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Title: Wither the State
Author: Mason Herson Hord
Date: Winter 2019
Language: en
Topics: the state, social ecology, Marxism, post-Marxism
Source: *Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology*, Issue 1, Winter 2019. https://harbinger-journal.com/issue-1/wither-the-state/

Mason Herson Hord

Wither the State

The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production

in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it

abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and

class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as a state. Society thus

far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an

organisation of the particular class, which was pro tempore the

exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of

production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly

keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression… When at

last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it

renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social

class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the

individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in

production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are

removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive

force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which

the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of

society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name

of society – this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a

state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain

after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government

of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the

conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished.” It

withers away.

—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)

Recent years have seen a burgeoning convergence among revolutionaries

from the Marxist and anarchist traditions, especially around the nuts

and bolts of working-class movement-building. Most excitingly, this has

meant a shared, renewed emphasis on base-building and dual power to

guide our organizing. We often work together on shared political

projects and read each other’s literature. In many cases, we share the

same goal of a stateless, classless society free of all domination. Yet

serious theoretical and strategic differences remain, especially in

regard to how power should be wielded to transition between capitalism

and that liberated future. This question remains essential; in the words

of the British Marxist Ralph Milliband, “the exercise of socialist power

remains the Achilles’ heel of Marxism.”[1] With a focus on the

‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ this essay will attempt to think

through this question by bringing the Marxist idea of the “withering

away” of the state into conversation with the political theory of social

ecology. I will attempt to recenter a matter often skirted by Marxists

and anarchists alike: the role of direct democracy in the governance of

a revolutionary society.

Though not myself a Marxist (nor for that matter an anarchist), I have

worked to engage with the core Marxist literature on the “dictatorship

of the proletariat” in a manner which, while critical, I intend to be

comradely and in good faith. I have little patience for polemic and do

not wish to reproduce the variety of hostility that has characterized

almost all writing by social ecologists on Marxism. I do not believe it

has been effective at connecting with the democratic spirit that many

Marxists hold close at heart. With that in mind, I will rely on extended

quotes from Marx, Engels, and Lenin to allow them to speak for

themselves, with the aim that any necessary paraphrasing be

light-handed.

Most of all, however, this exchange between Marxism and the radical

democratic tradition is intended to be constructive, a contribution I

hope might be genuinely useful for Marxists and libertarian socialists

alike in thinking through the problems of our politics. There are thorny

questions to be unpacked, answers to which do not spring cleanly from

the revolutionary socialist canon. The stakes of such dialogues and

debates are high, and if we take our politics seriously, we need to be

willing to look these theoretical problems squarely in the face. I look

forward to a thoughtful and impassioned dialogue about them.

When Withers the State?: The Problem of Authoritarianism

Friedrich Engels, chief intellectual partner to Karl Marx, articulates

across his written work an elegant hypothesis for how a workers’ state

brings about the stateless society of communism: “Society thus far,

based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state…for the purpose of

forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of

oppression.”Thus for Engels, the state exists to manage class conflict

while upholding the power of the ruling class. But when the state,

through the overwhelming power of the working class, “takes possession

of the means of production in the name of society,” it “constitutes

itself the representative of the whole of society.” Through this act of

expropriation, classes and their resulting antagonisms cease to exist.

With “no longer any social class to be held in subjection,” the state

thereby “render[s] itself unnecessary.” Having no purpose to repression

and no one to repress, the state necessarily fades and disappears. It

“is not ‘abolished,’ it withers away.”[2]

This idea’s persuasive power comes from the simplicity and directness of

its internal logic. The conclusion—that the expansion of the state sets

it on a course of self-abolition—is counterintuitive, but flows clearly

from one step to another from its premises. It has a formulaic quality

that is predictive without speculation: what many Marxists might call

“scientific.” Committed readers of the Marxist canon may simply leave it

at that, concluding that this is therefore the road to communism. But

the heart of science is testing such ideas up against what we can

observe in the world—and unlike Marx, Engels, and Lenin, we have now a

full century of dozens of socialist or communist states ruled by

workers’ parties that have sought to put this into practice, in one form

or another. The unfortunate fact we must grapple with is that this

simple prediction, that state ownership of the economy leads the state

to wither away, has never once occurred. Socialists have put forward a

number of attempted explanations for this.

