III

THE HEGELIAN PARADOX OF LENIN'S STATE AND REVOLUTION

Those who are in the least acquainted with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the spread of Marxism was accompanied by a certain lowering of theoretical standards.^[1]

I. HEGEL AND MARX ON THE STATE: A RECAPITULATION

As noted in the previous chapter, Marx’s critique of the Hegelian theory of the state perhaps obscures the extent to which Marx’s enterprise was virtually identical to Hegel’s. Like Hegel, Marx sought to reveal contemporary human existence as inauthentic because of the alienation which all human beings experience in day-to-day life. According to both Hegel and Marx, this alienation is most clearly seen in the estrangement of individual, egoistic, finite human interests from infinite, universal ends. Furthermore, both see history as an ongoing process in which the particular and universal spheres are brought to synthesis. Though Hegel and Marx understand the nature of this alienation in quite different ways, they agree in principle on the barrier which stands between human beings and authentic being and on the need for reconciliation. For Hegel, this is a reconciliation of Absolute Mind with its finite phase; for Marx, this is a reconciliation of real, concrete men with their abstract ‘species-essence’.

Where Hegel and Marx disagree significantly is with respect to the means by which alienation can be eliminated. For Hegel, the relevant institution is the state. It is by the intervention of the state apparatus that universal thinking is engendered in the individual and that the particular man—as he exists in civil society—is brought into the ethical community. For Marx, on the other hand, the ostensibly universal state is shown to be contingent upon the particular interests of material life and, ultimately, exists for the protection of private property. The contemporary state’s claims to universality are a sham because, upon examination, the state is shown to protect sectional class interests. Furthermore, no exercise of those individual political rights endowed by the state challenges the fundamental separation of the individual from state power and the power of property over the individual. Thus, the state is incapable of engendering universal thinking. The only way, according to Marx, to reconcile the particular with the universal is not for the state to subsume the particular under its universality, but for the individual to absorb this universality into himself. In other words, the will of the individual ought not to become integrated into the state, but the functions of the state ought to be integrated into each individual. Reconciliation occurs when, like the monads of Leibniz’s Monadology, each man, each instance of finite mind, “has relations which express all the others” and “is a perpetual living mirror of the universe”.^[2]

It is only when the distinctions between Hegel’s and Marx’s ideas about the role of the state are made clear that the contradictions in Lenin’s own theory—as it is articulated in State and Revolution—are cast into strong relief. Lenin’s few philosophical works, among them Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and Philosophical Notebooks, provide little convincing evidence that Lenin drew on Hegelian sources for his theory of the state. Thus, Lenin’s political thought cannot be pigeon-holed as Hegelian. Nevertheless, it can be posited that his nominally Marxist theory of the state shows some marked Hegelian tendencies. Understanding that Lenin’s view of the state shared Marx’s misgivings about the state’s capacity to be anything but a reflection of civil society, the conflated name ‘Marxism-Leninism’ can be uttered with no contradiction. However, when considering the role that Lenin believes the state ought to take in the revolutionary transformation of society, the designation ‘Marxist-Leninist’ suddenly appears quite arbitrary. In State and Revolution, in spite of Lenin’s allegiance to Marx, the self-declared materialist reveals himself to be an idealist, and the mindless, contingent state is reconstituted as a social force standing above civil consciousness and having the capacity to alter it.

II.THE AMBIGUITY OF THE TEXT

The agendas of Hegel and Marx, as they are presented in Philosophy of Right and “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” respectively, are relatively unambiguous.^[3] In contrast, interpreting Lenin’s State and Revolution requires that the reader reaches some preliminary conclusions about the text, the nature and purpose of which is very much in dispute. Much of the controversy about the text swings in loopy orbits around its alleged utopianism and the subsequent difficulty of reconciling it with Lenin’s ‘programmatic’ works. While Lenin’s State and Revolution exalts the capacity of the masses for spontaneous revolutionary activity and the abolition of class conflict, it seemingly contradicts the tone of his earlier writings which advocated the revolutionary abolition of class conflict under the tutelage of Lenin’s Social-Democratic (later Bolshevik) Party and the subordination of working-class spontaneity to this revolutionary vanguard.

The Standard for Socialist Practice in What Is to Be Done?^[4]

Lenin acknowledged the power of the labour movement as it had arisen spontaneously in Russia. In What Is to Be Done?, written in 1901-02, Lenin made specific reference to the strikes of 1896 which had begun in St. Petersburg with about 3500 spinners and weavers and then spread over much of Russia. As a result of their actions, the workers were able to gain economic and legal benefits from their employers and the government—including legislation in 1897 which limited the working day to eleven and a half hours across Russia. Far from celebrating the spontaneous actions of St. Petersburg’s day labourers though, Lenin posited that simple, spontaneous self-organisation amongst the working class ultimately hinders the workers’ movement. In Lenin’s opinion, the St. Petersburg strikes actually created the mistaken impression that real improvements in working conditions could be gained by spontaneous, mass actions alone when, in reality, they did little more than exact concessions from the holders of capital. In spite of the economic and legal victories of the 1896 “industrial war” the inherently oppressive relationship between the capital holders and the workers remained unchallenged.

As it is described in What Is to Be Done?, the fault of the Russian working-class movement was that, while it contained the requisite spontaneity, it did not, as yet, exhibit a clearly defined class consciousness. While the working class was able to translate their misery into a struggle for economic gains within capitalism, they were unable to situate their plight in the grander process of social evolution and translate it into a political struggle against capitalism itself. Lenin describes the problem thus:

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realise the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.^[5]

Quoting Karl Kautsky (for whom Lenin later had no shortage of vitriol in State and Revolution), Lenin attempts to establish the need for a socialist vanguard party. This need is based on the fact that, contrary to the opinions of some socialists, the class struggle of modern society does not create both the conditions for socialist production and the requisite socialist consciousness. Certainly, Lenin argues, socialist consciousness is a concomitant of the class struggle, but neither arises from the other. Socialist consciousness is a uniquely bourgeois response to modern industrial society which, because it requires a basis in scientific knowledge, can arise only amongst the intelligentsia. Like modern technology, modern economic science is a prerequisite to socialist production and neither of these can be produced by the proletariat. Thus, while the inequities and drudgery of modern industrial society may push the working class to engage in struggles over wages and working conditions, the source of true socialist consciousness is the bourgeois intelligentsia. Only once socialism has been conceived amongst the intellectuals can it be, subsequently, communicated to intellectually developed proletarians who, in turn, introduce its principles into the class struggle. The hitherto economic struggle of the workers for reform within capitalism is thus transformed into the political struggle for socialism.^[7]

Assuming that the working class is incapable of producing a comprehensive ideology of its own, its only choice is to appropriate either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. In Lenin’s opinion, those who uphold the capacity of the working class to achieve socialist consciousness on its own actually belittle scientific socialism and, consequently, strengthen the hold of the prevailing bourgeois ideology on working people. The spontaneous labour movement, unable to translate its economic struggles into a coherent political program, “is pure and simple trade unionism ... and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers to the bourgeoisie”.^[8] Lenin’s contention that leaving the fate of socialism in the hands of the spontaneous labour movement is a de facto surrender to bourgeois principles was the basis for his passionate belief that “our task, the task of the Social-Democrats, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the labour movement from its spontaneous, trade unionist striving to go under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social-Democracy”.^[9] Those socialists who believe that the spontaneous element of the labour movement must be allowed to play itself out, and that it is impossible to divert the movement from the path determined by the material conditions of life encountered by its constituents, make claims “tantamount to the abandonment of socialism”. Indeed, if they pushed their position to its logical conclusion, “they would have nothing to do but ‘fold their useless arms over their empty breasts’” and leave the possibility of revolutionary social democracy to bourgeois trade unionists.^[10] Lenin does grant that the working class gravitates spontaneously towards socialism in the sense that “socialist theory defines the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory”,^[11] but he maintains that the socialist movement can seize the working class only to the extent that it does not bow to spontaneity. Since industrial society is hopelessly permeated by the bourgeois mentality, any spontaneous movement emerging from that society will be similarly permeated.

