In August 1917 the Russian Revolution stood at a crossroads. The Bolshevik Party had been driven underground. Lenin was in hiding, his life under threat. But it was at this perilous and uncertain moment that he delved into theory, producing arguably his most famous work.
The importance of The State and Revolution for the communist movement cannot be overstated. It saved the genuine ideas of Marxism from the wreckage of Social Democracy, and lit the way for the socialist revolution. Today it should be considered a foundational text for the communist movement, along with Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.
In defence of Marxism
The question of the state had assumed enormous importance during the First World War. In the course of the conflict, the repressive military and bureaucratic apparatuses of the contending imperialist powers had become all-consuming, and even the most ‘democratic’ imperialist states had been transformed into little more than “military convict prisons for the workers”, to use Lenin’s evocative expression.
At the same time, the clarification of the Marxist theory of the state had never been more urgent. For decades, the theorists of the ‘Marxist’ Second International had obscured the genuine ideas of Marx and Engels in relation to the state, rounding off its revolutionary edges. This gradual accumulation of small revisions was transformed into an open betrayal of Marxism and workers of the world in 1914, when almost all of the Social-Democratic parties supported their own state, and their own ruling class, in the imperialist slaughter.
It was in this context that Lenin began an in-depth study of Marx and Engels’ writings on the state in 1916, while in exile in Switzerland. He recognised that the resurrection of the world workers’ movement must proceed from the clearest possible understanding of its tasks, which had been deliberately obscured in the previous period. As Lenin writes:
“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’.”
The outbreak of the Russian Revolution in March (February, old-style calendar) 1917 interrupted Lenin’s work on the state, but he retained his voluminous notes, intending to write up the work at a later date.
The overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II had led to the establishment of a republic, led by a ‘provisional government’ tasked with carrying out the democratic demands of the masses, such as convening a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage, and land reform. But in addition to the provisional government, the workers and soldiers, who were largely drawn from the peasantry, had established their own democratic assemblies, called ‘soviets’.
The question thus presented itself: What position should the workers’ parties take in relation to the provisional government? And what role should the soviets play in the new republic? To this question the Mensheviks replied that in the conditions of Russia the workers could not, and should not, go further than the establishment of a ‘bourgeois’ – that is, a capitalist – republic, and so their role must be essentially to help the provisional government establish a parliamentary regime, similar to Western Europe, and then seek to form a government that could carry out pro-worker reforms in the future. The revolution, according to them, had achieved all it could. The task of the working class was now to defend what had already been achieved.
Lenin, by contrast, had put forward the slogan, “All power to the soviets!” in April 1917, and won the rest of the Bolshevik Party to this line: for the overthrow of the provisional government by the soviets and the establishment of a workers’ government, supported by the peasantry.
Either the republic would succeed in crushing the revolutionary workers, reverting to a military dictatorship, or the workers would overthrow the republic. There was no middle way. This conflict burst to the fore in July 1917, when the ‘democratic’ government brutally suppressed a workers’ demonstration, citing a ‘coup attempt’ by the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik Party’s press was smashed and warrants were issued for the arrest of its leaders.
It was clear that if Lenin were caught he would not live long enough to stand trial, so he was smuggled out of Petrograd to Finland, where he was presented not only with the opportunity but the urgent necessity of writing his work on the state. The fate of the revolution hung in the balance. Any theoretical confusion in the leadership of the revolutionary party could lead to catastrophe.
The pivotal questions confronted in this theoretical work were reflected in its full title, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution. And the urgency of these questions also comes across in Lenin’s writing. His passion for the ideas and their role in the struggle, as well as his indignation at the distortion of Marx and Engels by the Social-Democratic leaders, leap out of the page and take hold of the reader.
What is the state?
The state is something that has emerged at a certain stage of historical development / Image: Joshua Hayes, Flickr
Lenin begins his pamphlet with the most fundamental question: the nature of the state itself. To answer it, he draws from Friedrich Engels’ masterpiece, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
It is commonly assumed that kings, police, armies and the borders they fight over have always existed, as they reflect the innate greed or unruliness of ‘human nature’. Without them, mankind would have annihilated itself long ago, or so the story goes. But this is not so.