Chief among them is the problem of imperialism. In addition to

controlling an exploited subject class, the other classical function of

a state is to defend against external threats, which for socialist

states have been abundant. By this line of thinking, one would expect

that socialist states would, pending international revolution, maintain

strong militaries and border controls but absent the class conflict that

necessitates state repression, foster free and open societies within.

Yet this has not been a feature of actually-existing socialism either,

where the state’s repressive apparatus has continued apace. Indeed, in

some cases that domestic repressive apparatus instead aggressively

expanded under self-identified socialist states.

Another possibility is one anticipated by Marx: the need for socialist

states to first develop the productive forces of society so that the

material conditions of real social freedom—fulfillment of basic needs,

freedom from toil, the leisure to participate in the collective

decision-making of society—are first in place.[3] For instance, the

Soviet Union was established in an essentially feudal agrarian society,

and carried out a program of breakneck industrialization at incalculable

human and ecological cost, becoming in only a few decades the first

country in history to send a person into space. Yet, despite reaching a

degree of industrial development comparable to the West in which meeting

the needs of all while reducing working hours was possible, this never

resulted in free democratic participation by the whole working class,

nor through this deeper democratization a withering of the state.[4]

A rather more disturbing rationalization suggests that, despite

successful expropriation of the capitalist class, “bourgeois elements”

were not yet sufficiently suppressed. What this argument sets in motion

is the specter of the eternal but poorly defined enemy within, a fifth

column whose extermination must come before the working class may

actually take the reins through free democratic deliberation. During

Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union, the bugbear that could explain any

failure and justify any repression was the “Trotskyite wrecker” who

exploited the trust of faithful comrades to sabotage the revolution; in

China under Mao, it was the “capitalist roader” who secretly sought the

restoration of capitalism.[5] In his March 1937 report to the Central

Committee of the Communist Party, Stalin wrote,

Present-day Trotskyism is not a political trend in the working class but

a gang without principle, without ideas, of wreckers, diversionists,

intelligence service agents, spies, murderers, a gang of sworn enemies

of the working class, working in the pay of the intelligence services of

foreign states… We must bring about a situation where there is not a

single Trotskyite wrecker left in our ranks.[6]

Similarly, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China kicked

off the Cultural Revolution with the following communiqué:

Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the

party, the government, the army, and various cultural circles are a

bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe,

they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the

proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have

already seen through, others we have not. Some are still trusted by us

and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev, for

example, who are still nestling beside us.[7]

The defense that dissent within the ranks is grounds for setting

democracy aside becomes, in effect, an admission that communism can

never be achieved, as dissent in one form or another is

inextinguishable. Such a politics renders “communism” a horizon where

every step in its direction requires greater political repression—a

horizon which only retreats a step in turn. As with Robespierre’s

“republic of virtue” and the mountain of severed heads that rose

ever-higher behind him, one cannot purge, repress, or exterminate their

way to a stateless and classless society.[8] Better explanations—and

better politics—are needed.

I would like to suggest a different approach to this problem. Rather

than only seeking out forces that inhibit this expected withering of the

state under socialism, i.e., taking the “wither away” formula as a

given, I believe we also need to interrogate the formula itself, to

dissect it and reexamine its assumptions. By bringing some of the

critical insights of social ecology about direct democracy and the state

into this discussion, I think we can zero in on just what is wrong with

the Marxist prediction about the withering of the state and place

ourselves on firmer theoretical footing for achieving a democratic

communist future.

