The definitive essay on
Lenin's classic pamphlet.
Marx famously proclaimed the
need to “smash” the bourgeois state. But what does that mean in practice? If
our aim is a democratic, non-bureaucratic socialism,
what kind of state should we be striving for?
Those looking for answers have
often turned to Lenin’s State and
Revolution, where the famed revolutionary confidently speaks of
transforming “a state of bureaucrats” into “a state of armed workers.”
In the following essay, Ralph Miliband, the
legendary British Marxist, offers a critical appraisal of Lenin’s pamphlet
and explains why “the exercise of socialist power remains the
Achilles’ heel of Marxism.” First
published in 1970, the essay is still the sharpest reading of State
and Revolution available.
The State and Revolution is
rightly regarded as one of Lenin’s most important works. It addresses
itself to questions of the utmost importance for socialist theory and practice,
none of which have lost any of their relevance — rather the reverse. And as a
statement of the Marxist theory of the state, both before and particularly
after the conquest of power, it has, because it was written by Lenin, enjoyed
an exceptionally authoritative status for successive generations of socialists,
never more so than in recent years, since its spirit and substance can so
readily be invoked against the hyper-bureaucratic experience of Russian-type
regimes, and against official Communist parties as well. In short, here, for
intrinsic and circumstantial reasons, is indeed one of the “sacred texts” of
Marxist thought.
“Sacred texts,” however, are
alien to the spirit of Marxism, or at least should be; and this is itself
sufficient reason for submitting The State
and Revolution to critical analysis. But there is also another and
more specific reason for undertaking such an analysis, namely that this work of
Lenin is commonly held, within the Marxist tradition, to provide a theoretical
and indeed a practical solution to the all-important question of the socialist
exercise of power.
My own reading of it suggests,
for what it is worth, a rather different conclusion: this is that The
State and Revolution, far from resolving the problems with which it is
concerned, only serves to underline their complexity, and to emphasize
something which the experience of more than half a century has in any case
richly — and tragically — served to confirm, namely that the exercise of socialist power
remains the Achilles’ heel of Marxism. This is why, in a year which will
witness so much legitimate celebration of Lenin’s genius and achievements, a
critical appraisal of The State and Revolution may not come amiss.
For it is only by probing the gaps in the argument which it puts forward that
the discussion of issues which are fundamental to the socialist project may be
advanced.
The basic point upon which the
whole of Lenin’s argument rests, and to which he returns again and again,
derives from Marx and Engels. This is that while all previous revolutions have
“perfected” (i.e. reinforced) the state machine, “the working class cannot
simply lay hold of the state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”; and
that it must instead smash, break, destroy that machinery.
The cardinal importance which
Lenin attaches to this idea has often been taken to mean that the purpose
of The State and Revolution is to counterpose violent revolution to
“peaceful transition.” This is not so. The contraposition is certainly
important and Lenin did believe (much more categorically than Marx,
incidentally) that the proletarian revolution could not be achieved save by
violent means. But as Lucio Colletti has
recently noted,
Lenin’s polemic is not
directed against those who do not wish for the seizure of power. The object of
his attack is not reformism. On the contrary, it is directed against those
who wish for the seizure of power but not for the destruction of the old State
as well.
“On the contrary” in the above
quotation is too strong: Lenin is also arguing against reformism. But
it is perfectly true that his main concern in The State and Revolution is
to attack and reject any concept of revolution which does not take literally
Marx’s views that the bourgeois state must be smashed.
The obvious and crucial
question which this raises is what kind of post-revolutionary state is to
succeed the smashed bourgeois state. For it is of course one of the basic
tenets of Marxism, and one of its basic differences with anarchism, that while
the proletarian revolution must smash the old state, it does not abolish the
state itself: a state remains in being, and even endures for a long
time to come, even though it begins immediately to “wither away.” What is most
remarkable about the answer which Lenin gives to the question of the nature of
the post-revolutionary state is how far he takes the concept of the “withering
away” of the state in The State and Revolution: so far, in fact, that the
state, on the morrow of the revolution, has not only begun to wither
away, but is already at an advanced stage of decomposition.