Basing himself on the most advanced anthropological studies of the time, Engels demonstrated that, in fact, thousands of years ago the state simply did not exist. The political functions we associate with the state were carried out by the community as a whole, with all leaders subject to the authority of the people. Since Engels published his book in 1884, countless studies and excavations have proven him right.
The state is something that has emerged at a certain stage of historical development, and Engels identified that this stage coincided with the division of society into antagonistic classes, of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.
The community as a “self-acting armed organisation” had become impossible, because in Lenin’s words, “civilised society is split into antagonistic, and, moreover, irreconcilably antagonistic classes, whose ‘self-acting’ arming would lead to an armed struggle between them.” Out of the community thus emerge “special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.”
Engels explains:
“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.”
But what is meant by ‘order’? Is the state an impartial arbiter, which neutralises the struggle between the classes, and reconciles their opposing interests under the law, justice, and so on?
Not at all, as Engels explains:
“As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.”
The state is therefore not some kind of neutral judge or ‘forum’, in which the classes humbly submit their claims and appeal to ‘justice’, ‘reason’ and so on; it is itself an instrument of class oppression, of maintaining the rule of one class over another and holding the latter under the established conditions of exploitation.
The Roman Republic was ultimately an instrument for holding down the slaves, the feudal state was an instrument for holding down the serfs. “And the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labour by capital”, adds Engels.
Democracy
But haven’t the significant reforms that have been won by the working class over centuries, such as universal suffrage, transformed the modern state from an instrument of class exploitation into the genuine representative of society as a whole?
Today, in many parts of the world, all citizens over a certain age, irrespective of class or gender, may vote for their representatives in parliament, and even stand for election themselves. In theory therefore, any idea or programme could become the policy of the nation, provided it wins over ‘public opinion’.
In actual fact, as Engels explains, “Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but
all the more surely.” Lenin describes the democratic republic as “the best possible shell for capitalism”, as the most effective instrument for the class rule of the bourgeoisie.
Every worker will know from experience that even in the most democratic of capitalist states, the exploited masses are prevented from participating in politics by the very conditions created by their exploitation.
Even those workers who devote what spare time they can to political activity find their rights curtailed in practice by a million petty barriers, such as the lack of free meeting spaces, or the various tricks used by the establishment in relation to voter registration and the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries, for example.
Therefore, in the vast majority of cases, elections are little more than a circus, in which members of the ruling class and their paid representatives perform all kinds of tricks for the votes of the more respectable layers of the population who turn out on election day.
Once elected, our representatives are then free for four or five years to represent or misrepresent their electors in whatever way they like. Election promises are promptly thrown to the wind.
It seems the ‘system’ had been working just fine from the standpoint of the American capitalists / Image: fair use
The vast majority of the population are relegated to the role of sullen spectators (assuming they even bother to watch the tawdry spectacle). Meanwhile, the capitalists are able to exert a constant and direct influence over parliament and the government far beyond election season, with their funding of political parties, and the ‘lobbying’ (corruption) of politicians from all parties. As none other than Donald Trump boasted in 2015:
“I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.”
He then called this “a broken system”, but considering that Engels wrote of “direct corruption of officials” in the USA as far back as 1884, it seems the ‘system’ had been working just fine from the standpoint of the American capitalists.
Further, the capitalist class exercises control over the state through its ownership of all mass media outlets, which pressurise all governments and parties through their manipulation of so-called ‘public opinion’, and in some cases by outright blackmail. One need only look at the servile attitude of all British Prime Ministers towards Rupert Murdoch and his billion-dollar media empire to see who’s vote really counts in British so-called ‘democracy’. In Lenin’s words:
“Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society.”
Beyond the media, the very existence of capitalist production as the foundation of the economy exerts a constant, unbending pressure on any government. This fact was brought vividly to the fore during the brief government of Liz Truss in Britain. The fact that Truss was a right-wing lover of Margaret Thatcher didn’t change the fact that any government that carries out policies that threaten the profits of the capitalists will be confronted with economic and financial instability, caused by the consequent ‘loss of confidence’ amongst the capitalists. Either the government will change course, or it will be toppled, in Truss’ case by her own party, in order to stabilise the economy.
