Ota Šik 1976
Marx formulated his theories not merely as a contribution to analysing the capitalism of his day. They were also intended to adduce evidence for revolutionary replacement of the system. Hence, alongside the general concern to take hold of and enlarge on everything in his work which could be of value to economics or any other discipline – regardless of whether or not one accepts the revolutionary approach – we need to assess Marxism also in the light of its revolutionary goals. And here, too, we shall find that all is not plain sailing, that in addition to ideas that have proved entirely relevant to particular situations we shall encounter simplified assumptions, shortsighted views and mistaken conclusions, which, moreover, display a strong element of dogmatism.
Marx was firmly convinced that capitalism would inevitably lead to increasing exploitation and impoverishment of the working class, that economic crises of growing frequency and severity would disrupt the reproduction cycle and, ultimately, concentration of capital would vastly simplify the class division of society. Whereas the ranks of the exploited and impoverished, the proletarians, would swell enormously, the numerical strength of the capitalist exploiters would shrink to a mere handful. By virtue of their economic status, the proletarians would undoubtedly acquire revolutionary consciousness until, with circumstances revealing inexorably the obsolete and senseless face of capitalism, they would rise in revolt.
Subsequent developments in the capitalist system have demonstrated that these conclusions were premature, although they certainly had some relevance to the early phases. And now that many countries are, in their turn, entering the capitalist era Marxism will, in this sense, be relevant for a long time to come. True, the situation in the newly developing countries is not precisely comparable to things as they were in Marx’s lifetime, and, by the same token, political movements in the new context cannot but be influenced by experience gained in the meantime. Nevertheless, orthodox Marxist doctrine has a far stronger attraction in the developing countries than in the capitalist heartland.
There is no denying that at a certain stage in its evolution the capitalist system spells deprivation and misery for wide sections of the population, providing fertile soil for revolutionary ideas. So long as the thrust of capital into agriculture continues to uproot hundreds of’ thousands from their old way of life without managing to provide them with other means of subsistence, so long will they turn instinctively against the source of their misery. At moments of acute stress, such as economic crisis or war, the ferment of Marxist revolutionary teaching and the idealized vision of a dictatorship of the proletariat may lead to the overthrow of the established machinery of state, paving the way to revolutionary transformation of the social system.
The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ concept originated as the antithesis of ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ – concepts based on exhaustive study, particularly by Engels,[1] of the nature of the state. In the historical view – so Marxist thesis ran – through all its changing forms, the state remained essentially a power instrument in the hands of a succession of exploiting classes (slave-owners, feudal lords, capitalists) power was the instrument employed to maintain the economic status quo and crush any attempts by the exploited to offer resistance.[2]
Although, as a territorial entity, the state performed the role of defending from external attack the territory and the social formation it encompassed, its prime function was of an internal nature. Employing all the classical instruments of government, and primarily a special armed force, it was the job of the state to maintain ‘law and order’ in the society under its jurisdiction. Seemingly standing above all the social classes and groupings, it was supposed to be a supreme arbiter, restraining the conflicting interests, the tensions and the disturbances of public order.
The state did, indeed, originate as the instrument designed both to resolve the existing class divisions and to curb anti-social behaviour by individuals or groups which might be directed against the interests of’ all classes. But as the instrument expanded into an edifice standing above society, the wealthiest classes, by virtue of their economic power, arrogated to themselves the controlling influence in all affairs of state. They used the state machine to preserve the socio-economic conditions which, although providing the soil for the clash of interests, were the very conditions they naturally wished to maintain.[3]
Whatever specific form the state might assume, its essential parts have always included organs of political power, a bureaucratic administrative apparatus, a police force, judiciary, instruments for enforcing sanctions (prisons, etc.) and armed forces, as well as means for exerting ideological influence (the media, etc.). And however the power wielding these instruments of coercion came to be established – whether by election or by particular groups imposing their rule by force – the prime task of the state has always been to safeguard the socio-economic system favoured by the vested interests of the day. The self-evident fact that the economically most powerful classes and groups have the main say in controlling the organs of state is confirmed, not refuted, in times of revolution, when the victory has always fallen to the class currently reaching for economic supremacy – the bourgeoisie replacing the aristocracy, for instance. In short, whether by the overt exercise of arbitrary electoral privilege or by wielding power behind the scenes under universal suffrage, the wealthy classes have always carried more weight in the councils of state than those lacking a solid economic backing.[4]
While Marx regarded bourgeois democracy as a substantial advance compared with absolute rule, he always insisted that it, too, was no more than an agency for the domination of one class over another.[5] And, following up this line of thought, Marxists ultimately adopted the view that the state cannot be anything but the dictatorship of a particular class – be it exercised as naked power or existing in the form of economic inequality masked by the trappings of universal franchise. Hence the open or concealed dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was to be replaced by the open dictatorship of the proletariat[6] – envisaged as a transitional instrument for suppressing the bourgeois resistance to expropriation and as a defence during the phase of socialization and establishing the classless society.
