A couple of months ago, I wrote a post on V.I. Lenin‘s essay ‘What is to Be Done?‘. I read it in a collection of essays called the Essential Works of Lenin. The same book contains his work The State and Revolution, which he wrote much later on the eve of the October Revolution.
In the other post, I noted some of the good and bad of Lenin. He thought a great deal about strategy and tactics. Along the way, he laid out a lot of insightful critique of magical thinking and bad strategy on the left. On the other hand, he clearly had an intolerant, authoritarian style and personality. This served him poorly, both as a philosopher and as a leader.
These same issues reappear in The State and Revolution. But we get something new in the later text: Lenin on the verge of power, now using a quasi-religious reading of the classic texts of Marx and Engels to justify his own views. One of Lenin’s uses of Engels struck me in particular.
With that in mind, let’s take a brief look at this line of thought in The State and Revolution.
Lenin’s Views on The State
I’ll make no attempt to summarize the entire book. But Lenin lays out his basic view in the first chapter of The State and Revolution. He thinks the state arises shortly after class conflict appears in society. The state ‘solves’ that conflict. It does so by using armed groups (e.g., military and police) to bolster the dominant class’s position over and above other classes.
At the same time, the proletariat can’t simply abolish the state and replace it with nothing. It must – a claim we’ll evaluate closely below in the next section – maintain some sort of transitional ‘state’ in order to suppress the bourgeoisie and create a classless society. Only then – after a transitional period – can the state ‘wither away.’
And so, Lenin harshly criticizes both social democrats and anarchists. He criticizes social democrats for thinking that some form of Western representative democracy is worth saving. In this regard, he follow Marx’s critique of the ‘rights of man‘ pretty closely. And he criticizes anarchists for thinking that we can abolish the entire state immediately without a transitional period.
I’ll set aside whether Lenin correctly interprets either the social democrats or anarchists of his day. But my short answer for those groups would be ‘probably’ and ‘probably not,’ respectively.
Lenin’s Use of Sacred Texts
Lenin quotes Marx and Engels extensively. I mean, he quotes them to the point that were he writing today, there might even be copyright issues (another issue of bourgeois rights!). But my point is that Lenin adopts a certain argumentative style more appropriate to religious devotion and apologia than to philosophy or politics. Essentially, Lenin writes out extensive quotes from the masters. And then he ‘derives’ his own view from the quote. He does so whether or not the quote supports his view.
To be clear, sometimes this works well enough for him. Lenin did read Marx and Engels closely, and he provides some key insights into their work. But at other times, he has to stretch the text well past where it wants to go.
I’m going to show one example of Lenin’s method in The State and Revolution. It concerns a key point in the text, but it also brings out all the best and worst of Lenin.
A Quote from Engels
Here’s an extensive quote from Engels that Lenin cites:
The proletariat seizes the state power and transforms the means of production in the first instance into state property. But in doing this, it puts an end to itself as the proletariat, it puts an end to all class differences and class antagonisms, it puts an end also to the state as the state. Former society, moving in class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, an organization of the exploiting class, at each period for the maintenance of its external conditions of production; that is, therefore, for the forcible holding down of the exploited class in the conditions of oppression (slavery, villeinage or serfdom, wage-labor) determined by the existing mode of production. The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its embodiment in a visible corporation; but it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself, in its epoch, represented society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of the slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our epoch, of the bourgeoisie. When ultimately it becomes really representative of society as a whole, it makes itself superfluous. As soon as there is no longer any class of society to be held in subjection; as soon as, along with class domination and the struggle for individual existence based on the former anarchy of production, the collisions and excesses arising from these have also been abolished, there is nothing more to be repressed, which would make a special repressive force, a state, necessary. The first act in which the state really comes forward as the representative of society as a whole – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – is at the same time its last independent act as a state. The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the process of production. The state is not ‘abolished,’ it withers away. It is from this standpoint that we must appraise the phrase ‘free people’s state’ – both its justification at times for agitational purposes, and its ultimate scientific inadequacy – and also the demand of the so-called anarchists that the state should be abolished overnight.
Whew! OK, so yeah. Generally you don’t want to quote that much text at a time.
What Did Lenin Make of It?
What points did Lenin draw from all that Engels text? Here’s a summary of the theses Lenin claims follow from the text above:
1. In the revolution, the proletariat seizes the means of production and immediately abolishes the bourgeois state.
2. The state can only act as a repressive force. Insofar as the proletariat builds a state after the revolution, it will use the state to suppress the remaining elements of the bourgeoisie. [As a side note, this is what Lenin calls the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat‘ (and attributes, rightly or wrongly, to Marx and Engels). And Lenin considers it a necessary (and probably quite long) transitional stage.]
3. From (1), it follows that all elements of bourgeois democracy will be gone after the revolution. No more Western style democracy.
4. From (2), it follows that the ‘free people’s state’ that social democrats want won’t be around, either. Any remaining state will be based on internal proletarian democracy, but it will repress the bourgeoisie with the goal of ending the class system.
5. In line with (1)-(4), the bourgeois state cannot ‘wither away’ or be voted away. The proletariat has to overthrow it with force, probably very violent force.
Evaluation of Lenin
I want to take a look at how Lenin does merely as a reader of Engels. In short, I think if you read the quoted text closely, Lenin pretty much gets Engels right in (1) and (3). I think he’s more or less right about (4). And he’s probably more right than wrong about (5), though he stretches the Engels text to the breaking point to get there.
The biggest problems for Lenin concern (2), which seems to bear little relation to anything Engels wrote in the quoted text. If anything, it contradicts the Engels text. I won’t bother quibbling over what Engels’s real view might have been. In fact, Lenin draws some better quotes from other Engels texts to justify similar points later in The State and Revolution.
But I want to make the point that Engels says nothing like (2) in the quote above. In fact, he says in the text that the proletarian state will begin ‘withering away’ pretty quickly after the revolution. And that the proletariat’s very first act will involve putting an end to itself as a class. Aside from taking away the bourgeoisie’s tools of oppression, it doesn’t seem like the proletarian state will be doing much repression at all. Or that it will even exist for more than a brief time.
Lenin tries to address some of these issues later in the book. He even grants that the ‘withering away’ of the proletarian state will begin soon. But he continues to stubbornly hold on to the idea that a centrally run ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ will stick around for a long time. It’s an idea that had disastrous results in the Soviet Union.
The State and Revolution
As with the earlier Lenin text, Lenin displays many of the same good and bad qualities in The State and Revolution. He provides key insights into strategy. He reads Marx and Engels with insight. On the other hand, he’s dogmatic and rigid. He insults his opponents. And he often misreads his opponents, especially anarchists. One gets the impression that he does this deliberately at times. On this round, Lenin reads Marx and Engels almost like sacred texts – ones he warps to his own ends.
I think the left could benefit from reading Lenin. But the left should do so very critically. And we certainly shouldn’t imitate Lenin in how we run our orgs.
