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The “dictatorship of the proletariat” would soon become the “dictatorship over the proletariat.”, This is because the State is an “organisation of hierarchical centralization” and is “necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian – or it ceases to be the State.” It is “the absorption of the whole national life, concentrated into a pyramid of functionaries.” [24] This structure did not appear by accident. It is within the context of secure one-party rule that we must view the fate of the opposition parties. Lenin’s other writings during 1917 make it clear – it is the vanguard, the party, which assumes power. If you enjoyed this article we also recommend the following similarly themed pieces. The State and Revolution made clear that Lenin – unlike anarchists – expected the Revolution to be an easy affair, with minimal resistance. This is the grim reality of Engels comment that a “revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. Yet he fails to mention key aspects of this event and like Marx and Engels provides a superficial analysis of it. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul” and so “our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state.” Lenin does, as he promised, provide “a number of long quotations from the works of Marx and Engels themselves” (313) yet has to provide commentary in order to ensure that the reader interprets them correctly. One of the most formative of the books I read after leaving University in my early twenties was Lenin’s State and Revolution.. What, then, could be expected of these cadres when they became an all-powerful state bureaucracy?” [68]. In State and Revolution (1917), Lenin asserted that socialism corresponds to Marx’s first phase of communist society and communism proper to the second. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of 116 pages and is available in Paperback format. So by July 1918, the regime was a de facto Bolshevik dictatorship. The anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat should use the state power, they reject its revolutionary dictatorship. This was aided by the activities of its Bolshevik dominated presidium which circumvented general meetings, postponed regular sessions and presented it with policies which had already been implemented by the Sovnarkom. State and Revolution (subtitle: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution), a work in which V. I. Lenin developed the Marxist theory of the state (Poln. Instead the capitalists would remain and control “must be exercised not by a state of bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers.” [48] (380). The obvious conclusion is that to disagree with the party and its leadership was to show the absence of socialist consciousness. In March 1918, Trotsky replaced the militia with a regular army by eliminating the soldier’s committees and elected officers: “the principle of election is politically purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice, abolished by decree.” [79], This shifting of power territorially to the center and functionally to executives, the rise of a “new” bureaucracy and specialized armed forces – while all expected by anarchists – did not automatically mean dictatorship as other parties could, in theory, win elections to soviets, become the majority and replace the executives. Lenin and the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party reinforced this distinction in 1918, the year after they seized power in…. the state as an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class the "withering away" of the state and violent revolution. Lenin in 1917 during the Russian Revolution on ”the most urgent problem of the day … the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do … One of Lenin’s most important works. This was not only the opposite of the example given by the Paris Commune but also made clear the party’s pre-eminence over the soviets. – and make them private property.” (377). This is because Marx and Engels did not argue quite as Lenin suggested they did. The brochure, though never completed and often dismissed as Lenin’s most “Utopian” work, nevertheless served as Lenin’s doctrinal springboard to power. Man will be forced to find new forms of organisation for the social functions that the State apportioned between its functionaries.” [37]. Anarchist warnings were proven right and only anarchism offers a solution: in the form of a federalist, self-managed, bottom-up social organisation. There is no middle course […] Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. Instead of arguing – in-line with Marxist orthodoxy – that Russia faced a bourgeois revolution and so required the creation of a republic and capitalism, he argued that the revolution be intensified and pushed towards social transformation by means of the creation of a new State based on the soviets. […] revolution demands – precisely in the interests of its development and consolidation, precisely in the interests of socialism – that the people unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of labor.” [87], This was part of “our task” which was “to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not to shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it” and prefigured in The State and Revolution (as Lenin himself latter stressed against opponents within the Party). Numbering less than 350,000 in October 1917, the party had little option but to allow such independent organisations extensive leeway. The fundamental difference between the Opportunists and Kautskyites was that the former simply wished the party to revise the rhetoric used to bring it in line with the party’s (reformist) practice while the latter insisted that the rhetoric remain revolutionary. [107] Such local initiative came into conflict with orders from above but repeated demands for change were ignored for they “challenged” the “central directives of the party” which “approved the principles on which the glavki system was based” and “the maximum centralization of production.” So “the failure of glavkism did not bring about a reconsideration of the problems of economic organisation […] On the contrary, the ideology of centralization was reinforced.” [108]. This