The proletarian dictatorship would be the final act of the new state. Its purpose in suppressing the remnants of the exploiting classes would be to create a classless society; with private ownership of the means of production abolished – thereby eliminating all antagonistic classes – the state, having lost the reason for its existence, would disappear.[7] This ‘withering away’ of the state was a concept as deeply rooted in Marxist thinking as that of abolishing private property and market relations under socialism.
The Marxist view of bourgeois democracy has remained abstract and superficial. True, in his early writings Marx championed the cause of democratic freedom against the evils of absolute rule. Subsequently, however, democracy was regarded merely as a necessary precondition for greater freedom of organization by the workers, preparing them for the socialist revolution.[8] In all other respects, the negative aspects were underlined – namely, that the bourgeois masters of the economy were able to use the democratic system as a means to maintain their political domination over the proletariat. Entirely lost to sight in the Soviet ideology was any historical view of democracy as a system which, alongside the particular features displayed at different times, embodies certain essential principles transcending the limitations of class society and valid also under socialism. In consequence of this omission, freedom of the individual, of opinion, the press, organization and assembly, political activity and the other basic freedoms were no longer recognized as essential to a free society – even to a social order where exploitation and oppression were supposed to have been abolished.
Lenin, the leader who set his party on the straight road to revolution, was most emphatic in magnifying the drawbacks of bourgeois democracy as far as the workers were concerned. Viewing the system primarily as an instrument of class domination, he was, in fact, the first to describe bourgeois democracy as the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’, a concept which served to obscure the distinction between democratic and dictatorial rule under capitalism. And this theoretic bias combined with the circumstance that the Russian people had never, in all their history, experienced genuine democratic government, undoubtedly contributed over the years to the utter denigration of the basic democratic principles in the Soviet Union.
True, in a society where the privileged few own the means of production and control capital plus the bulk of the surplus value, the chances for anything but a formal political equality are slim. Although the form of government may be democratic, the vested interests of capital will certainly take precedence over all others. But this does not necessarily imply that these are the only effective interests or that where they run counter to the interests of the majority of working people the latter will be frustrated. The current situation in the Western democracies certainly affords no evidence for a facile interpretation of that nature.
The assumption ignores both the opportunities for workers and other sections of the working population (farmers, craftsmen, office staff, intellectuals) to make their voices heard in government, and also the existence of very considerable divisions within the capitalist class, which can be turned to the advantage of other interest groups. Altogether, the orthodox approach to ‘Interests’ and ‘conflicts of interests’ makes little allowance for differentiation, while the complex problems of ‘interest-awareness’, ‘interest groupings’ and ‘playing out interests’ are entirely overlooked. Moreover, as we noted earlier, the common interest of all classes in curbing anti-social behaviour is disconnected when considering capitalism, only to be heavily underlined in the life of the socialist state.
A deeper analysis of the actual interplay of interests in a Western democracy would be needed before venturing any general conclusions about the nature of democratic society – but that is not the purpose of the present work. We may confine ourselves here to noting that the Marxist interpretation of bourgeois democracy as a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is, to say the least, inadequately substantiated and certainly unscientific. Ignoring the intrinsic changes in the system, or denying any change in the nature of democracy, it refrains from making any scientific analysis – an attitude entirely at odds with the analytical method so strongly emphasized by Marx.