All of the above is largely concerned with the elected, parliamentary arm of the state. But it must not be forgotten that this constitutes one part of, and not the most important part, of the state. The actual business of government is not carried out by elected, accountable politicians or parties, but by a large state bureaucracy, which operates beyond the sight, let alone control, of the working class.
There is a revolving door between the top positions in the civil service and the major capitalist monopolies and the banks, which ensures that in normal periods the people who actually operate the machinery of the state are completely aligned with the interests of the class of which they are a part.
That is to say nothing of the unaccountable judiciary, police chiefs and above all, the generals in charge of the ‘special bodies of armed men’, that make up the most essential, repressive arm of the state. These layers are overwhelmingly drawn directly from the ranks of the ruling class, and irrespective of their origin they are then ‘groomed’ over decades of constant association and accommodation with the capitalist establishment.
In even the most democratic state under capitalism, all so-called ‘independent’ institutions (meaning, independent from the working class) act as a check on elected governments. They act as reserve weapons of the ruling class, which can act to undermine and even overthrow elected governments in the event that the elected arm of the state should throw up a government which does not toe the line.
Finally, at times the ruling class has been prepared to hand over power to the armed bodies of men directly, to install open military-police dictatorships as a kind of short-circuit mechanism, in the event that the masses are threatened to overload the narrow circuits of bourgeois democracy. Let us not forget that the capitalists of Italy, Germany, Spain and France all preferred to live under fascism, than to risk a successful revolutionary movement of the working class.
It was precisely this outcome that the Russian ruling class was preparing for, while Lenin was writing The State and Revolution in Finland. Lenin describes how the ‘democratic’ government of Kerensky was already beginning to “persecute the revolutionary proletariat”. He adds that Kerenskey was even attempting to establish the rule of the sword over all classes, due to the inability of the bourgeois to disperse the soviets, which had not yet taken power themselves. He compared this deadlock to that which produced the ‘Bonapartist’ dictatorships of Napoleon I and III in France, and of Bismarck in Germany.
But this was just a prelude to an even more serious threat: the attempted coup of General Kornilov in August 1917, which aimed at nothing less than the liquidation of all the gains of the revolution and the restoration of tsarism.
The dictatorship of the proletariat
If the modern bourgeois state is ultimately nothing more than “an instrument of exploitation of wage-labour by capital”, then how can this be used to liberate the working class and all oppressed people? It cannot, answers Lenin: “it must be broken, smashed.”
This bold language was not some ‘ultra-left’ innovation on Lenin’s part. It came directly from Marx himself, who repeated it on many occasions. In April 1871, while the Paris Commune was fighting for its life, Marx wrote in a letter to his comrade, Ludwig Kugelmann:
“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.”
A year later, Marx and Engels decided to add the following ‘update’ to The Communist Manifesto, in their preface to a new German edition:
“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.’”
What is to replace the pre-existing state, once it has been smashed? To this question an anarchist may well answer, “Nothing”, or, “The self-organisation of the people as a whole”, but this answer would ignore a very important and unavoidable fact: that the day after the smashing of the bourgeois state, ‘the people’ will continue to be divided into classes, just as before.
The seizure of power by the working does not put an end to the class struggle; it intensifies it. The recently deposed ruling class will stop at nothing to re-establish its class rule and its state. This was proven by the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, which only took power in a single city, and has been proven many times over since.
Drawing on Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune, Lenin sketched out the principle features of such a state / Image: public domain
In such conditions, the only way in which the revolutionary masses can even survive the counter-revolutionary onslaught is by forming their own organisations to hold down, disarm and utterly destroy the resistance of their former exploiters. In other words, they will require an instrument for the oppression of one class by another – a state. Marx called this form of state the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, as opposed to the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’.
However, for the first time in history, this form of state would be an instrument for the oppression of a minority by the overwhelming majority of society. Further, the proletariat as the new ‘ruling class’ has no property or privileges to defend. Its class interests lie in the nationalisation of all property and the planning of production to meet the needs of all. For these reasons, the dictatorship of the proletariat in no way resembles the state under capitalism, including its parliamentary forms.
Drawing on Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune, the first workers’ state in history, Lenin sketched out the principle features of such a state:
First, the abolition of standing armies and their replacement with “the armed people”. Instead of a special public force, hanging over the rest of society like a sword of Damocles, the suppression of the external and internal enemies of the workers’ state would be entrusted to a national militia, armed and organised by the state “with an extremely short term of service”.
