Speaker: Alex Miller
Tuesday 21st July 7.30pm, Bennetts Bar, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham City Centre
In a sense, Anarchists and Marxists share the same goal: a society in which there is no independent state power standing over and above the free association of working people. So what is the difference between Marxist and Anarchist views of the state?
In this forum, we’ll approach this question by examining Lenin’s views, as expressed in one of the classics of Marxist literature, The State and Revolution. In The Communist Manifesto (1847-8) Marx and Engels wrote:
- “The bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
Later, in the same work, they continue:
- “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
According to the Manifesto, then, in the course of a social revolution, the state is transformed from “a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie” into the ‘proletariat organized as the ruling class”. Writing 25 years later, in the Preface to the 1872 German edition of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels, though arguing that “the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever”, single out the passages on the state as somewhat out of date:
- “In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry in the last 25 years, and of the accompanying improved and extended party organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution [of 1848], and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat first held political power for two whole months, this program has in some details become antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.”
A year or so earlier, in a letter to Kugelmann, Marx had written:
- “The next attempt at the French Revolution must be: not, as in the past, to transfer the bureaucratic and military machinery from one hand to the other, but to break it up.”
In his The State and Revolution, written on the eve of the October 1917 Revolution while he was in hiding in Finland, Lenin looks at the evolution of Marx’s views on the state, and discusses a number of crucial questions: What is the “dictatorship of the proletariat”? What exactly does Engels mean when he writes of “the withering away of the state”? How has the right-wing of the international socialist movement perverted Marx’s ideas on the state and socialism? How does Marxism differ from Anarchism? In this forum, we’ll look at Lenin’s answers to these questions, questions that are all the more crucial for us in an era in which it daily becomes more and more evident that state intervention under capitalism serves the interests of capital rather than the interests of ordinary people.