This shelving of the problem certainly leaves a serious gap in the Marxist theory of the state; although precisely because of its revolutionary attitude to the capitalist state, one would expect a particularly solid theoretical grounding in this area – but apparently the ‘official’ Marxists are not over-worried about that. Even the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ remains a somewhat hazy concept, with silence reigning on a fundamental divergence between Marx and Lenin in their theoretical reasoning in justifying the dictatorship.
Whereas, initially, Marx made no attempt to visualize the special features distinguishing a proletarian from a bourgeois state, he was later able to draw on the experience of the first move by revolutionary workers to translate socialist ideas into a political and economic system.
The short-lived workers’ dictatorship established in Paris in 1871 has gone down in history as the ‘Paris Commune’. The armed workers in this city, where rapid industrialization had created a relatively large proletarian population, were able to take power at the crucial moment when the bourgeoisie had ceased to represent the national interest and had lost control over the military force.[9] Inspired by a variety of socialist theories current in those days, the communards ventured on the first steps towards changing the old order and establishing socialism.
By analysing the experience of the Commune, Marx constructed the first blueprint for a proletarian dictatorship. Of course, Paris was a rather special case – its administrative apparatus was small compared with that of an entire country, a factor which, for all practical purposes, saved the Commune from having to deal with a powerful bureaucracy; with agriculture absent, there were no peasants, and no complicated market relations to be handled. With these limitations, only very tentative conclusions could be drawn about the probable structure and functioning of a future workers’ government. And although the theorizing undoubtedly contributed some stimulating ideas, there was no foundation upon which to construct a reliable theory of the future state – yet for many years this remained the only source.
The picture which emerged was no more than the most general outline of the political set-up used by the worker power to achieve the transition to a classless society and, subsequently, to dismantle the machinery of state which, in the first phase, would safeguard the revolutionary interests. The principles proposed as the basis for the new type of government were, for the most part, adopted by Lenin in his work on the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Briefly, they are as follows: the leading idea was that the old bureaucratic apparatus of oppression had to be destroyed and replaced by the Commune – later, the Republic of Soviets. Elected workers’ deputies – later, workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies – would be vested not only with legislative powers, but would also constitute bodies wielding a combined legislative and executive power – they would have direct control over an administrative apparatus reduced to a bare minimum. All public officials, judges and the rest, would be elected by the Commune, be responsible to it and recallable by it. Officials would draw salaries not exceeding the wage level for workers.[10]
Revolutionary economic measures would be implemented by the new government as the direct representative of working-class interests; they would include expropriation of capitalist and, where present, feudal and church property, its transfer direct to the producers; democratization of education, free schooling for all; subordination of the financial system to the social and economic aims of the community; introduction of legislation controlling conditions of work, etc.[11]
Such was the origin of the theory which, in its Leninist embodiment, was put into practice in the Soviet system. But Lenin made no notable addition to the abstract image of the future socialist political model, preferring, like Marx and Engels before him, to rely wholly upon practical experience, and dismissing the earlier hypothetical visions as Utopian.[12] He devoted himself mainly, on the theoretical side, to elaborating the strategy and tactics of socialist revolution in the era of imperialism and imperialist war, to the transition from the bourgeois-democratic to the socialist revolution in Russia, to the role of the Communist Party (originally the Social Democratic Party) in the run-up to revolution, and to similar problems associated with preparing the power takeover.
Hence the theoretical groundwork for the future political system was, in effect, restricted to the ideas Marx had gleaned from the Paris Commune experience. The only aspect to be enlarged upon was the question of how long it would take to abolish the state and, in this connection, what were the grounds for the existence of a state – an issue which Lenin treated in his State and Revolution, where he developed the theory of the two phases of socialism. The new proletarian state, he argued, would not wither away immediately after the means of production had been socialized and classes eliminated – which was what Marx and Engels had envisaged; a state of a new type would remain throughout the first, socialist phase, to disappear only in the second, communist phase.