is precisely what the Mensheviks decided to do and they achieved significant success by the spring of 1918 as the working class was “becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Bolshevik regime, so much so that in many places the Bolsheviks felt constrained to dissolve Soviets or prevent re-elections where Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had gained majorities.” [80], As well as delaying elections and disbanding by force soviets elected with non-Bolshevik majorities, the Bolsheviks also took to packing soviets with representatives of organisations they controlled. In December 1917, the VTsIK decreed the creation of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (Vesenka). If the Paris Commune had been “overwhelmed” by the demands placed on it, the new institutions covering a far greater territorial and functional areas experienced for worse. Author(s): Theda Skocpol. [18]. While for Lenin Marx had “tried to draw practical lessons” from and so “‘learned’ from the Commune,” (344) in fact anarchists provided a deeper analysis of the revolt. In his “State and Revolution” Lenin pretty much comments on Engels’s ideas concerning the state and how some of those ideas were misinterpreted by different political factions of the Marxist movement. [98] Such perspectives were helped by Engels’ “On Authority” and the reference to “industrial armies” in the Communist Manifesto. We will compare the rhetoric of Lenin’s work to the reality of the regime that was created, the theory to the practice. Which means that in their eyes, the people, in electing representatives, does not appoint mandatories but rather abjure their sovereignty!… That is assuredly not socialism: it is not even democracy.” [6], Lenin – like Marx – forgets to mention that the Communards called themselves Fédérés (“Federals”). The center was unable to determine the correct proportions among necessary materials and eventually to enforce implementation of the orders for their total quantity. Lenin’s The State and Revolution [1] is taken as the focus for written during 1917 it expresses the aspirations of Bolshevism in their best light – as shown by the fact that even today Leninists recommend we read it in order to see why we should join their party. Centralism, in contrast, co-ordinates everything at the center (and so cannot be anything other than top-down). So rather than being unclear on what socialism was, the Bolsheviks had very strong opinions on the subject and sought to implement them. As he noted in March 1918, “victory was achieved” with “extraordinary ease” and the “revolution was a continuous triumphal march in the … The state evolved as a tool to manage conflict between classes. Ideas matter – particularly the ideas of those at the highest levels of the State. These developments did not come out of the blue. Yet by 1921 anarchists had broken with the regime with the crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion for soviet freedom. Hence the need for central control beyond the prejudices that it is more efficient and effective than federalism. They reflected the clash of Bolshevik ideology and prejudices with reality, a clash in which the former made the latter worse. If, “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.” (326) then Lenin’s regime failed to provide it. [5]. [117] The Russian anarchists – unlike their Ukrainian comrades – did not organize sufficiently and paid the price. Third, those paying attention would have concluded that the fate of Social Democracy and its degeneration into “Opportunism” would have shown why anarchists reject taking part in the State by contesting elections. Taking Lenin’s The State and Revolution as a focus, this text compares the rhetoric of Lenin to the reality of the regime that was created – comparing the theory to the practice. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology […] Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.” [57]. As anarchists predicted, function and organ are inseparable and the centralized State produced around it a new minority class. This Unknown Revolution saw the recreation of the soviets first seen during the revolution of 1905 based on delegates elected from workplaces subject to recall, workers creating unions and factory committees and peasants seizing land back from the landlords while unprecedented political freedoms were taken for granted after the tyranny of Tsarism. The State and Revolution describes the role of the State in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. All of which makes a mockery of Lenin’s assertion that “Anarchism has given nothing even approximating true answers to the concrete political questions: Must the old state machine be smashed? It addresses itself to questions of the utmost importance for socialist theory and practice, none of which have lost any of their relevance — rather the reverse. As the latter acted as the executive of the soviet executive, Lenin’s promises in The State and Revolution did not last the night. We concentrate on the Bolshevik’s relations with the urban working class as this was their favored class and the class the new State was meant to ensure was the ruling class. The practical conclusions which Marx and Engels drew from it was – as before it – that workers should organize in political parties and take part in “political action” to capture the State on the national level in the same way as the Communards had locally. While the situation was pretty chaotic in early 1918, this does not prove that the factory committees’ socialism was not the most efficient way of running things under the circumstances. The continued mass working class protests from the spring of 1918 onward (that is, during and after the civil war) indicate that there was a social base upon which an alternative could be based. To describe Lenin’s understanding of Anarchism as superficial would be generous. How self-government is to be organised and how we can manage, without a bureaucracy has been shown to us by America and the first French Republic, and is being shown even today by Australia, Canada and the other English colonies.” (362), There is no mention of the Paris Commune at all in Engels’ critique of the draft of the Erfurt Programme which is significant given