The state and the revolution in Marxist thought

Now the issue of the state is of particular importance, both theoretically and practically politically. The imperialist war has accelerated and aggravated to the extreme the course of the transformation of monopoly capitalism into monopolistic state capitalism. And the terrible injustice suffered by the masses of the working people on the part of the state, which fuses closer and closer with the long and mighty federations of capitalists, becomes more and more horrible. Developed countries - and we mean their "butts" - turn into military prisons for hard labor for workers.

The unprecedented horrors and misfortunes of the prolonged war make the masses in an incredible state and intensify their indignation. The world proletarian revolution is visibly rising. And the question of her attitude to the state acquires practical importance.

The elements of opportunism that have accumulated over decades of relatively peaceful development have given rise to the trend of social-chauvinism that prevails in official socialist parties all over the world. and this current (Plekhanov, Butrusov, Breshkovskaya, Rubanovich, and then the masked ones, Messrs. Tsereteli, Chernov and Co. in Russia; Scheidemann, Legin, David and co. in Germany; Reynaudel, Gade, Vandervelde in France and Belgium; Hyndemann and the Fabians in England, and so on and so on). Etc.), which is socialism in word and chauvinism in practice, and is characterized by the fact that the “socialist leaders” adapt in disgrace and despicableness not only according to the interests of the national “their” bourgeoisie, but, more precisely, according to the interests of “their” state, since the majority of the so-called great powers invest and enslave A long time ago a group of small and weak peoples. The imperialist war is nothing but a war to divide and redistribute this kind of booty. The struggle for the liberation of the working masses from the influence of the bourgeoisie in general and the imperialist bourgeoisie in particular is impossible without a struggle against opportunist illusions about the "state".

First we will look at the teachings of Marx and Engels on the state, taking at particular length what aspects of these teachings have been forgotten or subjected to opportunistic distortion. We will then study in particular the main representative of these distortions, Karl Kautsky, the most famous of the leaders of the Second International (years 1889-1914) which has been so disgracefully bankrupt during the present war. Finally, we will draw the main conclusions from the experience of the two Russian revolutions, the revolution of 1905 and the revolution of 1917 in particular. The latter seems to be finishing at present (1 August 1917) the first stage of its development, but this revolution as a whole can only be understood as a link in the chain of proletarian socialist revolutions provoked by the imperialist war. Thus, the question of the position of the proletarian socialist revolution towards the state not only acquires practical political importance, but also becomes an urgent issue of the hour, as it is a question of clarifying what the masses should do in the near future to get rid of the yoke of capital. Author

Chapter I Class Society and the State

1- The state is the product of the intractability of class contradictions

What happened to the teachings of Marx now is happening more than once in history to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of the oppressed classes in their struggle for liberation. In the life of the great revolutionaries, the oppressive classes used to punish them with perpetual persecution and receive their teachings with the most brutal savage rage, the most insane hatred, and the most insolent campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to make them icons that do not hope for benefit or harm, to include them, so to speak, in the list of saints, and to surround their names with a halo of reverence with the intention of “consoling” the oppressed classes and delusionalizing them, vulgarizing revolutionary teachings by uprooting their content and blunt their revolutionary blade. In the matter of “refining” Marxism in this way, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement now converge. They forget, exclude, distort the revolutionary aspect of the teaching, its revolutionary spirit. They put in the first place and sing in praise of what is acceptable or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All social-chauvinists are now "Marxists", no kidding! And the German bourgeois scholars, who until yesterday were specialized in eradicating Marxism, have been talking more and more about a “national German” Marx who, as they claim, raised well-organized labor unions to wage the war of conquest!

In the face of this situation, in the face of the unprecedented spread of the distortion of Marxism, our duty above all boils down to resurrecting the true teachings of Marx on the state. This necessitates the inclusion of a sentence of long paragraphs that burden the research, of course, without slowing down at all to make it closer to understanding. But dispensing with it is not possible in any case. In the writings of Marx and Engels we must inevitably measure, as fully as possible, all the passages on the question of the state, or at least all the defining passages, so that the reader can independently form for himself an idea of ​​the totality of the theories of the founders of scientific socialism and their development, and also in order to prove on their basis The distortion of these views by the “Kautskianism” prevalent today is clearly ripe.

We start with Friedrich Engels' most widely published work: "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", which was published in its sixth edition in 1894 in Stuttgart. It is necessary for us to translate quotations from the German original because Russian translations, despite their multitude, are, for the most part, either incomplete or completely unsatisfactory.

Summarizing the results of his historical analysis, Engels says:

«The state is in no way a force imposed on society from outside it. And the state is not likewise “the reality of the moral idea,” “the image and reality of reason,” as Hegel claims. The state is the product of society at a certain stage of its development; The state is an expression of the fact that this society has become embroiled in a contradiction with itself that it cannot resolve, and that it has been divided into intractable antagonisms from which it is unable to escape. In order for these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, not to devour each other and societies in a futile struggle, this is why it required a force that apparently stands above society, a force that moderates the collision and keeps it within the boundaries of the “order”. This power emanating from society, which, however, places itself above it and separates itself from it more and more, is the state” (pp. 177-178 of the sixth German edition).

In this paragraph, he expressed very clearly the basic idea from which Marxism stems from the question of the historical role and status of the state. The state is the product and manifestation of the intractability of class contradictions. The state arises where, when and to the extent that it is not possible, objectively, to reconcile class contradictions. Conversely, the existence of the state proves that class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

In this fundamental and very important point, the distortion of Marxism begins, which follows two main directions.

On the one hand, the bourgeois ideologists, especially the petty-bourgeois ideologists, who are compelled under the pressure of indisputable historical facts to admit that the state exists only where there are class antagonisms and the class struggle, they “correct” Marx in such a way that it appears that the state is an organ for reconciliation between layers. In Marx's opinion, the state cannot arise and survive if the reconciliation of classes is possible. And in the opinion of the petty-bourgeois and petty-minded professors and political writers - who leave no opportunity without leaning on Marx! The state exactly reconciles the classes. In Marx's opinion, the state is a body for class rule, a body for the oppression of one class by another, it is the formation of a "system" that erases this injustice with the smear of law and consolidates it, softening the collision of classes. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, the system is precisely the reconciliation of classes, not the oppression of one class by another; Softening the clash means conciliation, not depriving the oppressed classes of certain means and methods of struggle for the overthrow of the oppressors. Thus, when in the revolution of 1917 the question of the state and its role was raised in all its seriousness, when it was practically raised as a matter of direct action and in the mass sphere, all the Socialist-Revolutionaries slipped and the Mensheviks, all at once and without reservation, towards the petty-bourgeois theory that the “state” “reconciles” the classes. The innumerable resolutions and articles drawn up by the politicians of these two parties are permeated from A to Z by this petty bourgeois theory of "conciliation". As for the fact that the state is a body for the rule of a certain class that cannot be reconciled with its opposite (the anti-class), this is what petty-bourgeois democracy cannot understand under any circumstances. The attitude of our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks toward the state is one of the clearest proofs that they are not socialists at all (which we Bolsheviks have always proved), but are petty-bourgeois democrats with almost socialist expressions. On the other hand, the Kautsky distortion. Marxism, which is a much better disguise. He does not deny "theoretically" neither the fact that the state is a body of class sovereignty nor the fact that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But the following is overlooked and obscured: if the state is the product of the intractability of class antagonisms, if it is a force above society and “more and more separated from society,” then it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is not possible not only without violent revolution, but also without the abolition of the apparatus of state power. created by the ruling class and in which this “separation” is embodied. This conclusion, which is theoretically obvious, was reached by Marx with the utmost precision, as we shall see in what follows, on the basis of a concrete historical analysis of the duties of the revolution. And Kautsky… “forgotten” and distorted this very conclusion, which we will see in detail in what follows

2- Special factions of armed men, prisons, etc.

Engels goes on to say: “…in comparison with the old ‘sexual’ organization (clan or tribal), the state is distinguished first by dividing the subjects of the state according to the division of lands…”

This division seems "natural" to us, but it required a long struggle against the old organization on the basis of tribes or clans.

«… The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of public power which no longer corresponds directly to the population itself organized by itself into an armed force. And this particular public power is necessary because an armed organization of the population acting on its own has become impossible since the division of society into classes... This public power is to be found in every state. It consists not only of armed men, but also of material annexes, of prisons and various coercive institutions which were non-existent in a society organized on the basis of tribes (clans)...»

Engels explains the concept of "power" that is called the state, the power that originated in society, but puts itself above it and separates from it more and more. What is this force mainly composed of? From special factions of armed men at their disposal, prisons, etc..

We have the right to speak of private detachments of armed men because the general power inherent in every state "does not correspond directly" with the armed population, with "the organization of the armed population operating on its own".

Engels, like all great revolutionary thinkers, seeks to draw the attention of the conscious workers to what exactly seems to the prevailing petty-bourgeois mentality to be the least worthy of attention, to what seems most familiar to it, sanctified by illusions rooted and, one might even say, ossified. The standing army and the police are the two main instruments of state power. But how could it be otherwise?

It could not be otherwise from the point of view of the overwhelming majority of Europeans in the late nineteenth century, to whom Engels turned and who did not live or closely witness any major revolution. They never understand what a "self-employed armed population organization" is. And to the question why it has become necessary to have special detachments of armed men (police and regular army) placed above and separate from society, the petty philistine of Western Europe and Russia tends to answer with a line of phrases taken from Spencer or Mikhailovsky, citing the complexity of social life, the differentiation of functions, and so on. embolden.

This martyrdom seems “practical” and it perfectly hypnotizes the petty-bourgeois mentality by obliterating the main and essential matter, namely the division of society into hostile classes with intractable enmity.

Had it not been for this division, the “armed population organization operating on its own” would have been distinguished by its complexity, advanced equipment, and so on, from the organization of primitive people or people organized in tribal societies, but such an organization is possible.

But it is impossible because the civilized society is divided into antagonistic classes with intractable hostility, whose armament “working on its own” results in their fighting with weapons. A state is formed and a special force is created, special detachments of armed men; And every revolution, by demolishing the state apparatus, shows us the open class struggle, shows us the eye view of how the ruling class is trying to resurrect its own detachments of armed men at its service and how the oppressed class is trying to create a new organization of this kind, efficient to serve not the exploiters, but the exploited.

In the aforementioned passage Engels raises theoretically the same question which every great revolution puts before us in practice, obviously, and within the scope of the action of the masses, we mean the question of the relations between the 'special' detachments of armed men and the 'self-acting armed organization of the population'. We will see how this issue is practically illustrated by the experience of the European and Russian revolutions.

But let's go back to Engels' topic.

It shows that this public authority is sometimes weak, in some regions of North America, for example (we are talking about rare cases in capitalist society, and about regions of North America in the pre-imperial era, where the free age was dominated). But, in general, they are:

«… The public authority is strengthened to the extent that the class contradictions within the state are exacerbated and to the extent that the adjacent states increase in area and population. Look, at least, at present-day Europe, where class struggle and competition for conquest have raised public power to a level where it threatens to swallow up society as a whole, including the state itself…” This was written no later than the beginning of the tenth decade of the last century. Engels' last preface is dated June 16, 1891. At that time the turn towards imperialism—in the sense of complete domination by trusts, in the sense of the roundness and length of the big banks, in the sense of the greatness of the scope of colonial policy, etc.—was just beginning in France, and was weaker in North America and in Germany. Since then, the "competition for conquests" has taken a major step forward, especially since the globe appeared in the early second decade of the twentieth century to be finally divided between these "competing conquerors", that is, between the great usurping states. Since then, the military and naval armament has increased dramatically, and the war of plunder, the war of 1914-1918 that broke out for the domination of England or Germany in the world, in order to share the spoils, has come close to the complete catastrophe, the “swallowing” of all the forces of society by a striking state power.

Engels was able to show since 1891 that “competition for conquests” is an important feature of the policy of the great powers in the external field, while the bastards of social-chauvinism baptize in the years 1914-1918, when this competition was particularly intense Exponentially, the imperialist war has resulted in the cover-up of the usurped interests of “their” bourgeoisie with the phrases “defence of the homeland” and “defence of the republic and revolution” and the like!

3- The state is a tool for investing the oppressed class

To spend on a privileged public authority that stands above society, obligates taxes and obliges the debts of the state.

Engels wrote: “The officials, who enjoy the working power and the right to collect taxes, are accompanied, as the organs of society, above society. The voluntary, optional respect that was accorded to the bodies of the tribal society (clans) is no longer sufficient for them, even if they could acquire it...». Special laws are drawn up regarding the sanctity and immunity of employees. “Let the most insignificant policeman” have “authority” that exceeds the authority of the representatives of the clan, but the head of the military authority himself in a civilized state envies the clan’s sheikh, whom society extols with “respect that was not imposed with a stick.”

The question of the status of excellent officials as the organs of state power has been raised here. The main thing is to know: what puts them above society? We will see how the Paris Commune in 1871 practically solved this theoretical question and how Kautsky retroactively effaced it in 1912.

«… Since the state arose from the need to restrain the antagonism of classes; And since it arose at the same time within the collisions between these classes, it is, as a general rule, the state of the strongest, economically dominant class, which through the state becomes the politically dominant class as well, and in this way acquires new means of suppressing and perpetuating the oppressed class… ». The ancient state and the feudal state were not only two bodies for the exploitation of slaves and serfs, but also “the modern representative state is a tool for the exploitation of labor wages by capital. However, there are, as exceptional cases, stages in which the conflicting classes reach a degree of balance of power with which the state authority attains for a certain period a kind of independence vis-a-vis the two classes, appearing as an intermediary between them… » Such was the absolute monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Bonapartism in the first two empires the second in France and Bismarck in Germany.

Such as we would like to add is the government of Kerensky in republican Russia after the transition to the persecution of the revolutionary proletariat, at the time when the soviets were rendered powerless by the leadership of the petty-bourgeois democrats and the bourgeoisie was not yet strong enough to dissolve the soviets outright. .

In a democratic republic - Engels continues - “the revolution exercises its power indirectly, but in the most secure way”: first, through “direct bribery of officials” (America) and secondly, through “an alliance between the government and the stock exchange” (France and America).

At the present time, imperialism and the domination of banks have "upgraded" to an extraordinary art, these two means of defending and exercising the power of wealth in any democratic republic. If, for example, Mr. Palchinsky, when the Democratic Republic of Russia was in its very first months - and it can be said in the honeymoon of the union of the "Socialists", Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, with the bourgeoisie within the coalition government - he obstructed all measures aimed at curbing the capitalists and their plundering and plundering of the public treasury with requests And if Mr. Baczynski, who later left the ministry (and was replaced also by another Baczynski, no different from him) was "rewarded" by the capitalists with a position at 120,000 rubles a year - how can this be described? Is it direct or indirect bribery? Is it the government’s alliance with the capitalists’ syndicates, or “only” friendly relations? And what role do Chernov, Tsereteli, Avksentiev, Skobelev and their ilk play? Are the most important “direct” allies of the treasury thieves, or just indirect?

The authority of the "revolution" is also more secure under the democratic republic, because it does not depend on these or those shortcomings of the political mechanism and on the poor political cover of capitalism. The democratic republic is the best possible political envelope for capitalism, and therefore the opinion of money, as it seizes this best cover (through Palchinsky, Chernov, Tsereteli, and those who love them), establishes its power on a firm basis, on a guaranteed basis to the extent that no change is possible in persons, institutions, or institutions. The parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic have to shake this power.

It is also worth noting that Engels clearly and categorically describes universal suffrage as an instrument of bourgeois rule. He said, clearly taking into account the long-term experience of German Social Democracy, that universal suffrage is “a sign of the maturity of the working class. It cannot be and never will be more than that in the present state.”

The petty-bourgeois democrats, the pseudo-Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks of our country, as well as their brethren, all the social-chauvinists of Western Europe, expect "more" from universal suffrage than that. They themselves believe and deceive the people with the false idea that universal suffrage “in the present state” can in fact manifest the will of the working majority and guarantee its implementation.

We can only allude here to this erroneous idea, other than to point out that Engels' clear, accurate, and completely concrete statement is distorted at every moment by the propaganda and agitation of the "official" (that is, opportunist) socialist parties. The sequel to our presentation of Marx and Engels' theory of the "present" state shows in detail the degree of invalidity in the idea that Engels rejects here.

In his most widely published work, Engels gives a general summary of his views in the following terms:

«Thus, the state has not existed since eternity. There were societies that were indispensable for the state and had no idea of ​​the state and state power. And when economic development reached a degree that was necessarily associated with the division of society into classes, the state, by virtue of this division, became necessary. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only ceases to be a necessity, but becomes a direct impediment to production. Classes will necessarily disappear just as they arose in the past. With the disappearance of classes, the state will necessarily disappear. A society which organizes production in a new way on the basis of the association of producers freely and on equal terms, will send the entire state machine to where it should then be: to the Museum of Customs next to the primitive spindle and the bronze axe.

One encounters this quotation only occasionally in contemporary social-democratic publications of propaganda and agitation. But even when this quotation is encountered, they often cite it as if they were bowing before an icon, i.e. to solemnly pay homage to Engels, without any attempt to delve into the breadth and depth of the scope of the revolution assumed by "sending the whole state machine to the Museum of Habits". Rather, he often does not notice that there is an understanding of what Engels called the state machine.

4- The violent revolution and the “decay” of the state

Engels's words about the "withering away" of the state are so well known, and they are cited with a degree of repetition, that the usual conditioning of Marxism on the basis of opportunism is revealed with such clarity that they must be dealt with at length. Let's quote the entire paragraph you quoted from:

“The proletariat takes state power and transfers the means of production above all to the property of the state. But it annihilates itself as the proletariat, and thus annihilates all class distinctions, all class antagonisms, and the state at the same time as a state. The society that existed and is still moving within class antagonisms was in need of the state, that is, an organization of the forcibly exploited class in the conditions of oppression resulting from the existing mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage labour). The state was the official representative of the whole of society, concentrating it in a visible body, but it was not so except to the extent that it was the state of that class which alone in its time represented society as a whole: in ancient times it was the state of slave-owners-citizens of the state, and in the Middle Ages it was the state of notables The feudal lords, finally, are truly representative of the entire society, which social class should be suppressed; And when, with class domination and with the current anarchy in production, those collisions and extremes resulting from this struggle cease to exist, there is nothing left to be suppressed, and there is also no need for a special force of repression, for the state. The first act in which the state really emerges as the representative of the whole of society—the appropriation of the means of production in the name of society—is at the same time the last act it takes as a state, and then the state’s intervention in social relations becomes superfluous in one field after another and fades out of itself. Instead of ruling the people, it is “abolished,” it is withered away. On this basis, the phrase "the free people's state" should be evaluated. This phrase had the right to remain for some time for incitement, but is invalid in the last analysis from the practical point of view. On this basis, the demand of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the state overnight should also be assessed” (“Against Dühring.” “Mr.

We can say without fear of slipping up that the formula that the state "withers away", in Marx's opinion, contrary to the anarchist theory of the "abolition" of the state, is all that remains of this passage of Engels, which is very rich in ideas, an acquired right for socialist thought in the socialist parties current. To amputate socialism in this way means to bring it down to the bottom of opportunism, as all that remains after this “interpretation” is a vague conception of slow, balanced, gradual change, of the absence of leaps and hurricanes, of the absence of revolution. The concept of the “withering away” of the state in the common sense, which is widespread in general and mass, if it is possible to express it, undoubtedly means obliterating the revolution, if not denying it.

However, this “interpretation” is a very crude distortion of Marxism, beneficial to the bourgeoisie alone, and is theoretically based on forgetting very important circumstances and considerations that were mentioned, for example, in the “summary” paragraph of Engels, which we cited in full.

first. At the beginning of this particular paragraph, Engels says that the proletariat, in taking over state power, “thereby destroys the state as a state.” Either this means completely or is attributed to something like "Hegelian weakness" in Engels. In fact, these words briefly express the experience of one of the largest proletarian revolutions, the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, which we will talk about in detail in its place. Here, Engels is actually talking about the proletarian revolution's "elimination" of the bourgeois state, while what he said about the withering away concerns the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution. The bourgeois state does not “wither away,” according to Engels, but is “destroyed” by the proletariat in the revolution. After this revolution the proletarian state or quasi-state withers away.

Second. The state is a "special force of oppression." Engels gave here very clearly his wonderful and extremely profound definition. From it he follows that the “special force of oppression” of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, the suppression of millions of working people by handfuls of rich people must be replaced by the “special force of suppression” of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat (the dictatorship of the proletariat). And in this is the essence of "the elimination of the state as a state." In this is the essence of the “process” of owning the means of production in the name of society. It is self-evident that such a substitution of a "special force" (bourgeoisie) by another "special force" (proletarian) can never be carried out in the form of "withering away".

iii. Engels speaks of “decay” or even, which is a more prominent and beautiful expression, of “fading”, meaning quite clearly and clearly the stage after “the state’s ownership of the means of production in the name of society as a whole”, i.e. the stage after the socialist revolution. We all know that the political form of the "state" at this stage is the most complete democracy. However, none of the opportunists who unabashedly distort Marxism imagined that the discussion here at Engels was, therefore, about the “fading” and “decaying” of democracy. This seems at first sight very strange. However, “no one can understand this” except for those whose thinking has not reached the conclusion that democracy is also a state and that democracy also perishes, accordingly, when the state perishes. The bourgeois state can only be "eradicated" by revolution. And the state in general, that is, the most complete democracy, can only “wither away.”

iv. Engels formulated his famous theme: “The state is withering away,” explaining directly and concretely that this theme is directed simultaneously against the opportunists and against the anarchists. In this, Engels placed in the first place the conclusion directed against the opportunists, drawn from the thesis of “the withering away of the state.”

