Activist guide to workers' revolution
The State and Revolution
By Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Resistance Books, 1999
108pp, $8.50 rrp
Reviewed by Susan Price
They say you should never judge a book by its cover. But the contemporary format of this newly published Resistance Books edition of arguably Lenin's most famous theoretical work helps transport Lenin's polemics from their historical origins to a place where they still have relevance and applicability — the present.
Written in August and September 1917, in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution of November 7 (October 25 in the old Russian calendar), The State and Revolution was not published until 1918.
Lenin set out to, in his own words, demonstrate "the unprecedentedly widespread distortion of Marxism" on the question of the state and workers' revolution then prevailing in the international socialist movement. His task was accomplished by a comprehensive study and elucidation of what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had themselves written on the subject, accompanied by extensive commentary from Lenin himself.
Just as then, there are today various arguments and theoretical counterpositions, "distortions", put forward, both from the left and right, on the questions of the state and the struggle for revolutionary change.
For example, there is a popular view amongst postmodernists and "neo-Marxists" that proclaims the "withering away" of the nation-state and the triumph of "civil society" as a result of the globalised nature of capitalist investment and the drive for new global markets. But that scarcely tallies with the visible strengthening of states, in both the First and Third worlds, which has been necessary to enforce neo-liberal policies against unions, oppressed minorities and movements of resistance.
Others, like the Zapatista National Liberation Front in southern Mexico, have, while challenging neo-liberalism and exploitation, chosen a strategy which does not seek to ultimately gain state power. The Zapatistas have instead proclaimed their aim as being to create a new society within the old.
And yet the landless peasants and others who have supported the Zapatista movement have not stopped feeling the weight of state repression against them every day. The "old" continues to kill, torture and intimidate.
Still others have sought to construct socialist society from "within the interstices of capitalism", a frankly reformist position put by such figures as South African Communist Party leader Jeremy Cronin which echoes similar arguments of the "parliamentary road to socialism" advanced since the early days of last century.
Each of these contemporary debates has its historic bases; they're all reflected within the pages of The State and Revolution.
The State and Revolution is what you could call an activist's guide to Marx', Engels' and Lenin's thoughts on the origins and nature of the state, the process of proletarian revolution and the orientation of revolutions and revolutionaries to both the bourgeois and the workers' state.
Divided into six chapters, the book first presents an historical materialist analysis of the origin, nature and evolution of the modern bourgeois state, drawing on the work of Frederick Engels in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State and Anti-Duhring.
Lenin succinctly summarises Engels' position: "The state is a product and manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable."
Lenin investigates the evolution of Marx' and Engels' ideas on the state by examining their writings from the time of the bourgeois revolutions of 1848-51, particularly Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy, the Communist Manifesto and observations made by Marx in 1852.
He particularly notes, "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' ... and the 'proletariat organised as the ruling class'."
For Lenin, as for Marx, the Paris Commune, the revolutionary uprising which briefly took control of the city in 1871, was both the proof that such a proletarian state was possible and the blueprint for future attempts to establish it.
The Commune showed that it was possible and necessary to dismantle the old state apparatus, the "bureaucratic-military machine", and replace it with a workers' and farmers' state, which would be formed on the basis of workers' democracy in all its aspects.
Under the Commune, representatives were elected and immediately recallable and were paid no more than a skilled worker and the standing army was abolished and replaced with a popular militia. The "state" became the self-organised people in arms.
The culmination of Lenin's work is a passionate refutation of opportunism, in the form of one-time socialist theoretician Karl Kautsky who, in 1914, along with much of the international socialist movement, declared his support for his own government in World War I and renounced revolution.
In opposition to Kautsky's attempt to counterpose "democracy" and "revolution", Lenin argues that they are one and the same.
"Kautsky", Lenin argues, "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 the bureaucracy, to the introduction of complete democracy for the people".
This Resistance Books edition is accompanied by an introduction by Doug Lorimer, a member of the National Executive of the Democratic Socialist Party, who provides invaluable historical background to the debate between Lenin and Kautsky and the events surrounding the Paris Commune.
Lenin's The State and Revolution is an essential component to any revolutionary activist's library.