This, it must be noted at
once, does not mean that the revolutionary power is to be weak. On
the contrary, Lenin never fails to insist that it must be very strong indeed,
and that it must remain strong over an extended period of time. What it does
mean is that this power is not exercised by the state in the common meaning of
that word, i.e. as a separate and distinct organ of power, however
“democratic”; but that “the state” has been turned from “a state of
bureaucrats” into “a state of armed workers.” This, Lenin notes, is “a state
machine nevertheless,” but “in the shape of armed workers who proceed to form a
militia involving the entire population.” Again, “all citizens are transformed
into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers”; and
again, “the state, that is the proletariat armed and organized as the ruling
class.” Identical or similar formulations occur throughout the work.
In The Proletarian
Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written after the Bolshevik seizure of
power, Lenin fiercely rejected Kautsky’s view that a class “can only dominate
but not govern”: “It is altogether wrong, also,” Lenin wrote, “to say that a
class cannot govern. Such an absurdity can only be uttered by a
parliamentary cretin who sees nothing but bourgeois parliaments, who
has noticed nothing but ‘ruling parties.'”
The State and Revolution is
precisely based on the notion that the proletariat can “govern,” and
not only “dominate,” and that it must do so if the dictatorship of the
proletariat is to be more than a slogan. “Revolution,” Lenin also writes,
“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 blurs
over this basic idea of Marxism, or he does not understand it at
all.” This new “machine,” as it appears in The State and Revolution is
the state of the armed workers. What is involved here, to all appearances,
is unmediated class rule, a notion much more closely associated with
anarchism than with Marxism.
This needs to be qualified.
But what is so striking about The State and Revolution is how
little it needs to be qualified, as I propose to show.
Lenin strongly attacks the
anarchists, and insists on the need to retain the state in the period of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. “We are not Utopians,” he writes, “we do not
‘dream’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all
subordination.” But he then goes on:
The subordination, however,
must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and working people, i.e.
to the proletariat. [my italics] 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 by the state of the
armed workers. We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply
carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, moderately paid
“foremen and accountants” (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts,
types, and degrees).
Clearly, some kind of officialdom
continues to exist, but equally clearly, it functions under the strictest and
continuous supervision and control of the armed workers; and officials are, as
Lenin notes repeatedly, revocable at any time. “Bureaucrats,” on this view,
have not been altogether abolished; but they have been reduced to the role of
utterly subordinate executants of the popular will, as expressed by the armed
workers.
As for a second main
institution of the old state, the standing army, it has been replaced, in the
words quoted earlier, by armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving
the whole population.
Thus, two institutions which
Lenin views as “most characteristic” of the bourgeois state machine have been
radically dealt with: one of them, the bureaucracy, has been drastically
reduced in size and what remains of it has been utterly subdued by direct
popular supervision, backed by the power of instant revocability; while the
other, the standing army, has actually been abolished.
Even so, Lenin stresses, the
centralized state has not been abolished. But it takes the form of
“voluntary centralism, of the voluntary amalgamation of the communes into a
nation, of the voluntary fusion of the proletarian communes, for the purpose of
destroying bourgeois rule and the bourgeois state machine.”
Here too, the obvious question
concerns the institutions through which the dictatorship of the
proletariat may be expressed. For Lenin does speak in The State and
Revolution “of a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other
institutions of a fundamentally different type.” But The State and
Revolution has actually very little to say about institutions, save for
some very brief references to the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
Lenin reserves some of his
choicest epithets for one form of representative institution, namely “the venal
and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society.” However, “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 institutions which
embody this principle are, as noted, the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’
Deputies.
On one occasion, Lenin speaks
of “the simple organization of the armed people (such as the Soviet
of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies . . .)”; on another, of “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”; and the third such reference is in the form
of a question: “Kautsky develops a ‘superstitious reverence’ for ‘ministries’;
but why can they not be replaced, say, by committees of specialists working
under sovereign, all-powerful Soviets and Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies?”
It must be noted, however,
that the Soviets are “sovereign and all-powerful” in relation to the
“committee” of which Lenin speaks. In regard to their constituents, the
deputies are of course subject to recall at any time: “representation” must
here be conceived as operating within the narrow limits determined by popular
rule.