The state itself would be made up of democratic assemblies in every neighbourhood, including “the smallest country hamlet”, which would administer their own local affairs and elect delegates to wider district and national assemblies, constituting a single, unified, workers’ republic.
Lenin highlights Engels’ supplementary remarks on this question, in which he leaves open the possibility that in conditions where significant national differences or antagonisms are present, a federal republic could be a progressive step forward, towards a single workers’ republic at a later stage. Interestingly, Engels puts Britain forward as an example where this might apply, although on the surface the national question had seemingly been resolved there. It is clear that in quoting Engels, Lenin was thinking carefully about his own country, Russia, which contained over 130 recognised national groups.
The assemblies, or ‘communes’, that were to make up the state would not be purely ‘representative’, parliamentary bodies but “working bodies, executive and legislative at the same time.”
All public officials would be the elected and accountable officials of the local or national assemblies, paid an ordinary worker’s wage, including civil servants, judges, police etc. Further, all delegates and public officials would be subject to the right of recall at all times, meaning that if they failed to represent the people who elected them, or did not carry out their duties to the required standard, they could be quickly and democratically replaced.
In this way, Marx explains, “Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent 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 the workmen and managers in his business.”
From the brief but vivid sketch that Lenin provides, it is clear that the dictatorship of the proletariat would dismantle not only the bureaucratic and repressive arms of the old, bourgeois state, but also its ‘democratic’ forms, such as parliamentarism, whilst actually expanding a new and much more thorough form of democracy: proletarian, or workers’ democracy.
Finally, Lenin insists that these political measures “acquire their full meaning and significance only in connection with the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’ either being accomplished or in preparation, i.e., with the transformation of capitalist private ownership of the means of production into social ownership.”
In other words, the political forms of proletarian democracy are absolutely incompatible with the continued concentration of the means of production in the hands of a property-owning minority. Ultimately, one must destroy the other. But in transferring capitalist property into social ownership, workers’ democracy thus invades the last and most important stronghold of capitalist rule: the workplace.
Lenin was not dealing here with a far-off utopia. Several times in The State and Revolution, he points to the ‘Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’, which had been established from the ground up during the Russian Revolution, as the specifically Russian form of the ‘commune’ described by Marx. From this he concluded explicitly that the Soviets must dismantle the bourgeois republic that had replaced the Tsar in March 1917, and replace it with a ‘Republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’. This was the real, urgent meaning of the Bolshevik slogan, “All power to the Soviets!”
In many of the revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries, where the working class has stood at the fore, we see similar embryonic organs of workers’ power have been thrown up alongside the old state apparatus – starting as strike committees, self-defence committees, or other ad hoc organisations – creating a situation of what Lenin called “dual power”.
Today, as in 1917, these revolutionary committees or assemblies, represent a direct threat to the class rule of the bourgeoisie, which is why in every revolution the ruling class and its agents seek to divide, demoralise and eventually destroy these bodies as quickly as possible. The goal of the Communists, on the other hand, must be to strengthen and spread them, turning them into a national movement capable of toppling the old state, however ‘democratic’ it might claim to be.
The state under socialism
The working class must therefore seize political power from the bourgeoisie, dismantle the pre-existing state structures, and replace them with its own organs for the expropriation of the exploiters and the suppression of their violent resistance: the dictatorship of the proletariat. And in so doing, the working class lays the basis for the rapid development of the productive forces, and with it, the socialist transformation of society. For this reason, Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat “the political form at last discovered under which the economic emancipation of labour could be accomplished.”
But if the state is ultimately ‘special bodies of armed men’, standing above society, and the workers’ state envisaged by Marx, Engels and Lenin is made up of the armed people (excluding the former ruling class), under the direction of the broadest possible form of democracy, to what extent can this even be considered a state?
To the extent that the dictatorship of the proletariat is an armed organisation of one class, which holds down and represses another, it remains a state; to the extent that the former functions of the state’s military-bureaucratic machinery are dissolved into the self-acting organisations of the people as a whole, it is not a state. Therefore, the workers’ state necessarily has “a revolutionary and transient form”, to use Marx’s expression. Lenin calls it, “a semi-state”.