The State in Marxist Theory

The origins and nature of the state in Marxist theory are interwoven

with the origins of class. The state’s development and basis for

existence is understood as a consequence of class society. In The Origin

of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels writes:

[The state] is the product of a society at a certain stage of

development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled

in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into

irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order

that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests,

might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power

seemingly standing above society became necessary for the purpose of

moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of ‘order’; and

this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it, and

increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.[9]

Despite its appearance as standing above society and its internal

conflicts, in Marxist theory the state is rather an implement of the

ruling class to preserve its power. Marx and Engels therefore see the

exercise of state power as an extension of class conflict and broadly

reducible to such. This leads to a view of the state as passive, lacking

any internal dynamics independent of the interests or goals of the class

that wields it.

Between each past successive class society, upheavals or political

revolutions transformed the structure of the state, which cleared the

remnants of the previous social order and ushered into being the new.

Marx imagined that the transition out of capitalism would be similar.

The workers’ struggles would necessarily escalate towards their winning

political power as a class, in the form of the dictatorship of the

proletariat.

First-time readers of Marx may be confused or shocked (or worse,

excited) by the use of the word dictatorship, a term whose meaning took

on new dimensions through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Marx deploys “dictatorship” as a more neutral term, referring to

political power and the exercise thereof. Before adopting the

terminology of “dictatorship of the proletariat” (not his own coinage),

he variously referred to this idea as “rule of the proletariat,”

“political power of the working class,” and other such phrases that ring

more democratically to twenty-first century ears. In The “Dictatorship

of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin, Hal Draper argues that Marx’s

meaning was nothing like the Blanquist idea of dictatorship; not rule by

a tyrannical elite but collective governance by the masses of working

people directly.[10] Draper writes:

To understand this, the reader must put aside the modern aura that makes

‘dictatorship’ a dirty word for us; for this aura did not yet exist. How

do you counteract the primitive notion of dictatorship that was so

common precisely among the people who wanted to be good revolutionaries?

You tell them: Dictatorship? That means rule. Yes, we want the rule of

the proletariat; but that does not mean the rule of a man or a clique or

a band or a party; it means the rule of a class. Class rule means class

dictatorship.[11]

It must also be kept in mind that Marx was convinced that capitalism

would soon convert the vast majority of humanity into wage laborers,

such that rule by the working class to his mind meant something rather

like “political power to the 99%.” Working-class rule was therefore

understood as both radically democratic and embodying the true general

social interest, echoing core goals of social ecology.

While Marx and Engels’s perspectives on the specifics of how the working

class were to achieve political power shifted over the course of their

lifetimes—at some points favoring an insurrection to overthrow the

capitalist state, at others for winning the “battle of democracy” via

working-class parties absorbing the majority of the voting

population—the idea that the road to communism runs only through the

dictatorship of the proletariat was constant throughout their political

lives. Marx did have some specific ideas about what this political

supremacy of the working class would accomplish. If a constitutional

democratic republic did not yet exist, the workers would establish one.

They would nationalize industry, and with state control over the

economy, they would begin to plan production to be more efficient while

pushing forward rapid technological advances. These would allow the

workers’ state to shorten the workday, freeing more time for ordinary

working men and women to participate in governing the socialist society.

They would abolish the standing army and redistribute their weapons to

militias of the working class. Armed to defend their new society and

expropriate the expropriators, the people themselves would replace any

“special force” for repression in the form of a professionalized army

and police force. This dictatorship of the proletariat marks the

disappearance of the state as a “power, arisen out of society,

but…plac[ed] above it…alienat[ed] from it.”[12] The people armed and

assembled, in this view, are the state.

The Contested Legacy of Revolutionary Governance in the Paris

Commune

In the spring of 1871, Parisians who were resisting the disarmament of

their citizen militias cast out the national government of France. The

new system these ordinary men and women devised to replace it was a

government of participatory democracy and worker control, with decisions

made through popular assemblies and recallable delegates. The working

class was in the saddle, guiding the transformation of a city of nearly

two million people. This was in many ways dramatically different from

Marx’s political vision of nationalized industry, universal national

programs, and state-driven technological development. As the Commune was

embraced by the First International, Marx came to accept that the

reality of emerging revolutionary movements was even more transformative

than he had previously envisioned, calling it “the political form at

last discovered” for the emancipation of the working class.[13] The

Commune became the living example of socialist revolution that many

communists, Marx and Engels included, would continually refer to, long

after its defeat. As Engels wrote twenty years later, “Well and good,

gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look

at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”[14]