The “state” of which Lenin
speaks in The State and Revolution is therefore one in which the
standing army has ceased to exist; where what remains of officialdom has come
to be completely subordinated to the armed workers; and where the
representatives of these armed workers are similarly subordinated to them. It
is this “model” which would seem to justify the contention, advanced earlier,
that the “state” which expresses the dictatorship of the proletariat is,
already on the morrow of the revolution, at a stage of advanced decomposition.
The problems which this raises
are legion; and the fact that they are altogether ignored in The State and
Revolution cannot be left out of account in a realistic assessment of it.
The first of these problems is
that of the political mediation of the revolutionary power. By this I
mean that the dictatorship of the proletariat is obviously inconceivable
without some degree at least of political articulation and
leadership, which implies political organization. But the extraordinary fact,
given the whole cast of Lenin’s mind, is that the political element which
otherwise occupies so crucial a place in his thought, namely the party,
receives such scant attention in The State and Revolution.
There are three references to
the party in the work, two of which have no direct bearing on the issue of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. One of these is an incidental remark concerning
the need for the party to engage in the struggle “against religion which
stupefies the people”; the second, equally incidental, notes that “in revising
the program 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 its distortions, to guide the struggle of the working class
for its emancipation more correctly.” The third and most relevant reference
goes as follows: “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.”
It is not entirely clear from
this passage whether it is the proletariat which is capable of
assuming power, leading, directing, organizing, etc.; or whether it is
the vanguard of the proletariat, i.e. the workers’ party, which is
here designated. Both interpretations are possible.
On the first, the question of
political leadership is left altogether in abeyance. It may be recalled that it
was so left by Marx in his considerations on the Paris
Commune and on the dictatorship of the proletariat. But it is not
something which can, it seems to me, be left in abeyance in the discussion of
revolutionary rule — save in terms of a theory of spontaneity which constitutes
an avoidance of the problem rather than its resolution.
On the other hand, the second
interpretation, which fits in better with everything we know of Lenin’s
appraisal of the importance of the party, only serves to raise the question
without tackling it. That question is of course absolutely paramount to the
whole meaning of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat: what is
the relationship between the proletariat whose dictatorship the revolution is
deemed to establish, and the party which educates, leads, directs, organizes,
etc.?
It is only on the basis of an
assumption of a symbiotic, organic relationship between the two, that the
question vanishes altogether; but while such a relationship may well have
existed between the Bolshevik Party and the Russian proletariat in the months preceding
the October Revolution, i.e. when Lenin wrote The State and Revolution,
the assumption that this kind of relationship can ever be taken as an automatic
and permanent fact belongs to the rhetoric of power, not to its reality.
Whether it is the party or the
proletariat which is, in the passage above, designated as leading the whole
people to socialism, the fact is that Lenin did of course assert the former’s
central role after the Bolsheviks had seized power. Indeed, he was by 1919
asserting its exclusive political guidance. “Yes, the dictatorship of one
party!” he said then: “we stand upon it and cannot depart from this ground,
since this is the party which in the course of decades has won for itself the
position of vanguard of the whole factory and industrial proletariat.” In fact,
“the dictatorship of the working class is carried into effect by the party of
the Bolsheviks which since 1905 or earlier has been united with the whole
revolutionary proletariat.”
Later on, as E. H. Carr also notes, he
described the attempt to distinguish between the dictatorship of the class and
the dictatorship of the party as proof of an “unbelievable and inextricable
confusion of thought”; and in 1921, he was bluntly
asserting against the criticisms of the Workers’ Opposition that
“. . . the dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible except
through the Communist Party.”
This may well have been the
case, but it must be obvious that this is an altogether different “model” of
the exercise of revolutionary power from that presented in The State and
Revolution, and that it radically transforms the meaning to be attached to the
“dictatorship of the proletariat.” At the very least, it brings into the
sharpest possible forms the question of the relation between the ruling party
and the proletariat. Nor even is it the party which is here in
question, but rather the party leadership, in accordance with that grand
dynamic which Trotsky had prophetically
outlined after the split of Russian Social Democracy between Bolshevik
and Mensheviks, namely that “the party organization [the caucus] at first
substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee
substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single ‘dictator’
substitutes itself for the Central Committee . . .”