One can bet that 9,990 out of 10,000 people who have read or heard about the “withering away” of the state do not know at all or do not realize that Engels directs his conclusions on this subject not only against the anarchists, and that nine of the remaining ten people do not know, for the most part What is the "free people's state" and why does the attack on this slogan include an attack on opportunists. This is how history is written! Thus, the great revolutionary teachings are imperceptibly altered in accordance with the prevailing spirit of banality and narrow-mindedness. The conclusion directed against the anarchists has been repeated a thousand times, savagely scorned in the heads in the most vulgar form, and acquired the firmness of illusions. As for the conclusion directed against the opportunists, they obscured it and “forgot” it!

"The Free People's State" was a demand of the German Social-Democrats in the eighteenth decade and one of their popular slogans. This slogan is devoid of any political content except for the pretentious petty bourgeois description of the concept of democracy. Since they openly alluded to the democratic republic in this slogan, Engels was ready to "justify" it "for a while" from the point of view of agitation. But this slogan was opportunistic, because it not only revealed the embellishment of bourgeois democracy, but also the lack of understanding of socialist criticism of every state in general. We support the democratic republic because for the proletariat it is the best form of state in the era of capitalism, but we must not forget that slavery to wage labor is the share of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. And yet. Each state is a special "force for oppression" of the oppressed class. Therefore, every country is neither free nor popular. Marx and Engels repeatedly explained this to their Party comrades in the eighties.

fifth. The same work of Engels from which everyone remembers the discourse on the withering away of the state contains a discourse on the importance of violent revolution. The historical appraisal of its role is transformed by Engels into a just tribute to the violent revolution. And “nobody remembers” that. Talking or even thinking about the importance of this idea is not unusual in the present socialist parties, and in the daily propaganda and agitation among the masses these ideas have no role. This is while it is closely associated with the idea of ​​the “withering away” of the state, and is a compact whole with it.

And here is this trial of Engels:

«… Violence also plays another role in history” (besides what it causes of evil) “and exactly a revolutionary role, and that, as Marx said, the generator of every old society bearing a new society, and that violence is that tool that divides the social movement By means of it to itself the way and the breaking of ossified and dead political forms - of all this Mr. Dühring did not say a word. He only concedes, with sighs and moans, that the overthrow of investment-based control may require violence. What a pity because every use of violence weakens, as he said, the morale of those who resort to it. And this is said despite what we know of the amount of moral and intellectual advancement that was resulting from every victorious revolution! This is said in Germany, where a violent clash, which might be imposed on the people, would have the advantage, at the very least, of eradicating the spirit of servility that permeated the consciousness of the nation as a result of the indignities of the Thirty Years' War. This sick, feeble, helpless Khawarna thinking dares to impose itself on the party that did not know history, opposing its revolutionary spirit! (p. 193, according to the third German edition, end of chapter four of section two).

How is the way to unite in one teaching this praise of violent revolution, which Engels continued to present insistently to the German Social-Democrats from 1878 until 1894, that is, until his death, with the theory of the “withering away” of the state?

Usually, they combine this and that together voluntarily, by means of unprincipled and sophistical qualitative extraction (or to satisfy the holders of power) of this subject in stages and images of that, noting that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, if not more, “decay” is placed. Especially in the first place. The dialectic is replaced by electiveism, and this attitude towards Marxism is the most familiar and widespread phenomenon in the official Social-Democratic literature of our day. This replacement is not, of course, a new innovation, as it was noted even in the history of classical Greek philosophy. Showing voluntarism in the appearance of dialectics in the case of transforming Marxism according to opportunism, deceives the masses in the easiest way, and satisfies them in appearance, as it seems as if it takes into account all aspects of the process, all directions of development, all opposing influences, etc., but in reality it does not give any harmonious and revolutionary idea. on the process of development of society.

We said in the foregoing, and we will explain in more detail in what follows from the research, that the teachings of Marx and Engels regarding the inevitability of violent revolution are related to the bourgeois state. This cannot be replaced by a proletarian state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) by means of “withering away” and, as a general rule, can only be achieved by violent revolution. The praise that Engels singled out for it, which is in complete agreement with Marx’s many statements (let us remember the conclusion of “The Misery of Philosophy” and the conclusion of the “Communist Manifesto” where he proudly and openly calls for the inevitability of violent revolution, and let us remember the criticism of the Gotha Program in 1875, which came nearly thirty years later, and which rebuked Marx has the opportunism of this program without mercy, - This praise is never out of the kind of "fading", it is never out of the tinsel of speech, nor out of the fervor of argument, the need to constantly educate the masses in the spirit of this view and this view in particular of violent revolution is the basis The entire teachings of Marx and Engels, and the betrayal of their teachings by the social-chauvinist and Kautsky currents prevailing today, is particularly evident in their forgetfulness of this propaganda, of this agitation.

The replacement of the bourgeois state by a proletarian state is not possible without violent revolution. The abolition of the bourgeois state, that is, of every state, is possible only through “withering away.”

Marx and Engels developed these theories in a detailed and concrete way, studying each specific revolutionary situation and analyzing through the experience of each specific revolution. Here we turn to this section of their teachings, which is undoubtedly the most important of them.

Chapter Two: The State and the Revolution. Experience of the years 1848-1851

1- On the eve of the revolution

The "misery of philosophy" and "the Communist Manifesto", which are the bakorta of mature Marxism, go back exactly to the eve of the revolution of 1848. By virtue of this reality, we find in them to some extent, in addition to laying out the general foundations of Marxism, a reflection of the concrete revolutionary situation existing at the time, and so perhaps It would be more correct to analyze what the authors of these two books said about the state immediately before extending the conclusions they drew from the experience of the years 1848-1851.

Marx said in The Misery of Philosophy:

«… In the course of development the old bourgeois society will be replaced by the working class as an association in which there is no place for classes and their antagonisms; And there will be no political power in the special sense of the word, because political power itself is the official expression of the class antagonism in the heart of bourgeois society” (p. 182 of the German edition of 1885).

It is useful to compare this general exposition of the idea of ​​the state’s demise after the abolition of classes with the exposition contained in the “Communist Manifesto” written by Marx and Engels several months later, i.e. in November 1848:

“…when we describe the most general stages in the development of the proletariat, we follow the more or less hidden civil war going on in society to the extent that it turns into an open revolution and in which the proletariat establishes its rule by violently overthrowing the bourgeoisie…

… We have seen above that the first step in the world revolution is the transformation (literally: luxury) of the proletariat into a ruling class, the conquest of democracy.

The proletariat takes advantage of its political rule in order to gradually wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie and centralize all the instruments of production in the hands of the state, that is, in the hands of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and in order to increase the productive forces as quickly as possible” (pp. 31-37 of the previous German edition of 1906). ).

We see here a formulation of one of the most wonderful and important ideas of Marxism on the issue of the state, that is, the idea of ​​the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (as Marx and Engels came to say after the Paris Commune), and then a definition of the state that is extremely important also among the “forgotten words” of Marxism. “The state, that is, the proletariat organized as the ruling class.”

This definition of the state, apart from being never explained in the dominant propaganda and agitation publications issued by the official Social-Democratic parties, has been forgotten, moreover, precisely because it cannot be reconciled with reformism, and because it arouses the illusions of opportunism and the petty bourgeoisie The usual "peaceful development of democracy".

The proletariat needs a state - this is what all opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyists repeat, emphasizing that this is the teaching of Marx and “forgetting” to add, first, that the proletariat, in Marx's opinion, only needs a state on the way to decay, i.e. It is built in such a way that it immediately begins to decay, and it has no chance of decaying with it. Secondly, that the working people need a “state,” “that is, the proletariat organized as the ruling class.”

The state is a special kind of organization of force, an organization of violence with the aim of oppressing one class. Which class should the proletariat oppress? Of course it should only suppress the exploiting class, the bourgeoisie. The working people do not need the state except to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat can lead this suppression, implement it in general, as the only class that is revolutionary to the end, the only class capable of uniting all the working people and the exploited in order to struggle against the bourgeoisie, in order to overthrow it completely.

The exploiting classes need political sovereignty to maintain investment, that is, for the selfish interests of the tiny minority against the overwhelming majority of the people and against the tiny minority of modern slave owners, that is, the landlords and capitalists.

These petty-bourgeois democrats, pretenders to socialism, who replaced the class struggle with dreams of reconciling classes, also imagined the socialist transformation in an imaginary way, not in the form of the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but in the form of the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority aware of its duties. This petty-bourgeois utopianism, which is inseparably linked to the recognition of the existence of a state based on classes, has led in practice to a betrayal of the interests of the toiling classes, as the history of the French revolutions of 1848 and 1871 showed, for example, and as the experience of "socialist" participation in bourgeois ministries in England, France, Italy and other countries in the Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Marx fought all his life against this petty-bourgeois socialism which is now being revived in Russia by the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Marx straightforwardly developed the theory of class struggle including the theory of political power, the theory of the state.

The overthrow of the bourgeoisie's rule can only be done by the proletariat as a special class whose economic conditions of existence prepare it for this overthrow and give it the possibility and power to do so. While the bourgeoisie is fragmenting and scattering the peasantry and all petty-bourgeois groups, the proletariat consolidates, unites and organizes it. The proletariat, by virtue of its economic role in mass production, is the only one competent to be the leader of all the working and exploited masses whom the bourgeoisie exploits, oppresses and pressures in many cases, not weaker, but more severe than its pressure on the proletarians, but who are not qualified for an independent struggle for their liberation.

The teachings of the class struggle that Marx applied to the question of the state and to the question of the socialist revolution inevitably lead to the recognition of the political supremacy of the proletariat, its dictatorship, that is, its power that it does not share with anyone and that rests directly on the power of the armed masses. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can only be determined by the transformation of the proletariat into a ruling class capable of suppressing the inevitably frenzied resistance of the bourgeoisie and of organizing all the toiling and exploited masses for the sake of the new economic order.

However, the proletariat needs state power, that is, the organization of concentrated power, the organization of violence, whether to suppress the resistance of the exploiters or to lead the large masses of the population of peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians in order to “arrange” the socialist economy.

Marxism, as it educates the workers' party, educates the vanguard of the proletariat that is competent to take power, to lead all the people to socialism, to direct and organize the new system, and to form a teacher, leader, and leader for all the working and invested in the matter of organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. As for the prevailing opportunism today, on the contrary, it educates from the Labor Party a group separate from the masses that represents workers with higher wages who “manage their affairs” in a good way under capitalism and sell for a stew of lentils the right of the eldest son, that is, they abandon the role of the revolutionary leaders of the people in The struggle against the bourgeoisie.

“The state, that is, the proletariat organized as the ruling class” - this theory of Marx is closely related to the whole of his teaching on the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The pinnacle of this role is the dictatorship of the proletariat, the political supremacy of the proletariat.

However, if the proletariat needs the state as a special organization for violence against the bourgeoisie, then the following conclusion automatically emerges from this: is it possible to create such an organization without first smashing and destroying the state machine that the bourgeoisie has created for itself? This is the conclusion that the "Communist Manifesto" leads us directly to. It is about this conclusion that Marx speaks, summarizing the experience of the years 1848-1851.

2- The outcome of the revolution

On the issue of the state in question, Marx summed up the experience of the revolution of 1848-1851 in his book “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” in the following terms:

«… But the revolution is deep. It's still on a journey through purgatory. It performs its mission methodically. By the second of December, 1851” (the day of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état) “she had completed one half of her preparatory work, and is now completing the other half. In the beginning, it perfects the parliamentary power so that it can overthrow it. and now, having attained this, it takes the executive power to perfection, brings it to its purest expression, sets it apart, presents it itself as the sole subject, in order to concentrate against it all the forces of destruction” (emphasis us). And when the revolution completes this second half of its preparatory work, then Europe will rise to its feet and exclaim with joy: How well you dig, old mole!

This executive power with its colossal bureaucratic and military organisation, with its state machine, so complex and artificial, with this army of officials of half a million people as well as an army of soldiers of half a million, this horrible parasitic membership that envelops the whole body of French society as if The net, and clogs all its pores, arose in the time of absolute monarchy, at the decline of feudalism, a decline which this membership helped hasten.” The first French Revolution had developed centralization, “but besides this it expanded the scope and powers of government power and multiplied the number of its agents. As for Napoleon, he reached the degree of perfection with this state machine. The legal monarchy and the July monarchy "added nothing new except a greater division of labour...

…Finally, the parliamentary republic found itself, in its struggle against the revolution, compelled to strengthen, in addition to repressive measures, the tools of government power and centralize it. All coups have mastered this machine instead of destroying it” (emphasis is ours). “The parties that created each other in the struggle for sovereignty saw in seizing the state’s massive edifice the main spoil in the event of its victory” (his book “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, pp. 98 and 99, Fourth Edition Hamburg, 1907).

In this wonderful trial, Marxism takes a huge step forward in comparison with the Communist Manifesto. In the "Communist Manifesto" the question of the state was raised in a very abstract way and with very general concepts and expressions. Here the issue is raised concretely and the conclusion is drawn with the utmost precision and clarity and in a completely practical sense: All previous revolutions have mastered the state machine while it should be destroyed and broken.

This conclusion is the main and basic conclusion in the teachings of Marxism about the state. And this very essential point, in addition to being completely forgotten in the dominant official Social-Democratic parties, has been distorted (as we shall see below) by the most eminent theoretician of the Second International, Kautsky.

In the “Communist Manifesto” I summarized the general lessons of history that make us see the state as a body of class sovereignty and lead us to the inevitable conclusion that the proletariat cannot overthrow the bourgeoisie if it does not first seize political power, if it does not obtain political sovereignty. If the state is not transformed into a “proletariat organized as the ruling class,” and that this proletarian state begins to wither away immediately after its victory, because the state is unnecessary and cannot exist in a society devoid of class contradictions. The Communist Manifesto did not raise the question of how, from the point of view of historical development, this replacement of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state should take place.

This particular issue was raised by Marx and resolved in the year 1852. Marx, faithful to his philosophy of dialectical materialism, takes as a basis the historical experience given by the great years, the years of the revolution of 1848-1851. Marx's teachings here, as always, are a summary of experience in the light of a deep and widely known philosophical view of history.

The question of the state was raised concretely: How did the bourgeois state, the necessary state for the rule of the bourgeoisie, arise historically? What has happened to it in terms of change and development in the course of the bourgeois revolutions and in the face of the independent struggles inherent in the oppressed classes? What are the duties of the proletariat to this state machine?

The centralized state power inherent in bourgeois society appeared in the era of the fall of absolutism. There are two institutions that characterize this state machine more than others, namely the bureaucracy and the regular army. In their writings, Marx and Engels spoke over and over again, pointing out the thousands of threads that exactly linked these two institutions to the bourgeoisie. The experience of each worker explains this connection very clearly and eloquently. The working class learns through its bitter experiences to understand this connection, and therefore the working class understands with such ease and grasps with such steadfastness the science which shows the inevitability of this connection, the science which the petty-bourgeois democrats either ignorantly or recklessly deny, or which they know “generally” with the greatest recklessness, forgetting to draw from it. Appropriate practical conclusions.

Dawanism and the regular army are a "parasite" on the body of bourgeois society, a parasite generated by the internal contradictions that tear this society apart, but they are exactly that "parasite" that "clogs" the pores of life. However, the Kautskyian opportunism prevailing today in official Social-Democracy regards the view of the state as a parasitic organism, particularly and exclusively characteristic of anarchism. It is obvious that this distortion of Marxism is very favorable to the interests of those philistines who have brought socialism to the point of an unparalleled scandal, which is to justify and embellish the imperialist war by applying to it the concept of “defence of the fatherland.” But this is, in any case, an undoubted distortion.

Throughout all the bourgeois revolutions, of which Europe has witnessed a large number since the fall of feudalism, this bureaucratic and military apparatus is being developed, perfected and consolidated. The petty bourgeoisie, for example, is the one that is attracted to the side of the big bourgeoisie and submits to it to a large extent through this apparatus that gives the upper classes of peasants, small artisans, merchants and others comfortable, quiet and relatively respectable seats that make those sitting in them above the people. See, for example, what happened in Russia in the six months since February 27, 1917: the chairs of the bureaus, which they once preferred to give to the Black Hundreds, became booty for the Cadets, Mensheviks, and Social-Revolutionaries. They did not, in essence, think of any serious reforms, trying to postpone them “until the Constituent Assembly” and to postpone the Constituent Assembly little by little until the end of the war! As for the issue of sharing the booty, the issue of filling the positions of ministers, deputy ministers, governors, etc. Etc., they did not slow down and did not wait for any constituent assembly! The game of compositions for the strength of the government was not, in essence, nothing but the disclosure of the division and redistribution of the “spoils” that were taking place from top to bottom, in the country from end to end and in the entire central and local administrative apparatus. The result, the objective result of six months - from February 27 to August 27, 1917 - is indisputable: the reforms were postponed, the division of the diwans' seats took place, and the "mistakes" of the division were corrected by redistribution several times.

But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is “re-distributed” between the various parties of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie (between the Cadets, the Social-Democrats, and the Mensheviks, if we take Russia for example), the oppressed classes, with the proletariat in the forefront, the hostility of all classes against bourgeois society becomes clearer. the whole. Hence, all bourgeois parties, including the most democratic ones, including the “revolutionary democracy,” find themselves faced with the necessity of intensifying measures of repression directed against the revolutionary proletariat and strengthening the apparatus of repression, i.e. the state machine itself. This course of events leads the revolution to "concentrate all forces of destruction" against the authority of the state.

What prompted the task to be presented in this way is not logical trials, but the realistic course of events, the live experience given by the years 1848-1851. What shows us the extent to which Marx stands firmly on the base of realism from historical experience is that he did not raise, in the year 1852, in a practical way the following question: With anything to replace this state machine that should be eliminated. This is because experience at that time did not provide material for this question, which history raised for discussion later, in the year 1871. In 1852, one could not decide on the basis of historical tracing and with the accuracy of natural science other than the fact that the proletarian revolution faced the task of “focusing All forces of destruction” are against the state, the task of “smashing” the state machine.

A questioner may ask whether it is correct to generalize Marx's experience, observations, and conclusions and apply them to a wider circumference of the history of France during the three years, 1848-1851? To analyze this issue, we first mention a remark by Engels, and then we move on to discussing the facts.

In his preface to the third edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Engels wrote:

«… France is the country in which, more than in any other country, the historical struggle of the classes has always proceeded to its decisive end. In France, the changing political forms within which this class struggle was moving and in which its results were manifested were most clearly formed. France, which had been the centers of feudalism in the Middle Ages and which, since the Renaissance, had been the model country of homogeneous monotonous monarchy, smashed feudalism in the Great Revolution and established the rule of the bourgeoisie with a classic purity not known in any other European country. In this country the struggle of the proletariat, which raises its head, against the ruling bourgeoisie, appears with a sharpness that other countries do not know” (p. 4 of the 1907 edition).

The last remark has become obsolete since there has been a break since 1871 in the revolutionary struggle of the French proletariat, although this break, however long it may be, does not at all negate the possibility that France will emerge in the next proletarian revolution as the classic country of the class struggle until its decisive end .

However, let us take a general look at the history of the developed countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We see that the same process took place more slowly, in more varied forms, and on a very broader stage: on the one hand, the process of forming “parliamentary power” both in republican countries (France, America, Switzerland) or in the monarchical countries (England, Germany to some extent, Italy and the Scandinavian countries, etc.), and on the other hand, the process of struggle for power between the various parties of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie that were dividing and redistributing the "plunder" of the seats In the bureaucracy, while the foundations of the bourgeois system remain, it is, finally, the process of perfecting and consolidating the “executive authority”, its bureaucratic and military apparatus.

There is no doubt that these are the general features of the whole modern development of capitalist countries in general. During three years, from 1848 to 1852, France demonstrated rapidly, sharply and centrally the same course of development inherent in the entire capitalist world.

Imperialism in particular - which is the era of banking capitalism, the era of giant capitalist monopolies, the era of the transformation of monopoly capitalism into monopolistic state capitalism - shows the extraordinary strengthening of the “state machine” and the unparalleled expansion of its bureaucratic and military apparatus as a result of the intensification of repression directed against the proletariat in monarchical countries or, in the countries with the greatest freedom, that is, republican countries.

Undoubtedly, world history now pushes, on an incomparably larger scale than in 1852, to "concentrate all the forces" of the proletarian revolution on the "destruction" of the state machine.