Lenin too looked to the Paris Commune as the model of the dictatorship

of the proletariat. In his most important work, The State and

Revolution, Lenin makes his case for why the working class cannot take

hold of the state as it exists, but must instead overthrow it and erect

in its place a fundamentally different sort of government. To that end,

he quotes at length from Marx’s pamphlet on the Commune, The Civil War

in France. Detailing the many ways the Paris Commune fully democratized

public life, Lenin writes:

Thus the Commune appears to have substituted “only” fuller democracy for

the smashed state machine: abolition of the standing army; all officials

to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this “only”

signifies the very important substitution of one type of institution for

others of a fundamentally different order. This is a case of “quantity

becoming transformed into quality”: democracy, introduced as fully and

consistently as is generally conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois

democracy into proletarian democracy; from the state (i.e., a special

force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is

no longer really a state.[15]

He argues that these changes in the functioning of democracy amount to

not a difference in degree, but in kind. The matter of direct recall

upends the relationship of power between public officials and the

people, turning those officials from representatives handed independent

decision-making power into mere delegates who may only carry forward the

decisions of ongoing popular assemblies. The abolition of the standing

army and the armament of popular militias in their stead reflects and

upholds this reversal. The qualitative transformations wrought by the

Paris Commune were so total that Lenin regarded the new system as “no

longer really a state.”

In 1875, in a letter to August Bebel criticizing the Gotha Program,

Engels likewise wrote that the Paris Commune “had ceased to be a state

in the true sense of the term.”[16] Lenin, responding to this some

decades later, regards this claim as Engels’s “most important

theoretical statement”![17] If the Paris Commune—the shining example of

the dictatorship of the proletariat—was not really a state, then what

was it?[18] Is the dictatorship of the proletariat also then not a

state? And if this is so unclear, what is a state?

In their many debates with anarchists over the years, Marxists argued

vigorously that the state should be abolished, but not overnight. They

offered instead a political program of abolishing privileged rule in

favor of the direct governance of society by the vast majority. Lenin’s

central argument in The State and Revolution is that the proletariat

cannot lay its hands on the ready-made machinery of the state, but

instead must destroy the state and build something else in its place

that is not a state. To anarchist ears, that is doing away with the

state overnight.[19]

Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin, and others in the

libertarian socialist tradition have advocated the replacement of states

by federations of free communes, governed directly by ordinary people

without mediation through ruling elites—in short, the Paris Commune to

scale.[20] What then distinguishes this from the dictatorship of the

proletariat which is “no longer really a state” wherein the “functions

of state power devolve upon the people generally”?[21] What are we to

make of the fact that the desired political system of those who do not

want a state, transitional or otherwise, aligns closely with the Marxist

vision of a “workers’ state”? Are these merely definitional challenges,

or something more fundamental?[22] I do not mean to suggest the

differences between Marxism and anarchism are merely semantic, but

clearly we must think through the word “state” with more precision.

On this topic, Marx, Engels, and Lenin are all guilty of category

muddling. Much of the theoretical verbiage in their relevant passages

masks, rather than clarifies, the underlying ideas. The fundamental

problem underlying Engels and Lenin’s ambiguity—the dictatorship of the

proletariat being not quite a state—is that there are two core

characteristics that make something a state, and as a result they are

struggling to describe a social order in which one but not the other is

present.

