Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin

The proletariat seizes from state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation. But it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for its own time, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our own time, of the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection—nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society—the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society—is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished.” It withers away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase “a free people’s state,” both as to its justifiable use for a long time from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists’ demand that the state be abolished overnight.¹

The comment to this passage from Engels’s Antidühring opens the fourth paragraph of the first chapter of The State and Revolution, concerned with “the withering-away of the state and violent revolution.” This issue is at the heart of Lenin’s discussion and here we find a synthetic and formidable preview of the development of the work as a whole: the preview is polemical and forces the pace of the argumentation but also connects the analytical moment to a political proposal and changes the direction of the whole debate. As we have already pointed out, the target of Lenin’s attack is a gradualist notion of the revolutionary process: the withering-away of the state, as opposed to the anarchist notion of the abolition of the state, was understood as a “vague idea of a slow, equal, gradual change without leaps and storms.” In the next conversation we will try to insist on the methodological and substantial aspects of Lenin’s notion of dialectics as it emerges with great clarity in these words, and will highlight its subjectivist character in the insistence on the relation between the notion of the state and the notion of politics, the analysis of reality, and the forces of mass and revolutionary change. Before we look into these subjectivist aspects, we would like to dwell on the other side, the analytical and objectivist side, if you like, of Lenin’s analysis, since this side of the analysis concentrates on the reality of the state and draws on its substantial features from the standpoint of revolutionary dialectics.

The first concerns the impossibility of the proletariat recuperating the state of the bourgeoisie. Engels claims, and Lenin reasserts, that as soon as power is seized, the state is destroyed by the proletariat. The issue of the withering-away only concerns the “remains of the state” after the socialist revolution and refers to the “proletarian semi-state.”² Only the destruction of the state as such can set into motion the revolutionary process of its withering-away. Clearly, this approach underlines an objective fact about the structure of the bourgeois state, a rigidity and totality that cannot be shaped by the proletarian forces. All of the reformist ideas, both prior to and, even more so, subsequent to Lenin, are ruled out on the grounds of a correct use of the dialectics of totality, rather than on the basis of an ideology. This is the totality of bourgeois domination and a conception of the state as an ensemble of means adequate to the sustenance of command. Reformism can only be functional to the development of the state totality, a totality of the bourgeois class. No structural concession can be made to the reformist effort of the good social democrats. On the other hand, the concept of destruction includes that of withering-away rather than vice versa, as the reformist would like to. The reduction of the state to a semistate and the breaking of its totality are a substantial act that cannot be given up on, one that needs to attack the rigidity and implacable centripetal tension of the state of the bourgeoisie. Reformist argumentations could only be sustained if they demonstrated that the current state is already a semistate: but would we ever find a reformist so mad as to consider this an affirmation worthy of any attention? This is clearly not enough.

In the second part of his commentary (on dictatorship), Lenin clarifies the rigid character of the state structure and brings it back to bear on a determinate apex around which the intensity of the revolutionary class relation can be measured. The state is a particular “apparatus of repression.” It is a property, an exclusive and unilateral use of force for the domination of capital. It is the coerced outcome of the capitalist command over society. The revolution will aim at this determinacy of the state power of the bourgeoisie in order to destroy it. Again, here the issue is neither the withering-away nor the substitution of the state, if not as dialectical moments of the will to destruction. The moments of the process of substitution (the dictatorship of the proletariat is the substitution of the proletariat for the bourgeoisie in holding on to this special power of repression) are subordinate to the destruction of the unilateral and ferocious character of the capitalist centralization of power aimed at domination, and they are so with no illusions, according to the most neat and determinate figure of destruction, insofar as by destruction we mean violence proper, an equal and opposing violence that must be set into motion and can never be diluted in the process of the withering-away of the state. Let us note that there is no contradiction between the first and the second moment: the destruction of the bourgeois state and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the necessary violence of the proletariat and the process of the seizure of the state. These are not opposing elements: they are related as substance to form and absolutely complementary. The destruction of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat are, in this form, a process!

And here we come to the third point (on “withering away”). The destructive determination of the revolutionary process and its punctual and extreme violence are mediated through the process of withering away. The latter loses its utopian and voluntarist features and becomes an effective framework for the revolutionary process. The withering-away of the state occurs after the seizure of power and the expression of the will to destroy the state: it is defined as a stage that can be embarked upon starting with the destruction of the specific function of the state of the bourgeoisie, that is, when the state in general, “the most complete democracy,” has come into being as a result of the seizure of power, as the content of the dictatorship. The process of the withering-away of the state is not a dialectical synthesis (as in Hegel) of a triadic process, after an abstract thesis (the distinction of the bourgeois totality) and the punctual antithesis (the actual violence of the revolution as the appropriation of power and exercise of dictatorship): the only thing it shares with Hegel’s dialectics is that it comes third! This is because each element of this process has its own full individuality, and because a potential continuity is founded on the leaps of the political will, on the alternating of the power relations, and finally, as we will amply argue, on the determinacy of material conditions. Given that these conditions decide in the last instance, we will later see how the timing and the modes of the phases of the process can be changed in continuity with the design and tendency of the stages Lenin defines here.

