which the Commune had
no time to develop, it states explicitly that the Commune was to be
the political form of even the smallest village...." The communes
were to elect the "National Delegation" in paris.
The extent to which the opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy
have failed -- perhaps it would be more true to say, have refused -- to
understand these observations of Marx is best shown by that book of
Herostratean fame of the renegade Bernstein, The Premises of Socialism
and the Tasks of the Social-Democrats. It is in connection with the
above passage from Marx that Bernstein wrote that
"as far as its political content", this programme "displays, in all
its essential features, the greatest similarity to the federalism
of Proudhon.... In spite of all the other points of difference
between Marx and the 'petty-bourgeois' Proudhon [Bernstein places
the word "petty-bourgeois" in inverted commas, to make it sound
ironical] on these points, their lines of reasoning run as close as
could be." Of course, Bernstein continues, the importance of the
municipalities is growing, but "it seems doubtful to me whether the
first job of democracy would be such a dissolution [Auflosung] of
the modern states and such a complete transformation [Umwandlung]
of their organization as is visualized by Marx and Proudhon (the
formation of a National Assembly from delegates of the provincial
of district assemblies, which, in their turn, would consist of
delegates from the communes), so that consequently the previous
mode of national representation would disappear."
To confuse Marx;s view on the "destruction of state power, a parasitic
excrescence", with Proudhon's federalism is positively monstrous! But
it is no accident, for it never occurs to the opportunist that Marx
does not speak here at all about federalism as opposed to centralism,
but about smashing the old, bourgeois state machine which exists in all
bourgeois countries.
ABOLITION OF THE PARASITE STATE
"It is generally the fate of new historical creations," he wrote,
"to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms
of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus,
this new Commune, which breaks [bricht, smashes] the modern state
power, has been regarded as a revival of the medieval communes...
as a federation of small states (as Montesquieu and the Girondins
visualized it)... as an exaggerated form of the old struggle
against overcentralization....
"Breaking state power", which as a "parasitic excrescence"; its
"amputation", its "smashing"; "state power, now become superfluous" --
these are the expressions Marx used in regard to the state when
appraising and analyzing the experience of the Commune.
"... The multiplicity of interpretations to which the Commune has
been subjected, and the multiplicity of interests which expressed
themselves in it show that it was a thoroughly flexible political
form, while all previous forms of government had been essentially
repressive. Its true secret was this: it was essentially a
working-class government, the result of the struggle of the
producing against the appropriating class, the political form at
last discovered under which the economic emancipation of labor
could be accomplished....
The utopians busied themselves with "discovering" political forms under
which the socialist transformation of society was to take place. The
anarchists dismissed the question of political forms altogether. The
opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy accepted the bourgeois
political forms of the parliamentary democratic state as the limit
which should not be overstepped; they battered their foreheads praying
before this "model", and denounced as anarchism every desire to break
these forms.
Chapter IV
CONTINUATION.
SUPPLEMENTARY EXPLANATIONS BY ENGELS
THE HOUSING QUESTION
"How is the housing question to be settled then? In present-day
society, it is settled just as any other social question: by the
gradual economic levelling of demand and supply, a settlement which
reproduces the question itself again and again and therefore is no
settlement. How a social revolution would settle this question not
only depends on the circumstances in each particular case, but is
also connected with much more far-reaching questions, one of the
most fundamental of which is the abolition of the antithesis
between town and country. As it is not our task to create utopian
systems for the organization of the future society, it would be
more than idle to go into the question here. But one thing is
certain: there is already a sufficient quantity of houses in the
big cities to remedy immediately all real 'housing shortage',
provided they are used judiciously. This can naturally only occur
through the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering
in their houses homeless workers or workers overcrowded in their
present homes. As soon as the proletariat has won political power,
such a measure prompted by concern for the common good will be just
as easy to carry out as are other expropriations and billetings by
the present-day state."
The change in the form of state power is not examined here, but only
the content of its activity. Expropriations and billetings take place
by order even of the present state. From the formal point of view, the
proletarian state will also "order" the occupation of dwellings and
expropriation of houses. But it is clear that the old executive
apparatus, the bureaucracy, which is connected with the bourgeoisie,
would simply be unfit to carry out the orders of the proletarian
state.