Lenin proclaims that it “cannot be ignored; for it is with the opportunist views of the Social-Democrats on questions of state organisation that this criticism is mainly concerned.” (358). Thus the VTsIK, in theory the highest organ of soviet power, was turned into little more than a rubber stamp for a Bolshevik executive. Thus the Commissariat of Finance was “not only bureaucratically cumbersome, but [it] involved mountainous accounting problems” and “the various offices of the Sovnarkhoz and commissariat structure [were] literally swamped with ‘urgent’ delegations and submerged in paperwork.” [102] The Vesenka “was deluged with work of an ad hoc character”, demands “for fuel and supplies piled up” and factories “demanded instructions”. This can be seen quotes by Marx and Engels which Lenin himself provides and to which he feels the need to add commentary to what should be self-evident comments. In order to achieve a classless society, the lower class will seize control of the state and use it to redistribute wealth and change the mode of production. Lenin’s vision of socialism was impoverished but very much in the orthodox Marxist tradition. It “is the right of the citizens to appoint the hierarchy of their military chiefs, the simple soldiers and national guards appointing the lower ranks of officers, the officers appointing their superiors.” In this way “the army retains its civic feelings” while the People “organize its military in such a way as to simultaneously guarantee its defense and its liberties”. Rising anarchist influence in 1917 could not make-up for the previous lack of systematic organisation and activity within the labor movement. The practice of the Bolshevik regime did not match the theory but first we need to discuss the theoretical problems of Lenin’s argument in order to understand why this happened for bad theory produces bad practice. “The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals” but rather they would “belong to the whole of society” (376) and while there would, initially, be differences in wealth “the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production – the factories, machines, land, etc. The leadership naturally substitutes itself for the membership as required by “the transformation of the power of ideas into the power of authority, the subordination of lower Party bodies to higher ones.” [64] A centralized, top-down perspective becomes a necessity: “it is the organisational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy as opposed to the organisational principle of opportunist Social-Democracy. The former were the reformist wing of the Social Democratic parties and most associated with Eduard Bernstein. Lenin confuses smashing the State machine with smashing the State itself. The following text was first published as a chapter in “Bloodstained, One Hundred Years of Lenninist Counterrevolution” by AK Press. The problem is that in a State it is not the people who rule but rather those who make up the government and these, in turn, need bodies to implement their decisions. [99]. Similarly, he was wrong to proclaim that if the workers and peasants “organize themselves quite freely in communes, and unite the action of all the communes in striking at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, and in transferring the privately-owned railways, factories, land and so on to the entire nation, to the whole of society” then that would “be the most consistent democratic centralism.” (348) In fact it would be federalism: “All productive capital and instruments of labor are to be confiscated for the benefit of toilers’ associations […] the Alliance of all labor associations […] will constitute the Commune […] there will be a standing federation of the barricades and a Revolutionary Communal Council [… made up of] delegates […] invested with binding mandates and accountable and revocable at all times […] all provinces, communes and associations [… will] delegate deputies to an agreed place of assembly (all […] invested with binding mandated and accountable and subject to recall), in order to found the federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces” [40], Unsurprisingly then, it was Kropotkin and not Lenin who in 1905 saw the soviets as the means of both fighting and replacing the State as well as comparing them to the Paris Commune. If, as Lenin argued, the State is “a power which arose from society but places itself above it and alienates itself more and more from it” and “consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command” (316) then the Bolshevik regime was most definitely a State… in the normal sense of the term. Only a party, wielding the authority it has won, is capable of overcoming the vacillation of the masses themselves […] if the dictatorship of the proletariat means anything at all, then it means that the vanguard of the proletariat is armed with the resources of the state in order to repel dangers, including those emanating from the backward layers of the proletariat itself.” [119]. State and Revolution clarifies this argument. Paul Vernell looks at Lenin's answer. So Engels confused the need to defend a revolution with the ruling party suppressing those who oppose it – including the proletariat. When workers’ organisations, protests and strikes are being repeatedly and systematically repressed, it is a nonsense to suggest that the working class is the ruling class – particularly when this repression began so soon into the new regime. The Russian Revolution shows that it was not a case of the State and Revolution but rather the State or Revolution. State and Revolution. But what is the systematic use of arms by one class against another if not a ‘transient form’ of state?” (353), So, according to Marx and Engels, the anarchists urged the working class to rise in insurrection against the bourgeoisie and its State and, once victorious, then simply put down its arms? April 1917, he quickly came into conflict with his colleagues by taking a radical position vanguard, the decreed., true enough, offered rather meager scope for such formalities of democracy as electiveness, accountability and.! The Paris Commune but also made clear that Lenin had indicated in the –... 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