Two observations follow on from this in Lenin’s commentary, and each of them approaches the issue from a different standpoint. They are still moments of the definition of the nature of the state in “objectivist” terms, part of a conception that moves forward explosively from the destruction of the state, to the dictatorship, and to the withering-away of it. But these are polemical remarks where the substance of the argument tends to emerge from a theoretical confrontation. Moreover, there is a paradoxical reclaiming of the anarchist notion against all the stances that have used the polemics against anarchists as a shortcut to arrive at reformism. Fourthly, Lenin comments, “after formulating his famous proposition that ‘the state withers away,’ Engels at once explains specifically that this proposition is directed against both the opportunists and the anarchists. In doing this, Engels puts in the forefront that conclusion, drawn from the proposition that ‘the state withers away,’ which is directed against the opportunists.”³

an opportunist slogan, for it expressed not only an embellishment of bourgeois democracy, but also failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in general. We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism; but we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a “special force for the suppression” of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not “free” and not a “people’s state.” Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.⁴

On the last point, Lenin defends the value of the anarchist notion of violence against that of the opportunists. He notes that “Engels’ historical analysis of its role becomes a veritable panegyric on violent revolution. This, ‘no one remembers’; it is not good form in modern Socialist parties to talk or even think about the significance of this idea, and it plays no part whatever in their daily propaganda and agitation among the masses. And yet, it is inseparably bound up with the ‘withering away’ of the state into one harmonious whole.”⁵ Lenin proceeds to comment on the following passage:

That force, however, plays another role [other than that of a diabolical power] in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with the new, that it is the instrument by the aid of which the social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms—of this there is not a word in Herr Dühring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of the economic system of exploitation—unfortunately, because all use of force, forsooth, demoralizes the person who uses it. And this in spite of the immense moral and spiritual impetus which has resulted from every victorious revolution! And this in Germany, where a violent collision—which indeed may be forced on the people—would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has permeated the national consciousness as a result of the humiliation of the Thirty Years’ War. And this parson’s mode of thought—lifeless, insipid, and impotent—claims to impose itself on the most revolutionary party that history has ever known!⁶

If we try to evaluate the content of our overall discussion of Lenin’s notion of the state, of the state in general, both here and in the preceding lessons, we can immediately note that his conception is articulate and complete. In fact, we are used to the absurd and mystifying notions of the state and right offered by bourgeois science, in our times but even more so during Lenin’s, which claim that the state and right are always split and analyzed at two extreme poles, that of pure consensus and that of pure command. Juridical realism, normativism, pluralist and monistic notions are pitted against one another throughout the history of the theory of the bourgeois state. But their battle is ephemeral because their ideology is completely mystifying, because the state of the bourgeoisie, the state of the capitalist organization of labor, lives its own life in the constant synthesis of elements of organization and command. One is functional to the other; one is meant for the other, and vice versa. The figure of the capitalist state fully realizes the dialectics of organization and command, as well as that of cooperation and exploitation, that characterizes the whole process of valorization of capital. The state is a form of the capitalist process as a whole, the gigantic projection of the dualistic character of commodity fetishism. Above all, it is the centripetal acceleration of all capitalist exigencies of command over the overall process of the production and circulation of value. It is an accomplished form of the collective capitalist over the society of capital. Lenin fully comprehends this accomplishment and centripetal articulation of the state organization. Lenin’s notion of the state is a chapter in Marx’s theory of capital that is consistent with Marx’s teachings and analysis in Capital.

Nonetheless, this theory of the state has hardly been understood. For many, Lenin’s insistence on the state as violence and totalitarian command over society entails a normative and imperative option. After all, Lenin’s ability to regard the workers’ power to attack the state as a theoretical aspect relevant to the analysis of the state itself, or in any case, fundamental in the project of its destruction, has led to an emphasis on the organizational, institutional, and sociological aspects of Lenin’s theory of the state. As a result, Marxist theory of right ended up reproducing internally the same dualism of the bourgeois tradition and its mystifying powers. Only a handful of authors, especially Pasukanis,⁷ had the strength to reassert the complexity of Lenin’s theory of the state, and they did not meet with much gratitude from the workers’ movement. It is therefore necessary to return to Lenin’s theory of the state with great determination: to learn to read the theory of the state inside the categories of commodity and capital.

Having said that, it cannot be denied that fundamental changes concerning the general conditions of capitalist development have intervened after, and because of, the October revolution. Undoubtedly, the reformed state of capital exalts the moment of organization and the social continuity of its command much more than it did during the tsarist aristocracy. Moreover, the socialization of the capitalist mode of production makes the determinations of command over society more extensive, mobile, and efficient. While we acknowledge this, the state is still a specific form of the synthesis between organization and command: it cannot give these up wherever they are and however they determine their synthesis. Violence is organic and substantial to social organization and will be so as long as there is exploitation. Lenin’s teaching is that it must be seized and attacked, isolated and perfected for it to be fully exposed and ultimately destroyed. The fact that capitalist command is diluted into development does not change the grave reality of it: it only generalizes it and makes it so strong that its existence is mistaken as a natural occurrence. Today, prior to being confronted with the definition of the formal reality of the state, a revolutionary notion of the state that adopts Lenin’s standpoint is faced with the problem of its destruction: what differentiates us from Lenin is the extent of the spread of the command that needs to be destroyed, not the will or need to destroy it.

We have now gone through the paradoxes of the political and juridical science of capital, only to approach our own paradox.⁸ Let us assume that the capitalist will to mystify and its ability to organize reach a stage where the recognition of the function of command over society becomes invisible both as a result of its totality and for its inherence in the overall social organization. Who is going to identify the moment of its destruction, then? Workers’ hatred will be sufficient, because the capitalist paradox has its integral reverse side: it will be possible to find, inside the relation of production, the power of the state of capital fully deployed, and to hit it and destroy it there. This workerist attitude is more Leninist today than that of the many who seek out in the “present state” the “state of the past.”