"... It must be pointed out that the 'actual seizure' of all the
instruments of labor, the taking possession of industry as a whole
by the working people, is the exact opposite of the Proudhonist
'redemption'. In the latter case the individual worker becomes the
owner of the dwelling, the peasant farm, the instruments of labor;
in the former case, the 'working people' remain the collective
owners of the houses, factories and instruments of labor, and will
hardly permit their use, at least during a transitional period, by
individuals or associations without compensation for the cost. In
the same way, the abolition of property in land is not the
abolition of ground rent but its transfer, if in a modified form,
to society. The actual seizure of all the instruments of labor by
the working people, therefore, does not at all preclude the
retention of rent relations."
We shall examine the question touched upon in this passage, namely, the
economic basis for the withering away of the state, in the next
chapter. Engels expresses himself most cautiously. saying that the
proletarian state would "hardly" permit the use of houses without
payment, "at least during a transitional period". The letting of
houses owed by the whole people to individual families presupposes the
collection of rent, a certain amount of control, nd the employment of
some standard in allotting the housing. All this calls for a certain
form of state, but it does not at all call for a special military
bureaucratic apparatus, with officials occupying especially privileged
positions. The transition to a situation in which it will be possible
to supply dwellings rent-free depends on the complete "withering away"
of the state.
"... Necessity of political action by the proletariat and of its
dictatorship as the transition to the abolition of classes and,
with them, of the state...."
Addicts of hair-splitting criticism, or bourgeois "exterminators of
Marxism", will perhaps see a contradiction between this recognition of
the "abolition of the state" and repudiation of this formula as an
anarchist one in the above passage from Anti-Duhring. It would not
be surprising if the opportunists classed Engels, too, as an
"anarchist", for it is becoming increasingly common with the
social-chauvinists to accuse the internationalists of anarchism.
CONTROVERSY WITH THE ANARCHISTS
"If the political struggle of the working class assumes
revolutionary form," wrote Marx, ridiculing the anarchists for
their repudiation of politics, "and if the workers set up their
revolutionary dictatorship in place of the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie, they commit the terrible crime of violating
principles, for in order to satisfy their wretched, vulgar everyday
needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie, they give the
state a revolutionary and transient form, instead of laying down
their arms and abolishing the state."
It was solely against this kind of "abolition" of the state that Marx
fought in refuting the anarchists! He did not at all oppose the view
that the state would disappear when classes disappeared, or that it
would be abolished when classes were abolished. What he did oppose was
the proposition that the workers should renounce the use of arms,
organized violence, that is, the state, which is to serve to "crush the
resistance of the bourgeoisie".
"... When I counter the most rabid anti-authoritarians with these
arguments, they only answer they can give me is the following: Oh,
that's true, except that here it is not a question of authority
with which we vest our delegates, but of a commission! These people
imagine they can change a thing by changing its name...."
Having thus shown that authority and autonomy are relative terms, that
the sphere of their application varies with the various phases of
social development, that it is absurd to take them as absolutes, and
adding that the sphere of application of machinery and large-scale
production is steadily expanding, Engels passes from the general
discussion of authority to the question of the state.
"Had the autonomists," he wrote, "contented themselves with saying
that the social organization of the future would allow authority
only within the bounds which the conditions of production make
inevitable, one could have come to terms with them. But they are
blind to all facts that make authority necessary and they
passionately fight the word.
This argument touches upon questions which should be examined in
connection with the relationship between politics and economics during
the withering away of the state (the next chapter is devoted to this).
These questions are: the transformation of public functions from
political into simple functions of administration, and the "political
state". This last term, one particularly liable to misunderstanding,
indicates the process of the withering away of the state: at a certain
stage of this process, the state which is withering away may be called
a non-political state.
LETTER TO BEBEL
"The free people's state has been transferred into the free state.
Taken in its grammatical sense, a free state is one where the state
is free in relation to its citizens, hence a state with a despotic
government. The whole talk about the state should be dropped,
especially since the Commune, which was no longer a state in the
proper sense of the word. The 'people's state' has been thrown in
our faces by the anarchists to the point of disgust, although
already Marx's book against Proudhon and later the Communist
Manifesto say plainly that with the introduction of the socialist
order of society the state dissolves of itself [sich auflost] and
disappears. As the state is only a transitional institution which
is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one's
adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free
people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state,
it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to
hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to
speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist. We would
therefore propose replacing the state everywhere by Gemeinwesen,
a good old German word which can very well take the place of the
French word commune."
