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State and Revolution
V. I. Lenin, Todd Chretien
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State and Revolution
V. I. Lenin, Todd Chretien
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About This Book
State and Revolution is an indispensable guide to confronting the political and bureaucratic structures that protect the power and position of the world's elites and suffocate the lives of the vast majority of humanity. It has been considered essential reading for generation after generation of revolutionaries, and this fully annotated edition offers an essential guide to contemporary activists trying to work through and adapt its conclusions to our present conditions.
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Much of Valdimir Ilyich Lenin's most famousâand most misunderstoodâbook was written in July of 1917 while its author was on the run and plagued by fears that the revolution would be swallowed by the forces of reaction waging a war to restore Russia's Tsar. By 1918, when this small 'notebook on Marxism and the State' was first published, the autocracy was no more, and the centuries old apparatus of repression it had used to sustain its rule had been smashed to bits by the collective power of Russia's working class and peasantry.
In part because it was forged in the crucible of revolutionary foment, and in part because the state continues to be the guardian of the same inhumane systems of exploitation and oppression that Lenin thundered against, State and Revolution has offered inspiration and invaluable lessons to anti-capitalists the world over. But this small book was very much a product of its time, written for a specific context with a focus on certain questions over others. Because of this, any contemporary reader attempting to absorb State and Revolution 's numerous lessons without a guide travels a perilous road.
This new edition from Haymarket Books features an extensive introduction, hundreds of explanatory annotations, and an invaluable glossary of key figures and terms by Todd Chretien, all of which help place Lenin's work in its historical context. Chretien deftly offers an accessible account of the most important people, parties, and debates within the socialist movement of Lenin's time, and provides a map to navigating the book's most controversial points.
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Chapter 1
Class Society and the State
1. The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms
What is now happening to Marxâs 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 lifetimes 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 deaths attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to speak, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the âconsolationâ 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 extoll what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social chauvinists are now âMarxistsâ (donât laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the ânational-Germanâ 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 unprecedentedly widespread 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 the 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, so that their distortion by the âKautskyismâ1 now prevailing may be documentarily proved and clearly demonstrated.
Let us begin with the most popular of Engelsâs works, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, the sixth edition of which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 1884.2 We shall 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:
The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it âthe reality of the ethical idea . . . the image and reality of reason,â 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 âorderâ; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.3
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.
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 petit-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, âcorrectâ Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the state 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 petit-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 âorderâ that legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion of the petit-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, as all the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks descended at once to the petit-bourgeois theory that the âstateâ âreconcilesâ classes. Innumerable resolutions and articles by politicians of both these parties are thoroughly saturated with this petit-bourgeois and philistine âreconciliationâ theory. That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class that cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petit-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 Mensheviks4 are not socialists at all (a point we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petit-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology.5
On the other hand, the âKautskyiteâ distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. âTheoretically,â 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 âalienating itself more and more from it,â 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 âalienation.â 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. Andâas we shall show in detail further onâit is this conclusion that Kautsky has âforgottenâ and distorted.
2. Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, Etc.
Engels continues:
As distinct from the old gentile [tribal or clan] order,6 the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory. . . .
This division seems ânaturalâ 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 population7 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 society knew nothing.8
Engels elucidates the concept of the âpowerâ that is called the state, a power that 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.
We are justified in speaking of special bodies of armed men9 because the public power that is an attribute of every state âdoes not directly coincideâ with the armed population, with its âself-acting armed organization.â
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 nineteenth 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 âself-acting armed organization of the populationâ 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 Western European and Russian philistines are inclined to utter a few phrases borrowed from Spencer or Mikhailovsky10 to refer to the growing complexity of social life, the differentiation of functions, and so on.
Such a reference seems âscientificâ 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 âself-acting armed organization of the populationâ 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 âself-actingâ arming would lead to an armed struggle between them.11 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 that 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 âspecialâ bodies of armed men and the âself-acting armed organization of the population.â We shall see how this question is specifically illustrated by the experience of the European and Russian revolutions.12
But to return to Engelsâs exposition.
He points out that sometimesâin certain parts of North America, for exampleâthis 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:
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.13
This was written not later than the early nineties of the last century, Engelâs last preface being dated June 16, 1891. The turn toward imperialismâmeaning the complete domination of the trusts, the omnipotence of the big banks, a grand-scale colonial policy, and so forthâwas only just beginning in France and was even weaker in North America and in Germany. Since then ârivalry in conquestâ has taken a gigantic stride, all the more because by the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century the world had been completely divided up among these ârivals in conquest,â i.e., among the predatory Great Powers. Since then, military and naval armaments have grown fantastically and the predatory war of 1914 to 1917 for the domination of the world by Britain or Germany, for the division of the spoils, has brought the âswallowingâ of all the forces of society by the rapacious state power close to complete catastrophe.
Engels could, as early as 1891, point to ârivalry in conquestâ 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 times intensified, gave rise to an imperialist war, been covering up the defense of the ...