Alongside the main thesis of What Is to Be Done? is a parallel claim that revolutionary tactics and Marxism are wholly compatible. By Lenin’s account of Marx, the claim that having a “tactics plan” contradicts the fundamental spirit of Marxism “not only means theoretically vulgarising Marxism, but also practically dragging the Party backward”.^[12] “[W]hat else is the function of Social-Democracy”, asks Lenin,

if not to be a ‘spirit’, not only hovering over the spontaneous movement, but also raising the movement to the level of ‘its programme’? Surely, it is not its function to drag at the tail of the movement: at best, this would be of no service to the movement; at the worst, it would be very, very harmful.^[13]

Rather than adopting an uncritical subservience to ‘spontaneity’, it is the duty of the Social-Democrats to use Marxist theory in order to guide the various oppositional strata and act as the vanguard of the working class. Unlike the ‘opportunists’, the Social-Democratic Party should not “soothe itself by arguments about the economic struggle bringing the workers up against their own lack of rights, and about concrete conditions fatalistically impelling the labour movement onto the path of revolution”.^[14] On the contrary, it should intervene in every sphere and in every question of social and political life—using Marxist thought as a basis for prudent action.

The substance of What Is to Be Done? can therefore be summarized as follows. The spontaneous class struggle and theory of scientific socialism are both the result of modern social forces. Still, coherent socialist theory does not necessarily grow out of conflicts in material life; it merely exists concurrently within the class of the bourgeois intelligentsia. Consequently, left to itself, the working class is incapable of moving beyond simple attempts to exact economic concessions from capital holders. It is unable to transcend the trade-union mentality, or see beyond immediate material concerns. Lenin is as critical of premature “excitative terror”^[15] as he is of the opportunistic genuflection to spontaneity. Nevertheless he insists that only with the injection of a political element into the proletarian class struggle—by bourgeois intellectuals who have thought through the nature of industrial society—can this limited, “pure and simple” economic struggle become a full-fledged political struggle which asks not only how labour can achieve better terms of sale but also how the conditions under which labour must be sold can be abolished once and for all. For Lenin, the locus of the political and intellectual element of the proletarian class struggle is the Social-Democratic Party—the revolutionary vanguard, the ‘head’ of the social movement of which the proletariat is the ‘heart’. The duty of the Social-Democrats is to create an organisation of proletarian revolutionaries under a central authority rather than to “kneel in prayer to spontaneity, gazing with awe upon the ‘posteriors’ of the Russian proletariat”.^[16]

“An Aberrant Intellectual Enterprise”?

The problem of reconciling Lenin’s State and Revolution (published in January 1918) with his programmatic work What Is to Be Done? is located in the apparent change of attitude about the roles of the proletariat and the socialist party that the former book exhibits. While What Is to Be Done? stressed, amongst other things, the need for a set of clearly defined socialist tactics, a revolutionary party to act as the repository for coherent Marxist theory and practice, and the subordination of working-class spontaneity to the conscious, calculated actions of the vanguard party, State and Revolution seemingly de-emphasises the role of the Party and celebrates the workers’ capacity to smash the old “parasitic” state and reorganise themselves along socialist lines. In short, the reason why State and Revolution presents us with such a problem is that its shift from the Party to the proletariat, and from socialist tactics to spontaneous organisation, casts Lenin, hitherto an apparent practitioner of realpolitik, as both an idealist and a utopian.

The essentials of State and Revolution’s argument can be summarised in the following fashion. As described by Marx, all states are reflections of the egoistic property interests of civil society; as such, the state can be nothing other than an instrument by which the owners of capital oppress those classes who do not have access to property. The capitalist state, as a reflection of the capitalist mode of production, is only adequate to the needs of a capitalist society; consequently, if the proletariat are to create a society in which their needs are met, the old capitalist state apparatus must be destroyed and replaced with a proletarian apparatus. The main institution of the proletarian state is, for Lenin, the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, to which Marx referred only incidentally, but which Lenin claimed had historical precedent with the Paris Commune.^[17] One of the distinguishing features of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that, though backed by a state apparatus, it will require this backing to a far smaller degree than the capitalist regime that came before it. This is true because the state will represent the interests of the majority for the first time in history and the tasks of the state will have become so simplified by technology and the division of labour that any literate person can conduct them; thus, the state’s raisons d’ être, administration and the repression of class, will have been eliminated. The only remaining purpose of the state will be to repress the residual bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements in society and to ensure that all of the economy’s resources are allocated equitably. All members of society will be eligible, and obliged, to hold office in the new communal council style of government in which all officials would be bound by strict recall laws and paid a worker’s wage. The most striking feature of the new state as Lenin describes it is that it creates the conditions for its own abolition. Since the state exists solely for the purpose of extinguishing the last of the old class antagonisms in society, and since the existence of the state is in general premised upon class conflict, as class conflicts are ameliorated so too shall the state wither away.

In the secondary literature on State and Revolution, there has been some consensus about its ‘utopian’ character. For Robert Conquest, State and Revolution is of special interest as “an expression of the most purely Utopian and theoretical side of the Marxist doctrine of society”. Thus, the pamphlet’s intentions seem diametrically opposed to the hard-nosed regard for political tactics characteristic of, say, What Is to Be Done?. Fifteen years earlier, when it seemed that a socialist revolution might not occur in Lenin’s lifetime, Lenin was absorbed in the practical concerns of orchestrating a revolution. Yet in 1917,

[w]hile Petrograd simmered in the background, Lenin—right on the eve of the anticipated and actual seizure of power—was giving the most idyllic semianarchist account of proletarian revolution and of how it is to result immediately in the most intensive democratization, culminating in the withering away of the state.^[18]

In a similar vein, State and Revolution is, for Robert V. Daniels, “a work conforming neither to Lenin’s previous thought nor to his subsequent practice. It stands as a monument to its author’s intellectual deviation during the year of the revolution, 1917”.^[19] Daniels notes that the book hardly makes mention of the Party, as opposed to Lenin’s earlier text in which the role of the Party is emphasised and the success of the Party is associated with revolutionary success. Assuming the veracity of the claim that, for Lenin, the Party was characteristically the key element of the revolutionary process, Daniels is correct to say that “State and Revolution, the most developed product of Lenin’s thought in 1917, stands in sharp contrast to the main substance of ‘Leninism’ expressed previously and subsequently”.^[20] Adam Ulam does not reject the pamphlet’s significance out of hand. Citing both the amount of time Lenin took preparing the manuscript and the care that Lenin took to ensure that it would be published even if he were killed,^[21] Ulam insists that Lenin treated the book’s writing as a serious exercise. Even so, he concedes that “no work could be more un-representative of its author’s political philosophy and his general frame of mind than this one by Lenin”. Far from expressing Lenin’s well-established views, “[t]hat unfortunate pamphlet is almost a straightforward profession of anarchism”.^[22] Of the critics of State and Revolution, Louis Fischer makes perhaps the harshest condemnation. According to Fischer, State and Revolution subscribes shamelessly to the “utopian Nowhere method” of which Lenin was such a strident critic elsewhere and “[d]espite its plethora of Marx-Engels terminology and quotations, the Lenin book is an aberrant intellectual enterprise, a fanciful exercise for so rock-hard a man, as un-Leninist as the mask he wore and the false name he bore in hiding while writing it”.^[23]