It should be borne in mind that this letter refers to the party
programme which Marx criticized in a letter dated only a few weeks
later than the above (Marx's letter is dated May 5, 1875), and that at
the time Engels was living with Marx in London. Consequently, when he
says "we" in the last sentence, Engels undoubtedly, in his own as well
as in Marx's name, suggests to the leader of the German workers' party
that the word "state" be struck out of the programme and replaced by
the word "community".
"The state must... be transformed from one based on class rule
into a people's state."
This was printed in the ninth (ninth!) edition of Bebel's pamphlet! It
is not surprising that opportunist views on the state, so persistently
repeated, were absorbed by the German Social-Democrats, especially as
Engels' revolutionary interpretations had been safely pigeon-holed, and
all the conditions of life were such as to "wean" them from revolution
for a long time.
CRITICISM OF THE DRAFT OF THE ERFURT PROGRAMME
"When we pass from joint-stock companies to trusts which assume
control over, and monopolize, whole industries, it is not only
private production that ceases, but also planlessness."
Here was have what is most essential in the theoretical appraisal of
the latest phase of capitalism, i.e., imperialism, namely, that
capitalism becomes monopoly capitalism. The latter must be emphasized
because the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly
capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but
can now be called "state socialism" and so on, is very common. The
trusts, of course, never provided, do not now provide, and cannot
provide complete planning. But however much they do plan, however much
the capitalist magnates calculate in advance the volume of production
on a national and even on an international scale, and however much they
systematically regulate it, we still remain under capitalism -- at its
new stage, it is true, but still capitalism, without a doubt. The
"proximity" of such capitalism to socialism should serve genuine
representatives of the proletariat as an argument proving the
proximity, facility, feasibility, and urgency of the socialist
revolution, and not at all as an argument for tolerating the
repudiation of such a revolution and the efforts to make capitalism
look more attractive, something which all reformists are trying to do.
"The political demands of the draft," engels wrote, "have one great
fault. It lacks [Engels' italics] precisely what should have
been said."
And, later on, he makes it clear that the German Constitution is,
strictly speaking, a copy of the extremely reactionary Constitution of
1850, that the Reichstag is only, as Wilhelm Liebknecht put it, "the
fig leaf of absolutism" and that to wish "to transform all the
instruments of labor into common property" on the basis of a
constitution which legalizes the existence of petty states and the
federation of petty German states is an "obvious absurdity".
"To touch on that is dangerous, however," Engels added, knowing
only too well that it was impossible legally to include in the
programme the demand for a republic in Germany. But he refused to
merely accept this obvious consideration which satisfied
"everybody". He continued: "Nevertheless, somehow or other, the
thing has to be attacked. How necessary this is is shown precisely
at the present time by opportunism, which is gaining ground
[einreissende] in a large section of the Social-Democrat press.
Fearing a renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law, or recalling all
manner of overhasty pronouncements made during the reign of that
law, they now want the Party to find the present legal order in
Germany adequate for putting through all Party demands by peaceful
means...."
Engels particularly stressed the fundamental fact that the German
Social-Democrats were prompted by fear of a renewal of the Anti-
Socialist Law, and explicitly described it as opportunism; he declared
that precisely because there was no republic and no freedom in Germany,
the dreams of a "peaceful" path were perfectly absurd. Engels was
careful not to tie his hands. He admitted that in republican or very
free countries "one can conceive" (only "conceive"!) of a peaceful
development towards socialism, but in Germany, he repeated,
"... in Germany, where the government is almost omnipotent and the
Reichstag and all other representative bodies have no real power,
to advocate such a thing in Germany, where, moreover, there is no
need to do so, means removing the fig leaf from absolutism and
becoming oneself a screen for its nakedness."
The great majority of the official leaders of the German Social-
Democratic Party, which pigeon-holed this advice, have really proved to
be a screen for absolutism.
"... In the long run such a policy can only lead one's own party
astray. They push general, abstract political questions into the
foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete questions,
which at the moment of the first great events, the first political
crisis, automatically pose themselves. What can result from this
except that at the decisive moment the party suddenly proves
helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the most decisive
issues reign in it because these issues have never been
discussed? ...