This meant that the simple concept of a worker state founded on direct worker democracy, employing the workers’ armed power as a temporary instrument for suppressing the former exploiting class, now had to be extended to cover a lengthy period of time. The state in the first, socialist phase was envisaged as fulfilling its repressive function also to control anti-social habits deriving from the still indispensable socialist mode of distribution – that is to say, anti-social behaviour by the workers themselves would have to be dealt with.[13] Despite the insistence that the state – now figuring as the armed power of the workers – was responsible for overall control of labour and its remuneration,[14] and assurances that ‘hangovers’ from capitalism in the shape of infringing regulations or shirking duties by the workers would become increasingly rare, we may detect here the germ of theoretical justification for the state assuming an oppressive role vis-à-vis the working people – with no consideration for the equally vital matter of providing safeguards against abuse of this function.
We have here a glaring contrast – on the one hand, the sweeping economic powers accorded to the socialist state by Lenin’s state-monopoly concept, and on the other, wholly inadequate attention paid to the question of democratic and institutional safeguards to prevent particular interest groups from abusing the powers of state. The underlying idea was that only capitalism allowed the state to be used against the workers by classes hostile to their interests – with the abolition of capitalism, the opportunity would automatically disappear. Implicit to this approach, however, was an underestimation of the working people’s ability to make their own democratic decisions, combined with an idealized vision of the role played by the Communist Party under socialism (an attitude emerging even more clearly in Lenin’s later work). The Party image was, in fact, that of the socialist version of a power elite – notwithstanding the lip service paid to the idea that it represented a superior type of workers’ democracy.
It is customary to argue that Lenin had to abandon the idea of establishing genuine democracy because of Russia’s backwardness, the absence of democratic traditions, the minority position of the working class and its poor education – all of which indicates, however, that the situation in, Russia was simply not ripe for socialism. Another matter, of course, was to overthrow the Tsarist feudal system and allow state capitalism to spur the country’s progress. For that the time was certainly ripe; but to assume, then, that socialism could be established without genuine democracy for everyone was, firstly, mistaken and, secondly, paved the way to a power system denying the democratic freedoms even to the far more sophisticated working class of the days ahead.
The party programme put forward by Lenin and adopted in 1918, after the power takeover, went no further in its definition of the new political system and the state than the principles previously outlined by Marx as embodying the antithesis of bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois state.[15] Apart from propaganda proclamations of the most general kind, the measures set forth in the programme were: election of deputies by direct vote and the power to recall them, combining legislative and executive power, smashing the old bureaucratic machine (with a warning about the rise of a new bureaucracy),[16] gradual involvement of all working people in the state administration and so on.
This was really no more than a restatement, in the most general terms, of the original Marxist principles. No provision was made for genuine popular control of the elected deputies, nor was there any consideration of how to tackle the problem of bureaucracy and to make it serve the public interest. The very fact that the bold words at the outset about fighting bureaucracy were then repeated over the years, without looking into the question of how the power it wielded was all the time divorcing and alienating the state from the people, is evidence in itself that all the proclamations about remaking the state were no more than empty phrases.
Altogether, the approach to transforming the state and eventually abolishing it after the socialist revolution reveals a patent weakness in Marxist political theory which is reflected also in the concepts of how to prepare the way to socialism. The most obvious defect, as things have turned out, is in the idea that the state is purely and simply an instrument of repression in the hands of a particular class. Even before the revolution, Lenin realized that it would be impossible to allow the state to wither away the moment private ownership of the means of production had been abolished. Tacitly, without openly discarding the old theories, he shifted the emphasis from the transitional role of the new state in repressing remnants of the defeated classes to that of control over labour and distribution throughout a lengthy period of ‘socialist’ development. No longer, then, the transition to socialism but the ultimate transition to communism (when all products would be in abundance, the economic pressure to work would be abolished and distribution would be according to needs, not to work done) was to bring the day when the state would be discarded, or would wither away.