As for what the proletariat should replace, the Paris Commune gave instructive material in this respect.

3- Marx put the issue in the year 1852*

In 1907, Mehring published in the magazine “Neue Zeit” (25, 2, 164) passages from a letter addressed by Marx to Wedemeyer on March 5, 1852. The letter included, among other things, the following remarkable trial:

«As far as I am concerned, I have no credit for discovering classes in contemporary society, nor for discovering their conflict. Long before me, bourgeois historians explained the historical conception of this class struggle, and bourgeois economists explained the economic structure of classes. What I have given again consists in proving the following: 1) that the existence of classes is associated only with certain stages of the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Produktion), 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself is not other than the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society...»

In these words Marx managed to articulate with astonishing clarity, firstly, what distinguishes us mainly and radically from the teachings of the advanced and deeper thinkers of the bourgeoisie, and secondly, the essence of his teachings on the state.

The main thing in Marx's teachings is the class struggle. This is what is said and written in abundance. However, this is not true. From this untruth, opportunist distortions of Marxism and its falsification are produced, one after the other, to make it acceptable to the bourgeoisie. This is because the teachings on the class struggle were not formulated by Marx and are generally acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Whoever does not know the class struggle is not yet a Marxist, and it may appear that it has not yet departed from the scope of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. Limiting Marxism to teachings on the class struggle means amputating and distorting Marxism and limiting it to what the bourgeoisie accepts. There is only a Marxist who generalizes his recognition of the class struggle over the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This fundamentally distinguishes the Marxist from the ordinary petty (and even big) bourgeois. On this test, the true understanding of Marxism and the true recognition of it must be ascertained. It is not surprising, then, that when the history of Europe has practically come to this question with the working class, all the opportunists and reformists, not to mention all the “Kautskyites” (people who fluctuate between reformism and Marxism) have become pitiful petty, petty-bourgeois democrats who deny the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky's pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, published in August 1917, i.e. long after the first edition of this book was published, is an example of petty-bourgeois distortion of Marxism and repudiation of it, in fact, rather than hypocritically admitting it (cf. Petrograd and Moscow, 1918).

Contemporary opportunism in the person of its chief representative, the former Marxist Kautsky, fully corresponds to the description that Marx gave of the bourgeois position, because this opportunism limits the recognition of the class struggle to the framework of bourgeois relations. (Within this scope, within its framework, there is no educated liberal who refuses “in principle” to recognize the class struggle!). Opportunism does not lead to the recognition of the class struggle until the main issue itself, until the stage of transition from capitalism to communism, until the stage of overthrowing and completely eliminating the bourgeoisie. In fact, this stage must be a stage of class struggle whose intensity is unparalleled, a stage in which its forms take on unprecedented intensity, and therefore the state of this stage must be a democratic state of a new type (for the sake of the proletarians and the poor in general) and a dictatorship of a new type ( against the bourgeoisie).

.... The content of Marx's teachings on the state will only be understood by those who realize that the dictatorship of one class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat that overthrew the bourgeoisie, but also for an entire historical period separating capitalism from "classless society", from communism. The forms of the bourgeois state are very diverse, but their essence is the same: the society of these states is in one form or another and ultimately the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, to be sure. Certainly, the transition from capitalism to communism must give an enormous abundance and variety of political forms, but its content will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Chapter Three: The State and the Revolution.

The experience of the Paris Commune in 1871. Marx's analysis

1- What is the heroism of the Commune's attempt? It is known that Marx warned the Parisian workers several months before the Commune, in the autumn of 1870, demonstrating that it would be the folly of despair to attempt to overthrow the government. But when the decisive battle was imposed on the workers in March 1871, and when they accepted it and the uprising became a fait accompli, Marx saluted the proletarian revolution with the utmost enthusiasm despite the ominous omen. Marx did not cling to a pretentious denunciation of an “untimely” movement in the manner of the infamous Russian renegade from Marxism Plekhanov, who wrote in November 1905 encouraging the struggle of the workers and peasants, and then, after December 1905, shouted in the manner of the liberals: “We should not have The weapon.”

However, Marx was not content with admiring the heroism of the Communards, who, as he put it, “rushed to attack heaven.” In this mass revolutionary movement, although it did not reach its goal, he saw historical experience of great importance, a certain step forward that the world proletarian revolution would take, a practical step more important than hundreds of programs and trials. Marx set his sights on the task of analyzing this experience, drawing tactical lessons from it, and reconsidering his theory on the basis of this experience.

The only “amendment” that Marx considered necessary to make to the “Communist Manifesto” was inspired by the revolutionary experience of the Parisian Communards.

The last introduction to a new German edition of the "Communist Manifesto" signed by its two authors together bears the date of June 24, 1872. In this introduction, the authors Karl Marx and Frederick Engels say that the "Communist Manifesto" program "has become outdated today in some places."

“… In particular, the Commune proved that “the working class cannot be satisfied with seizing the state machine at the ready and setting it in motion for its own ends”…”

The words in brackets in this excerpt were quoted by the authors from Marx's book: The Civil War in France.

Thus, Marx and Engels considered one of the main basic lessons given by the Paris Commune so important that they included it in the "Communist Manifesto" as a fundamental amendment.

It is eloquent in its implication that the opportunists have distorted this fundamental amendment in particular, and that nine-tenths of the readers of the "Communist Manifesto", if not ninety-nine percent of them, are ignorant of confirming its meaning. We will discuss this distortion in detail in what follows, in a chapter on distortions. Here, we just have to point out that the common vulgar “concept” of Marx’s well-known phrase that we quoted is summed up in claiming that Marx emphasizes here the idea of ​​slow development in contrast to the seizure of power and so on.

The truth is just the opposite. Marx's idea is summed up in the fact that the duty of the working class is to smash and break the "ready-made state machine", and not to be content with merely seizing it.

On the twelfth of April 1871, that is, in the very days of the Commune, Marx wrote to Kugelmann:

“…if you look at the last chapter of my book “18 Brumaire,” you will see that I declared that the next attempt of the French Revolution should not be to transfer the military-bureaucratic machine from one hand to another, as has been done hitherto, but to smash it” (emphasis on Marx .and originally the word zerbrechen). This is the initial condition of every truly popular revolution on the continent. In this very attempt is summed up by our heroic Parisian comrades” (p. 709 in “Neue Zeit”, 20, 1, in the years 1901-1902). (Marx's letters to Kugelmann in Russian have been published in no fewer than two editions, one of which I supervised and presented to her editor).

In these words: “to smash the military-bureaucratic state machine” he briefly expressed the main lesson of Marxism regarding the duties of the proletariat in revolution towards the state. This particular lesson was not limited to being completely forgotten by the prevailing “interpretation” of Kautsky’s Marxism, but rather distorted by distortion!

With regard to the passage to which Marx refers from the "18th Brumaire", we have included it in full above.

Special reference should be made to two points from Marx's passage mentioned. First, he limited his conclusion to the continent. This was understandable in 1871, when England was still a model of a purely capitalist country, but devoid of military junta and to a large extent bureaucracy. Therefore, Marx excluded England, where revolution, including popular revolution, seemed possible at that time, and it was possible without destroying the “ready-made state machine” as a preliminary condition.

Now, in the year 1917, in the era of the first great imperialist war, this determination of Marx falls short. England and America, the greatest and last representatives of the Anglo-Saxon "freedom" in the whole world, in the sense of the absence of a military junta and bureaucracy, have slipped completely into the general European quagmire, the dirty and bloody quagmire of bureaucratic and military institutions that subjugate everything to themselves and subdue everything. “The initial condition for every truly popular revolution” is, at the present time, in England and America as well, the smashing and destruction of the “ready-made state machine” (which was prepared in these two countries during the years 1914-1917 to the degree of “European”, general imperialist perfection).

Secondly, Marx's profoundly profound remark that the smashing of the bureaucratic and military state machine is "the initial condition of every truly popular revolution" deserves special attention. This concept of "popular" revolution seems strange to Marx. It seems that the Plekhanovists and the Russian Mensheviks can follow Struve those who want to be considered Marxists, for they have distorted Marxism in such a despicable liberal way that they no longer see with him anything but the opposition of the bourgeois revolution to the proletarian revolution, and they understand this opposition as stagnation beyond stagnation.

If we take, for example, the revolutions of the twentieth century, it must be recognized, of course, that the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions are both bourgeois revolutions. But neither this nor that was a "popular" revolution, because the masses of the people, its great majority, did not emerge in a noticeable, active and independent manner with its own economic and political demands, neither in this revolution nor in that one. On the contrary, the Russian bourgeois revolution in the years 1905-1907, although it did not suffer from the “brilliant” successes that sometimes befell the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, was undoubtedly “truly popular”, because the mass of the people, its majority, its far-flung and subdued “lower” social strata Under the weight of oppression and investment, it has risen independently and marked the entire course of the revolution with the nature of its own demands, with the nature of its attempt to build a new society in its own way in place of the old one that is being demolished.

In 1871, the proletariat did not constitute the majority of the people in any country on the European continent. The revolution could not be a "popular" revolution that really attracted the majority to the movement, unless it included the proletariat and the peasantry. These two classes made up the “people” at that time. These two classes are united by the fact that the “bureaucratic and military state machine” oppresses them, pressures and exploits them. The smashing and smashing of this machine is the true interest of the “people,” the interest of its majority, the interest of the workers and the majority of the peasantry—it is the “preliminary condition” for a free alliance between the poor peasantry and the proletariat; Without this alliance, democracy is not solid and socialist transformation is not possible.

It is known that the Paris Commune was making its way to such an alliance, and it did not reach the goal due to a number of reasons of an internal and external nature.

So, when Marx spoke of "a truly popular revolution", he took into account very precisely the actual ratio between the classes in the majority of the countries of the European continent in the year 1871, without forgetting for a moment the characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie (characteristics of which he often spoke and more about). On the other hand, he decided that the “destroying” of the state machine is imposed by the interests of the workers and the peasants alike, and that it unites them and places before them a common duty, which is to eradicate the “parasite” and replace it with something new.

Anything in the investigation?

2- How can the broken state machine be replaced?

In the year 1847, Marx did not give in the "Communist Manifesto" about this question anything but a very abstract answer, or rather, he gave an answer that points to the tasks and not to the way to solve them. The intention of the "Communist Manifesto" was thus: to replace it with "the organization of the proletariat into a ruling class", "the conquest of democracy".

Marx did not coordinate with the imagination and waited for the experience of the mass movement to answer the question: What concrete forms will the organization of the proletariat take as the ruling class, and in what form will this organization be associated with the most complete and complete "conquest of democracy?"

In the book “The Civil War in France,” Marx analyzes the most accurate analysis of the experience of the Commune despite the meagerness of this experience. Here are the most important passages from this book:

In the nineteenth century, the "centralized power of the state with its ubiquitous apparatus: the regular army, the police, the bureaucracy, the clergy, and the judicial class" developed, this medieval power. With the intensification of the class antagonism between capital and labor, “the power of the state took on more and more the character of a public authority for the oppression of labor, the character of an instrument of class domination. After every revolution that constitutes a certain step forward in the course of the class struggle, the character of the pure oppression of state power becomes clearer and clearer. After the revolution of 1748-1849, state power became "a national instrument for capital's war against labour." The Second Empire came to consolidate it.

"The Commune was the direct opposite of the empire." “It was a certain form” “of a republic which ought to abolish not only the monarchical form of class rule, but also class rule itself...”

How exactly did this “particular” form of the proletarian, socialist republic emerge? And how was the state that initiated its establishment?

«… The first decree issued by the Commune was to abolish the regular army and replace it with armed people…”

This requirement is now included in the programs of all parties that want to claim socialism. However, the value of its programs appears most clearly from the behavior of our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, as they, in fact, abandoned the implementation of this demand after the revolution of February 17 in particular!

«… The Commune was formed from the deputies of the commune who were elected by universal suffrage in the various districts of Paris. They were responsible and could be withdrawn at any time. The majority of them, of course, were workers or recognized representatives of the working class...

... The police, which until then had been an instrument of the central government, was at once stripped of all its political functions and transformed into a responsible body of the Commune that could be replaced at any time... The same was the case with the officials of all branches of administration... From top to bottom, starting Of the members of the commune, the public service was to be performed at a wage equal to that of a labourer. With the demise of these officials, all privileges and allowances for representation that were received by senior state officials were removed... After the Commune removed the regular army and police, the two tools of material rule in the hands of the old government, it began at once to break the tool of spiritual enslavement, the power of priests... and the judicial officials lost their nominal independence … And it became necessary for them to be elected publicly and to be responsible and subject to withdrawal….”

Thus, it seems that the Commune has only replaced the broken state machine with a more complete democracy: the abolition of the regular army, the principle of electing and withdrawing all employees. But this “except” means in reality a massive exchange of one type of institution for another that differs in principle. Here we are, in fact, facing a case of “transformation of quantity into quality”: Democracy applied in the most complete and complete form that can be imagined in general transforms from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy, from a state (= a special force to oppress a certain class) to something that is not the state in its concept.

The suppression and resistance of the bourgeoisie was still necessary, and this necessity imposed itself on the Commune in particular. One of the reasons for its defeat is that it did not do so with the required firmness. But the oppressive body becomes in this case the majority of the population, and not the minority, as was always the case in the era of serfdom, in the era of serfdom, and in the era of wage-labour slavery. And since the majority of the people themselves practice repressing their oppressors, there is no need for a “special force” for repression! In this sense, the state takes decay. Instead of private institutions returning to do so directly; And to the extent that the performance of the functions of the state authority takes on a more comprehensive and popular character, the less the need for this authority.

The measure taken by the Commune, to which Marx referred, is very remarkable: the abolition of all representation bonuses, the abolition of all privileges of state employees to the level of "worker's wages". It is precisely in this that the turn from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy, from the democracy of the oppressors to the democracy of the oppressed classes, from the state as a “special force” for the suppression of a certain class to the suppression of the oppressors with the combined power of the majority of the people: workers and peasants. The issue of the state, which is the most prominent and perhaps the most important among all points, forgetting the lessons of Marx reached its limit! They don't say a word about it in the countless simplistic comments they post. It is “usual” to remain silent about this, just as it is necessary to remain silent about an outdated “naivety”, just as Christians “forgot” when their religion became the religion of the state, the “naivety” of Christianity of the first era with its revolutionary and democratic spirit.

Reducing the salaries of senior officials in the state apparatus appears to be "just" a naive, primitive democratic demand. One of the "founders" of modern opportunism, the former Social-Democrat, Ed. Bernstein licked again and again the vile bourgeois jeers of "primitive" democracy. He, like all opportunists and like the current Kautskyists, did not understand at all, first, that the transition from capitalism to socialism is impossible without some “return” to “primitive” democracy (otherwise, how is it possible to move to the state functions being carried out by the majority of the population, over the last of the population?), and secondly, that "Primitive democracy" on the basis of capitalism and capitalist civilization differs from primitive democracy in primitive or pre-capitalist eras. The capitalist civilization has created mass production, factories, railways, post office, telephone and the like, and on this basis the vast majority of the functions of the old “state power” have reached a degree of simplicity and tomorrow they can be transformed into processes of recording, codification and fixation on a degree of ease so that they become completely within reach. all who can read and write, so that these jobs can perfectly be done for the usual 'worker's wages', and these jobs can and must be stripped of any shadow of privilege and 'presidency' character.

The election of all employees without exception, the possibility of withdrawing them at any moment, and reducing their salaries to the usual “worker’s wages.” These simple and “self-evident” democratic measures that completely unite the interests of the workers and the majority of the peasants are at the same time the bridge for the transition from capitalism to socialism. These measures are related to the reorganization of the state, to the reorganization of society from a purely political point of view, but they do not, of course, gain all their significance and importance except in the case of realizing or preparing the “expropriation of the usurpers of property,” that is, the transformation of capitalist private ownership of the means of production into social property.

Marx wrote:

"The Commune has made that slogan that all bourgeois revolutions proclaimed - the low-spending government - a reality, by abolishing the two largest branches of expenditure: the regular army and the staff corps."

Only a small group of peasants and other petty-bourgeois strata can “advance” and “become respectable people” in the bourgeois sense of the word, i.e. become either one of the well-to-do, the bourgeoisie, or one of the privileged and affluent employees. As for the great majority of peasants in any capitalist country in which there are peasants (and such capitalist countries are the majority), they encounter injustice from the government and are thirsty for its overthrow, thirst for a “cheap” government. Only the proletariat can achieve this, and by achieving this it takes at the same time a step towards reorganizing the state on a socialist basis.

3- Cancellation of parliamentarianism

Marx wrote: “The Commune was intended to be not a parliamentary body, but a functioning body enjoying both legislative and executive powers at the same time...

...instead of deciding once every three or six years which member of the ruling class should represent and suppress (ver-und zertreten) the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve, instead, the people, The organizer in the commune intends to search for workers, auditors and accountants for his establishment, and the right of individual suffrage serves for this purpose, whatever the employers are.

This wonderful critique of parliamentarism, written in 1871, has now also become, thanks to the dominance of social-chauvinism and opportunism, among the "forgotten words" of Marxism. That the ministers and parliamentarians, and on this reasonable basis to an extraordinary extent called "anarchist" all criticism of parliamentarism!! It is not surprising that the proletariat of the “avant-garde” parliamentary countries loathed the vision of “socialists” like Scheidemann, David, Leggin, Samba, Renodel, Henderson, Vannervelde, Stauning, Branting, Pisolati and Co., and leaned more and more in its sentiments towards anarchic-syndicalism, although this was the sister of opportunism.

However, revolutionary dialectics was never, in Marx's view, an empty, fashionable phrase, nor was it a rosary for patter, as Plekhanov and Kautsky and their ilk made it. Marx was good at breaking with anarchism without pity for its inability to benefit even from the “fold” of bourgeois parliamentarism, especially when it was evident that there was no revolutionary situation, but at the same time he was also good at criticizing parliamentarism in a truly proletarian, revolutionary way.

Deciding once every few years which member of the ruling class will repress the people in parliament—this is the true essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in constitutional parliamentary monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.

But if the question of the state is raised, and if one considers parliamentarism as one of the state institutions, from the point of view of the tasks of the proletariat in this field, then where is the way out of parliamentarism? And how can it be dispensed with?

We must say and repeat: Marx's lessons based on the study of the Commune have been forgotten to the extent that the current "Social-Democrat" (read: traitor to the current socialist) does not understand at all any criticism of parliamentarism other than the anarchist or reactionary criticism.

The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the electoral principle, but rather the transformation of representative institutions from gossip forums into “working” institutions. “The Commune was intended to be not a parliamentary body, but a body that enjoys both legislative and executive powers at the same time.”

A "non-parliamentary" institution, but rather a functioning institution. This saying has blinded the eyes of contemporary parliamentarians and the parliamentary “parlor dogs” of Social-Democracy itself! Look closely at any parliamentary country, from America to Switzerland, and from France to England, Norway, etc., and you will see that the real work of the "state" takes place behind the scenes and is carried out by bureaucrats, offices and staff bodies. In parliaments they are content with chattering with the specific intention of deceiving the "common people". And this is so true that all these defects of parliamentarism were immediately revealed even in the Russian Republic, which is a bourgeois-democratic republic, before it had time to form a real parliament. The heroes of the rotten petty-bourgeoisie, such as Skobelev, Tsereteli, Chernov and Avksentiev, were able to make the Soviets ugly as well, in the manner of bourgeois parliamentarism, by turning them into forums for idle talk. Messrs. "Socialist" ministers in the soviets deceive the quick-witted peasants with the hoarseness of their phrases and decisions. In the government, scenes change without interruption, on the one hand, so that as many Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks as possible take turns at the “table” of honorable seats, and on the other hand, with the aim of “diverting the eyes” of the people. As for the bureaus and staff headquarters, they are “involved” in the work of the “state”!

For a short period of time, the newspaper "Delo Naruda", the mouthpiece of the ruling "Socialist-Revolutionaries" party, wrote, acknowledging in an editorial article - acknowledging the insolence of the members of the "good environment" in which "everyone" engages in political prostitution - that the entire staff apparatus remained In essence and without change, even in the ministries belonging to the “socialists” (and there is no blame for this expression!) and that he works according to the old pattern and impedes “with all freedom” the revolutionary initiatives! And assuming that this recognition did not exist, would it not be evidenced by the actual participation of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the government? What is far more indicative here is the fact that Messrs. Chernov, Rusanov, Zenzinov and their co-editors of “Delo Naroda” who are in the Assembly of Constitutional Democrats (Cadets) in the ministry have lost their shame to such an extent that they are no longer ashamed to announce publicly without a reddening of shame on their faces, as if they were announcing a matter. It is insignificant, because everything is going on according to the old style “they have” in the ministries!! The revolutionary democratic cult to deceive the rural gullibility, the bureaucratic bureaucratic bureaucracy to "please" the capitalists - this is the thrust of the "honorable" coalition.