For a time after the
revolution, Lenin was able to believe and claim that there was no conflict
between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the party;
and Stalin was to make that claim the basis and legitimation of his own total
rule. In the case of Lenin, very few things are as significant a measure of his
greatness than that he should have come, while in power, to question that
identification, and to be obsessed by the thought that it could not simply be
taken for granted. He might well, as his successors were to do, have tried to
conceal from himself the extent of the gulf between the claim and the reality:
that he did not and that he died a deeply troubled
man is not the least important part of his legacy, though it is not
the part of his legacy which is likely to be evoked, let alone celebrated, in
the country of the Bolshevik Revolution.
It is of course very tempting
to attribute the transformation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as
presented in The State and Revolution into the dictatorship of the
party, or rather of its leaders, to the particular circumstances of
Russia after 1917 —
to backwardness, civil war, foreign intervention, devastation, massive
deprivation, popular disaffection, and the failure of other countries to heed
the call of revolution.
The temptation, it seems to
me, ought to be resisted. Of course, the adverse circumstances with which the
Bolsheviks had to cope were real and oppressive enough. But I would argue that
these circumstances only aggravated, though certainly to an extreme degree, a
problem which is in any case inherent in the concept of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
The problem arises because
that dictatorship, even in the most favorable circumstances, is unrealizable
without political mediation; and because the necessary introduction of the
notion of political mediation into the “model” considerably affects the
latter’s character, to say the least. This is particularly the case if
political mediation is conceived in terms of single-party rule. For such rule,
even if “democratic centralism” is much more flexibly applied than has ever
been the case, it makes much more difficult, and may preclude, the
institutionalization of what may loosely be called socialist pluralism.
This is exceptionally
difficult to achieve and may even be impossible in most revolutionary
situations. But it is just as well to recognize that unless adequate provision
is made for alternative channels of expression and political
articulation, which the concept of single-party rule excludes by definition,
any talk of socialist democracy is so much hot air.
Single-party rule postulates
an undivided, revolutionary proletarian will of which it is the natural
expression. But this is not a reasonable postulate upon which to rest the
“dictatorship of proletariat”: in no society, however constituted, is there an
undivided, single popular will. This is precisely why the problem of political
mediation arises.
The problem need not be
thought insuperable. But its resolution requires, for a start, that it should
at least be recognized.
The question of the party,
however, brings one back to the question of the state. When Lenin said, in the
case of Russia, that the dictatorship of the proletariat was impossible except
through the Communist Party, what he also implied was that the party must
infuse its will into and assure its domination over the institutions which had,
in The State and Revolution, been designated as representing the
armed workers.
In 1921 he noted that “as the
governing party we could not help fusing the Soviet ‘authorities’ with the
party ‘authorities’ — with us they are fused and they will be”; and in one of
his last articles in Pravda,
written in early 1923, he also suggested that “the flexible union of Soviet with
party element,” which had been a “source of enormous strength” in external
policy “will be at least equally in place (I think, far more in place) if
applied to our whole state apparatus.”
But this means that if the
party must be strong, so must the state which serves as its organ of rule. And
indeed, as early as March 1918, Lenin was saying that “for the present we stand
unconditionally for the state”; and to the question which he himself put: “When
will the state begin to die away?” he gave the answer: “We shall have time to
hold more than two congresses before we can say, See how our state is dying
away. Till then it is too soon. To proclaim in advance the dying away of the
state will be a violation of historical perspective.”
There is one sense in which
this is perfectly consistent with The State and Revolution; and another,
more important sense, in which it is not. It is consistent in the sense that
Lenin always envisaged a strong power to exist after the revolution had been
achieved. But it is inconsistent in the sense that he also, in The State
and Revolution, envisaged this power to be exercised, not by the state as
commonly understood, but by a “state” of armed workers. Certain it is that the
state of which he was speaking after the revolution was not the state of which
he was speaking when he wrote The State and Revolution.