In spite of the consensus which exists amongst some critics regarding the utopian character of State and Revolution, there is disagreement about the relationship of this work to Lenin’s earlier writing. While acknowledging the book’s “naïve notions” and utopian character, Rodney Barfield insists that the content of the book does not represent an intellectual deviation of the kind claimed by Conquest, Daniels, Ulam, and Fischer. Rather, Barfield suggests that Lenin was a utopian idealist throughout his political career and that State and Revolution merely gave a systematic statement of Lenin’s inner convictions about human nature and his ideals for a humane new world.^[24] As already shown, State and Revolution is supposed to represent a big departure from ‘real’ Leninism because it emphasised the ability of the proletariat to organise themselves spontaneously, without egoistic self-interest, while de-emphasising the role of the vanguard party. Yet, some textual evidence suggests that this assessment of the proletariat was not an exception but was, rather, typical of Lenin’s thought. To support this assertion, Barfield directs the reader to two articles—“What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are” and “To the Rural Poor”—written in 1894 and 1903 respectively. In these articles, Lenin indicates a faith in the spontaneous development of proletarian class consciousness, and a vision of a society characterised by voluntary toil and mutual self-sacrifice, which was repeated later in State and Revolution.

For example, in “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are”, Lenin says of the proletariat:

When the advanced representatives of this class will have mastered the ideas of scientific socialism, the idea of the historical role of the Russian worker, when these ideas become widespread and when durable organisations arise among the workers which will transform the present sporadic economic war of the workers into a conscious class struggle—then the Russian workers will rise at the head of all the democratic elements, overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian proletariat (side by side with the proletariat of all countries) along the straight road of open political struggle towards the victorious communist revolution.^[25]

Unlike What Is to Be Done? this passage asserts the capacity of the proletariat to master the ideas of scientific socialism themselves, and to be the leading force in the communist revolution, without being subordinate to a vanguard organisation. Furthermore, in “To the Rural Poor”, Lenin writes

When the working class is victorious over the whole of the bourgeoisie, it will take the land away from the big proprietors and introduce co-operative farming on the big estates, so that the workers will farm the land together, in common, and freely elect trusted men to manage the farms. They will use machinery to save labour; they will work shifts for not more than eight (or even six) hours daily. Then the small peasant who prefers to carry on his own farm in the old way on individual lines will not produce for the market, to sell to anyone who comes along, but will produce for the workers’ associations; the small peasant will supply the workers’ associations with corn, meat, vegetables, and the workers in return will provide him with machinery, livestock, fertilizers, clothes and whatever else he may require, without his having to pay for it. Then there will be no struggle for money between the big and the small farmer, then there will be no wage labour for others; all workers will work for themselves, all labour-saving devices and all machinery will benefit the workers and help to make their work easier, to improve their standard of living.^[26]

In Barfield’s opinion, both of these passages are quite revealing because they show that, even at the time when Lenin was supposedly most absorbed by realpolitik, he was concerned with such things as ending the egoistic struggle for wealth, the abolition of wage slavery, and creating conditions under which coercive state power would become unnecessary. Far from representing a deviation from the spirit of his earlier work, State and Revolution was, in Barfield’s eyes, merely an explicit reiteration of tendencies already well established in his thought. For Barfield, Lenin’s “belief in the innate intelligence of the masses, his idealization of the common man, and his conviction of the inevitable dawning of a new historical era of universal harmony” were not idealist illusions that Lenin fell into in a moment of weakness or revolutionary fever; rather, they were “the basis of his entire revolutionary career and are the foundation upon which much of his writing rests”.^[27] Specifically acknowledging Barfield’s conclusion, Rolf Theen argues that to understand State and Revolution the work as aberrant

fails to recognize, inter alia, that underneath Lenin’s pragmatism as a revolutionary there was always a powerful utopian vision—a vision that sustained him even the darkest and most despairing days of his underground and exile existence. Though frequently submerged and perhaps eclipsed by his political pragmatism, the presence of a utopian element in Lenin’s political thought can be demonstrated in his writings as far back as 1894.^[28]

Thus, in Barfield’s and Theen’s assessment, State and Revolution ought not to be considered an aberration. On the contrary, it should be viewed as a work in which the utopian tendencies present throughout Lenin’s career were most clearly dedicated to print.

Lenin’s Appropriation of Marxism

To summarize: the ‘utopian’ reading of State and Revolution leads to two possible conclusions about the text. It can be viewed as either an aberration, or a systematic statement of ideas that Lenin held throughout his political career. Unfortunately, neither conclusion seems intellectually satisfying. By the first conclusion, advocated by Conquest, Daniels, Ulam, and Fischer, State and Revolution cannot be taken as a credible text. At best, it must be seen as little more than a trivial addition to Lenin’s body of writing which neither makes a contribution to his political thought nor tells us anything about how Lenin really understood the world. At worst, it must be viewed as a thoroughly cynical piece in which Lenin provided revolutionary desiderata which he had not the slightest intention to implement. By the second conclusion, advocated by Barfield and Theen, State and Revolution retains its credibility because of the continuity between it and earlier ‘utopian’ writings. Nevertheless, it remains impossible to reconcile State and Revolution with the clearly un-utopian What Is to Be Done?. Barfield’s attempt to demonstrate that Lenin’s early work contained a utopian element does not make What Is to Be Done? and State and Revolution any less antithetical. In short, neither of the ‘utopian’ readings of the text can reconcile State and Revolution with Lenin’s earlier programmatic works while preserving its theoretical importance.

Alfred B. Evans offers a plausible alternative reading of State and Revolution which avoids the inadequacy of the conclusions arising from the utopian reading. Unlike the scholarly literature which uses the text qua utopian text as its point of departure, Evans contends that this starting point is poorly chosen. In other words, while the previously cited commentators disagree on the relationship of State and Revolution to the rest of Lenin’s work, they all use as the starting point of their analysis the false assumption that the book is a utopian work. Evans suggests that, on the contrary, this book has tactical value and represents a continuation of Lenin’s strategic attempts to better situate the Bolshevik Party. In this fashion, it can be argued that State and Revolution is cut from the same cloth as What Is to Be Done?—in spite of the apparent differences.

In adopting the ‘tactical’ reading of the text, one must ask what Lenin could hope to gain by writing it. In Evans’ opinion, the answer is to be found in the pamphlet’s opening pages. In the very first paragraph of Chapter One, Lenin writes the following:

What is now happening to Marx’s doctrine has, in the course of history, often happened to the doctrines of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes relentlessly persecute them, and treat their teachings with malicious hostility, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarising it and blunting its revolutionary edge.^[29]

Having established the vulgarisation that Marx’s thought suffered at the pens of bourgeois professors and labour union opportunists alike, Lenin declares that “[i]n such circumstances, in view of the incredibly widespread nature of the distortions of Marxism, our first task is to restore the true doctrine of Marx on the state”.^[30] This passage is of particular interest to Evans because it shows that Lenin’s primary objective in State and Revolution was not simply to describe the characteristics of a future socialist society. The book has the additional, more immediate, aim of consolidating Lenin’s status as the leading Marxist theorist in Russia and in the international socialist movement. Lenin’s aim was not simply to posit a theory of the revolutionary state based on Marx’s ideas, but to reestablish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state and to appropriate to himself the authority of Marx. At a time of divisive struggle within the international socialist movement, and of ideological differences in Russia, “State and Revolution represented Lenin’s bid to claim the mantle of international leadership in the interpretation of the teachings of Marx and Engels”.^[31] In short, it can be reasonably argued that State and Revolution was not written simply as a dream of some distant socialist future. Rather, it was a text of significant tactical value written to further the aims of the Bolsheviks in the circumstances immediately surrounding the October Revolution.