Unlike all previous forms of class rule, the dictatorship of the proletariat does not, and cannot, aim at the permanent subjugation and exploitation of any particular class. The more it succeeds in spreading the revolution and breaking the resistance of the former exploiters, the more society as a whole is converted into a mass of state ‘employees’, working as part of a common, democratic plan of production: socialism.
What would the role of the state be in such a society? “The state withers away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and, consequently, no class can be suppressed”, answers Lenin. But so long as humanity’s productive forces have not yet created a society of abundance, and so do not allow for the satisfaction of all need; so long as a division of labour persists, which privileges mental labour over physical labour; then some degree of inequality will remain, even under socialism, and the distribution of wealth and labour will still require some form of administration.
Lenin adds:
“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 labour has become so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability.”
Marx calls this the “higher stage of communism”.
Lenin explains that the aim of communists is therefore ultimately identical to that of anarchists: “the abolition of the state.” Where we differ, fundamentally, is on how we can get there. Anarchists wish to leap immediately from capitalism to a stateless society without removing the material basis for the state. In this respect, anarchism is completely utopian. Further, anarchists throughout history have strenuously discouraged the working class from seizing state power, which invariably has left power in the hands of the ruling class. In this sense it is reactionary, as it only serves to disarm the workers in their struggle against the bourgeoisie and its state.
A completely classless, stateless society of abundance is not something that can be created by any political reform. It requires decades of rapid economic development, and the flourishing of a generation of human beings that have never known the barbarous conditions of capitalist exploitation and oppression, which have left an indelible imprint on the outlook of those living today.
Until that time, “the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labour and the measure of consumption”. But Lenin emphasises that “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.” [emphasis added] These lines acquire a double significance in the light of Lenin’s struggle against the budding Soviet bureaucracy during his last years.
Rather than concentrating the tasks of administration in the hands of a clique of state bureaucrats, socialism would see these tasks distributed amongst the entire population, which would be more than capable of executing them with universal education and training. In this way, Lenin concludes, “Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing”, eventually leading to the disappearance of the state in any form whatsoever.
Reformism or revolution
One would think, therefore, that the Marxist position on this question was about as clear as could be when Lenin wrote his pamphlet in 1917. But in putting forward this argument, supported by extensive quotations from Marx and Engels, Lenin was combating a sustained campaign to hide and distort the real views of the founders of scientific socialism on the state, which had been waged within the Social-Democratic movement for decades.
During a prolonged period of capitalist upswing at the end of the 19th century, the bosses of Europe had granted a number of significant political and economic reforms to the workers. Mass Social-Democratic parties of the working class were allowed to stand in elections, and won millions of votes. In this context, the idea gained ground that it was possible to simply continue reforming the capitalist state, until it had been completely democratised, and the economy transformed gradually in accordance with the interests of the working class, while the bosses would meekly respect the will of the majority.
Eduard Bernstein was one of the most prominent representatives of this tendency, which Engels had earlier described as ‘opportunism’ / Image: public domain
Further, the leadership of the labour movement in the advanced capitalist countries began to be essentially bought off by the bosses, becoming “privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people”, as Lenin puts it. Increasingly, members of this ‘aristocracy of labour’ saw their role as mediators between the classes, negotiators, as opposed to leaders striving for the class rule of the proletariat.
The ‘Marxist’ leaders of the Socialist International were not immune from these petty-bourgeois prejudices, which elevated the state and ‘democracy’ above the class struggle, and lulled the workers with fairy tales of gradual, peaceful reform. Eduard Bernstein was one of the most prominent representatives of this tendency, which Engels had earlier described as ‘opportunism’: the “forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day”.
Bernstein was initially opposed by the leading theoreticians of the Socialist International, such as Karl Kautsky, but the latter assiduously avoided any reference to the essential question of whether the working class should simply form a government under a bourgeois parliamentary regime, or whether it should smash that regime altogether.
Whilst they repeated Engels’ idea that in a classless society the state would eventually “wither away”, influential figures like Plekhanov and Kautsky failed to mention that this would only take place after the expropriation of the capitalist class and the destruction of the old capitalist state machinery by revolutionary means. By this sleight of hand, the theoretical possibility was therefore left open for the working class to come to power in a bourgeois, parliamentary regime, and then succeed in eliminating class antagonisms until the state became redundant and withered away. Presented in this way, the need for revolution evaporates.