Engels realized here in a particularly striking form the fundamental
idea which runs through all of Marx's works, namely, that the
democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the
proletariat. For such a republic, without in the least abolishing the
rule of capital, and, therefore, the oppression of the masses nd the
class struggle, inevitably leads to such an extension, development,
unfolding, and intensification of this struggle that, as soon as it
becomes possible to meet the fundamental interests of the oppressed
masses, this possibility is realized inevitably and solely through the
dictatorship of the proletariat, through the leadership of those masses
by the proletariat. These, too, are "forgotten words" of marxism for
the whole of the Second International, and the fact that they have been
forgotten was demonstrated with particular vividness by the history of
the Menshevik Party during the first six months of the Russian
revolution of 1917.
"What should take the place of the present-day Germany [with its
reactionary monarchical Constitution and its equally reactionary
division into petty states, a division which perpetuates all the
specific features of "Prussianism" instead of dissolving them in
Germany as a whole]? In my view, the proletariat can only use the
form of the one and indivisible republic. In the gigantic
territory of the United States, a federal republic is still, on the
whole, a necessity, although in the Eastern states it is already
becoming a hindrance. It would be a step forward in Britain where
the two islands are peopled by four nations and in spite of a
single Parliament three different systems of legislation already
exist side by side. In little Switzerland, it has long been a
hindrance, tolerable only because Switzerland is content to be a
purely passive member of the European state system. For Germany,
federalization on the Swiss model would be an enormous step
backward. Two points distinguish a union state from a completely
unified state: first, that each member state, each canton, has its
own civil and criminal legislative and judicial system, and,
second, that alongside a popular chamber there is also a federal
chamber in which each canton, whether large or small, votes as
such." In Germany, the union state is the transition to the
completely unified state, and the "revolution from above" of 1866
and 1870 must not be reversed but supplemented by a "movement from
below".
Far from being indifferent to the forms of state, Engels, on the
contrary, tried to analyze the transitional forms with the utmost
thoroughness in order to establish, in accordance with the concrete
historical peculiarities of each particular case, from what and to what
the given transitional form is passing.
"So, then, a unified republic -- but not in the sense of the
present French Republic, which is nothing but the Empire
established in 1798 without the Emperor. From 1792 to 1798 each
French department, each commune [Gemeinde], enjoyed complete
self-government on the American model, and this is what we too must
have. How self-government is to be organized and how we can
manage, without a bureaucracy has been shown to us by America and
the first French Republic, and is being shown even today by
Australia, Canada and the other English colonies. And a provincial
[regional] and communal self-government of this type is far freer
than, for instance, Swiss federalism, under which, it is true, the
canton is very independent in relation to the Bund [i.e., the
federated state as a whole], but is also independent in relation to
the district [Bezirk] and the commune. The cantonal governments
appoint the district governors [Bezirksstatthalter] and prefects --
which is unknown in English-speaking countries and which we want to
abolish here as resolutely in the future as the Prussian Landrate
and Regierungsrate" (commissioners, district police chiefs,
governors, and in general all officials appointed from above).
Accordingly, Engels proposes the following words for the
self-government clause in the programme: "Complete self-government
for the provinces [gubernias or regions], districts and communes
through officials elected by universal suffrage. The abolition of
all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state."
I have already had occassion to point out -- in Pravda (No.68, May
28, 1917), which was suppressed by the government of Kerensky and other
"socialist" Ministers -- how on this point (of course, not on this
point alone by any mens) our pseudo-socialist representatives of
pseudo- revolutionary pseudo-democracy have made glaring departures
from democracy. Naturally, people who have bound themselves by a
"coalition" to the imperialist bourgeoisie have remained deaf to this
criticism.
THE 1891 PREFACE TO MARX'S THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE
In France, Engels observed, the workers emerged with arms from
every revolution: "therefore the disarming of the workers was the
first commandment for the bourgeois, who were at the helm of the
state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new
struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers."
This summary of the experience of bourgeois revolutions is as concise
as it is expressive. The essence of the matter -- among other things,
on the question of the state (has the oppressed class arms?) -- is here
remarkably well-grasped. It is precisely this essence that is most
often evaded by both professors influenced by bourgeois ideology, and
by petty-bourgeois democrats. In the Russian revolution of 1917, the
honor (Cavaignac honor) of blabbing this secret of bourgeois
revolutions fell to the Menshevik, would-be Marxist, Tsereteli. In his
"historic" speech of June 11, Tsereteli blurted out that the
bourgeoisie were determined to disarm the Petrograd workers --
presenting, of course, this decision as his own, and as a necessity for
the "state" in general!