Since no commentator is privy to what was on Lenin’s mind at the Zurich Library as he gathered the material for State and Revolution, it is impossible to make any claims about the pamphlet’s purpose with certainty. The controversy about it, summarised above, is not likely to be resolved from the existing evidence. However, one can suggest some plausible conclusions about it. Utopian elements notwithstanding, the ‘tactical’ reading of State and Revolution is quite convincing. Such a reading allows one to reconcile the text with programmatic works like What Is to Be Done?. Furthermore, the tactical reading does not force the reader to treat as trivial the work which Lenin evidently believed was of great importance. Most importantly, the tactical reading of the pamphlet encourages readers to refocus their attention on the agenda which Lenin himself sets out very clearly on the first page. Unlike the utopian interpretation, which is likely to view State and Revolution exclusively as a vision of a shiny socialist future or as an “attempt to establish a yardstick for socialist practice”,^[32] the tactical interpretation stresses Lenin’s self-declared aim to “restore the true doctrine of Marx on the state” and, in so doing, fortify his position as the leading exponent of Marxist theory. Granted, the ‘tactical’ reading of the pamphlet cannot be sustained to the exclusion of the ‘utopian’ reading, or vice versa, based on textual evidence alone. However, Lenin’s explicit agenda makes the former reading at least as plausible as the latter. Understood as an attempt to reclaim the torch of Marxism, State and Revolution is consistent with the tactical concerns of What Is to Be Done? and represents Lenin’s attempt to get the upper hand in the doctrinal struggles within the socialist movement.

This conclusion has implications for the analysis of Lenin’s theory of the state. To the extent that Lenin considered himself to the be the true heir of Marx, his theory of the state must be assessed according to how well it reflects Marx’s ideas about the state. As will now be shown, Lenin’s theory of state and revolution accords with Marx’s theory of the state in its belief that the state is merely an instrument of class domination. However, because Lenin upholds the state’s capacity to end class conflict, his theory represents a significant departure from that of Marx.

III. LENIN’S REVOLUTIONARY STATE: AN UNEASY COEXISTENCE

As Lenin’s attempt to establish himself as the leading interpreter of Marx, and as an attempt to present a coherent ‘Marxist’ theory of the state, State and Revolution is a troublesome work. Many of Marx’s most significant writings on the state were not published until after Lenin’s death; thus, the raw materials for Lenin’s attempt to reconstitute the Marxist theory of the state were surprisingly scant.^[33] Lenin had limited access to Marx’s theoretical conclusions arising from his early encounters with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Perhaps owing to this textual deficiency, Lenin was driven to use Engels’ interpretations of Marx’s theory of the state (including Anti-Dühring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) to fill in the blanks. It can be reasonably argued that, due to Lenin’s inability to study Marx’s most comprehensive critique of the state and his reliance on Engels’ reading of Marx, Lenin subsequently misunderstood Marx’s ideas about the transcendence of the state and underestimated the degree to which the state was a mirror of civil consciousness. Furthermore, as Neil Harding has suggested, Lenin’s uncritical acceptance of Engels’ idea that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ constituted completed communism forced Lenin to reconcile theoretically two social forms which were, in fact, irreconcilable.^[34]

The State: “Parasitic Excrescence” or Proletarian Instrument?

Lenin’s understanding of the relationship between the state and civil society follows the same contours as that of the early Marx. Quoting from Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Lenin denies the Hegelian notion that the state can stand above civil society or that it has the capacity to dissolve the schism between class interest and the ethical community:

‘The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from the outside; just as little is it ‘the reality of the moral idea’, ‘the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel asserts. 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 is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms, which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power apparently standing above society became necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict and keeping it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arising out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.’^[35]

Lenin’s conception of the state thus coincides with Marx’s conception. He believes that the state exists when, and to the extent that, class conflict cannot be resolved; in other words, the existence of the state proves that class conflict is irresolvable. This is the basis for Lenin’s dismissal of the idea of “bourgeois ideologists” that the state can be used as an instrument for the conciliation of classes. “According to Marx”, argues Lenin, “the state could neither arise nor continue to exist if it were possible to conciliate classes.” It is thus incoherent to think of the state in the Hegelian sense, as an instrument of universalization, because it is foremost “an instrument of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it creates ‘order’, which legalises and perpetuates the oppression by moderating the collisions between the classes”.^[36] Properly conceived, the state’s ‘order’ is not a reconciliation but a means of rendering the oppressed classes impotent. As advocates of the state’s role as a conciliator, the Menshevik faction of the Russian socialist movement betrayed itself as a mere collection of “petty-bourgeois democrats with near-Socialist phraseology”.^[37]

Like Marx, Lenin characterises the state as being composed of “special bodies of armed men” which constitute the public power and which are not identical to the armed population itself, i.e., the “self-acting armed organisation of the population”. In spite of the claims made about them—that they act in the general interest of the population—the standing army and the police are little more than the instruments of state power.^[38] According to Lenin, these bodies, which are said to exist for the purpose of social order, would be unnecessary if society were not cleft into antagonistic classes. Thus, a society might have a great deal of social complexity or technical competence, but even then the state cannot be considered a natural characteristic of it. The state does not arise from the administrative needs of a complex society, but from class conflict alone. Given that the state is not an instrument for the conciliation of classes, but, rather, a symptom of their irreconcilability, Lenin, like Marx, rejects the idea that universal suffrage within the modern state is capable of expressing a universal will. In fact, to act within democratic institutions is to do worse than resign oneself to imperfect representation; to act in this manner is to consent to the social cleavage from which the state arose. For this reason, the attempt to mend the cleavages of class society is, to Lenin, irrevocably linked with the imperative to reconsider the state apparatus as a whole. The demand for the elimination of the state’s deficiencies is a demand for its dissolution. Believing that the secret to the transcendence of the state was to be found in Marx’s account of the Paris Commune, Lenin posits the commune-society as the basis for a new social order which has liberated itself from class conflict, and its institutional analogue—the state. As stated by Engels, a society modelled upon the Paris Commune “‘that organises production anew on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong: in the museum of antiquities side by side with the spinning wheel and the bronze axe’”.^[39]

Because Lenin understood the state to be a reflection of class conflicts present in civil society, and believed it to be incapable of reforming class cleavages, his account of the state accords well with that of Marx. Recall that in the “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, Marx denied the universality of the state, preferring to describe it as a plenum of numerous egoistic interests which is nothing more than the antagonism of civil society institutionalized at the political level. In this manner, Lenin’s self-declared mission to “restore Marxism by purging it of its distortions”^[40] is not liable to question. However, as State and Revolution progresses, Lenin’s attitude towards the state undergoes a curious shift which is made even more remarkable by his apparent failure to recognize this. While upholding the claim that the state is necessarily a reflection of the antagonisms existing within civil society, further reading of State and Revolution reveals that Lenin also saw the state as an instrument of proletarian emancipation. The contradiction between these two conceptions of the state—as an apparatus contingent upon class antagonism and as a power standing outside civil society capable of resolving class antagonism—necessitates the critical reassessment of State and Revolution.