Lenin even tried to attribute this image of the future state to Marx by quoting the passage in the Critique of the Gotha Programme where Marx writes that in the transitional phase between capitalism and communism the state can be nothing but ‘a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat’. But Marx makes no distinction here between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ – that was added later by Lenin – he simply refers to a lower and a higher stage of communism. He equates the ‘lower stage of communism’ with ‘socialism’, that is, the classless society following on capitalism and based on socialist ownership. When writing of the transitional phase from capitalism to communism, he really had in mind the brief interim between capitalism and the classless socialist society. Lenin, however, extended the concept to cover the entire phase of transition to communism as defined by him.[17]
Obviously the difference is not merely a matter of the time scale, but of a radical divergence of views on the state as such. In the Critique Marx defined the first or lower phase of communist society as a period during which the law, the economy and cultural life would still bear the marks of the capitalist past. Vigorous economic growth during this phase would ultimately – and not as a short-term process – usher in the higher phase of communism.[18] There is no suggestion, however, that the disappearance of the state would have to wait until that goal was reached – on the contrary, the moment would come with the ending of oppression by the former exploiters, that is, at the beginning of the first phase.
That Marx did, in fact, envisage communism as covering the entire phase of eliminating private ownership, exploitation and the antagonistic classes, not postponing it to the phase of universal abundance, is confirmed by a letter which Engels wrote to Bebel at the time Marx was composing his Critique of the Gotha Programme. Engels writes:
As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people’s state: so long as the proletariat still uses the state, it does not use 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.[19]
In extending the life of the state over the entire period preceding the second phase of communism – when for decades the exploiting class could not possibly have survived – Lenin was not merely giving practical expression to the Marxist doctrine; implicit in his approach is a revision of the teaching.
That in itself should give no cause for concern; for my part, I certainly do not share the horror that any hint of revision arouses in the breasts of the official dogmatists; on the contrary, I am convinced that Marxist theories must be subjected to constant revision if they are to be of value. But we have here a concealed revision involving the tacit assumption that the state has to be preserved in its old form not purely on account of the former exploiting class, but also for other repressive purposes.
The issue cannot be brushed aside by insisting that the socialist state is needed not as an instrument of repression, but primarily to organize and plan the economy and other areas of life, that is, as the administrator of public affairs. Any such argument merely serves to obscure the nature of the state. When similar functions are cited to justify the capitalist state, Marxists promptly retort that the prime function is that of repression, exercised through the police, the law courts, the prisons, and so on. As for the administration of affairs, that is not specific to the state and would, as Marx and Engels pointed out, naturally continue after the withering away. The crux of the matter is the repressive function, the state as a power divorced from the people, with its armed forces, its judiciary and penal institutions, its burgeoning bureaucracy, in short, all the attributes proclaimed as instruments for suppressing one particular class but, in reality, designed to crush resistance by the working people throughout the entire era of socialist evolution.
Lenin was aware before the revolution that this course would be necessary, because he had turned his attention wholly to the revolutionary path in a country where the working class was not only young and lacking in experience of a mature capitalist economy, but which also constituted a tiny minority in the vast semi-feudal agrarian population, so that there could be no question of laying the foundations for socialism without the support of a powerful state and bureaucratic state-monopoly control of the economy. This, however, is a subject to which we shall return in detail in a later work. In the meantime, it should be noted in connection with our examination of the political preparation for socialism that whereas, on the one hand, theoretical views on the future socialist state never really advanced beyond Marx’s somewhat sketchy ideas derived from the Paris Commune, the idea that a powerful state machine would persist throughout a very long phase of development was, on the other hand, accepted without any theoretical backing.
And just as the state was expected to function in the conventional manner, separated from the people by a permanent division of labour and equipped with all the powers of authority and coercion, so it was taken for granted that there should be a power elite to steer the socialist course in the name of and in the interest of the workers.
1. See his book, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Marx, Engels, Selected Works (Moscow 1949), vol. II.
2. ‘As, the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of’ the most powerful, economically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.’ Ibid., p. 290.
3. ‘Society thus far, based on class antagonisms, had need of the state. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was pro tempore the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The state was the official representative of society, as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as whole: in ancient times the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie.’ Ibid., p. 138.