The Commune has replaced the corrupt and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society with institutions in which freedom of opinion and research does not degenerate into deception, because parliamentarians must work themselves, implement their own laws, verify their practical results themselves, and give an account directly to their constituents. Representative institutions remain, but parliamentarianism as a special system, as a separation of legislative action from the executive, as an excellent position for representatives, is absent here. We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions; But we can and must imagine it without parliamentarism if, for us, criticism of bourgeois society is not mere empty phrases, if our aspiration to overthrow the domination of the bourgeoisie is sincere and serious, and not an "electoral" phrase to hunt down workers' votes, as in the case of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, as in the case of Scheidemann. And Legion and Samba and Vannerfelde, and from a roll to understand.

And the rhetorician conveyed the significance that Marx, when he spoke about the functions of those employees who are needed by the Commune as well as by proletarian democracy, took for comparison the employees of “any employer”, i.e. a normal capitalist factory with its “workers, foremen and accountants”.

Marx is completely innocent of utopianism, in the sense that he does not fabricate, does not imagine a "new" society. both. He studies, as he studies the course of natural history, the birth of the new society from the old and the forms of transition from this to that. It takes the practical experience of the mass proletarian movement, and endeavors to draw practical lessons from it. He “learns” from the Commune, like all the great revolutionary thinkers who were not afraid to learn from the experience of the great movements of the oppressed class and did not deliver “sermons” to them with the arrogance of his work (similar to Plekhanov’s sermon: “You should not take up arms” or Tsereteli’s sermon “It is the duty of the class to abide by its limits.”

The issue of abolishing the bureaucracy cannot be raised all at once, everywhere and completely. This is utopia. But breaking the old bureaucratic machine all at once and proceeding without delay to build a new one made it possible to gradually eliminate the direct duty of the revolutionary proletariat.

Capitalism simplifies the functions of managing the “state” and makes it possible to limit the whole matter to the organization of the proletarians (as the ruling class), which hires “workers, foremen and accountants” in the name of the whole of society.

We are not utopians. We do not "dream" of dispensing at once with every administration, with every submission. These chaotic dreams resulting from a lack of understanding of the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat are completely alien to Marxism and in reality do nothing but postpone the socialist revolution until people are not what they are. no. We want the socialist revolution with the people as they are today, with those people who cannot dispense with submission, from control, from “observers and accountants.”

But the armed vanguard, the vanguard of all the exploited and all the working people, must submit to the proletariat. One can and should proceed immediately, overnight, to replace the privileged "heading" of state officials with the simple functions of "controllers and accountants" by jobs which from today are entirely at the level of development of the townspeople in general and can be done perfectly for a "worker's wages".

We will organize large-scale production on the basis of what capitalism has established, and we the workers ourselves, relying on our labor experience and establishing a very strict discipline, an iron discipline supported by the state authority of the armed workers, will limit the role of state employees to that of mere executors of what it entrusts them with, to the role of “controllers and accountants.” (Of course, with technicians of all kinds, types, and grades) they are responsible and can be withdrawn and receive modest salaries. This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with when making the proletarian revolution. And this beginning based on mass production naturally leads to the gradual “withering away” of all the bureaucracy, which gradually leads to the emergence of a system – a system without objectors, a system that does not resemble the slavery of wage labor – in which the functions of control and accounting that are becoming simpler and simpler are achieved by everyone in turns. Then these jobs become a habit and eventually disappear as special jobs carried out by a special class of people.

A clever German Social-Democrat from the 1990s sent the Post Office a model of the socialist project. And this is true of all health. The post office is now organized on the model of a state capitalist monopoly. Imperialism is gradually turning all trusts into projects of this kind. For the “simple” workers, who are immersed in work until the ears and are hungry, the same bourgeois bureaucracy sits above them. But the social management mechanism is in these projects ready. As soon as the capitalists fall and the iron hand of the armed workers breaks the resistance of these exploiters and breaks the bureaucratic machine of the current state, we see before us a machine liberated from the “parasite” and equipped with the best technical equipment that the united workers themselves can operate in the best way by hiring technical experts, controllers and accountants, rewarding them for their work, all of them as they are. The same applies to all state employees in general, with the wages of a worker. This is the practical, concrete task, immediately realizable in relation to all trusts, which frees the working people from investment and takes into account the experience that the Commune has begun in practice (especially in the field of state-building).

Organizing the entire national economy according to the postal pattern, provided that the salaries of technical experts and accountants, like all employees, do not exceed the "worker's wages", under the control and command of the armed proletariat - this is our direct aim. This is the country we need. This is the economic foundation on which it should be based. This will lead to the elimination of parliamentarism and the preservation of representative institutions. This is what will save the working classes from the prostitution of these institutions by the bourgeoisie.

4- Organizing the unity of the nation

“...and it was stated very clearly in the Brief of the National Organization, which the Commune did not have time to elaborate in greater detail, that the Commune must … become the political form of even the smallest village” … and it was the Commune that had to elect the “deputies of the nation” in Paris.

“...the few but very important functions which would remain in the hands of the central government were not to be abolished - such a claim was deliberately false - but to be transferred to the functionaries of the Commune, that is, to officials with strictly defined responsibility...

… And the unity of the nation would not have been severed, but on the contrary, it would have been organized by means of communal construction. The unity of the nation was to become a reality by eliminating the authority of the state, which was claiming to be the embodiment of that unity, but wished to be independent of the nation, superior to it. In reality, this state power was nothing but a parasitic appendage on the body of the nation... The task was to amputate the purely oppressive apparatus of the old governmental power, to wrest the usual functions from an authority that aspired to be above society and hand them over to the responsible servants of society.

The book of the apostate Bernstein, “Preliminaries to Socialism and the Tasks of Social-Democracy,” which became famous in the style of Herastrat, shows us in the clearest way to what extent the opportunists in contemporary Social-Democracy did not understand - and it is correct to say: they did not want to understand - these trials of Marx Precisely, this program “in terms of its political content resembles in all its essential features a very great resemblance to Proudhon’s federalism … and despite all the differences between Marx and the “petty bourgeois” Proudhon (Bernstein puts the words “petty bourgeois” in double brackets, which, in his opinion, should give the expression A bit of flavor), the course of thinking they have on these points is close to the maximum.” There is no doubt - Bernstein continues - that the importance of municipal councils is on the rise, but “it seems doubtful to me that the first duty of democracy is to abolish (literally Auflosung: dissolve) modern states and completely change (Umwandlung: overturn) their organization as Marx and Proudhon envision, That is, the formation of the National Assembly from delegates from the councils of the regions or provinces, which in turn consist of delegates from the communes, so that the entire previous form of national representation is completely eliminated” (Bernstein, “Preliminaries”, pp. 134 and 136, German edition, year 1899).

It is most terrible to confuse Marx's views on "the abolition of state power, on a parasite" with Proudhon's union! But it is not by chance, because it would not even occur to an opportunist that Marx is not speaking here at all of federalism as the antithesis of centralism, but of the smashing of the old, bourgeois state machine that exists in all bourgeois countries.

The opportunist only thinks of what he sees around him from the environment of the petty bourgeoisie and the “reformist” stagnation, that is, he is compelled to think of mere “municipal councils”! As for the proletarian revolution, the opportunist has lost even the ability to think about it.

This is funny. Significantly, however, no one argued with Bernstein on this point. It was refuted by many, especially Plekhanov in Russian literature and Kautsky in European literature, but neither one nor the other talked about this distortion of Marx by Bernstein.

The opportunist has lost his ability to think revolutionary and to think about revolution to the extent that he attributes “federalism” to Marx and confuses him with Proudhon, the founder of anarchism. As for Kautsky and Plekhanov, who wish to be among the orthodox Marxists and to defend the teachings of revolutionary Marxism, they are silent about that! Herein lies the root of the excessive vulgarity of views on the difference between Marxism and anarchism, a vulgarity that accompanies Kautskyists and opportunists alike and which we will talk about later.

There is no trace of federalism in what we have cited of Marx's trials of the experience of the Commune. Marx and Proudhon meet exactly where the opportunist Bernstein does not see. Marx and Proudhon differ precisely in what Bernstein sees as the similarities.

Marx and Proudhon meet in the fact that the two call for “breaking” the modern state machine. This similarity between Marxism and anarchism (Proudhon and Bakunin alike) does not want the opportunists or the Kautskyists to see it because they have deviated from Marxism on this point.

Marx differs from Proudhon, as well as from Bakunin, on the question of federalism in a concrete way (as well as on the dictatorship of the proletariat). Federalism initially stems from the petty-bourgeois views of anarchism. Marx is a centralist. With regard to what we have mentioned about his trials, there is no retreat from centralization. Only people whose heads have been stuffed with petty bourgeois “blind superstitious faith” in the state can see in the abolition of the bourgeois state machine the abolition of centralization!

But if the proletarians and the poor peasants take state power into their own hands, if they freely organize themselves into a commune and unite the work of all communes in strikes against capital, in smashing the resistance of the capitalists, in transferring private ownership of railways, factories, land, etc. to the whole nation, to the whole of society Wouldn't that be from the center? Isn't that the most upright democratic centralism? blah proletarian centralism?

Bernstein could never imagine the possibility of voluntary centralization, the voluntary unification of the communes into a nation, the voluntary cohesion of the proletarian communes in order to destroy bourgeois rule and the bourgeois state machine. Bernstein, like all petty-bourgeois-minded people, conceives of centralism as something that can only be imposed and maintained from above, through the bureaus of officials and the military junta.

Marx deliberately pointed out, as if anticipating that his views might be distorted, that the accusation of the Commune of wanting to destroy the unity of the nation and to abolish the central power was a deliberate falsification. Marx intended to use the expression “organizing the unity of the nation” in order to contrast bourgeois and military-bureaucratic centralism with conscious and democratic proletarian centralism.

But… I would have listened if you called alive. However, the opportunists in modern Social-Democracy do not want at all to hear of the abolition of state power, of the amputation of a parasite.

5- Eliminate the parasite, on the state

We have quoted the appropriate sayings of Marx, and we must supplement them with other sayings of his.

Marx wrote:

«… The usual lot of the new historical creativity is that it is considered as a companion to old or even obsolete forms of social life, to which new institutions bear some resemblance. Thus, this new commune which smashes (bricht-breaks) the power of the modern state is seen as a revival of the medieval communes...as a federation of small states (Montesque, Girondists),...as an amplified form of the old struggle against excessive centralization...

… The communal organization would have restored to the social body all the forces that had hitherto been swallowed up by the “state,” that parasitic appendage that feeds on society and impedes its free progress. This alone was enough to advance the revival of France.

…that the Commune organization would have placed the rural producers under the spiritual leadership of the principal cities of each district and secured for them there, in the person of the urban workers, the natural representatives of their interests. The existence of the Commune implied in itself, as something self-evident, local self-administration, but not as an antithesis to state power, which from now on becomes superfluous.

"Eliminating the power of the state," which was a "parasitic superfluity," "amputating" it, "destroying" it; “State power is already superfluous” - in these terms Marx spoke of the state in his assessment and analysis of the experience of the Commune.

All of this was written almost half a century ago, and now it is time for us to do what looks like excavations to reach the understanding of the vast masses of the teachings of Marxism undistorted. When the era of the new great proletarian revolutions came, in this era exactly they forgot the conclusions drawn by Marx from tracing the last great revolution that took place in his life.

“…The multiplicity of interpretations which the Commune followed, and the multiplicity of interests in which it found expression, prove that it was a very flexible political form, while all previous forms of government were forms of oppression in their essence. And the real secret of the Commune was this: it was, in essence, the government of the working class, it was the product of the struggle of a class of producers against a class of the exploited, it was the political form finally discovered under which the economic emancipation of labor could be achieved...

Had it not been for this last condition, communal organization would have been impossible and would have been a fraud… »

The utopians set out to “discover” the political forms under which the reorganization of society on the basis of socialism should take place. The anarchists turned a blind eye to the question of political forms in general. The opportunists in Parliamentary Social-Democracy accepted it as an insurmountable limit, and furrowed their foreheads in kneeling and prostrating themselves before this “idol” and declared anarchism every tendency to destroy these forms.

Marx concluded from the entire history of socialism and political struggle that the state must perish and that the transitional form of its demise (the transition from the state to the non-state) will be "the proletariat organized into a ruling class." But Marx did not take it upon himself to discover the forms of this future. He limited himself to following French history closely, to analyzing it, and to drawing the conclusion to which the year 1851 led: Things are approaching the destruction of the bourgeois state machine.

When the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat broke out, Marx, despite the failure of this movement, despite its shortness, despite its apparent weakness, began to study the forms it had discovered.

The Commune is the form that the proletarian revolution has "finally discovered" under which the economic emancipation of labor can be achieved.

The Commune is the first attempt of the proletarian revolution to destroy the bourgeois state machine and the political form that has been “at last discovered” and which can and must replace the broken one.

We will see in what follows from the research that the Russian revolutionaries in the years 1905 and 1917 pursued the issue of the Commune in another case and in other circumstances, and that they prove Marx's genius historical analysis.

Chapter 4 continues. Additional Explanations of Engels

Marx has advanced what is essential on the question of the importance of the experience of the Commune. Engels repeatedly returned to the same topic, explaining Marx's analysis and conclusions, and clarifying the other aspects of the issue with force and clarity, which makes it necessary to deal with these explanations in particular.

1-«The issue of housing»

Engels had taken into account the experience of the Commune in his book on housing issues (in 1872) when he dealt in it several times with the tasks of the revolution against the state. What is striking is that he clearly showed, on the basis of this tangible subject, on the one hand, the similarities between the proletarian state and the present state, and on the other hand, the aspects of contrast or the transition to the abolition of the state.

«What is the way to solve the housing issue? This issue is solved in the current society just as it solves every other social issue: by gradually balancing between supply and demand economically, and this solution raises the issue again in itself, that is, it does not give any solution. How does the social revolution solve this issue? This depends not only on the circumstances of time and place, but also on matters of much greater scope, chief among which is that of eliminating the antithesis between town and country. And since we do not want to do justice to the invention of utopian forms for organizing the future society, it would be more than idle to stop at these issues. One thing is clear, however: in the great cities there are now a sufficient number of dwelling-buildings sufficient to satisfy at once the real need for dwellings, provided that these buildings are reasonably utilized. It achieves this, of course, only by confiscating the buildings of the current owners and by making them dwellings for workers who have no homes or who live in very crowded apartments. And as soon as the proletariat gains political power, this measure imposed by the public interest becomes an easy matter to achieve, like all other operations carried out by the present state to confiscate apartments and make them work” (p. 22, German edition, 1887).

The discussion here does not revolve around changing the form of state power, but rather deals with the content of its activity only. The confiscation and occupation of dwellings are also ordered by the present State. The proletarian state, from the formal point of view, also “issues” orders to occupy flats and confiscate houses. What is clear, however, is that the old executive apparatus, the apparatus of officials attached to the bourgeoisie, will, on the whole, be incapable of carrying out the orders of the proletarian state.

“… It must be noted that the actual possession by the working people of all the tools of labor, of all industry, is the direct opposite of Proudhon’s ‘purchase’. In the latter case, each individual worker becomes the owner of a dwelling, a piece of agricultural land, and the tools of work. In the first case, the “working people” remain the collective owners of homes, factories, and tools. These houses, factories, etc., we do not think that they will be given to individual persons or individual associations to benefit from them without covering the costs, at least in the transition phase. Also, the elimination of land ownership does not require the elimination of real estate rent, but rather its transfer to society, albeit in an adapted manner. Accordingly, the actual ownership of all the tools of labor by the working people does not in any way negate the survival of leasing and renting” (p. 68).

The issue discussed in this paragraph, by which we mean the issue of the economic foundations for the withering away of the state, is the subject of our discussion in the next chapter. Engels speaks here with extreme caution, saying: “We do not think” that the proletarian state will distribute housing without wages, “at least in the transition period.” Renting the houses that belong to the people as a whole to this or that family in exchange for a rent requires the collection of this rent and a kind of control and determination of this or that rate in the distribution of housing. All this requires some form of state, but it does not require a special military and bureaucratic apparatus with employees enjoying special privileges. As for the transition to a state in which it becomes possible to give housing free of charge, it depends on the complete “withering away” of the state.

And if Engels talked about the transition of Blanqui's followers to the principled position of Marxism after the Commune and under the influence of its experiences, he formulated this position in the context of the conversation in the following way:

“… the necessity of the political action of the proletariat and its dictatorship, as a transition to the abolition of classes, and with it the state…” (p. 55).

Perhaps the amateurs of literal criticism or perhaps the bourgeois "annihilators of Marxism" see a contradiction between this recognition of the "abolition of the state" and the denial of this formulation, as anarchic, in the paragraph we mentioned above from "Anti-Dühring". It is not surprising if the opportunists put Engels himself among the "anarchists". Nowadays the social-chauvinists are more and more accusing the internationalists of anarchism.

Marxism has always taught that the state abolishes with the abolition of classes. The well-known passage in “Anti-Dühring” on the subject of “the withering away of the state” accuses the anarchists not merely of saying that the state is abolished, but of promoting the claim that it is possible to abolish the state “overnight.”

Since today's prevalent "Social-Democratic" tendency has completely distorted Marxism's position on anarchism in the question of the abolition of the state, it is very useful to mention a polemic of Marx and Engels with the anarchists.

2- An argument with the anarchists

This controversy dates back to 1872. Marx and Engels published two articles in an Italian socialist group against Proudhon's followers and "supporters of autocracy" or "opponents of power." These two articles were not published in "Neue Zeit" translated into German until 1913. .

Marx wrote mocking the anarchists and their denial of politics:

“… If the political struggle of the working class takes revolutionary forms, and if the workers establish their revolutionary dictatorship in place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, then they are committing a heinous crime, the crime of insulting principles, because the workers, in order to satisfy their crude daily needs, in order to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie, give The state is a revolutionary and temporary form instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state... » ("Neue Zeit" 1913-1914 year 32, vol. 1, p. 40).

In refuting the anarchists, Marx only denounced this kind of "abolition" of the state! He did not object to the clause stating that the state would disappear with the abolition of classes or that it would be abolished with the abolition of classes, he only objected to the idea that the workers would refrain from using arms, from the use of organized violence. That is, about the state, which must serve the following goal: “to destroy the resistance of the bourgeoisie.”

Marx deliberately refers - so as not to distort the significance of his struggle against anarchism - to the "revolutionary and transitory form" of the necessary state for the proletariat. The proletariat needs the state only for a limited time. We are not at all in disagreement with the anarchists on the question of abolishing the state as a goal. However, we assert that it is necessary to achieve this goal to temporarily use the tools, means, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the abolition of classes requires, as a temporary matter, the dictatorship of the oppressed class. Marx chooses the sunniest and clearest form for posing the question against the anarchists: Should the workers, having overthrown the capitalist yoke, “lay down arms,” or should they use them against the capitalists to break their resistance? And what is the regular use of arms by one class against another, if not a "transient form" of the state?

Let every Social-Democrat ask himself: Does he himself raise the question of the state in this way in the debate with the anarchists? Did the great majority of the official socialist parties of the Second International raise these questions in this way? Engels sets out these same ideas in much greater detail and in very simple terms. Above all, he ridicules the disorder of thinking of Proudhon's supporters, who called themselves "opponents of authority," that is, they denied all authority, all submission, all authority. Take any factory, railroad, or ship out on the open sea, says Engels. Is it not clear that the work of these complex technical institutions based on the use of machines and the systematic cooperation of many people is impossible without a kind of submission, and therefore, without some kind of authority or authority? Engels wrote:

«… If I objected with these arguments to the most intransigent opponents of the authority, they could not answer me without one answer: “Yes! This is correct. However, the discussion here is not about the authority that we give to our delegates, but rather about a specific assignment. These people think we can change something if we change its name….”

And after Engels showed in this way that power and self-rule are relative concepts and that the field of their application changes according to the various stages of social development and that it is foolish to understand them as absolutes, and after he added that the field of the use of machines and mass production is constantly expanding, he moved on from the general discussion on power to the question of the state.

He wrote:

“If the advocates of self-rule confine themselves to saying that the coming social organization will not allow the Sultan except within the limits that are necessarily imposed by the conditions of production, then it is not possible to reach an agreement with them. But they are blind to all the facts which make authority necessary, and they fight zealously against the word.

Why do the opponents of the authority not limit themselves to shouting against the political authority, against the state? All socialists agree that the state will disappear, and with it the political authority, as a result of the upcoming social revolution, meaning that social jobs lose their political character and turn into mere administrative jobs that watch over social interests. However, the opponents of power demand the abolition of the political state at once, before the social relations from which the state arose are abolished. They demand that the abolition of power be the first act of the social revolution.

Did these gentlemen see a revolution one day? The revolution is undoubtedly an authority beyond an authority, the revolution is an act by which a section of the population imposes its will on the other section with guns, by war, with cannons, that is, by means whose authority is not above authority. And the dominant party must necessarily maintain its supremacy by means of the fear that turns its weapons on the reactionaries. If the Paris Commune had not rested on the power of the armed people against the bourgeoisie, could it have held out for more than one day? Do we have the right to blame her, on the contrary, because she did not resort to this authority except very little? Thus, one of two things: Either the opponents of power do not know what they are saying, and in this case they do nothing but create confusion, or they know and in this case they betray the cause of the proletariat. In both cases, they serve nothing but reactionary” (p. 39).