Unlike Marx, for whom the state’s abolition was premised upon the spontaneous, authentic, democratic^[41] self-government of individuals, Lenin believed that the state must be the instrument of its own abolition. Referring to a lengthy passage from Engels’ Anti-Dühring, Lenin insists that Marx’s theory of the state does not indicate a “hazy conception of slow, even gradual change, of absence of leaps and storms, of absence of revolution”. According to Lenin, the Marxist theory of the state does not repudiate revolution in exchange for some vague faith that the state will ‘wither away’ on its own. In fact, the Marxist theory is said to prescribe “the ‘abolition’ of the bourgeois state by the proletarian revolution”.^[42] The spontaneous withering away of the state would occur only once the bourgeois state had been forcefully smashed with a decisive proletarian revolution and state power had been consolidated in the hands of the proletariat. The mending of social divisions is, for Lenin, possible only with proletariat’s violent seizure of the state instruments with which the oppressing class—the bourgeoisie—can be crushed and class antagonism eliminated. With the loss of the state’s only purpose, the maintenance of oppressive class relations, the vestigial state will atrophy and vanish.

Lenin’s account of this ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is interesting because, while it describes a social form in which antagonism has been abolished and, as such, “is so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately”, ^[43] it nevertheless describes a state under the control of the proletariat. While the bourgeoisie “need political rule in order to maintain exploitation”, the dictatorship of the proletariat uses the state apparatus strictly “in order completely to abolish all exploitation” and to free the majority from bourgeois manipulation.^[44] Seemingly, the idea of a state in which class antagonism has been abolished runs counter to Lenin’s earlier assertion (cited in Engels and attributed to Marx) that the existence of the state is necessarily a reflection of class conflict. Nevertheless, Lenin apparently saw no contradiction in claiming that the collapse of the state as an instrument of class domination can only be achieved by the domination of the proletariat, by their consolidation of state power, and by their becoming a ruling class capable of crushing bourgeois resistance. Most importantly, he believed that his elevation of the state to the head of the socialist revolution reflected accurately the word of Marx: “The state, i.e., the proletariat organised as the ruling class, is inseparably bound up with all [Marx] taught on the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The culmination of the role is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the political rule of the proletariat”.^[45] In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the revolutionary exercise of state power by the working class, is the true basis of socialist practice and “is the touchstone on which the real understanding and acceptance of Marxism should be tested”.^[46]

Therefore, in spite of Lenin’s initial agreement with Marx that the state is a sullied and useless instrument for ameliorating the antagonisms in civil society of which the state is, in fact, a reflection, Lenin gives the state a leading role in revolutionary practice. This is tempered somewhat by Lenin’s claim that the proletarian consolidation of power constitutes a transformation “from the state (i.e., a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is no longer really a state”.^[47] Nevertheless, the capture of the state’s coercive force by the proletariat to use for their own ends is essential to Lenin’s conception of the socialist revolution and this state-heavy approach is attributed to Marx. Furthermore, Lenin’s unwillingness to wait for the spontaneous amelioration of class conflict, and a subsequent withering of the state, reveals his belief in the ability of the state to alter fundamentally civil consciousness—in spite of his initial claims to the contrary. Though appealing to the principles of spontaneous self-organization in civil society, and the contingency of the state, Lenin is, at all points, strangely silent about civil society. He takes a bureaucratic approach to revolution and affirms the leading role of the state. This is revealed most clearly when he says that the Bolsheviks “do not indulge in ‘dreams’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination”. To think otherwise is to exhibit “a lack of understanding of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship” and a conception of socialism “totally alien to Marxism” which will “serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed”. To this Lenin declares that the Bolsheviks aim to secure socialism “with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and ‘managers’”.^[48]

The Problem of the State’s Leading Role

Lenin’s account of the state in State and Revolution, and of the role of the state in a socialist revolution, brings up a number of difficulties with the text which must be addressed in further detail. Because, as already noted, Lenin did not have Marx’s most comprehensive statements on the nature of the state at his disposal, the theory of the state offered in State and Revolution is necessarily influenced by Engels. In fact, much of Lenin’s attempt to lay out systematically “Marx’s” ideas on the matter is derived from Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and Anti-Dühring. While this use of Engels is perhaps justifiable in Lenin’s case, the extent to which Lenin relies on Engels to reconstruct Marx’s theory of the state, and of socialist revolution, ultimately leads him astray.

In searching for a practical model for socialist society, Lenin chose the municipal council style of the Paris Commune which Marx had discussed at length in his Civil War in France.^[49] Though Marx viewed the Commune simply as the response of the Paris proletariat to a particular political crisis, and, arguably, not as a model for all future socialist societies, Lenin’s choice was quite reasonable because, as Polan notes, the commune was the only administrative form “to which Marx did declare allegiance”.^[50] Engels makes this clear in his letter to August Bebel of 18-28 March 1875 in which he writes, on Marx’s behalf, that

All the palaver about the state ought to be dropped especially after the Commune, which had ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term. ... [T]he state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force ... and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen be universally substituted for state, it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French ‘Commune’.^[51]

Furthermore, the commune had the advantage of allowing Lenin to incorporate a similar and already existing Russian institution—the soviet—into a Marxist theory of the state.^[52] Thus, Lenin does not appear to do great violence to Marx’s theory by sharing Engels’ enthusiasm about the commune, and by embracing it as the political form appropriate to socialist society. Nevertheless, Lenin’s continued uncritical acceptance of Engels’ reading of Marx leads him to conclusions that Marx himself never made. Of particular importance was Engels’ statement in the 1891 Introduction to Marx’s Civil War in France that the Paris Commune and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat were one and the same.^[53] By taking this claim seriously, Lenin was forced to reconcile theoretically two conflicting models of social organization which were, in fact, irreconcilable.^[54] This, in turn, had serious effects upon the coherence of State and Revolution.

According to Marx, the Paris Commune of 1871 had ceased to be a state. In The Civil War in France Marx defined the state as a coercive mechanism characterised by separate bodies of armed men—soldiers and police—which enforce the superiority of one class over another. As Harding points out, since the communal council in Paris disbanded the army and reintegrated their functions into the armed people, the state had in fact vanished.^[55] Even Marx spoke of the commune as something which was “no longer a check on the, now superseded, State power”.^[56] In short then, the Commune was a social form which had overcome the “parasitic excrescence” of the state.^[57] The state, as an institutional reflection of class conflict, was transcended by the Commune.

On the other hand Marx understood the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ strictly as a transitional form. In his letter to Joseph Weydemeyer of 5 March 1852, Marx wrote that “the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat” but that “this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society”.^[58] In addition to being transitional, the dictatorship of the proletariat was, for Marx, indubitably a state form. In The Critique of the Gotha Program he writes that “[b]etween capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one to 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”.^[59] In contrast to the Commune which represented the de facto abolition of the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat was a state form in which the working class used the state’s instruments to orchestrate the transition to statelessness.