The first characteristic is the control over the means of organized

violence, to defend or repress. It is in terms of this characteristic

that Marx and Lenin define the state. Lenin writes, “The state is a

special organization of force; it is an organization of violence for the

suppression of some class.”[23] Both Marx and Lenin denounce the foolish

intent of anarchists to abolish the state as “laying down their arms,”

leaving the revolution exposed to bourgeois reaction.[24] Contemporary

political scientists also tend to define the state as the institution

with a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

The second characteristic, which Engels and Lenin recognize (sometimes

implicitly, other times explicitly) as a key feature of states is that

they are structures of elite rule. States are organized according to

command and control, through which a small group of rulers can impose

its authority upon the rest. The state, as Engels notes, is above

society, being inherently a form of minority rule. Lenin writes that

“The Commune ceased to be a state” in so far as it no longer repressed

the majority of the population.[25]

These two defining characteristics are closely related, of course, as

the function of the first (the monopoly on “legitimate” violence) is to

preserve and enforce the second (minority rule). But they are not the

same thing. In a generous interpretation of Marx and Engels, the

dictatorship of the proletariat is a new sort of governance in which the

second characteristic has been overthrown and no longer applies, with

the powers of decision-making and the means of violence to enforce them

having been devolved to the whole society of working people. This, it

seems, is what Engels means in saying that the Paris Commune—and by

extension the dictatorship of the proletariat—is “no longer a state in

the proper sense of the word,” as one of the defining features of the

state has been abolished.[26]

Even as these two aspects of states are connected, distinguishing them

as distinct features is the only way to gain theoretical clarity on the

state and the problem before us. Some of the insights of Bookchin and

social ecology more broadly are particularly helpful here. In his essay

“Anarchism, Power, and Government,” he writes:

[J]ust as elsewhere I have distinguished between politics and

statecraft, I must now also point out the distinction between

governments and states… All states are governments, but not all

governments are states. A government is a set of organized and

responsible institutions that are minimally an active system of social

and economic administration. They handle the problems of living in an

orderly fashion. A government may be a dictatorship; it may be a

monarchy or a republican state; but it may also be a libertarian

formation of some kind…

What kinds of governments, then, are not states? Tribal councils, town

meetings, workers’ committees, soviets (in the original sense of the

word), popular assemblies and the like are governments, and no amount of

juggling with words can conceal that fact…

A state, by contrast, is a government that is organized to serve the

interests of a privileged and often propertied class at the expense of

the majority. This historic rise of the state transformed governance

into a malignant force for social development. When a government becomes

a state—that is, a coercive mechanism for perpetuating class rule for

exploitative purposes—it invariably acquires different institutional

characteristics. First, its members are professionalized to one degree

or another, in order to separate them from the mass of the population

and thereby impart to them an extraordinary status, which in turn

renders them the full-time protectors of a ruling class. Second, the

state, aided by military and police functionaries, enjoys a monopoly

over the means of violence.[27]

Bookchin argues that a government only becomes a state when it

structures itself as an institution of elite rule to assert their power

over the rest of the population. His vision of a stateless society is

one where power lies with the people as a whole instead of a small group

of governing officials—not one lacking the organized use of force. In

fact, in Urbanization Without Cities, he writes, “A true civicism that

tries to create an authentic politics, an empowered citizenry, and a

municipalized economy would be a vulnerable project indeed if it failed

to replace the police, the professional army… with an authentic militia…

for dealing with external dangers to freedom.”[28]

When it comes to the necessity of force in overthrowing the present

system and defending the new socialist government, Bookchin is on the

same page as the Marxists. So too are the classical anarchists like

Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta. The question of force is not what

separates them. It ought not be where we draw the lines of debate about

the state.

If we are to adopt Bookchin’s distinction between states and

governments, then an institution or set of institutions is therefore

only a state if it meets both of our criteria. If it meets the first

(organized violence) but not the second (elite rule), it is some popular

system of government that is not a state. If it meets the second but not

the first, it cannot last (or exist at all), as elite rule relies on

force and coercion. We may also imagine into the future forms of

communal government that meet neither requirement, where hierarchy and

force have both been banished; this is what Marx would term the higher

stage of communism.