This paragraph deals with issues that should be discussed in connection with the issue of the relationship between politics and economics when the state withers away (and we will discuss this topic in the next chapter). Among these issues related to the transformation of social functions from political functions to mere administrative functions and the issue of the “political state”. This last term, which can especially cause misunderstanding, refers to the process of state withering away: the state in decline can be called, at a certain degree of its withering away, the apolitical state.

The most significant matter in this passage of Engels is again how the question is raised against the anarchists. The Social-Democrats who wished to be students of Engels had argued with the anarchists millions of times since 1873, but they did not argue as the Marxists could and should argue. The anarchic conception of the abolition of the state is confused and non-revolutionary, - this is how Engels put it. The anarchists do not want to see the revolution precisely in its emergence and development, in its special tasks regarding violence, power, power and the state.

The criticism of anarchism familiar to contemporary Social-Democrats has been limited to this pure petty-bourgeois platitude: “We recognize the state, but the anarchists do not!” Of course, this vulgarity cannot but alienate the thinking workers and revolutionaries, albeit to a limited extent. As for Engels, he gives another opinion: he asserts that all socialists recognize that the state perishes as a result of the socialist revolution. Then he raises concretely the revolution, i.e. precisely that question which the opportunist Social-Democrats usually avoid, leaving it, so to speak, to the anarchists alone in its "study". And as soon as Engels raised this question, he took it head on: Shouldn't the Commune have recourse to a greater extent to the revolutionary power of the state, that is, to the power of the proletariat armed and organized into the ruling class?

‘The dominant official Social-Democracy usually avoids the question of the concrete tasks of the proletariat in the revolution either with the mere cynicism of a petty-bourgeois philistine or, at best, with the sophistry of evasion: “Who tithes?” Thus the anarchists obtained the right to accuse this Social-Democracy of betraying its duty to educate the workers in a revolutionary way. Engels drew on the experience of the last proletarian revolution precisely in order to study in the most concrete way what and how the proletariat should do with regard to both the banks and the state.

3- A message to Pebble

One of the most wonderful, if not the most wonderful, is what was mentioned in the writings of Marx and Engels on the issue of the state, the following paragraph in a letter addressed by Engels to Bebel on March 18-28, 1875. We say between two objections that this letter was published by Bebel for the first time, according to what We know, in the second volume of his memoirs ("Memories from My Life") issued in 1911, that is, 36 years after they were edited and sent.

Engels wrote to Bebel, criticizing the same project of the Gotha program, which Marx also criticized in his famous letter to Barakah, and touched in particular on the issue of the state, saying:

«…the free popular state has become a free state. A free state means, in terms of linguistic terms, a state that is free towards its citizens, i.e. a state with an authoritarian government. All this chatter about the state must be stopped, especially after the Commune, which ceased to be a state in the original sense of the word. Enough of what the anarchists blinded us with the "people's state", although it was said without ambiguity or ambiguity in the book Marx against Proudhon and then in the "Communist Manifesto" that the state, with the establishment of the socialist social system, dissolves itself (sich auflost) and perishes. And since the state is an institution of only a transitory nature that can be used in struggle, in revolution, to suppress opponents by force, talk of a free people's state is idle talk: since the proletariat needs the state, it needs it not for freedom, but for the sake of oppression. Its opponents, and when it becomes possible to talk about freedom, then the state as a state will disappear. And so we propose replacing the word state everywhere with the word 'commune' (Gemeinwesen), this wonderful old German word whose meaning coincides with the meaning of the French word 'commune' (pp. 321-322 of the German edition).

We should bear in mind that this letter deals with a party programme, which Marx criticized in a letter dated only a few weeks after this letter (Marx's letter dated May 5, 1875), and that Engels was living at the time with Marx in London. Therefore, when Engels said “we” in his last phrase, he undoubtedly suggested, in his own name and in the name of Marx, to the leader of the German Workers’ Party to delete the word “state” from the program and to replace it with the word “common.”

And how much the leaders of the current "Marxism" adapted to the liking of the opportunists would have lamented about "anarchism" if it was suggested that they introduce such a correction to the program!

Let them wail. The bourgeoisie will praise them for that.

We will continue our work. When reconsidering the program of our party, no doubt the advice of Engels and Marx should be taken into account, in order to be closer to the truth, in order to properly direct the struggle of the working class for its liberation. It is most likely that among the Bolsheviks there were no opponents of the advice of Engels and Marx. Perhaps the difficulty will not be in finding the term. In German there are two words for “common,” from which Engels chose the word which does not mean a separate community, but a group of commons, the system of commons. As for Russian, there is no such word, and it may be necessary to choose the French word “commune”, although this also creates some confusion.

“The Commune did not remain a state in the original sense of the word” - this is Engels' most important theoretical assertion. This assertion is completely understandable after what we have shown above. The Commune ceased to be a state as long as it did not succeed in oppressing the majority of the population, but rather the minority (the exploiters), and it destroyed the bourgeois state machine; Instead of the special force of repression, the population itself came to the stage. And all this is a retreat from the state in its own sense. And if the commune was consolidated, what remained of the state's traces would automatically "wither away" in it, and it would not have had to "abolish" the state's institutions: these will be abolished to the extent that they have nothing left to do.

"The anarchists gouge out our eyes with the 'people's state'." When Engels said this he had in mind above all Bakunin and his campaigns against the German Social-Democrats. Engels considers these campaigns correct insofar as the concept of a "people's state", like the "free people's state", is absurd and superseded by socialism. Engels sought to correct the struggle of the German Social-Democrats against the anarchists, to make this struggle correct in principle, and to purify it of opportunist illusions about the "state". But warm his heart! For thirty-six years, Engels' letter has been kept in a box. We shall see below that Kautsky, even after the publication of this letter, stubbornly continued to repeat, in essence, the same mistakes against which Engels had warned.

Bebel addressed Engels in a reply letter dated September 21, 1875, in which he said, inter alia, that he "totally agreed" with his views on the draft program and that he blamed Liebknecht for his concession (p. 334 of the German edition of Bebel's memoirs. Vol. 2). However, if we take Pebel's pamphlet Our Goals, we find in it completely incorrect opinions about the state:

"The state based on class rule should be transformed into a people's state" (German edition of Unsere Ziele, 1886, p. 14).

This is what came in the ninth (ninth!) edition of Pamphlet Pebble! It is not surprising if German Social-Democracy absorbed these opportunist views on the state, because they were so obstinately repeated, especially since Engels' revolutionary explanations were hidden in the box, and all the circumstances of life had long "forgotten" the revolution.

4-Criticism of the draft Erfurt program

When examining Marxist teachings on the state, one cannot overlook Engels' criticism of the Erfurt Programme, in a letter of criticism that he sent to Kautsky on June 29, 1891, which was not published in Neue Zeit until ten years later, because this criticism It deals precisely and mainly with the opportunist views of the Social-Democrats on questions of state organization.

And we point out in the context of the conversation that Engels also made a very valuable observation on economic issues showing how he was able, because of that, to discern to some extent the tasks of our era, the imperialist era. And here is this observation: With regard to the word "planlosigkeit" in the draft program to describe capitalism, Engels wrote:

“…if we pass from joint-stock companies to trusts that subjugate to themselves and monopolize entire branches of industry, this is not only the end of private production, but also the end of unsystematicism.” Neue Zeit, year 20, vol. 1, 1901- 1902, p. 8)

We are here about the basic matter in the theoretical assessment of modern capitalism, that is, of imperialism, and we mean that capitalism turns into monopoly capitalism. It is necessary to refer to the word “capitalism”, because the very common mistake is the bourgeois reformist claim that monopoly capitalism or monopoly state capitalism has not remained capitalist and that the name “state socialism” and so on can be applied to it. Certainly, the trusts did not give, and they do not give until now, and they cannot give the full methodology. But to the extent that the methodology gives, and to the extent that the tyrants of capital calculate in advance the amounts of production on the national or even the global scale, and to the extent that they systematically control them, we will remain in any case under capitalism, and that there is a new stage for it, but under capitalism to be sure. As for the “closeness” of this capitalism to socialism, the true representatives of the proletariat should have an argument supporting the approach of the socialist revolution, its ease, the possibility of achieving it, and its urgent necessity.

But let's go back to the question of the state. Engels gives very valuable references here in three respects: first, on the issue of the republic, second, on the relationship of the national issue to the organization of the state, and third, on the issue of local self-administration.

As for the Republic, Engels made it the center of gravity in his criticism of the draft Erfurt programme. If we recall the importance the Erfurt Program acquired in the whole of international Social-Democracy and how it became a model for the entire Second International, we can say without exaggeration that Engels here criticizes opportunism in the entire Second International.

Engels wrote:

«There is a significant lack of the project's political demands. It is devoid of exactly what (Engels' emphasis) he should have said.

Then he explains that the German constitution is essentially a copy of the deeply reactionary constitution of 1850 and that the Reichstag is, in the words of Wilhelm Liebknecht, nothing more than “a fig leaf of absolutism” and that the desire to achieve “the transfer of all instruments of labor into public property On the basis of the constitution that gave legitimacy to the small states and the federation of German states, it is an "obvious absurdity."

"It's dangerous to take up this topic." This was added by Engels, who knew perfectly well that putting the republic's demand openly into the program was not possible in Germany. But Engels does not simply acquiesce in this consideration, which suffices to sell "everyone." Rather, he continues: “But the issue must be moved in any case, in one way or another. The necessity of this is shown by the common opportunism (einreibende) of today in a large section of the Social-Democratic press. Fearing that the Anti-Socialist Law might revive, or because they remember some of the premature statements made under this law, they now want the party to recognize that the current legal conditions in Germany are sufficient to achieve all its demands peacefully... »

As for the fact that the German Social-Democrats acted out of fear of giving rise to the effect of an exceptional law, Engels puts this basic fact in the foreground, calls it, without equivocation, opportunism, and declares that the dream of a “peaceful” path is completely absurd, precisely because For the absence of a republic and liberties in Germany. Engels was careful enough to keep his hands free. He admits that it is "possible" in republican countries or in which liberties exist so well to "imagine" (just "imagine") the peaceful development to socialism, but he repeats that in Germany,

«…in Germany, where the government is almost omnipotent and where the Reichstag and all other representative institutions possess nothing of real power, to call for a reason means to remove the fig leaf from absolutism.

«… Such a policy, in the end, can only lead the party to the path of misguidance. They put in the first place abstract general political issues and in this way hide the direct, concrete issues that impose themselves on the agenda at the first important events, at the first political crisis. Is it possible that the result of this is other than the fact that the party finds itself suddenly and at the decisive hour in a state of impotence, other than the fact that the party finds itself in a state of ambiguity and lack of unity regarding crucial issues, because it has never discussed these issues before...

This forgetting of the major, fundamental considerations out of concern for today's broad interests, this running behind broad successes, this struggle for them without reckoning with the consequences, and this sacrificing the future of the movement for the sake of the present, that all of this may have "honest" motives as well. But this is opportunism, and it remains opportunism, and perhaps “honest” opportunism is the most dangerous of opportunists…

If anything is beyond doubt, it is the fact that our party and the working class can only attain sovereignty under a political form such as the democratic republic. Even the latter is the special form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as demonstrated by the Great French Revolution...»

In this paragraph, Engels repeats, in a very clear manner, that basic idea that permeated all of Marx's writings, meaning that the democratic republic is the shortest path to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Because this republic, although it does not in any way remove the rule of capital and thus the oppression of the masses and the class struggle, it inevitably leads to the expansion of this struggle, its pricing, its disclosure and its intensification to the point that the possibility of securing the fundamental interests of the masses of the oppressed, when? This possibility is inevitably and exclusively realized in the dictatorship of the proletariat And in the leadership of these masses by the proletariat. For the entire Second International, too, these are the “forgotten words” of Marxism, and their oblivion was extraordinarily vividly shown by the history of the Menshevik Party during the first half year of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Engels dealt with the issue of the Federal Republic from the perspective of the national composition of the population and wrote:

"What should replace today's Germany?" (The same reactionary monarchical constitution and the no less reactionary division into small states, which perpetuates rather than dissolves the characteristics of "Prussianness" in Germany as a whole.) In my opinion, the proletariat can implement only the form of a unitary and indivisible republic. The Federal Republic is still necessary heretofore, in general, in the vast territory of the United States, though it is already becoming an obstacle in the east thereof. It is a step forward in England, where four nations live on the two islands, and where, although Parliament is one, they unite side by side three legislative systems. It has been nurtured in little Switzerland for a long time. If the Federal Republic can still be tolerated, it is for one reason that Switzerland is satisfied with the role of a purely passive member of the system of European states. For Germany, a Swiss-style federal organization would be a huge step backwards. There are two points that distinguish the federal state from the fully unified state, which is the fact that each individual state joining the federation has its own civil and penal legislation and its own judicial system, and then the fact that in addition to the People’s Assembly there is a council of representatives of states in which each canton (state) votes as a canton regardless of what Whether it is big or small. The federal state in Germany is a transitional form to a fully unitary state. It is not necessary to go back to the "revolution from above" in the years 1866 and 1870, but to complete it with a "movement from below".

Engels is not only indifferent to the question of the forms of the state, but on the contrary, he tries to analyze with utmost precision the transitional forms themselves, in order to determine, according to the concrete historical characteristics of each specific case, the following: a transition from anything to anything something considered the transitional form in question.

Engels, like Marx, defends, from the point of view of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution, democratic centralism, the republic as an indivisible whole. He sees in the Federal Republic either an exceptional case and an obstacle hindering development, or a transition from monarchy to a centralized republic, a "step forward" in certain special circumstances. Among these special circumstances, the national issue emerges.

We do not see either Engels or Marx, despite their merciless criticism of the reaction of small states and the cover-up of this reaction in the national question in certain cases, even if they remained inclined to evade the national question - the sin often committed by the Dutch and Polish Marxists who proceed from The perfectly legitimate struggle against narrow petty-bourgeois nationalism in “their” little states.

Even in England, where geographical conditions, the unity of language, and the history of many centuries seem to have “put an end” to the national question for the various small regions of England, even in England, Engels takes account of the obvious fact that the national question still exists, and therefore recognizes the Federal Republic "A step forward". It is evident that there is not even a shadow here to refrain from criticizing the shortcomings of the Federal Republic and from the absolutely resolute propaganda and struggle for the sake of a united central democratic republic.

But Engels never understood democratic centralism in the bureaucratic sense that the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologues give to this concept, including the anarchists. Centralization, in the view of Engels, does not at all negate the large-scale local self-administration, which, in the case of the “communes” and provinces voluntarily withdrawing from the unity of the state, undoubtedly removes every aspect of bureaucracy and every aspect of “issuing orders” from above.

Developing the concepts of programmatic Marxism with regard to the state, Engels wrote:

«…Thus, a unitary republic but not like the present French Republic which is nothing more than an empire without an emperor founded in 1798. From 1792 to 1798, every French province and every commune (Gemeinde) exercised complete self-administration in the American style And we should do that, too. As for the question of how self-administration should be organized and how it is possible to dispense with the bureaucracy, this is what America and the first French Republic have shown us, and Canada, Australia and other English colonies are also showing us now. Such self-administration at the level of regions (provinces) and municipalities in free organizations is much more, for example, than the Swiss federation, where the state is in fact very independent in relation to the Bund” (that is, in relation to the federal state as a whole) “but it is also independent in relation to the judiciary (Bezirk) and to the municipality . Statthalter and police prefects are appointed by the state governments, which is utterly absent in English-speaking countries, and which we shall have to completely eradicate in the future as Prussian prefects and magistrates” (commissioners, prefects, prefects, and in general all officials appointed from above) . Accordingly, Engels proposes that the article on self-administration be formulated in the following form: “complete self-administration in the regions” (districts or governorates), “in the district and municipality through officials elected on the basis of universal suffrage; Abolition of all local and regional authorities appointed by the state.

I already pointed out in Pravda (No. 68 of May 28, 1917), which was closed down by the government of Kerensky and other "socialist" ministers, that on this point - which, of course, is by no means the only one - our so-called socialist representatives have apostatised. The so-called revolutionary so-called democracy has a blatant retreat from democracy*. It is understandable that those people who have bound themselves in a “coalition” with the imperialist bourgeoisie have remained deaf to these remarks.

It is of the utmost importance to point out that Engels, relying on the facts, refuted on the basis of a very accurate example two of the illusions so widespread, especially among petty-bourgeois democracies, that the federal republic inevitably means more freedoms than in the centralized republic. This is not true. The facts mentioned by Engels regarding the central French Republic in the years 1792-1798 and the Swiss Federal Republic refute this claim. The truly democratic central republic has given more freedoms than the federal republic. Or in other words: The most complete freedom known in history at the local level and at the governorate level, etc., was given by the central republic, not the federal republic.

This fact, like the issue of the Federal Republic, the Central Republic, and the Autonomous Administration in general, was our partisan propaganda and still does not devote enough attention to them.

5- Preface to Marx's 1891 book "The Civil War"

In the preface to the second edition of The Civil War in France - this preface is dated March 18, 1891 and was published for the first time in the journal Neue Zeit - Engels gives, in addition to what he gave, a presentation of valuable observations on issues related to the situation From the State, a wonderfully clear summation of the lessons of the Commune. This in-depth summation of all the experience of the period of twenty years separating the author from the Commune, and directed specifically against the "blind, superstitious faith in the state" widespread in Germany, can rightfully be described as the last word of Marxism on the question under consideration.

Engels notes: After every revolution in France, the workers were armed, “therefore disarming the workers was the first requirement for the bourgeoisie in power. Therefore, after every revolution in which the workers are victorious, a new struggle breaks out, ending in their defeat...»

The summary of the experience of bourgeois revolutions is as eloquent as its significance. The crux of the issue, including on the question of the state (Do the oppressed class have weapons?) is remarkably well indicated here. It is this very essence that professors under the influence of bourgeois ideology are as often avoided as petty-bourgeois democrats. In the Russian Revolution of 1917, the first "Menshevik", "Marxist-him-too", Tsereteli had the honor (honor of Cavaignac!) to divulge this secret of bourgeois revolutions. In his "historic" speech on June 11, Tsereteli slipped his tongue and declared that the bourgeoisie had decided to disarm the Petrograd workers, pretending, of course, that this decision was his own and that it was a necessity imposed by the interest of the "state" in general!

The historic speech Tsereteli gave on June 11 will, of course, be for all historians of the revolution of 1917 one of the clearest evidences showing how the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks led by Mr. Tsereteli went over to the side of the bourgeoisie, against the revolutionary proletariat.

Another observation made by Engels casually also relates to the question of the state and is related to religion. It is well known that German Social Democracy, the more it was degenerating and penetrating into opportunism, was slipping more and more towards a vulgar misinterpretation of the well-known formula: “Declaring religion is a personal matter.” This formula was interpreted in such a way that it appears that religion is a personal issue even for the revolutionary party of the proletariat!! It was against this complete betrayal of the revolutionary program of the proletariat that Engels revolted, who, in 1891, had noticed only the weakest early signs of opportunism in his party, which made him formulate his phrases with the utmost caution:

Since almost only the workers, or their recognized representatives, sit in the commune, the decisions it adopted bore an overtly proletarian character. These decisions, however, stipulated the implementation of reforms that the republican bourgeoisie abandoned for mere cowardice, and constitute the necessary basis for the free activity of the working class. Such was the realization of the principle that religion for the state was a purely personal matter. Or, the Commune issued orders that were directly in the interest of the working class and, in part, caused a deep rift in the old order of society...»

Engels deliberately referred to the phrase “with regard to the state”, aiming the blow not at the eyelid but at the pupil of the eye of German opportunism, which declared religion a personal matter for the party and thus reduced the party of the revolutionary proletariat to the level of the “free-thinking” petty bourgeoisie, which is extremely vulgar. ready to accept one's existence outside the realm of religion, but giving up the task of partisan struggle against the opium of religion that deranges the people.

The future historian of German Social-Democracy, when he searches for the reasons for its disgraceful bankruptcy in 1914, will find ample material on this question, beginning with the elusive statements that open the door wide to opportunism, contained in the articles of the intellectual leader of this party, Kautsky, And ending with the party’s position on “Los-von-Kirche-Bewegung” (the movement to secede from the Church) in 1913.

But let us now see how, twenty years after the Commune, Engels singled out the lessons it gave to the struggling proletariat.

And here are which lessons Engels laid out in the first place:

“…the unjust power which the former central government, the army, the political police, and the bureaucracy that Napoleon had established in 1798, and which every new government has since received as a coveted tool and wielded against its enemies—it was precisely this power that should have been overthrown.” Everywhere in France just as it fell in Paris.