Herein lies the difference between the commune and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the profound oddness of Engels’ attempt to identify the two. While the dictatorship of the proletariat was a transitional state form replacing the moribund bourgeois state, there was nothing at all transitional about the Paris Commune as it was described by Marx.^[60] Through the reintegration of the state’s coercive force into the people of Paris, the Paris Commune superseded the state. It was not a preparation for something more perfected, the ‘withering away’ of the state; it was the actual reabsorption of state functions into the general population. In this way, the Commune corresponded to Marx’s conception of ‘democracy’ as explained in his “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”. It is evident, then, that Lenin, in accepting Engels’ identification of the commune and the dictatorship of the proletariat, commits himself to reconciling two fundamentally irreconcilable social forms. This had lasting implications for his theory of the state. As Harding puts it,

[Lenin’s] attempted resolution followed the lines implicit in Engels’ identification, that is he characterised the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the moment at least, in terms of the commune. There was, however, always lurking in the immediate background, an alternative model which stressed centralisation against initiative from below, emphasised the need for a transitional period as against an immediate reappropriation by society of the powers arrogated by the state, and separate bodies of armed men under the guidance of the Party as against the self-activity of the people in arms.^[61]

In spite of his attempt to use the commune as the basis for a Marxist theory of revolution, the uneasy coexistence of social forms which characterises State and Revolution legitimized in Lenin’s thought a belief in the leading role of the state. As already noted, the idea that the state has a leading role in orchestrating social change is questioned by Marx’s account of the Paris Commune and refuted outright by Marx’s “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”. Lenin’s attempt to shoehorn the idea of the leading role of the state into a Marxist theory of revolution is responsible for the frequent contradictions of State and Revolution.

As already noted, there is no doubt that Lenin understood the relationship between the state and civil society in the same manner that Marx did. Furthermore, he accepted the spontaneous, stateless commune as the best model for socialist society. However, because of the false identity that Engels bequeathed—of commune society and the dictatorship of the proletariat—there is dreadful theoretical tension within State and Revolution. Because of his commitment to Engels’ reading of Marx, Lenin is forced to sustain two incompatible views about the state. The state is presented both as a mere reflection of the egoistic interests of civil society and as an agent capable of determining social consciousness.

The text provides substantial evidence to this effect. Throughout State and Revolution Lenin tries to resolve the antinomy between the commune and the dictatorship of the proletariat by arguing that the dictatorship is necessary to smash the power of the bourgeois state and to replace it with a proletarian state which, by its very nature, will “wither away”. Illustrative of this attempt is Lenin’s claim that Marxists “recognise that after the proletariat has conquered political power it must utterly destroy the old state machine and substitute for it a new one consisting of the organisation of the armed workers, after the type of the Commune”.^[62] With this, he attempts to reconcile the state-directed approach of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the spontaneity of the commune. Unfortunately, this kind of argument often simply calls attention to how incompatible these two forms really are. For example, after a lengthy quotation from Engels’ Anti-Dühring, Lenin attributes to Engels the belief that the bourgeois state must be abolished “by the proletarian revolution” and that “the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution” will wither away”.^[63] This statement suggests that the proletariat will use their revolution to consolidate state power, and, further, that the coercive instruments of the state will be wielded to end all class differences within civil society. Since the existence of the state is premised upon class division, the seizure of state power by the proletariat puts an end to the state as a state. In finally coming to represent all of society and wielding its instruments in the interest of society as a whole, the state is said to commit its last act. The government of people by a privileged few is transformed into a simple administration of the process of production by all. This argument by Lenin is, however, puzzling. On the one hand, Lenin makes it clear that the proletariat must forcibly smash the bourgeois state and place their own apparatus in its place. On the other hand, the proletarian state is said to fade away of its own accord. This is problematic by Lenin’s own reasoning. Like Marx, Lenin believes that the state is an expression of class cleavages, that it exists only to mediate these cleavages, and that an amelioration of class cleavage, accordingly, makes the state irrelevant. The fact that, to Lenin’s mind, the proletariat must retain the state as a coercive instrument implies one of two things: 1) that the proletarian revolution does not necessarily dissolve class difference or represent the whole of society, i.e., the proletariat simply preside over a new kind of class antagonism; or, 2) that the state is not an expression of class antagonism, i.e., the state can continue to exist in spite of the fact that class conflict has been effectively abolished. In the first case, the proletarian revolution represents nothing more than a coup d’état, a substitution of one oppressive state apparatus for another. In this case there is no reason to suppose that the state must ever disappear even if it is recognized that this would be desirable. If states, by Lenin’s own admission, exist only to mediate class conflict, then why is the proletarian state any more likely to wither away than a bourgeois one?^[64] In the second case, it is claimed that the character of the state is not contingent upon civil consciousness and that it does not necessarily follow that where there are no classes there can be no state. This, of course, contradicts everything Marx said about the dependent character of the state in his critique of Hegel.

Further along Lenin repeats himself saying that “[r]evolution alone can ‘put an end’ to the bourgeois state” and that the proletarian state “can only ‘wither away’”.^[65] The implication here is that once power has been consolidated in the hands of the workers, state power is used to eliminate class conflict. However, in the context of Marx’s views on the relationship between the state and civil society, the idea of the proletarian state having a leading role in the creation of socialist society is incoherent. What Lenin is advocating is a revolution ‘from above’, an autonomous initiative on the part of the state. This seemingly contradicts Marx’s notion that the state is a mere reflection of civil society. For Lenin to say that a socialist revolution can be orchestrated by the state apparatus is to deny the contingency which Marx insists characterizes the state. To argue that the state, as an expression of civil conflict, can act against its own base in order to end class conflict is nothing less than an affirmation of the state’s irrational will to suicide. For Marx, the end of class conflict cannot be achieved though top-down measures. The revolution is not, to Marx’s mind, an initiative of the state but a negation of the state through a reabsorption of its functions into civil society.

Lenin is, nevertheless, insistent. While he argues that “according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away”, he maintains that “the toilers need a ‘state’, i.e., ‘the proletariat organised as the ruling class’”^[66] and that “[t]he exploited classes need political rule in order completely to abolish all exploitation”.^[67] Yet, if the proletarian state, like all others, is based upon class conflict (in this case, between the deposed bourgeoisie and the ruling proletariat) it is not at all clear what the basis of its withering away is. Lenin suggests that by using the force of the state to liquidate the bourgeoisie and, thus, abolish class conflict, the proletariat have the capacity to abolish the state. But this line of reasoning runs counter to Marx’s thinking on two counts. Not only does it deny that the state is an institution which emerges from civil consciousness, but it affirms the idea that the state can be universal and monological—not merely a plenum of particular interests.^[68]

In sum then, Lenin has a subtle grasp of Marx’s conception of the state in the sense that he understands it to be an institutional expression of conflict within civil society and a moderator of that conflict. Lenin’s keen awareness of the state’s contingency upon class conflict is reflected in his observation that “Marxism always taught that the state will be abolished with the abolition of classes”.^[69] It is this apparent enthusiasm for Marx’s ideas which makes his approach to political practice all the more bewildering. Having argued that the form of the state is a reflection of society’s development at a given stage in history, Lenin is still intent on reversing the relationship between the state and civil society, and on using the coercive force of the state, in the name of proletarian interests, in order to determine the development of civil society. Unlike Marx, who held that “[t]he mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life” and that “[i]t is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness”,^[70] Lenin’s theory of revolution assigns leading roles in history to human consciousness and political institutions. Lenin’s idealism is especially ironic in light of his respect for Marx as a realist. In Lenin’s opinion,

[t]here is no trace of an attempt on Marx’s part to conjure up a utopia, to make idle guesses about what cannot be known. Marx treats the question of communism in the same way as a naturalist would treat the question of development of, say, a new biological species, if he knew that such and such was its origin, and such and such the direction in which it was changing.^[71]