"As almost only workers, or recognized representatives of the
workers, sat in the Commune, its decisions bore a decidedly
proletarian character. Either they decreed reforms which the
republican bourgeoisie had failed to pass solely out of cowardice,
but which provided a necessary basis for the free activity of the
working class -- such as the realization of the principle that in
relation to the state religion is a purely private matter -- or
the Commune promulgated decrees which were in the direct interest
of the working class and in part cut deeply into the old order of
society."
Engels deliberately emphasized the words "in relation to the state" as
a straight thrust at at German opportunism, which had declared religion
to be a private matter in relation to the party, thus degrading the
party of the revolutionary proletariat to the level of the most vulgar
"free- thinking" philistinism, which is prepared to allow a
non-denominational status, but which renounces the party struggle
against the opium of religion which stupifies the people.
"... It was precisely the oppressing power of the former
centralized government, army, political parties, bureaucracy, which
Napoleon had created in 1798 and which every new government had
since then taken over as a welcome instrument and used against its
opponents -- it was this power which was to fall everywhere, just
as it had fallen in paris.
Engels emphasized once again that not only under a monarchy, but also
under a democratic republic the state remains a state, i.e., it retains
its fundamental distinguishing feature of transforming the officials,
the 'servants of society", its organs, into the masters of society.
"Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the
state from servants of society into masters of society -- an
inevitable transformation in all previous states -- the Commune
used two infallible means. In the first place, it filled all posts
-- administrative, judicial, and educational -- by election on the
basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to recall at
any time by the electors. And, in the second place, it paid all
officials, high or low, only the wages received by other workers.
The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs.
In this way a dependable barrier to place-hunting and careerism was
set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to
representative bodies, which were added besides...."
Engels here approached the interesting boundary line at which
consistent democracy, on the one hand, is transformed into socialism
and, on the other, demands socialism. For, in order to abolish the
state, it is necessary to convert the functions of the civil service
into the simple operations of control and accounting that are within
the scope and ability of the vast majority of the population, and,
subsequently, of every single individual. And if careerism is to be
abolished completely, it must be made impossible for "honorable" though
profitless posts in the Civil Service to be used as a springboard to
highly lucrative posts in banks or joint-stock companies, as constantly
happens in all the freest capitalist countries.
"... This shattering [Sprengung] of the former state power and its
replacement by a new and truly democratic one is described in
detail in the third section of The Civil War. But it was
necessary to touch briefly here once more on some of its features,
because in Germany particularly the superstitious belief in the
state has passed from philosophy into the general consciousness of
the bourgeoisie and even of many workers. According to the
philosophical conception, the state is the 'realization of the
idea', or the Kingdom of God on earth, translated into
philosophical terms, the sphere in which eternal truth and justice
are, or should be, realized. And from this follows a
superstitious reverence for the state and everything connected
with it, which takes root the more readily since people are
accustomed from childhood to imagine that the affairs and interests
common to the whole of society could not be looked after other than
as they have been looked after in the past, that is, through the
state and its lucratively positioned officials. And people think
they have taken quite an extraordinary bold step forward when they
have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by
the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing
but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and
indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.
And at best it is an evil inherited by the proletariat after its
victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the
victorious proletariat will have to lop off as speedily as
possible, just as the Commune had to, until a generation reared in
new, free social conditions is able to discard the entire lumber of
the state."
Engels warned the Germans not to forget the principles of socialism
with regard to the state in general in connection with the substitution
of a republic for the monarchy. His warnings now read like a veritable
lesson to the Tseretelis and Chernovs, who in their "coalition"
practice have revealed a superstitious belief in, and a superstitious
reverence for, the state!
ENGELS ON THE OVERCOMING OF DEMOCRACY
"... For Marx and myself," continued Engels, "it was therefore
absolutely impossible to use such a loose term to characterize our
special point of view. Today things are different, and the word
["Social-Democrat"] may perhaps pass muster [mag passieren],
inexact [unpassend, unsuitable] though it still is for a party
whose economic programme is not merely socialist in general, but
downright communist, and whose ultimate political aim is to
overcome the whole state and, consequently, democracy as well. The
names of real political parties, however, are never wholly
appropriate; the party develops while the name stays."