4. ‘In most of the historical states, the rights of citizens are, besides, apportioned according to their wealth, thus directly expressing the fact that the state is an organization of the possessing class for its protection against the non-possessing class. It was so already in the Athenian and Roman classification according to property. It was so in the medieval feudal state, in which the alignment of political power was in conformity with the amount of land owned. It is seen in the electoral qualifications of the modern representative states. Yet this political recognition of property distinctions is by, no means essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage of development. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which under our modern conditions of society is more and more becoming an inevitable necessity, and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be fought out – the democratic republic officially, knows nothing more of property distinctions. In it wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely. On the one hand, in the form of the direct corruption of officials, of which America provides the classical example; on the other hand, in the form of an alliance between government and Stock Exchange, which becomes the easier to achieve the more the public debt increases and the more joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself, using the Stock Exchange as their centre.’ Ibid., p. 291.
5. ‘And people think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and sweat by the domestic 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 ...’ Ibid., vol. I, pp. 439–40.
6. ‘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.’ Lenin, Selected Works (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1963), p. 292.
7. ‘When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.
‘If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away, by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.’ Marx, Engels, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 51 (Communist Manifesto).
‘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 our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out 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 dies out.’ Marx, Engels, op. cit., vol. II, p. 138.
8. ‘To the proletarians the struggle for political liberty, and a democratic republic in a bourgeois society is only one of the necessary stages in the struggle for the social revolution which will overthrow the bourgeois system.’ Lenin, op. cit., vol. VIII, p. 24.
9. ‘Paris could resist only because, in consequence of the siege, it had got rid of the army, and replaced it by a National Guard, the bulk of which consisted of working men. This fact was now to be transformed into an institution. The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, arid the substitution for it of the armed people.’ Marx, Engels, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 470.
10. ‘The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time. Instead of continuing to be the agent of the central government, the police 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 vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the central government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid in the hands of the Commune.’ Ibid., p. 471.
11. ‘The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. Its special measures could but betoken the tendency of a government of the people by the people. Such were the abolition of the night-work of journeymen bakers; the prohibition, under penalty, of the employers’ practice to reduce wages by levying upon their workpeople fines under manifold pretexts – a process in which the employer combines in his own person the parts of legislator, judge, and executor, and filches the money, to boot. Another measure of this class was the surrender, to associations of workmen, under reserve of compensation, of all closed workshops and factories, no matter whether the respective capitalists had absconded or preferred to strike work.’ Ibid., p. 478.
12. ‘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.’ Lenin, op. cit., vol. II, p. 331.
13. ‘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 right.” Of course, bourgeois right in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for right is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the standards of right.’ Ibid., p. 342.
14. ‘All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens become 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.’ Ibid., p. 344.
15. Draft Programme of the R.C.P. (B.) in Lenin, op. cit., vol. XXIX, pp. 97–139.
16. ‘Those strongholds of the bourgeoisie which everywhere, both under monarchies and in the roost democratic bourgeois republics, have always kept the state bound to the interests of the landowners and capitalists, have been destroyed in present-day Russia. The struggle against the bourgeoisie, however, is certainly not won in our country. The bourgeoisie is trying to regain some of its positions and is taking advantage, on the one hand, of the unsatisfactory cultural level of the masses of the people and, on the other, of the tremendous almost superhuman war efforts of the most developed section of the urban workers. The continuation of the struggle against the bourgeoisie, therefore, is absolutely necessary, is imperative, to ensure the success of future socialist development.’ Ibid., p. 109.
17. ‘In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx wrote: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” Up to now this truth has been indisputable for socialists and it includes the recognition of the fact that the state will exist until victorious socialism develops into full communism. Engels’s dictum about the withering away of the state is well known. We deliberately stressed, in the first thesis, that democracy is a form that will also wither away when the state withers away. And until our opponents replace Marxism by some sort of “non-state” viewpoint their arguments will constitute one big mistake.’ Ibid., vol. XXII, p. 323.
18. ‘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. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
‘In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – then only can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ Marx, Engels, op. cit., vol. II, p. 23.
19. Ibid., p. 39.
Last updated on 10 April 2021