This theoretical capitulation to the bourgeois state was translated into practice in 1914, when all of the Social-Democratic Parties, with the exception of the Russians and the Serbs, voted in favour of war credits to assist their ‘own’ imperialists in the industrial slaughter of millions of workers, in order to redivide the monstrous oppression of the colonies amongst the European powers.
In The State and Revolution, Lenin identifies the question of the state as the fundamental dividing line between genuine Marxism, communism, and reformist opportunism. It was due to their clinging to bourgeois ‘democracy’ that the Mensheviks and so-called ‘Socialist Revolutionary’ Party in Russia were “not socialists at all… but petty-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology.”
“Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat”, explains Lenin. “This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested.”
Today, the same reformist outlook is completely dominant within the old Social-Democratic parties and so-called ‘democratic socialist’ organisations around the world. The renunciation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ has led inevitably to the complete abandonment of socialism in any form.
The Social-Democratic leaders today claim that their goal is simply ‘fairness’, ‘jobs’, ‘a better future’ and other empty phrases. Once in power, they are keen to prove that they can even manage capitalism better even than the bosses’ own parties.
However, we’ve seen a number of parties, movements and honest individuals to their left in recent years. Many, such as Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, and Syriza in Greece, call themselves ‘democratic socialists’ rather than Social Democrats. They point at the class differences in society. Some even talk about the need for socialism.
What is ‘democratic’ about these ‘democratic socialists’? They see parliamentary democracy as something above class division. They do not see it as an instrument of class oppression, but a means to rebalance society, and a hallowed line which must not be crossed. ‘Socialism’ for them becomes limited to what is ‘possible’ within bourgeois democracy, which is inevitably limited to that which is acceptable to the capitalist system, upon which the state is based. All of these movements have thus ended in failure.
In recalling the failures of modern left reformism we should keep in mind Lenin’s prophetic words in The State and Revolution: “opportunism limits recognition of the class struggle to the sphere of bourgeois relations.” As far back as 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels derided this ‘bourgeois socialism’.
The fact that some of the leaders of these formations honestly wanted to end capitalist exploitation does not fundamentally change anything. Adds Engels put it in 1891: “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!” In the long run, “such a policy can only lead your own party astray.”
A light in the dark
Lenin always regarded the struggle for theoretical clarity as an essential part of the life of a revolutionary party / Image: public domain
Lenin always regarded the struggle for theoretical clarity as an essential part of the life of a revolutionary party, but he never treated this as an academic exercise. In the last analysis, theory is and must always be a guide to action.
This relationship between theory and practice is epitomised in The State and Revolution. In fact, Lenin never completed the last planned chapter, analysing the 1905 and 1917 revolutions in Russia, precisely because he had to rush back to Petrograd in order to lead the very seizure of power that he had been arguing for in the book!
This fact in no way reduces the value of The State and Revolution as a work of Marxist theory. If anything it enhances it. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this concise pamphlet to the arsenal of communism, which is comparable to that of The Communist Manifesto, the founding document of our movement.
In carefully studying the writings of Marx and Engels, in bringing the Marxist theory of the state together in a clear, coherent argument, and in applying it so successfully to the complex and dangerous situation of the time, Lenin performed a permanent, inestimable service for the world working class.
In a single work, Lenin salvaged Marxism from under a pile of dirt, which had been heaped on it over decades of distortions, and he saved the Russian Revolution, which was facing catastrophe, by lighting the way by which the working class could push forward, overthrow the counter-revolutionary provisional government, and establish soviet rule.
He also secured the future of the world workers’ movement, providing the theoretical basis for an international organisation of Communist Parties throughout the world: the Communist International, founded in 1919.
Today, that International no longer exists, and the Communist Parties, founded on the ideas of Lenin, have suffered a reformist degeneration even more shameful than that of the Social Democracy. It is necessary to re-establish the real traditions of communism and found a new worldwide party of revolution. In doing so we must return to works like The State and Revolution, and study them with the diligence with which Lenin studied Marx and Engels.
As in 1917, The State and Revolution continues to light the way for revolutionary communists the world over.