The dialectician Engels remained true to dialectics to the end of his
days. Marx and I, he said, had a splendid, scientifically exact name
for the party, but there was no real party, i.e., no mass proletarian
party. Now (at the end of the 19th century) there was a real party,
but its name was scientifically wrong. Never mind, it would "pass
muster", so long as the party developed, so long as the scientific in
accuracy of the name was not hidden from it and did not hinder its
development on the right direction!
Chapter V
THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE
PRESENTATION OF THE QUESTION BY MARX
"'Present-day society' is capitalist society, which exists in all
civilized countries, being more or less free from medieval
admixture, more or less modified by the particular historical
development of each country, more or less developed. On the other
hand, the 'present-day state' changes with a country's frontier.
It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in
Switzerland, and different in England from what it is in the United
States. 'The present-day state' is, therefore, a fiction.
After thus ridiculing all talk about a "people's state", Marx
formulated the question and gave warning, as it were, that those
seeking a scientific answer to it should use only firmly-established
scientific data.
THE TRANSITION FROM CAPITALISM TO COMMUNISM
"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the
revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.
Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in
which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship
of the proletariat."
Marx bases this conclusion on an analysis of the role played by the
proletariat in modern capitalist society, on the data concerning the
development of this society, and on the irreconcilability of the
antagonistic interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
THE FIRST DRAFT OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY
"What we have to deal with here [in analyzing the programme of the
workers' party] is a communist society, not as it has developed on
its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from
capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically,
morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of
the old society from whose womb it comes."
It is this communist society, which has just emerged into the light of
day out of the womb of capitalism and which is in every respect stamped
with the birthmarks of the old society, that Marx terms the "first", or
lower, phase of communist society.
"... With an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share
in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than
another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all
these defects, the right instead of being equal would have to be
unequal."
The first phase of communism, therefore, cannot yet provide justice and
equality; differences, and unjust differences, in wealth will still
persist, but the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible
because it will be impossible to seize the means of production -- the
factories, machines, land, etc. -- and make them private property. In
smashing Lassalle's petty-bourgeois, vague phrases about "equality" and
"justice" in general, Marx shows the course of development of communist
society, which is compelled to abolish at first only the "injustice" of
the means of production seized by individuals, and which is unable at
once to eliminate the other injustice, which consists in the
distribution of consumer goods "according to the amount of labor
performed" (and not according to needs).
"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist
society as it is when it has just emerged, after prolonged birth
pangs, from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the
economic structure of society and its cultural development
conditioned thereby."
And so, in the first phase of communist society (usually called
socialism) "bourgeois law" is not abolished in its entirety, but only in
part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained,
i.e., only in respect of the means of production. "Bourgeois law"
recognizes them as the private property of individuals. Socialism
converts them into common property. To that extent -- and to that
extent alone -- "bourgeois law" disappears.
HIGHER PHASE OF COMMUNIST SOCIETY
"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and with
it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has
vanished, after labor has become not only a livelihood but life's
prime want, after the productive forces have increased with the
all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the
narrow horizon of bourgeois law be left behind in its entirety and
society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs!"
Only now can we 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.
Chapter VI
VULGARIZATION OF MARXISM BY THE OPPORTUNISTS
PLEKHANOV'S CONTROVERSY WITH THE ANARCHISTS
KAUTSKY'S CONTROVERSY WITH THE OPPORTUNISTS
"We can quite safely leave the solution of the problems of the
proletarian dictatorship of the future," said Kautsky, writing
"against" Bernstein.
This is not a polemic against Bernstein, but, in essence, a concession
to him, a surrender to opportunism; for at present the opportunists ask
nothing better than to "quite safely leave to the future" all
fundamental questions of the tasks of the proletarian revolution.
"Still, it goes without saying that we shall not achieve supremacy
under the present conditions. Revolution itself presupposes long
and deep-going struggles, which, in themselves, will change our
present political and social structure."
Undoubtedly, this "goes without saying", just as the fact that horses
eat oats of the Volga flows into the Caspian. Only it is a pity that an
empty and bombastic phrase about "deep-going" struggles is used to avoid
a question of vital importance to the revolutionary proletariat, namely,
what makes its revolution "deep-going" in relation to the state, to
democracy, as distinct from previous, non-proletarian revolutions.