Yet, in attempting to systematize the Marxist theory of the state and of revolution, Lenin abandoned detached contemplation and took the active path of planning a socialist revolution. While it would be fruitless to deny that on occasion Marx appears to recognize the necessity of violent, willful revolution in his writing, Marx’s account of history, the motion of capital, and social evolution was that of a fundamentally contemplative man—a scientist and a philosopher. His concern was not to set up sectarian principles “by which to shape and mould that proletarian movement”,^[72] but to discern with clarity the revolutionary social conditions to which capitalism had given birth. Furthermore, Marx expressed hope that the proletariat could achieve their objectives by peaceful means.^[73] While there is nothing inherently wrong with a doctrine of state-orchestrated revolution for the purpose of changing society, Lenin is incorrect to suppose that this doctrine can eliminate class conflict or that it can be accommodated within a Marxist theory of the state. Because Lenin prefers action to contemplation,^[74] he forsakes the analytic integrity of Marx’s theory and his Marxism shows itself to be of “a peculiarly voluntarist sort”.^[75] Lenin cannot be faulted for believing that Marx arrived at an accurate understanding of the state and its relationship to civil society. Yet, no knowledge of Marx’s theory of the state provides any more of a tool for the proletarian creation of communism than an understanding of Darwin’s writing could empower a particularly quixotic chimpanzee to overthrow the laws of natural selection, and become human.

IV. “A PIECE OF ‘HEGELIAN WEAKNESS’”?

As a statement of Lenin’s inclinations, State and Revolution is very revealing. It might be argued that this book is an anomaly amongst the others. Closer examination suggests though that the book is an affirmation of Lenin’s longstanding commitment to revolutionary tactics. Furthermore, in spite of his exaltation of proletarian spontaneity rather than the machinations of the Party, Lenin’s basic commitment to the state as the leading force in a proletarian revolution reconciles State and Revolution with other works such as What is to Be Done? However, his insistence in State and Revolution that the state must assume a leading role in the abolition of class conflict and the reconciliation of egoistic man with his ethical community raises the question of how well it can be accommodated within the Marxist theory of the state. Unlike Hegel, who believed that the state was the universal light of reason in the world, Marx understood the state to be at all times a reflection of civil society. As part of the superstructure of material life, the state was a mindless executor of the needs of capital and had no capacity to change material conditions. To Marx, the state was as incapable of altering its material basis as the human mind is of reconstituting the physical brain of which it is an epiphenomenon. As an expression of antagonism within civil society, the state would exist for as long as egoistic self-interest reigned in the civil sphere and individuals remained incapable of reabsorbing the coercive functions of the state into themselves. Lenin, for all practical purposes, dispensed with Marx’s conception of the state as a symptom of conflict in civil society and reconstituted the state as self-supporting and capable of the revolutionary transformation of civil consciousness. The result was to be nothing less than the abolition of civil conflict, and the creation of a transparent and monological society in which the state would become irrelevant.

If the consistency of Lenin’s State and Revolution with his other works, in spite of its ‘utopian’ appearance, makes it remarkable, then the role it assigns to the state in the life of civil consciousness is outright provocative. Lenin’s apparent hostility to the state was tempered by his enthusiasm for a state-heavy doctrine of proletarian rule. Prior to withering away, the state was to assume a universal form and facilitate the universalization of civil society. In this way, a state-centred approach to rule would inaugurate statelessness—a Hegelian paradox. By arguing that the state can stand apart from the puerile demands of civil society, and that it can express the universal interests of human beings, Lenin not only rejects Marx, but affirms the conception of the state which Marx rejected in Hegel. This is not to say that State and Revolution should be branded summarily as a ‘Hegelian’ text. However, to read State and Revolution from the Hegelian standpoint brings its subterranean values of state universality, and the universalizing capacity of the state, to the surface. Most importantly, it provides a good basis for assessing Lenin’s claim to the torch of Marxism. If one pushes to the point of philosophical clarity the theory of the state which is implicit in Lenin’s political program, Lenin’s claim to “restore the true doctrine of Marx on the state” is tenuous at best. Though Lenin insisted that it was Marx’s thought which animated the Bolshevik movement, it was, arguably, the spectre of Hegel which hovered over it.

^[1]V.I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” in Selected Works: Volume II, The Struggle for the Bolshevik Party (1900-1904) (J. Fineberg, ed.; London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., 1936), 47.

^[2]Gottfried Leibniz, “Monadology” in Classics ofWestern Philosophy (Steven M. Cahn, ed.; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977), §56.

^[3]This is not to belittle the objections often put against Hegel that his Philosophy of Right was a radically conservative, philosophical justification for the Prussian state. However, as I suggested in Chapter I, the idea that Hegel was a conservative and that he deified the Prussian state does not accord well with the claims of Hegel’s philosophy or with historical fact. Avineri offers a very credible objection to the reading of Hegel as a “Prussianist”:

To represent [the Philosophy of Right] as Hegel’s apotheosis of Prussia is nonsense, for philosophical and biographical reasons alike. No state, as Hegel would point out, could ever be adequate to the philosophical idea of the state as expounded in this work. Furthermore, Hegel prepared the Philosophy of Right while he was lecturing on the subject at Heidelberg, in Baden, before he moved to Berlin and ever became associated with Prussia. Lastly, the book contains provisions—like the election of representative assemblies—which were absent in Prussia and which cannot by an stretch of the imagination, be seen as a reflection of Prussian reality.

See Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974 [1972]), 116.

^[4]One of the difficulties of working with primary sources which have appeared in multiple editions and translations is that works which were originally published as individual volumes also appear as parts of collections. Throughout this chapter I have mostly adhered to the usual convention of indicating the titles of books in italics, and the titles of articles, or parts of books, in quotation marks. I have, however, made exceptions to this when the work to which I am referring appears as part of collection, yet is best known as a separate volume. In these cases, the title of the work is italicized in the text and printed in quotation marks in the corresponding footnote.

^[5]Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?”, 53.

^[6]Ibid>., 61.

^[7]Ibid., 61¦.

^[8]Ibid., 62.

^[9]Ibid., 62¦.

^[10]Ibid., 63.

^[11]Ibid., 64, n.1.

^[12]Ibid., 71.

^[13]Ibid., 73.

^[14]Ibid., 114.

^[15]Ibid., 151.

^[16]Ibid., 123.

^[17]To my knowledge Marx uses this phrase, to which Lenin gives a curious amount of weight, only twice: once in his letter of 5 March 1852 to Joseph Weydemeyer, in which Marx argued that “the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat” and that “this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society”, and once again in Critique of the Gotha Program in which he argued that the revolutionary period of transition from capitalist to communist society was the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. See Karl Marx-Frederick Engels: Collected Works (Volume 39; New York: International Publishers, 1983), 62 and Critique of the Gotha Program (New York: International Publishers, 1977 [1938]), 18. See also Engels’ 1891 Introduction to Marx’s Civil War in France in which Engels refers to the Paris Commune as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

^[18]Robert Conquest, V.I. Lenin (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 84.

^[19]Robert V. Daniels, “The State and Revolution: A Case Study in the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology” in The American Slavic and East European Review (Vol. XII; 1953), 22.

^[20]Ibid., 23.

^[21]According to Ulam, when Lenin fled St. Petersburg on 11 July 1917 to avoid arrest, he left instructions for S. S. Kamenev that, should he be killed, the manuscript should be brought from Stockholm (where it was in safe keeping) and published. See Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 352¦.

^[22]Ibid., 353.

^[23]Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1964), 122.

^[24]See Rodney Barfield, “Lenin’s Utopianism: State and Revolution” in Slavic Review (Vol. 30., No. 1., March 1971), 56.