The Commune had to realize from the outset that the working class, having come to power, could not continue to run things by means of the old state apparatus; and that the working class, in order not to lose again the sovereignty it has just won, must, on the one hand, overthrow all the old apparatus of oppression, which was formerly used against it, and, on the other, protect itself from its deputies and officials by declaring that they are all , and without exception, subject to withdrawal and replacement at any time… »

Engels points out over and over again that the state remains the state, not only under the monarchy, but also under the democratic republic, in the sense that it retains its main distinguishing feature: the transformation of the officials, the "servants of society", its organs, into its masters.

«… In order to prevent the state and state apparatus from transforming in this way from servants of society to its masters - a transformation that was inevitable in all previous states - the Commune resorted to two correct means: First, it appointed in all positions - administrative, judicial and educational - elected persons on the basis of universal suffrage, and at the same time approved the right to withdraw those elected at any time by a decision of their electors. Secondly, it paid all employees, young and old, only the wages earned by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune in general was 6,000 francs*. In this way a safe barrier was erected against the runner for winning positions and against careerism, even notwithstanding the binding mandates which were issued to the delegates to the representative bodies, and which were further introduced by the Commune...»

Engels approaches here to that point that stops consideration, where, on the one hand, straight democracy turns into socialism, and on the other hand requires socialism. This is because the abolition of the state requires the transformation of the functions of the state into operations of control and calculation so simple that they become within the reach and power of the great majority of the population, and then of the entire population. And the complete removal of careerism requires that “honorable” positions in the service of the state, even if they do not generate income, become bridges for jumping to high-income positions in banks and joint-stock companies, as always happens in all countries of capitalism even with the most freedom.

But Engels does not make the mistake that some Marxists make, for example, on the issue of the right of nations to self-determination: they say that this right is impossible under capitalism and unnecessary under socialism. And such an opinion that claims to be intelligent and is actually erroneous in reality can be repeated with regard to every democratic institution, including the payment of modest salaries to employees, because a completely straight democracy is impossible under capitalism, but under socialism, all democracy withers away.

This is a sophistry of the kind that old joke: Does a person become bald if one hair falls out of his head?

Developing democracy to the end, searching for forms of this development and actually verifying them, etc. All of this is a task of the struggle for the social revolution. There is no democracy, if taken separately, that gives rise to socialism, but democracy in life is never “taken” separately, but “taken together” and affects the economy as well, stimulates its development and is exposed to the influence of economic development, etc.. This is the dialectic of history. District.

And Engels goes on:

«... This explosion (Sprengung) of the power of the former state and its replacement by a new, truly democratic one, are described in detail in the third chapter of the 'Civil War'. But it was necessary to pause here again briefly at some of the features of this replacement, because the superstitious belief in the state had moved, in Germany specifically, from philosophy to the general consciousness of the bourgeoisie and even to many workers. The state, according to the teachings of the philosophers, is the kingdom of God on earth. The state is the sphere in which eternal truth and justice are or should be realized. From this derives the superstitious respect for the State and everything related to it, a respect that is more easily established because people are accustomed, from childhood, to imagine that the affairs and interests belonging to the whole of society can only be achieved and maintained in the manner used in the past, that is, by means of the State and its officials who give winning positions. People imagine that they are taking an extraordinarily daring step forward if they abandon belief in hereditary monarchy and become supporters of the democratic republic. As for the truth, the state is nothing but an apparatus for the oppression of one class by another, and this is true of the democratic republic to a degree no less true than it is true of the monarchy. And the state, even in the best case, is an evil inherited by the proletariat victorious in the struggle for class domination. The victorious proletariat, like the Commune, will have to amputate the worst aspects of this evil at once, until such time as a generation brought up in new, free social conditions can throw the whole ashes of the state onto the rubbish heap.

Engels warned the Germans not to forget, in the case of replacing monarchy with a republic, the foundations of socialism in the matter of the state in general. His warning now appears to be a lesson directed directly at Messrs. Tsereteli and Chernov and their ilk, who demonstrated in their "coalition" activity an extraordinary faith in the state and a superstitious reverence before it!

Two notes also: 1) If Engels says that the state remains an "apparatus for the oppression of one class over another" in the democratic republic "to a degree no less" than in property, this does not mean at all that the proletariat should be indifferent to the broader and freer form of class oppression It will greatly facilitate the struggle of the proletariat for the abolition of classes in general.

2) Why can only a new generation completely eradicate this state's apathy in its entirety? It is a question related to the question of transcending democracy, which we turn to.

6- Engels and the question of transcending democracy

It is possible for Engels to express his opinion on this subject in the context of discussing the issue of scientific inaccuracy in the designation "Social-Democrat".

Engels, in the preface to his collection of articles that he published in the eighteenth decade, in which he dealt with various topics, mainly “international” topics (“Internationales aus dem “Volksstaat””*) - that preface dated January 3, 1894, i.e. before He died a year and a half ago - he wrote that in all his articles he uses the word "communist" and not the expression "social-democratic", although it remains inaccurate (Unpassend, inappropriate) for a party whose economic program is not just a socialist program in general, but directly communist For a party whose ultimate political goal is to transcend the entire country and thus democracy as well. The names of real political parties (Engels' emphasis) do not apply to them in any case; The party develops, while the name remains.

The man of dialectics, Engels, remained faithful to dialectics until the end of his days. He says: We, Marx and I, had a wonderful, scientifically accurate name for the party, but there was no real party, that is, a mass proletarian party. Now (late 19th century) there is a real party, but its name is scientifically incorrect. It's okay, "cattle", the important thing is that the party develops, the important thing is that the scientific inaccuracy in its name should not be concealed from it, or it would not hinder it from developing in the right direction!

Perhaps some kind of witty person will console us Bolsheviks on the way to Engelsk: we have a real party, and it is developing well; “Cattle” is this empty, distorted word “Bolshevik” § which expresses absolutely nothing other than a purely accidental circumstance, which is that we obtained a majority at the Brussels-London Conference in 1903... I hesitate now, after our party endured in July and August the persecutions of the Republicans and petty-bourgeois democrats "Revolutionary" is what made the word "Bolshevik" so venerable in the eyes of the whole people, and after these persecution have indicated, moreover, the enormous historical step forward that our Party has taken in its actual development, I too may hesitate with regard to my proposal of April About changing our party name. Perhaps I would offer my comrades a “compromise”: to call ourselves the Communist Party, but to leave the word Bolsheviks in brackets...

But the question of the name of the party is incomparably less important than the question of the attitude of the revolutionary proletariat towards the state.

The usual trials about the state always contain the mistake that Engels warned here against falling into, and which we referred to incidentally in the foregoing research. We mean: It is always forgotten that the abolition of the state is the abolition of democracy as well, and that the withering away of the state is the withering away of democracy.

At first glance, this assertion seems very strange and incomprehensible. Perhaps there are those who fear, and think that we expect the advent of a social system in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority is not observed, because, what is democracy if it is not the recognition of this principle?

No. Democracy and the subordination of the minority to the majority are not the same thing. Democracy is a state that recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization to practice violence permanently against one class by another, or against one section of the population by another.

Our ultimate goal is the abolition of the state, that is, of all permanent organized violence, all violence against people in general. We do not expect the emergence of a social system in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority is not observed. But we aspire to socialism, and we are convinced that it will turn into communism, and as a result, all necessity to use violence against people in general, to subjugate one person to another, one section of the population to another, will disappear, because people will become accustomed to observing the basic conditions of life in society without violence and without submission.

To point out this element of habit, Engels spoke of an iron generation "brought up in new, free social conditions, capable of throwing the entire state's ashes on top of the rubbish" - every state, including the democratic-republican state.

To clarify this, it is necessary to examine the issue of the economic foundations for the withering away of the state.

Chapter Five: The economic foundations of the withering away of the state

The most detailed explanation of this issue is the explanation given by Marx in his article “Criticism of the Gotha Program” (a letter to Barakah dated May 5, 1875, which was not published until 1891 in “Neue Zeit” 1, 9 and issued in Russian in an edition of Separately). The polemical part of this wonderful treatise, which consists in criticizing lasalism, has left in the shadows, so to speak, its positive part, namely the analysis of the connection between the development of communism and the withering away of the state.

1- Marx's formulation of the question

If the letter that Marx addressed to Barakeh on May 5, 1875 was superficially compared to the letter that Engels addressed to Bebel on March 28, 1875, which we discussed above, it would seem that Marx is a much stronger "state advocate" than Engels, and that the difference between the two writers' views To the state is very large.

Engels proposes to Bebel that he completely desist from chattering about the state and that the word state should be completely removed from the program and replaced with the word “commoner”; Engels even declares that the Commune ceased to be a state in the special sense of the word. Whereas Marx even speaks of “the future state system in communist society,” that is, he seems to recognize the necessity of the state even under communism.

However, such a view is fundamentally incorrect. A closer look shows that the views of Marx and Engels on the state and its withering away are in complete agreement, and that Marx's aforementioned statement relates exactly to the withering state system.

It is clear that there can be no talk of determining the hour of the next “decay”, especially since it is inevitably a long process. The apparent difference between Marx and Engels stems from the difference between the issues they dealt with and the tasks they wanted to solve. The task that Engels set before himself was to prove to Bebel clearly, clearly and in bold all the falsity of the illusions (in which Lassalle believed to a large extent) that were so common in the matter of the state. Marx only dealt with this issue casually, directing his attention to another subject: the development of communist society.

The entire theory of Marx is an application of the theory of development - in its most complete, complete, consistent and rich form - on contemporary capitalism. It is natural, therefore, that Marx faced the issue of applying this theory as well to the upcoming collapse of capitalism and to the next development of the coming communism.

On the basis of what facts can the question of the future development of the coming communism be raised?

Based on the fact that communism arises from capitalism and develops historically from capitalism and that it is the result of the action of a social force generated by capitalism. One does not see in Marx even the shadow of an attempt to weave utopias and to make vain efforts to speculate about the unknowable. Marx raises the question of communism, just as the natural world raises the question of the development of a new species, say, of biological species, after knowing its source and making clear the direction its evolution takes.

Marx begins first of all by rejecting the confusion introduced by the Gotha Program on the question of the relationship between state and society.

He wrote:

«… The current society is the capitalist society that exists in all civilized countries and has been purified to one degree or another from medieval elements and modified to one degree or another by the historical development in every country and developed to one degree or another. As for the "current state", on the contrary, it differs within the borders of each country. It is in the German Prussian Empire as it is in Switzerland, and it is in England as it is in the United States. The “present state” is therefore just an illusion.

Nevertheless, the different states in the various civilized countries are all characterized by a common character, despite the type of their forms, which is that they are based on the soil of modern bourgeois society, which is developed capitalistically to one degree or another. They thus have intrinsic common features. In this sense, it is possible to talk about either the "present state" in contrast to the future, where its current origin, which is bourgeois society, will cease to exist.

Then the following question is raised: What transformation is taking place in the state in communist society? In other words: What social functions similar to the present functions of the state remain in communist society? Only science can answer this question. We will not push the issue forward even if we combine the word “people” with the word “state” in a thousand ways.

After Marx ridiculed this way of all this chatter about the "people's state", he clarified how the issue should be formulated, as if he was warning that giving a scientific answer can only be based on scientifically proven data.

The first thing that was proven with complete precision by the whole theory of evolution and the whole of science in general, and what the utopians and the current opportunists who fear the socialist revolution have forgotten, is the fact that historically there must be a special phase or phase for the transition from capitalism to communism.

2- The transition from capitalism to communism

Marx continues:

«… Between the capitalist society and the communist society lies the stage of the capitalist's revolutionary transformation into the communist society. It is also suitable for a political period of transition, in which the state can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat...»

Marx's conclusion is based on an analysis of the role played by the proletariat in the present capitalist society, on the facts of the development of this society, and on the fact that the opposing interests of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie cannot be reconciled.

In the past, the question was put in the following way: the proletariat, in order to gain its freedom, must overthrow the bourgeoisie, gain political power, and establish its revolutionary dictatorship.

Now, the issue is presented in a slightly different way: the transition from a capitalist society on the path of development towards communism to a communist society is impossible without a “political transition stage.” The state of this stage can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

What is the position of this dictatorship on democracy?

We have seen that the "Communist Manifesto" simply juxtaposes the concepts of "the transformation of the proletariat into the ruling class" and "the acquisition of democracy". On the basis of all that was presented above, we can determine with more precision how democracy changes in the transition from capitalism to communism.

In capitalist society, in the case of its most favorable development, we see more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always compressed within a narrow framework of capitalist investment, and therefore it always remains, in essence, a democracy for the minority, for the wealthy classes alone, the rich alone. Freedom in capitalist society remains almost always what it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave owners, as the current wage-earners remain, by virtue of the conditions of capitalist investment, under the burdens of destitution and misery to the extent that “they do not care about democracy,” “they do not care about politics.” To the extent that the majority of the population, in the event of events proceeding in their normal, peaceful course, is far from participating in political and social life.

Perhaps the validity of this assertion is proved most clearly by the example of Germany, precisely because constitutional legitimacy has continued in this country with amazing constancy and permanence for nearly half a century (1871-1914), and because Social-Democracy has been able during this period to do much more than In other countries, to “benefit from legitimacy” and to organize in a political party a large percentage of the workers that cannot be matched by a percentage in any country in the world.

What, I wonder, is this higher proportion of conscious and politically active wage-earners that capitalist society has known? One million members of the Social-Democrats out of 15 million wage-workers! Three million workers organized in unions out of 15 million!

The democracy of capitalist society is the democracy of a small minority, the democracy of the rich. And if we look closely at the mechanism of capitalist democracy, we see in everything and every step - in the allegedly "trivial" - trivial - details of the electoral right (registration of residence, excluding women, etc.), in the way the representative institutions work, and in the actual obstacles that exist in The aspect of the right to assembly (public buildings are not for “braggers”!) And in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., we see democracy shackled by shackles upon shackles. These restrictions, expungements, exceptions and obstacles for the poor seem trivial, especially to one who has never personally known want and has not come to know firsthand the life of the masses of the oppressed classes (which is the case for nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine percent of bourgeois journalists and politicians), but these Restrictions as a whole distance and push the poor away from politics, from active participation in democracy.

Marx clearly understood the content of this capitalist democracy, when he said in his analysis of the experience of the Commune: Once every few years, the oppressed are allowed to decide: Which of the representatives of the oppressing class will represent them and suppress them in Parliament!

But the forward development from this capitalist democracy - which is inevitably narrow and which secretly excludes the poor and which is, therefore, entirely hypocritical and false - does not proceed simply, directly and unhindered in the direction of "more and more full democracy", as the liberal professors and petty opportunists make it out to be. bourgeoisie. no. Forward development, that is, towards communism, passes through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and there is no way for it other than this way, because there is no other class or other way to break down the resistance of the capitalist exploiters.

Engels expressed this very clearly in his letter to Bebel, when he said, as the reader recalls: “The proletariat needs the state, not for the sake of freedom, but in order to suppress its opponents, and when it becomes possible to talk about freedom, then the state will not remain.”

Democracy for the great majority of the people and repression by force, that is, the exclusion of the exploiters, the oppressors of the people, from democracy - this is the change that takes place in democracy during the transition from capitalism to communism.

Only in a communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists is completely destroyed, when the capitalists vanish, when there are no classes (that is, when there is no difference between the members of society in terms of their relationship to the social means of production), only then "the state disappears and it becomes possible to talk about freedom." Only then will it become possible and truly complete democracy, truly free from all restrictions, will be achieved. And only then will democracy begin to wither away by virtue of the simple circumstance that people freed from capitalist servitude and from the innumerable horrors and atrocities of capitalist investment, its follies and immoralities will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of life in society, rules known for centuries and repeated thousands of years in all books, will become accustomed to Observing it without violence, without coercion, without submission, without the apparatus specially designed for coercion called the state.

The expression “the state withers away” is a well-chosen expression, since it denotes both the gradualness and spontaneity of this process. And that habit alone can do this act and there is no doubt that it will do it, because we notice around us millions of times how people easily get used to observing the rules of life in society that are necessary for them, if the investment is non-existent, if there is nothing that arouses resentment and calls for protest and uprising and requires repression .

Accordingly, we see that democracy in the capitalist society is a petty, despicable, and false democracy. It is a democracy for the rich alone, for the minority. As for the dictatorship of the proletariat, the stage of transition to communism, it gives for the first time democracy to the people, to the majority, along with the necessary oppression of the minority, of the exploiters. And communism alone is the one that can give democracy truly complete, and the more it is integrated, the more it is no longer needed, so it withers away on its own.

In other words: Under capitalism, we see the state in the original sense of the word, in the sense of a special machine for the oppression of one class by another, and specifically: the oppression of the majority by the minority. It is obvious that this matter - the suppression of the majority exploited permanently by the exploited minority - requires for its success the utmost ferocity, the utmost brutality in repression, requires seas of blood, and this is the path that humanity follows while it is in a state of slavery, serfdom and wage work.

.... In the stage of transition from capitalism to communism, oppression remains necessary, but it becomes oppression of the exploited minority by the exploited majority. Because the suppression of the exploited minority by the majority, the slaves of wage-labour of yesterday, is relatively easy, simple and natural, to the extent that it costs much less blood than it does to suppress the uprisings of slaves, serfs, or wage-workers, to the extent that it costs humanity much less, and is compatible with making democracy It includes an overwhelming majority of the population to such an extent that the need for a special machine of repression disappears. It is obvious that the exploiters are incapable of oppressing the people without a very complex machine prepared for this task. But the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple “machine”, almost without a “machine”, without a special apparatus, simply by organizing the armed masses (we note, looking ahead, on the example of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies).

Finally, only communism makes bloodletting completely superfluous, because then there is no one left to suppress, "no one" in the sense of class, in the sense of a systematic struggle against a certain section of the population. We are not utopians, and we never deny the possibility and inevitability of individual transgressions, nor do we deny the necessity of suppressing such transgressions. But this matter does not need, first, a special instrument of repression, a special apparatus of repression - the armed people themselves do it as simply and easily as every group of civilized people even in the present society disperses quarrels or prevents the assault of a woman. Secondly, we know that the root social cause of the irregularities which manifest themselves in the breach of the rules of life in society is the exploitation, want and misery of the masses. And when this main cause disappears, the excesses inevitably begin to “wither away.” We do not know at what speed and at what gradient, but we do know that it will diminish. With its decay, the state also decays.

Marx, without falling in line with utopias, defined in detail what can now be defined in connection with this future, namely the difference between the lower phase (degree, stage) and the higher phase of communist society.

3- The first phase of communist society

In the "Criticism of the Gotha Programme," Marx refuted in detail and refuted Lassalle's idea that the worker receives, under socialism, "the product of labor in its entirety" or "uncut". Marx showed that it is necessary to deduct from the total social work carried out by the whole society allocations for reserves, allocations for expanding production, allocations for replacing “expendable” machinery, etc., and then from the balance of consumption allocations for spending on the administration, schools, hospitals, shelters for the elderly, and so on.

Instead of Lassalle's general, ambiguous phrase ("to give the worker the whole product of labor") Marx clearly shows how a socialist society must necessarily run things. Marx concretely analyzes the conditions of life in a society in which capitalism will not exist and says:

“We are faced here” (when analyzing the program of the Workers’ Party) “not a communist society that has developed on its own foundations, but rather a society that has just emerged from capitalist society itself; A society that still, in all aspects, economic, moral and intellectual, bears the stamp of the old society that emerged from its bowels.

This communist society that has just emerged from the bowels of capitalism and which bears in all respects the character of the old society, Marx calls it the “first” or lower stage of communist society.

The means of production do not remain the private property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole society. Each member of society performs a certain amount of socially necessary work and obtains from society a receipt for the amount of work he performs. By virtue of this receipt, he receives from the general stores of consumer goods the appropriate quantity of products. After subtracting the amount of work required for the general allowances, each worker obtains permission from the community to the extent of what he gave.

It seems that I am in the kingdom of "heaven".

But when Lassalle says, taking into account these social conditions (which is usually called socialism and Marx calls it the first phase of communism), that this is a "fair distribution", that this is "the equal right of everyone to an equal quantity of the products of labour", he is He makes a mistake, and Marx explains his mistake by saying:

We are here, in fact, about the "equal right", but it is still a "bourgeois right" that assumes, like all rights, inequality. Every right is one standard for different people who are not, in fact, similar or equal, and therefore the “equal right” is a violation of equality and is unfair. In fact, each individual receives, for an equal share of social work, an equal share of social products (after deducting the aforementioned allowances).

However, people are not equal: one is strong and the other is weak, one is married, the other is single, one has more children, the other fewer, etc.

And Marx concludes:

«…for equal labour, and therefore for equal shares in the social fund of consumption, one actually receives more than the other, and thus becomes richer than the other, etc.. In order to avoid all these hardships, the right should not be equal, but rather unequal… »

Therefore, the first stage of communism cannot yet give justice and equality: differences remain in wealth, which are unfair differences, but the investment of man by man becomes impossible, because it becomes impossible for one to seize as private property the means of production, the factories and the machines. earth and so on. In refuting Lassalle's petty-bourgeois ambiguous phrase concerning "equality" and "justice" in general, Marx showed the course of development of communist society which is compelled at the outset to eliminate only that "injustice" which consists in private ownership of the means of production, but which is incapable of It eliminates at once the second unfairness, which is summarized in the distribution of consumption materials “according to work” (not according to need).