Here too, I believe that
simply to attribute the inconsistency to the particular Russian conditions
which faced the Bolsheviks is insufficient. For it seems to me that the kind of
all-but-unmediated popular rule which Lenin describes in the work belongs in
fact, whatever the circumstances in which revolution occurs, to a fairly
distant future, in which, as Lenin himself put it, “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.” Until that time, a state does endure, but it is not likely
to be the kind of state of which Lenin speaks in The State and Revolution:
it is a state about which it is not necessary to use inverted commas.
In Lenin’s handling of the
matter, at least in The State and Revolution, two “models” of the state
are contraposed in the sharpest possible way: either there is the
“old state,” with its repressive, military-bureaucratic apparatus, i.e. the
bourgeois state; or there is the “transitional” type of state of the
dictatorship of the proletariat which, as I have argued, is scarcely a state at
all. But if, as I believe, this latter type of “state” represents, on the
morrow of a revolution and for a long time after, a short cut which real life
does not allow, Lenin’s formulations serve to avoid rather than to meet the
fundamental question, which is at the center of the socialist project, namely
the kind of state, without inverted commas, which is congruent with the
exercise of socialist power.
In this respect, it needs to
be said that the legacy of Marx and Engels is rather more uncertain than Lenin
allows. Both men undoubtedly conceived it as one of the main tasks,
indeed the main task of the proletarian revolution to “smash” the old
state; and it is also perfectly true that Marx did
say about the Paris Commune that it was “the political form at last
discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.” But it
is not irrelevant to note that, ten years after the commune, Marx also
wrote that “quite apart from the fact that this was merely the rising
of a city under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no
wise socialist, nor could be.”
Nor of course did Marx ever
describe the commune as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only Engels did
so, in the 1891 preface to The Civil War in France:
Of late, the Social-Democratic
Philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words:
Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know
what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
But in the same year, 1891,
Engels also
said, in his Critique of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme of
the German Social Democratic Party, that “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 . . .”
Commenting on this, Lenin
states that “Engels repeated 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.” But the “nearest approach” is not “the specific form”; and it may
be doubted that the notion of the democratic republic as the nearest approach
to the dictatorship of the proletariat is a fundamental idea which runs through
all of Marx’s works. Also, in the preface to The Civil War in
France, Engels said of the state that
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.
It is on the basis of such
passages that the Menshevik leader, Julius Martov,
following Kautsky, wrote after
the Bolshevik Revolution that in speaking of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, Engels is not employing the term “to indicate a form of
government, but to designate the social structure of the State power.”
This seems to me to be a
misreading of Engels, and also of Marx. For both men certainly thought that the
dictatorship of the proletariat meant not only “the social structure of the
State power” but also and quite emphatically “a form of government”; and Lenin
is much closer to them when he speaks in The State and Revolution of
“a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by institutions of a
fundamentally different type.”
The point, however, is that,
even taking full account of what Marx and Engels have to say about the commune,
they left these institutions of a fundamentally different type to be worked out
by later generations; and so, notwithstanding The State and Revolution,
did Lenin.
This, however, does not
detract from the importance of the work. Despite all the questions which it
leaves unresolved, it carries a message whose importance the passage of time
has only served to demonstrate: this is that the socialist project is an
anti-bureaucratic project, and that at its core is the vision of a society in
which
for the first time in the
history of civilized society, the mass of the population will rise to
take 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.
This was also Marx’s vision;
and one of the historic merits of The State and Revolution is to have
brought it back to the position it deserves on the socialist agenda. Its second
historic merit is to have insisted that this must not be allowed to remain a
far-distant, shimmering hope that could safely be disregarded in the present;
but that its actualization must be considered as an immediate part of
revolutionary theory and practice.
I have argued here that Lenin
greatly overestimated in The State and Revolution how far the state
could be made to “wither away” in any conceivable post-revolutionary situation.
But it may well be that the integration of this kind of overestimation into
socialist thinking is the necessary condition for the transcendence of the gray
and bureaucratic “practicality” which has so deeply infected the socialist
experience of the last half-century.
No comments:
Post a Comment