^[25]V.I. Lenin, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are” in Selected Works: Volume I, The Prerequisites of the First Russian Revolution (1894-1899) (J. Fineberg, ed.; London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., n.d.), 454¦.

^[26]V.I. Lenin, “To the Rural Poor” in Selected Works: Volume II, The Struggle for the Bolshevik Party (1900-1904) (J. Fineberg, ed.; London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., 1936), 293.

^[27]Barfield, op. cit., 55.

^[28]Rolf H. W. Theen. Lenin: Genesis and Development of a Revolutionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 [1973]), 117.

^[29]V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution: The Marxist Doctrine of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution” in Selected Works: Volume XII, After the Seizure of Power (J. Fineberg, ed.; London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., 1937), 7.

^[30]Loc. cit.

^[31]Alfred B. Evans, “Rereading Lenin’s State and Revolution” in Slavic Review (Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring 1987), 5.

^[32]Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1981), 84.

^[33]For example, the “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State” was not published until 1927, the two volumes of Grundrisse were published in 1939 and 1941 respectively, and the German Ideology was not completely published until 1932. See Bibliography to A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Bottomore et al., eds.; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983).

^[34]Harding, op. cit., 91¦.

^[36]Lenin, “State and Revolution”, 9.

^[37]Loc. cit.

^[38]Ibid., 10.

^[39]Engels as quoted in Lenin, “State and Revolution”, 16. See also Engels, op. cit., 198.

^[40]Lenin, “State and Revolution”, 61.

^[41]Recall from the previous chapter that, though Marx’s use of the word ‘democracy’ apparently indicates his support for bourgeois representative government, his conception of democracy was classical rather than liberal-bourgeois.

^[42]Ibid., 16¦.

^[43]Ibid., 24.

^[44]Ibid., 25.

^[45]Ibid., 26.

^[46]Ibid., 33.

^[47]Ibid., 41. My italics.

^[48]Ibid., 47.

^[49]The Paris Commune of 1871 originated in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. After the victory of the French National Guard over the government forces on 18 March 1871, the National Guard found itself in control of the capital and, subsequently, passed on the leadership to what it considered to be the legitimate local government: the Commune. Elections were held on 26 March, and the Commune lasted for about two months until soldiers loyal to the Versailles government moved in on 21 May and defeated the Communards on 28 May. As a form of municipal council, the Commune was not intrinsically ‘revolutionary’; it was, in fact, a reversion to an ancient form of organization. As Draper points out, “In France commune did not, and does not, necessarily have the meaning of a revolutionary form of government or society. On the contrary, its base meaning is simply ‘free town’, a more-or-less autonomously self-governing municipality not controlled out of hand by a top-down super-centralized national government such as has been the French tradition since the absolute monarchies”. See Foreword to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Writings on the Paris Commune (Hal Draper, ed.; New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 9.

^[50]A.J. Polan, Lenin and the End of Politics (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 6.

^[51]Friedrich Engels, “Engels to August Bebel, 18-28 March 1875” in Marx-Engels: Collected Works (Vol. 45; New York: International Publishers, 1991 [1975]), 63.

^[52]Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldier Councils, 1905-1921. (Ruth Hein, trans.; New York: Pantheon Books, 1974 [1972]), 11.

^[53]See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 17¦. Engels’ exact words were, “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”.

^[54]Neil Harding believes that Engels’ rhetorical outburst “posed to all subsequent Marxists the insuperable problem of reconciling, indeed identifying, the commune with the dictatorship of the proletariat” and that the theoretical tension within Lenin’s attempt at a Marxist theory of the state “arose from his inclination to take Engels seriously and therefore from his endeavour to square the circle which Engels had sketched”. See Harding, op. cit., 91.

^[55]Ibid., 89.

^[56]Marx, Civil War in France, 71.

^[57]Ibid., 69.

^[58]Karl Marx, “Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852" in Karl Marx-Frederick Engels: Collected Works (Volume 39; New York: International Publishers, 1983), 62.

^[59]Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (New York: International Publishers, 1977 [1938]), 18.

^[60]Harding, op. cit., 90. Interestingly, Hannah Arendt, who reads Marx as an advocate of centralism and the Party monopoly on power, and who also conflates the commune and the dictatorship of the proletariat like Engels and Lenin, reaches a different conclusion to Harding. Arguing that Marx eventually became aware that the Commune “contradicted all notions of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’”, Arendt says that Marx “concluded that the communal councils were, after all, only temporary organs of the revolution”. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 261.

^[61]Harding, op. cit., 91¦.

^[62]Lenin, “State and Revolution”, 105.

^[63]Ibid., 16¦.

^[64]Rosa Luxemburg was particularly critical of the Leninist notion that the coercive instruments of the state could be wielded by the Party in the name of the proletariat. In “Leninism or Marxism” [See The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Bertram D. Wolfe, intro.; Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1961).] Luxemburg criticizes the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as an instance of the mere substitution of one oppressive state form for another, unlikely to ‘wither away’ of its own accord. “What is there in common”, she asks, “between the regulated docility of an oppressed class and the self-discipline and organization of a class struggling for its emancipation?” [90] The working class is unable to acquire a new sense of discipline from a state form premised upon Party rule, and must destroy its old habits of obedience and servility. For Luxemburg, “[i]t is a mistake to believe that it is possible to substitute ‘provisionally’ the absolute power of the Central Committee (acting somehow by ‘tacit delegation’) for the yet unrealizable rule of the majority of conscious workers” [91]. It is the principle of proletarian rule on the part of the Party which makes it all the more likely that the proletarian movement will be handed over to bureaucrats and turned into “an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee” [102].

^[65]Lenin, “State and Revolution”, 18¦.

^[66]Ibid., 24.

^[67]Ibid., 25.

^[68]Another, perhaps secondary, problem with Lenin’s discussion of the state is his use of words. In several passages, of which the first quotation in this paragraph is an example, Lenin uses ‘state’ (in single quotation marks) to denote a state “which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”. ‘State’ becomes Lenin’s way of referring to the dictatorship of the proletariat while suggesting that it, like the commune, is not really a state at all. Lenin’s use of ‘state’ implies to the reader that language is too imprecise for his purposes and that, in conjunction with the commune, state is not what he really means. However, this peculiar usage also serves to obscure Lenin’s meaning in conjunction with the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this case, when he says ‘state’ he means state in the conventional sense of the word, although the use of single quotation marks suggests that he means something else. The word state has become so emptied of semantic content in State and Revolution that it can be used to describe a social form—like the commune—in which the state is withering away just as easily as it can be used to describe the dictatorship of the proletariat in which the state is strong and in the hands of the proletariat. Yet the word means two quite different things on the two occasions: in the first case it describes a society which has become monological and transparent, and in the second case it describes a society in which there is still class division and coercive force. Lenin’s use of the word in these two different ways is not indicative of the failure of language to convey Lenin’s thoughts, but of the tension underlying those thoughts.

^[69]Ibid., 56.

^[70]Karl Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (N.I. Stone, trans.; Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, International Library Publishing Co., 1904), 11¦.

^[71]Lenin, “State and Revolution”, 77.

^[72]Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1988 [1948]), 22.

^[73]See “The Possibility of Non-Violent Revolution” in Marx-Engels Reader (Robert C. Tucker, ed.; New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978 [1972]), 522-524.

^[74]On the interruption of his work on State and Revolution by the October Revolution, Lenin wrote “It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it”. See Postscript to “State and Revolution”, 112.

^[75]Harding, op. cit., 3.