(Not as needed).

The vulgar economists, including the bourgeois professors, including “our friend” Tughan, constantly reproach the socialists, claiming that they forget that people are unequal and “dream” of eliminating this inequality. This reproach, if it proves something, only proves, as we see, that the bourgeois ideologues are utterly ignorant.

Marx, in addition to carefully calculating the inevitability of inequality among people, also takes into account that the mere transition of the means of production into the common property of the whole of society (“socialism” in the usual sense of the word) does not eliminate the inequalities of distribution and inequality in “bourgeois right.” Which continues to prevail as long as the products are distributed "according to work".

Marx goes on:

«… But these are inevitable and unavoidable difficulties in the first phase of communist society, just as it emerges from capitalist society after a long and difficult toil. Right can never be at a higher level than the economic system and the degree of civilization of society that is appropriate to this system... »

Accordingly, the “bourgeois right” in the first phase of communist society (which is usually called socialism) is not completely abolished, but partially abolished, only to the extent that the economic revolution has reached, that is, only with regard to the means of production. "Bourgeois law" recognizes them as the private property of individual persons. As for socialism, it makes it public property. Only by this amount, "bourgeois right" falls.

But it remains, however, in its other part, as a regulator (defining) for the distribution of products and the distribution of labor among the members of society. “He who does not work shall not eat.” This socialist principle was applied; “For an equal amount of labor, an equal amount of product,” this other socialist principle was also applied. But that is not communism yet. This does not yet remove the "bourgeois right" which gives unequal people for an unequal (actually unequal) amount of work an equal amount of product.

Marx says that this is a “deficiency”, but it is inevitable in the first phase of communism, because it is not possible to think, without falling into utopianism, that people, after overthrowing capitalism, immediately learn to work in the interest of society without any legal provisions, Not to mention the abolition of capitalism does not immediately provide economic predispositions for such a change.

There are no provisions other than those of "bourgeois right". Therefore, there remains the need for a state that preserves public ownership of the means of production and thus preserves equality of labor and equal distribution of products.

The state withers away, because there are no capitalists and no classes, so it is impossible to suppress any class.

But the state has not yet completely withered away, because there remains the maintenance of the "bourgeois right" that perpetuates actual inequality. The complete withering away of the state requires complete communism.

4- The higher phase of communist society

Marx continues:

«… In the higher phase of communist society, after the humiliating subjection of individuals to the division of labor has ceased and the antagonism between intellectual and physical labor has ceased; And when work is no longer just a means of subsistence, but rather becomes the first need in life; And when the productive force grows with the development of individuals in all respects, and when all the springs of collective revolution flow abundantly and abundantly - only then will it be possible to completely bypass the narrow horizon of bourgeois right, and society will be able to inscribe on its banner: “From each according to his capabilities, to each according to his capabilities.” his needs.”

Only now can we fully appreciate the correctness of Engels' remarks when he ruthlessly ridiculed the absurdity of combining the words "freedom" and "state". As long as the state remains, there is no freedom, and when freedom comes, the state ceases to exist.

The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is the development of communism to a high extent, with which the contradiction between intellectual work and physical work disappears, and thus one of the most important sources of current social inequality disappears, knowing that it is a source that is impossible to completely and immediately remove once the means of production are transferred to property. Socially, once the property of the capitalists was confiscated.

This confiscation will pave the way for the tremendous development of the productive forces, and seeing to what enormous extent capitalism now hinders this development, and how much things can be pushed forward on the basis of the modern tactics that are available today, we have the right to say with complete certainty that The expropriation of the capitalists' property inevitably results in the tremendous development of the productive forces of human society. However, what we do not know and what we cannot know is the degree of speed of this development later on, and the speed at which it reaches the point of breaking with the division of labor, the limit of removing the contradiction between intellectual work and physical work, the limit of work becoming “the first need in life.”

Therefore, we have no right to speak except about the inevitability of the state's decay, pointing out that this process takes a long time and that it stops depending on the speed of development of the higher phase of communism, leaving the question of the time of this decay or its concrete forms pending, because there is nothing necessary to solve this matters.

The state cannot completely wither away except when society applies the rule of “from each according to his capabilities, to each according to his needs,” that is, when people get used to observing the basic rules of life in society and their work becomes productive so that they start working voluntarily according to their capabilities. And then that “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” that makes one count in the manner of Shylock—not working half an hour more than another, or not being paid less than another, is overcome. Then the distribution of products will not require rationing by society of the quantity of products that each individual receives, for each individual will take freely “according to his needs.”

It is easy, from the bourgeois point of view, to declare such a social system “pure utopian” and to mock the socialists because they promise every citizen that he will have the right to take from society without any control over his work any quantity of sweets, cars, pianos, etc. With such sarcasm, the majority of the bourgeois "scientists" have so far evaded themselves, revealing their ignorance and disinterested defense of capitalism.

Ignorance, because it never occurred to any socialist to "promise" the advent of the highest phase of communism's development. As for the prophecy of the great socialists with its advent, it assumes a labor productivity other than the current labor productivity and a human being other than the current insignificant human being who can, like the students of theological school described by the writer Pomyalovsky, destroy public wealth “to the face of the devil” and demand the impossible.

Unless the “higher” phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand very strict control on the part of society and on the part of the state on the scale of work and the measure of consumption, but this control must start from the confiscation of the capitalists’ property, from the workers’ control over the capitalists, and it should not be practiced by the state of employees. , but a state of armed workers.

The disinterested defense of capitalism by bourgeois ideologues (and their henchmen like Messrs. Tsereteli, Chernov and Co.) is precisely that they substitute debate and chatter about the distant future for the topical issue, the pressing issue of today's politics: the expropriation of the capitalists and the transformation of all citizens into toilers and employees In one big "Syndica", that is, the whole country, and the complete subordination of the entire work of this Syndica to a truly democratic state, to the state of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

As for the essence, the learned professor, followed by the narrow-minded philistine, followed by Messrs. Tsereteli and Chernov and their ilk, when they talk about clumsy utopias and the demagogic promises of the Bolsheviks and about the impossibility of “implementing” socialism, they mean precisely the highest phase or the highest stage of communism, this stage that did not Someone thinks of "implementing" them, let alone promising to do so, because "implementing" them is generally impossible.

Here we come to the question of the scientific difference between socialism and communism. This question was touched upon by Engels in the paragraph we mentioned above regarding the invalidity of the designation “Social-Democrats.” It is most likely that the difference in political terms between the first or lower phase and the higher phase of communism will become enormous with the passage of time, but it is ridiculous to admit it at the present time, under capitalism, and no one can put it in the first place except some anarchists (if The anarchists remained people who had not learned anything after the transformation of Kropotkin, Graf, Kornelisin and their cohorts from the “stars” of anarchism, “like Plekhanov”, into social-chauvinists, or into trench anarchists as Guy put it, one of the few anarchists who kept honor and conscience).

However, the practical difference between socialism and communism is clear. What they usually call socialism, Marx called the "first" or lower phase of communist society. And since the means of production become public property, the word “communism” is applicable to this stage as well, provided one does not forget that this is not complete communism. The great importance of Marx's explanations is that he applied in harmony on this point also the materialist dialectics, the theory of development, looking at communism as something arising from capitalism. Instead of different and “invented” verbal definitions and sterile debates about the words (what is socialism and what is communism) Marx gives an analysis of what can be called the degrees of economic maturity of communism.

Communism in its first phase, in its first stages, cannot yet be fully mature from an economic point of view, it cannot be completely devoid of the traditions or traces of capitalism. Hence this funny phenomenon, the survival of the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” in communism during its first phase. It is clear that the bourgeois right regarding the distribution of consumption products inevitably requires a bourgeois state, because the right is nothing without an apparatus capable of coercing the observance of the provisions of the right.

He concludes that in communism, not only bourgeois right remains for a certain time, but also the bourgeois state - without the bourgeoisie!

This may seem a contradiction or just a dialectical manipulation of the mind, which Marxism is often accused of by people who have not made any effort to study its deep content in the most profound depth.

In reality, life shows us at every step, in nature and in society, the remnants of the old in the new. Marx did not enter into communism in a manner that is a piece of the "bourgeois" right, but rather took what is, economically and politically, an inevitable matter in a society that emerges from the bowels of capitalism.

Democracy is of great importance in the struggle of the working class against the capitalists, for its liberation. But democracy is not at all an insurmountable boundary, for it is only one of the stages on the way from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to communism.

Democracy means equality. There is no need to point out how important the struggle of the proletariat for equality and the slogan of equality are, if this slogan is correctly understood in the sense of the abolition of classes. But democracy does not mean anything but formal equality. As soon as the equality of all members of society is achieved regarding the ownership of the means of production, i.e. equality in work, equality in wages, then humanity will inevitably raise the issue of moving further, from formal equality to actual equality, to the realization of the rule “from each according to his capabilities and to each according to his needs.” ». We do not know and cannot know through what stages and by what practical measures humanity will proceed towards this higher goal. But it is important to understand how invalid the common bourgeois idea that claims that socialism is something dead, rigid, static and unchanging, while the movement of rapid progress in all fields of social and individual life, the really and truly mass movement in which the majority of the population participates and then the entire population does not. In fact, it only begins with socialism.

Democracy is a form of the state, one of its types. Therefore, it is, like every country, the use of violence against people on a regular and permanent basis. This is on the one hand, but on the other hand, it means the formal recognition of equality between citizens, the recognition of everyone's equal right to determine the form of building the state and in itself. This, in turn, is related to the fact that democracy, at a certain stage of its development, firstly, unites against capitalism the revolutionary class, the proletariat, and enables it to destroy and wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois state machine - even if it is a republican bourgeois one - and the regular army, police and bureaucracy, and replaces all of this with a more state machine. Democracy, however, remains a state machine in the person of the masses of armed workers and then with the participation of the whole people in the militia.

Here, "quantity turns into quality": Such a degree of development of democracy is linked to leaving the framework of bourgeois society and starting to rebuild it on socialist foundations. And the development of capitalism, in turn, creates the conditions for “everyone” to truly participate in the administration of the state. Among these preparations is the complete absence of illiteracy, which has been achieved by a number of the most advanced capitalist countries, and then the presence of millions of workers who are “taught by their promises on the system” by the large complex system of a social nature: mail, railways, large factories, supermarkets, banks. etc.,etc..

When there are such economic smoothers, every possibility is possible, after overthrowing the capitalists and the employees, to move to replace them immediately, overnight, in the matter of controlling production and distribution, in the matter of accounting for labor and products, by armed workers, by the entire armed people. (It is not permissible to confuse censorship and arithmetic with the issue of the scientifically educated cadres of engineers, agricultural experts, and others: these gentlemen work today subservient to the capitalists, and then they will work better subordinate to the armed workers).

Arithmetic and censorship are the main things necessary for the 'adjustment' of the first phase of communist society and for its proper functioning. All citizens then become employees hired by the state, which is the armed workers. And all the citizens become employees and workers in a single “syndicah” that belongs to the whole people and to the state. The whole point is that they work on an equal footing, properly observing the measure of work, and that they receive equal wages. Capitalism has made this calculation and this control a very simple matter, the processes of monitoring and recording are super easy, which are within the power of every non-illiterate person, not exceeding the four arithmetic operations and giving the necessary receipts*.

And when the majority of the people undertake independently and everywhere to carry out this calculation and this control over the capitalists (who then turn into employees) and over the educated gentlemen who retain capitalist habits, then this control becomes truly general, comprehensive, of a general popular character, and there is nothing left It is possible to evade it, and "there is no escape from it."

The whole society will become one office and one factory where everyone will have equal work and wages.

However, this “laboratory” system in which the proletariat includes the whole of society after its victory over the capitalists and the overthrow of the exploiters is by no means our ideal nor our final goal, it is only a degree necessary to purify society radically from the atrocities and outrages of capitalist investment and its troubles to move forward .

Since all members of society, or at least their great majority, have learned to run the state themselves, since they take this matter into their own hands and “arrange” control over the tiny minority of capitalists, over the effends who want to preserve capitalist habits, over the workers who have been corrupted to their core by capitalism, Since then, the need for every administration in general will disappear. And the more integrated democracy is, the more time it will cease to be needed. And the more complete democracy is in the “state” composed of armed workers and which “remains a state in the original sense of the word,” each state begins to wither faster.

For when everyone learns to manage and in fact independently manages social production, and independently achieves reckoning and control over parasites, effends, swindlers and the like "keepers of the traditions of capitalism" - then evading the people's reckoning and censorship will surely become unattainable and rare. so presumably accompanied by swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are practical people, and not of the sentimental type of intellectuals, who are unlikely to allow anyone to underestimate them) that the necessity of observing the simple basic rules of life in every human society will very quickly become habit.

Then the door of transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase and at the same time to the complete withering away of the state will open wide.

Chapter Six: The Opportunists' Replacement of Marxism

The issue of the state's position on the social revolution and the social revolution's position on the state did not concern the great theorists and journalists of the Second International (1889-1914) except very little, as was the issue of revolution in general. But the main distinguishing feature of the process of gradual growth of opportunism which led to the bankruptcy of the Second International in 1914 is the fact that even when they found themselves face to face with this question they sought to avoid it or did not notice it.

It can be said in general that the distortion and complete vulgarity of Marxism arose out of evasion from the question of the attitude of the proletarian revolution towards the state, an evasion that is beneficial and nourishing to opportunism.

To describe this unfortunate process, albeit briefly, we take the two most famous theorists of Marxism, Plekhanov and Kautsky.

1- Plekhanov's polemic with the anarchists

Plekhanov devoted a special pamphlet entitled “Anarchism and Socialism” to the position of anarchism on socialism, which was published in German in the year 1894.

Plekhanov did tricks in dealing with this issue, completely avoiding the urgent question, the question of the state in general! Two sections of his pamphlet draw attention: a historical-literary section that includes valuable material on the evolution of the views of Stirner, Proudhon, and others, and the other is very vulgar, containing trials of the cheap kind, stating that it is not possible to distinguish between an anarchist and a bandit.

The combination of the two subjects is very funny and very characteristic of the whole activity of Likhanov on the eve of the revolution and during the revolutionary period in Russia: this is exactly how Plekhanov showed himself in the years 1905-1917: half dogmatic, half philistine, crawling in politics for the guilt of the bourgeoisie.

We have seen Marx and Engels, in their polemics with the anarchists, express with the greatest precision their point of view on the attitude of the revolution towards the state. When Engels published in the year 1891 Marx’s book “The Critique of the Gotha Programme,” he wrote: “We (meaning Engels and Marx) at that time, and hardly two years had passed since the (First) International conference in The Hague, were in the midst of the battle against Bakunin and his anarchists.”

The anarchists tried to proclaim the Paris Commune itself as "their Commune," so to speak, that is, to prove their teachings, but they never understood the lessons of the Commune, nor Marx's analysis of these lessons. Anarchism gave nothing resembling even nearly the truth about the two concrete political questions: Should the old state machine be destroyed? What should it be replaced with?

However, talking about “anarchism and socialism” while completely avoiding the question of the state and not observing the full development of Marxism before and after the Commune means an inevitable slip into opportunism. Because opportunism does not need anything more than its need not to ask these two questions that we have mentioned now and to ignore them completely. For this in itself is a victory for opportunism.

2- Kautsky's polemic with the opportunists

There is no doubt that the number of Kautsky's works translated into Russian is unparalleled in any other language. It is no coincidence that some German Social-Democrats joke that they read Kautsky more in Russia than they read him in Germany (and we say between two objections that there is a much greater deep historical content in this joke than those who invented it imagine: the fact is that the Russian workers, having shown themselves in The year 1905 received an extraordinary, uncommon turnout for the best of the social-democratic literature in the world, and having received from translations and editions of these books the likes of which were unheard of in other countries of the world, they quickly transferred that, so to speak, to the level of our young proletarian movement, the great experience. Available in neighboring countries have gone further in the field of progress).

Kautsky gained a great reputation among us for his polemics with the opportunists, led by Bernstein, as well as for presenting Marxism in an accessible way. But there is an almost unknown reality which one must not lose sight of if one sets one's sights on the task of tracing Kautsky's slide into the most shameful intellectual turmoil and of defending social-chauvinism during the great crisis of 1914-15. And it is a fact that Kautsky hesitated a lot before speaking out against the most prominent representatives of opportunism in France (Millerand and Joris) and in Germany (Bernstein). The Marxist magazine Zarya, which was published in Stuttgart during the years 1901-1902 and which defended the revolutionary proletarian ideas, was forced to argue with Kautsky and to denounce the vague, vague and conciliatory decision vis-a-vis the opportunists that Kautsky presented in 1900 at the World Socialist Congress in Paris as a "elastic" decision. Letters by Kautsky appear in German publications, showing that he hesitated no less before attacking Bernstein.

But of incomparably greater importance is the fact that we now notice, when we investigate the history of Kautsky's recent betrayal of Marxism, in his polemics with the opportunists and in his presentation and treatment of the question, a permanent deviation towards opportunism precisely on the question of the state.

Let us take Kautsky's first major work against opportunism, his book Bernstein and the Social-Democratic Programme. Bernstein has been refuted by Kautsky. But the eloquent indication is the following.

In Preliminaries of Socialism, which made Herostrat famous, Bernstein accuses Marxism of "Balalanism" (an accusation that opportunists and bourgeois liberals in Russia since then leveled thousands of times at the representatives of revolutionary Marxism, at the Bolsheviks). Bernstein deals in particular with Marx's work The Civil War in France and tries, without success as we have seen, to prove that Marx's view of the lessons of the Commune is identical to Proudhon's. In particular, Bernstein's attention is drawn to the conclusion referred to by Marx in the preface to the 1872 "Communist Manifesto", which states: "The working class cannot be satisfied with seizing the state machine at the ready and using it for its own ends."

Bernstein was "impressed" with this formula to the extent that he repeated it in his book no less than three times, interpreting it in an opportunistic, distorted way.

We have seen that Marx wanted to say that the working class must smash, smash, blow up (Spregung, blow up, the expression used by Engels) the entire state machine. As for Bernstein's opinion, it follows from it that Marx warned the working class with these words against excessive revolutionary impulse when seizing power.

One cannot imagine a coarser and heinous distortion of Marx's idea.

How was Kautsky's behavior in his detailed refutation of the Bernsteinian epics?

He avoided revealing all the depth of the opportunist distortion of Marxism on this point. He cited the aforementioned paragraph from Engels' preface to Marx's work. It cannot suffice with seizing the ready-made state machine, but in general it can seize it, and he did not go beyond that. As for the fact that Bernstein attributed to Marx an idea completely opposite to his real idea, and that Marx set before the proletarian revolution since 1852 the task of “smashing” the state machine, Kautsky did not say a word about all of this.

The result was that the main feature that distinguishes Marxism from opportunism in the question of the tasks of the proletarian revolution has become obscured by Kautsky!

Kutsky wrote “against” Bernstein:

“We can leave it to the future with a clear conscience to decide the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (p. 172 of the German edition).

This is not an argument against Bernstein, but in essence it is a concession to him, a relinquishment of positions to opportunism, because the opportunists want in this circumstance nothing more than to “leave to the future with a clear conscience” all the fundamental questions about the tasks of the proletarian revolution.

Marx and Engels have taught the proletariat in forty years, from 1852 to 1891, about the complete betrayal of Marxism by the opportunists on this point. vulgar “indisputable” (and useless) that we cannot know in advance the concrete forms!!

A chasm separates Marx from Kautsky in terms of their position on the duty of the proletarian party in the matter of preparing the working class for revolution.

Let us take Kautsky's next, more mature work, which is also largely devoted to the refutation of opportunism. We mean his pamphlet The Social Revolution. In this pamphlet, the author has made the question of the "proletarian revolution" and the "proletarian system" his own theme. The author has given many very valuable ideas, but he avoided the question of the state in particular. In all sections of the pamphlet, the talk is only about the seizure of state power, that is, he chose a formula that is a concession to the opportunists as long as it recognizes the seizure of power without destroying the state machine. Kautsky in 1902 resurrects precisely what Marx declared in 1872 that he had "aged" in the program of the Communist Manifesto.

In his pamphlet, Kautsky dealt with, in a special chapter, “Forms and Weapons of Social Revolution”; In this section, he talked about the mass political strike and the civil war, as well as about “the two tools of the power of the modern great state: the bureaucracy and the army,” but he did not say a word about what the Commune taught the workers. It is clear that it was not in vain that Engels warned, especially the German socialists, against “superstitious reverence” before the state.

Kautsky simplifies the matter in the following way: The victorious proletariat "fulfills the democratic programme", and explains the provisions of this programme. And he did not say a word about what the year 1871 gave him again in the matter of replacing bourgeois democracy with proletarian democracy. Kautsky dodged the resonance with "sober" cliches:

It is obvious that we will not achieve sovereignty under the current conditions. The revolution itself presupposes a long, deep-seated struggle that can change our current political and social structure.