"The most varied form of enterprises -- bureaucratic [??], trade
unionist, co-operative, private... can exist side by side in
socialist society," Kautsky writes. "... There are, for example,
enterprises which cannot do without a bureaucratic [??]
organization, such as the railways. Here the democratic
organization may take the following shape: the workers elect
delegates who form a sort of parliament, which establishes the
working regulations and supervises the management of the
bureaucratic apparatus. The management of other countries may be
transferred to the trade unions, and still others may become
co-operative enterprises."
This argument is erroneous; it is a step backward compared with the
explanations Marx and Engels gave in the seventies, using the lessons of
the Commune as an example.
(1) not only election, but also recall at any time;
Kautsky has not reflected at all on Marx's words: "The Commune was a
working, not parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same
time."
KAUTSKY'S CONTROVERSY WITH PANNEKOEK
"The struggle of the proletariat," he wrote, "is not merely a
struggle against the bourgeoisie for state power, but a struggle
against state power.... The content of this [the proletarian]
revolution is the destruction and dissolution [Auflosung] of the
instruments of power of the state with the aid of the instruments
of power of the proletariat.
The formulation in which Pannekoek presented his ideas suffers from
serious defects. But its meaning is clear nonetheless, and it is
interesting to note how Kautsky combated it.
"Up to now," he wrote, "the antithesis between the Social-Democrats
and the anarchists has been that the former wished to win the state
power while the latter wished to destroy it. Pannekoek wants to do
both."
Although Pannekoek's exposition lacks precision and concreteness -- not
to speak of other shortcomings of his article which have no bearing on
the present subject -- Kautsky seized precisely on the point of
principle raised by Pannekoek; and on this fundamental point of
principle Kautsky completely abandoned the Marxist position and went
over wholly to opportunism. His definition of the distinction between
the Social-Democrats and the anarchists is absolutely wrong; he
completely vulgarizes and distorts Marxism.
(1) The former, while aiming at the complete abolition of the state,
recognize that this aim can only be achieved after classes have
been abolished by the socialist revolution, as the result of the
establishment of socialism, which leads to the withering away of
the state. The latter want to abolish he state completely
overnight, not understanding the conditions under which the state
can be abolished.
In this controversy, it is not Kautsky but Pannekoek who represents
Marxism, for it was Marx who taught that the proletariat cannot simply
win state power in the sense that the old state apparatus passes into
new hands, but must smash this apparatus, must break it and replace it
by a new one.
"Perhaps he [Pannekoek]," Kautsky continues, "wants to abolish the
state functions of the officials? But we cannot do without
officials even in the party and trade unions, let alone in the
state administration. And our programme does not demand the
abolition of state officials, but that they be elected by the
people.... We are discussing here not the form the administrative
apparatus of the 'future state' will assume, but whether our
political struggle abolishes [literally dissolves -- auflost] the
state power before we have captured it. [Kautsky's italics]
Which ministry with its officials could be abolished?" Then follows
an enumeration of the ministeries of education, justice, finance,
and war. "No, not one of the present ministries will be removed by
our political struggle against the government.... I repeat, in
order to prevent misunderstanding: we are not discussing here the
form the 'future state' will be given by the victorious Social-
Democrats, but how the present state is changed by our opposition."
This is an obvious trick. Pannekoek raised the question of revolution.
Both the title of his article and the passages quoted above clearly
indicate this. By skipping to the question of "opposition", Kautksy
substitutes the opportunist for the revolutionary point of view. What
he says means: at present we are an opposition; what we shall be after
we have captured power, that we shall see. Revolution has vanished!
And that is exactly what the opportunists wanted.
"Its object [the object of the mass strike]," Kautsky continues,
"cannot be to destroy the state power; its only object can be to
make the government compliant on some specific question, or to
replace a government hostile to the proletariat by one willing to
meet it half-way [entgegenkommende]... But never, under no
circumstances can it [that is, the proletarian victory over a
hostile government] lead to the destruction of the state power; it
can lead only to a certain shifting [verschiebung] of the balance
of forces within the state power.... The aim of our political
struggle remains, as in the past, the conquest of state power by
winning a majority in parliament and by raising parliament to the
ranks of master of the government."
This is nothing but the purest and most vulgar opportunism: repudiating
revolution in deeds, while accepting it in words. Kautsky's thoughts go
no further than a "government... willing to meet the proletariat
half-way" -- a step backward to philistinism compared with 1847, when
the Communist Manifesto proclaimed "the organization of the
proletariat as the ruling class".* * *
Chapter VII
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1905 AND 1917
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