This is undoubtedly “self-evident”, as is the fact that horses eat barley and that the Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea. It is only a pity that this empty and pretentious phrase about the struggle that "reaches the depths" is taken as a means of avoiding a vital question for the revolutionary proletariat, which is the question of knowing what the "depth" of its revolution is against the state, against democracy, in contrast to the previous, non-proletarian revolutions.

By avoiding this issue, Kautsky actually concedes to opportunism on this very essential point, and declares a fierce war against it, stressing the importance of the “idea of ​​revolution” (but is there any value to this “idea” if it calls upon one to spread among the workers the concrete lessons that The revolution gave it?) or saying that “revolutionary idealism is in the first place” or declaring that it is “doubtful” that the English workers of the present time are “other than petty bourgeois”.

Kautsky wrote:

"In a socialist society, various forms of enterprise can co-exist: bureaucratic (??), trade-union, cooperative and individualistic"... "There are, for example, projects that cannot do without bureaucratic organization (??) such as the railways. In the railways, democratic organization can take the following form: the workers elect delegates who form a kind of parliament, and this parliament decides the system of work and supervises the work of the bureaucratic apparatus. There are other projects that can be placed under the supervision of trade unions, and there is a third type of enterprise that can be organized on the basis of the cooperative principle” (pp. 148 and 115 of the Russian translation, Geneva edition, 1903).

This view is wrong, and it is a step backward compared to what Marx and Engels explained in the 1970s based on the lessons of the Commune.

From the point of view of the alleged necessity of “bureaucratic” organization, railways are nothing at all different from all large mechanical industry enterprises in general, from any factory, from any large warehouse, from any large capitalist agricultural enterprise. In all these projects, the technique undoubtedly imposes on every worker the strict discipline and observance of complete accuracy in carrying out the work entrusted to him, and the whole work does not stop or the machine breaks down and the product spoils. In all such projects, of course, the workers will "elect delegates who will form a kind of parliament."

But the whole point is in the fact that this “kind of parliament” will not be a parliament in the sense of bourgeois parliamentary institutions. The whole point is in the fact that this “kind of parliament” will not be limited to “deciding the system of work and supervising the work of the bureaucratic apparatus,” as imagined by Kautsky, whose thinking does not go beyond the framework of bourgeois parliamentarism. Of course, this “kind of parliament” which in a socialist society consists of workers’ delegates “will decide the system of work and supervise the work” the “apparatus”, but this apparatus will not be a “bureaucrat”. The workers, having seized political power, break the old bureaucratic apparatus, smash it to the foundation, leaving not one stone upon another and replacing it with a new one consisting of the workers and the employees themselves, against whose transformation into bureaucrats the measures laid down in detail by Marx and Engels will immediately be taken: 1) Not only their election, but also the possibility of withdrawing them at all times, 2) salaries not exceeding the wages of the worker, 3) the immediate transition to everyone doing the functions of control and supervision, to everyone becoming “bureaucrats” for a time so that no one can become “bureaucrats” because of this. .

Kautsky did not think at all about Marx's words: "The Commune was not a parliamentary body, but a functioning body, endowed with legislative and executive powers at the same time."

Kautsky did not at all understand the difference between bourgeois parliamentarism which unites democracy (not for the people) and bureaucracy (against the people) and proletarian democracy which will immediately take measures to uproot the bureaucracy from the roots and which will be able to carry these measures to the end, to its complete abolition Over the bureaucracy, even the establishment of full democracy for the people.

Kautsky showed here the same "superstitious reverence" before the state, the same "superstitious faith" in the bureaucracy.

Let us turn to Kautsky's last and best work against the opportunists, to his pamphlet The Path to Power (and I think it was not published in Russian, because it was published when reaction in Russia was at its height, in 1909). This pamphlet is a great step forward, since the discussion in it does not revolve around the revolutionary program in general, as is the case with the pamphlet of 1899 against Bernstein, nor about the tasks of the social revolution, regardless of the time of its occurrence, as is the case with the pamphlet “The Social Revolution” (1902), but rather about Concrete circumstances lead us to admit that the “era of revolutions” is coming.

The author has clearly indicated the intensification of class contradictions in general, and to imperialism, which plays a particularly large role in this matter. After the “revolutionary period in the years 1871-1879” in Western Europe, a similar phase began in the East in 1905. World war is approaching with alarming speed. We have entered the revolutionary phase. "Let the revolutionary era begin."

These statements are very clear. And that Kautsky's pamphlet should be a measure of comparison between what German Social-Democracy was expected to be before the imperialist war and the extent of its disgraceful degradation (and with it Kautsky himself) at the outbreak of the war. In the pamphlet we are considering, Kautsky wrote: "The present situation involves the danger that we (i.e., German Social-Democracy) can easily be regarded as more moderate than we really are." But it turns out that the German Social-Democratic Party is actually more moderate and opportunist than it appears!

And the rhetorician reported that Kautsky, after declaring very clearly that the era of revolutions had begun, avoided again the question of the state even in the pamphlet devoted, as he himself said, to the question of the "political revolution" itself.

From all the facts of avoiding the issue, being silent about it, and evading it, this complete transition to opportunism necessarily arose, which we must deal with now.

As if in German Social-Democracy, in the person of Kautsky, I declare: I keep my revolutionary views (1899). I acknowledge in particular that the proletarian social revolution is inevitable (1902), I admit that the era of proletarian revolutions against the state has receded backwards compared to what Marx said in 1852 (1912).

This is exactly how the question is raised in Kautsky's polemic with Pannekoek.

3- Kautsky's polemic with Pannekoek.

Panekoek ran against Kautsky as one of the representatives of the “left-radical” trend that included Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Radek and others in its ranks, the trend that was defending revolutionary tactics and was united by the belief that Kautsky was moving to the position of the “middle” oscillating without principle between Marxism and opportunism . The correctness of this view was fully confirmed during the war, when the "center" current (erroneously called Marxist) or "Kautskyism" revealed all its hideous baseness.

In the article "Mass Actions and Revolution" ("Neue Zeit", 1912, 30, 2) Pannekoek touches on the question of the state and characterizes Kautsky's position as "negative radicalism", as "the theory of negative waiting". “Kautsky does not want to see the course of the revolution” (p. 616). Having raised the issue in this way, Pannekoek arrived at the subject that interests us, the tasks of the proletarian revolution against the state. He wrote:

“The struggle of the proletariat is not merely a struggle against the bourgeoisie for the sake of state power, but rather a struggle against state power… The content of the proletarian revolution is the destruction of the tools of state power and their displacement (literally: dissolution, Auflösung) by the tools of proletarian power… The struggle stops only when It achieves, as its final result, the final destruction of the state organization. The organization of the majority proves its superiority by eliminating the organization of the dominant minority” (p. 548).

The formulation in which Pannekoek expressed his ideas has very significant shortcomings. However, the idea is clear. We shall see how Kautsky tried to refute them. He wrote:

«Until now, the opposition between the Social-Democrats and the Fauchists was that the former wanted to seize state power, while the others wanted to destroy it. As for Panicuk, he wants this and that » (p. 724).

And if Pannekoek's exposition complains of vagueness and lack of accuracy (not to mention the other shortcomings in his article that have nothing to do with the topic under discussion), Kautsky has taken exactly the thrust of the principled injunction drawn by Pannekoek. On the fundamental question of principle, Kautsky completely deviated from the position of Marxism and moved completely to opportunism. He defined the difference between the Social-Democrats and the anarchists completely incorrectly, and completely distorted and replaced Marxism.

The difference between Marxists and anarchists is summed up in: 1) that the former, aiming at the complete elimination of the state, recognize that this goal is not possible except after the socialist revolution eliminates classes and as a result of establishing socialism that leads to the withering away of the state; And in the fact that others want to completely eliminate the state overnight, without understanding the conditions that make this achievable. 2) in that the first two recognize that it is necessary for the proletariat, after its conquest of political power, to completely destroy the old state machine and to replace it with a new one consisting of the organization of armed workers on the model of the Commune; and in the fact that others say of destroying the state machine, imagining with complete vagueness what the proletariat will replace it with and how it will benefit from the revolutionary power; Even anarchists deny its revolutionary dictatorship. 3) In the fact that the first two demand the preparation of the proletariat for the revolution by taking advantage of the current state, while the anarchists deny this.

It is Pannekoek who represents Marxism against Kautsky in this debate, because Marx himself knew that the proletariat cannot be satisfied with simply seizing state power in the sense of transferring the old state apparatus into new hands, but rather it must smash this apparatus, break it and replace it with a new one .

Kautsky deviates from Marxism to the opportunists, because this smashing of the state machine, which is absolutely unacceptable by the opportunists, vanishes from him completely, leaving them with an outlet in the sense of interpreting the “conquest” as mere gaining the majority.

Kautsky behaves like a talker in order to cover up his distortion of Marxism: he intersects a "paragraph" that he quotes from Marx himself. Marx wrote in 1850 stressing the need to "concentrate force firmly in the hands of the power of the state." Kautsky exultantly asks: Does Pannekoek not want to demolish “centralization”?

This is just an acrobatics like Bernstein's attempt to prove the congruence of the views of Marxism and Proudhonism regarding the replacement of centralism by federalism.

The "paragraph" cited by Kautsky is inappropriate. Centralization is possible with both the old and the new state machine. If the workers voluntarily unite their armed forces, this will be from centralization, but it is centralization based on the “total destruction” of the centralized state apparatus, the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy. Kautsky behaves completely in the manner of frauds in that he ignores the well-known opinions of Marx and Engels on the Commune and cuts off an irrelevant passage.

Kutsky continues:

«…Perhaps Pannekoek wants to abolish civil servant jobs in the state? However, we do not do without employees in either the party organizations or the trade union organizations, not to mention the state administration. Our program does not ask for the abolition of state officials, but for the election of officials by the people... We are not talking now about the form that the administrative apparatus will take in the "future state", but rather about whether our political struggle destroys (literally: dissolves, auflöst) power The state before our conquest of it (emphasis on Kautsky). Which ministry can be eliminated along with its employees? Then Kautsky enumerates the ministries of education, justice, finance and war. "no. Our political struggle against the government will not abolish any of the present ministries... I repeat to avoid misunderstanding: the issue is not the form that the victorious Social-Democracy gives to the 'state of tomorrow', but the question of how our opposition changes the present state (p. 725).

This is the same sorcery. Bangkok raised the very question of revolution. He made this clear in the title of his article and in the quoted paragraphs. As for Kautsky, by leaping to the question of "opposition" he substitutes exactly the revolutionary point of view for the opportunist point of view. What happened to him is as follows: today there is opposition, but after the seizure of power, we will see. The revolution fades away! Which is exactly what the opportunists need.

This is not about the opposition or the political struggle in general, but about the revolution itself. As for the revolution, it is summed up in the fact that the proletariat destroys the “administrative apparatus” and the entire state apparatus, replacing it with a new apparatus made up of armed workers. Kautsky shows "mythic reverence" before the "ministries", but why can't they be replaced, say, by committees of specialists in the Soviets of Workers 'and Soldiers' Deputies exercising full sovereignty and power?

The issue is not at all about whether the “ministries” will remain or “committees of specialists” or any other institutions will be established. This is not important. Or is the matter whether the old state machine (linked to the bourgeoisie by thousands of bonds and imbued to its depths with a spirit of conservatism and rigidity) will remain, or will it be destroyed and replaced by a new machine. A revolution does not consist in being ruled by a new machine after the old one has been destroyed - Kautsky obscures this basic Marxist idea, or does not understand it at all.

A question about the officials clearly shows that he did not understand the lessons of the Commune and the teachings of Marx. “We do not dispense with employees, neither in party organizations nor in trade union organizations…”

We do not do without employees under capitalism, under the rule of the bourgeoisie. Capitalism oppresses the proletariat and enslaves the working masses. Under capitalism, democracy is bound, crushed, petrified, distorted by every circumstance of the slavery of wage labor and the poverty and misery of the masses. It is for this reason, and for no other reason, that the functionaries of our political and trade union organizations are corrupted (or rather show a tendency to corruption) under the conditions of capitalism and show the tendency to turn into bureaucrats, i.e. into privileged persons separate from and standing above the masses.

This is the essence of bureaucracy. And as long as the capitalists are not confiscated, unless the bourgeoisie is overthrown, there will inevitably remain some “bureaucracy” even among the proletarian officials.

The outcome for Kautsky is as follows: As long as there are officials who are elected, then the employees remain under socialism and the bureaucracy remains! This is the same mistake. Like the Commune itself, Marx showed that officials under socialism cease to be "bureaucrats", "employees", cease to the extent that is applied, except the principle of their election, also the principle of their withdrawal at any time, in addition to the reduction of salaries to the average level of the worker's wage, and the addition of To replace parliamentary institutions with “functional” institutions, i.e. that issue laws and implement them.

In essence, all of Kautsky's arguments against Pannekoek, and especially his brilliant argument where he says that we do not do without employees neither in trade unions nor in party organisations, shows that Kautsky is repeating Bernstein's old "arguments" against Marxism in general. Bernstein, in his book Preliminaries to Socialism imbued with the spirit of apostasy, wages war against the ideas of "primitive" democracy, against what he calls "ideological democracy" - mandatory mandates, unrewarded officials, impotent central representation, etc.. and to prove the invalidity of this democracy. Primitiveness» Bernstein cites the experience of the English trade unions as explained by the Webbs. He says that the trade unions, within seventy years of their development “under complete freedom,” as he claims, (p. 137 of the German edition), were convinced of the invalidity of primitive democracy and replaced it with ordinary democracy: a combination of parliamentarism and bureaucracy.

In fact, the trade unionists did not develop "in light of complete freedom", but rather under the shadow of complete capitalist slavery, under which it is not possible, of course, to "dispensate" with a number of concessions in front of the prevailing evil, in the face of violence, in the face of falsehood and the exclusion of the poor from the affairs of the "higher" administration ». Under socialism, many aspects of "primitive" democracy will inevitably emerge, because the population rises for the first time in the history of civilized societies to participate independently, not only in voting and elections, but also in daily administration. Under socialism everyone will take turns taking over the management functions and quickly get used to someone ruling.

Marx, with a genius, critical and analytical mind, saw in the practical measures taken by the Commune that turn which the opportunists fear and do not want to admit because of their cowardice and unwillingness to sever all ties with the bourgeoisie, and which the anarchists do not want to see either because of their haste or because they do not understand the conditions of social changes major in general. “We should not even think of destroying the old state machine, because how can we dispense with ministries and employees” - this is how the vulgar opportunist thinks to the core, who, in addition to not believing in the essence of revolution or its creative power, is mortally afraid of it (just as the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries fear it). we have).

"There is no need to think about anything other than destroying the old state machine. There is no need to delve deeper into the concrete lessons given by the previous proletarian revolutions, nor to analyze what and how we can replace what we are destroying" - this is how the anarchist is judged (the best of the anarchists, of course, not the one who follows Messrs. Kropotkin and Co. and crawl in the guilt of the bourgeoisie); Therefore, the anarchist concludes with the tactic of despair, and not with the tactic of daring and relentless revolutionary activity that sets concrete tasks before his eyes and at the same time takes into account the realistic circumstances surrounding the movement of the masses.

Marx teaches us to avoid making two mistakes, teaches us to have the greatest audacity in smashing the old state machine to the ground, and at the same time teaches us to put the question concretely: the Commune was able, within a few weeks, to start building a new state machine, proletarian in this form, The measures mentioned above have been taken with a view to ensuring fuller democracy and the eradication of bureaucracy. Let us, then, take from the Communards their revolutionary audacity, and see in their practical measures the first form of urgent practical measures immediately applicable, and then, by going on this road, we will extirpate the stigma of bureaucracy.

The possibility of this eradication is guaranteed by the fact that socialism shortens the working day, awakens the masses to a new life, and puts the majority of the population in conditions that enable everyone, without exception, to perform “state functions,” and this is what leads to the complete withering away of the state, every state.

Kutsky continues:

«...the task of the mass strike cannot in any way be the destruction of state power, it can only be to force the government to concede on a certain question or to replace a government hostile to the proletariat by a government that satisfies (entgegenkommende) its demands...but this" (i.e. The victory of the proletariat over the hostile government) “can in no way and under no circumstances lead to the destruction of state power, it can only result in some change (Verschiebung) in the ratio of forces within state power... The aim of our political struggle remains So as it is now, the seizure of state power by gaining the majority in Parliament and making Parliament the master of the government” (pp. 726, 727, 732).

This is pure opportunism, the most despicable opportunism, a retreat from revolution in deed while acknowledging it in word. Kautsky's idea goes no further than "a government that meets the demands of the proletariat" - a step backward in the direction of pettiness and narrow-mindedness compared to 1848 when he proclaimed " The Communist Manifesto” with “the organization of the proletariat into a ruling class.”

Kutsky must achieve what he desires of "unity" with Scheidemann, Plekhanov, Vandervelde and their cohorts, all agreeing to fight for a government that "satisfies the demands of the proletariat."

As for us, we will sever our ties with these traitors to socialism and fight for the destruction of the entire old state machine so that the armed proletariat itself becomes a government. They are two completely different things.

Kautsky must be in the company of a favorable group: the group of Legin, Davyd, Plekhanov, Petrosov, Tsereteli, Chernov, and others who fully agree with the struggle for “changing the ratio of forces within state power,” for “gaining a majority in parliament and making parliament the master of government The Absolute”, - it is a noble and ultimate goal that the opportunists accept with its weight and its weight, and with it everything remains within the framework of the parliamentary bourgeois republic.

As for us, we will sever our ties with the opportunists, and the entire conscious proletariat will be with us in the struggle, not for a “change in the ratio of forces,” but for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, for the smashing of bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic on the type of the Commune or the Republic of Soviets of Deputies Workers and soldiers, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

*******

There are more currents in international socialism than Kautsky, including the Monthly Socialist Review in Germany (Legen, David, Kolb, and many others, including the Scandinavian Stauning and Branting), the followers of Jürss and Vandervelde in France and Belgium, Turati, Treves and other representatives of the right wing of the Italian party, the Fabians and The Independents (the “Independent Labor Party” which was, in fact, always dependent on the Liberals) in England and their ilk. All these gentlemen, who play an important and often predominant role in parliamentary activity and in party publications, openly deny the dictatorship of the proletariat and practice open opportunism. The “dictatorship” of the proletariat, according to these gentlemen, is “contradictory” to democracy!! In essence, there is no serious difference between them and the petty-bourgeois democrats.

In view of this we have the right to conclude that the Second International in the overwhelming majority of its official representatives has completely slipped into opportunism. Not only was the experience of the Commune forgotten, but it also distorted it. They did not explain to the working masses that the hour was approaching when they had to rise up and smash the old state machine and replace it with a new one, thus transforming their political rule into a basis for transforming society on a socialist basis. Rather, they taught the masses the opposite. They interpreted the "seizing of power" as leaving a thousand outlets for opportunism.

The distortion and omission of the issue of the position of the proletarian revolution on the state could not but play a huge role at a time when states, whose military apparatus has been strengthened as a result of imperialist competition, have become war monsters that take millions of lives in order to decide and decide whether the domination of the world belongs to England or For Germany, for this or that finance capital

Attention to the reader in the first edition

This pamphlet was written in August and September 1917. I prepared the curriculum for the next chapter, the seventh, “The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917.” But it was not possible for me to write any line from this chapter except for the title, because I was “impeded” by the political crisis, on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917. Such an “obstacle” would really make one’s heart happy. However, I think that I will postpone for a long time the second part of this pamphlet (which deals with “the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917”), as applying the “experience of the revolution” is better and more useful than writing about it.

the author

Petrograd

November 30, 1917

Written in August-September 1917; Chapter 2, paragraph 3, was written before December 17, 1918

It was published in the year 1918 in Petrograd in a separate book by the publishing house “Jezin A. Zaniye” (“Life and Knowledge”).

pp. 1-120

Volume 33.

notes:

* Addition to the second edition.

* Refer to Lenin's article "A Question of Principle". publisher.

* This amount is approximately equivalent, in Russian terms, to 2,400 rubles, which is approximately 6,000 rubles at the current price. It is absolutely unforgivable for the behavior of those Bolsheviks who propose, for example, that salaries be 9,000 rubles in municipalities, and who do not propose that the maximum salary for the whole country be 6,000 rubles, which is sufficient.

* “On the international issues of the “people’s state”.” publisher.

§ “Bolshevik” (Bolshevik) is derived from the word “Bolshevik”, which in Russian means “the majority”. The translator.

* When the main part of the functions of the state is limited to accounting and control by the workers themselves, then the state ceases to be a “political state”, then “public functions are transformed from political functions to mere administrative functions” (see the above, Chapter IV The second stanza is on Engels' polemic with the anarchists.

•0 Then it comes in the manuscript: •1 «Chapter Seven

The experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917

The subject referred to in the title of this chapter is so extensive that volumes can and should be devoted to it. It is necessary for us to confine ourselves in this pamphlet, of course, to the main lessons that this experience gives, which are directly related to the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution in the face of state power.