David Harvey, one of the few Marxists to genuinely engage with

Bookchin’s work, lays out a somewhat different perspective in “Listen,

Anarchist!,” a playful reference to Bookchin’s own 1969 pamphlet

“Listen, Marxist!” Harvey frames the issue as a matter of serious

anarchists coming to recognize the necessity of state-building in some

fashion, but acknowledges that much of this comes down to defining

terminology:

The odd thing here is that the more autonomistas and anarchists grapple

with the necessity to build organizations that have the capacity to ward

off bourgeois power and to build the requisite large-scale

infrastructures for revolutionary transformation, the more they end up

constructing something that looks like some kind of state… Bookchin’s

position on all of this is interesting… Opposition to the state must not

carry over to opposition to government… Consensus decision making, he

says, “threatens to abolish society as such.” Simple majority voting

suffices. There must also be a “serious commitment” to a “formal

constitution and appropriate by-laws” because “without a democratically

formulated and approved institutional framework whose members and

leaders can be held accountable, clearly articulated standards of

responsibility cease to exist… Freedom from authoritarianism can best be

assured only by the clear, concise and detailed allocation of power”…All

of this looks to me like a reconstruction of a certain kind of state

(but this may be nothing more than semantics).[29]

In essence, if it looks like a state and quacks like a state, shouldn’t

we call it a state? I do not particularly want to push back on Harvey

here to argue about what is and is not a state; the meaning of the word

is not a fact of the universe floating in the world outside language or

theory. What does matter is that whatever categories we use encompass

and reflect real distinctions in our social world. This may mean we take

“state” to mean the same thing as “government,” as Harvey suggests,

while clearly distinguishing between governments where decisions come

from on high (the political order we as revolutionaries aim to

overthrow) and those where decisions flow from below (the system of

radically democratic popular self-rule that we strive to establish). Or

it could mean we distinguish the broader, arguably neutral categories of

government and governance from “the state,” a more particular form of

government organized around elite domination through the implements of

violence, as Bookchin does. I believe the second option results in

considerably more clarity, but it is inessential to my argument.

Crucially, as thinkers and organizers we must recognize that this

consensus of meaning within a shared leftist discourse has not yet been

achieved. This is a source of dispute and confusion that must be

consciously navigated while communicating these ideas both within and

beyond our movements. Sloganeering will not suffice; simply asking

“abolish the state, yes or no?” is not good enough either. Yet we

nevertheless require firmer answers than “Well, sort of.” Semantics

undergird this problem, but it is not merely semantic. The confused way

we talk about states also garbles our thinking about essential questions

for revolutionaries.

Prevailing Marxist notions of what is and is not a state consider the

Paris Commune and a Marxist-Leninist one-party dictatorship to be the

same sort of political order, both dictatorships of the proletariat, but

also consider the Paris Commune to be categorically different from

anarchist polities like the Ukrainian Free Territory or the Shinmin

Prefecture despite their clear similarities in form.[30] The lines of

this debate about abolishing the state are drawn artificially, with a

certain sectarian shallowness. This serves to confuse and obscure the

deeper debate between those who advocate a socialism from below through

the direct popular self-governance of the working class and those who

merely desire another form of elite rule. In short, the manner and the

terms in which both anarchists and Marxists have discussed these

questions have actively impeded the revolutionary left’s ability to

think about them clearly.

This confusion creates fertile ground for polemical distortion and

misrepresentation. More dangerously, it opens space for groups to co-opt

the moral force of ‘all power to the people’ even as they do not value

democracy and undermine it as it suits them. Lenin himself was guilty of

all the above, both in his writings and political life. He straddled the

imprecision that we need now to overcome, riding soviet democracy into

power while preparing justifications for its replacement by the party

apparatus. As he writes in The State and Revolution, “Democracy is of

great importance for the working class in its struggle for freedom

against the capitalists. But democracy is by no means a boundary that

must not be overstepped; it is only one of the stages in the process of

development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to

communism.”[31] But democracy is not a stage, nor a boundary; it is the

masses in power. To “overstep” democracy can only mean to roll back that

popular power.

The question we must always ask is this: does the working class as a

whole govern the socialist society, or does a segment of society govern

the working class? Lenin cannot, or will not, provide a consistent

answer. Mere paragraphs away from the most radically democratic

assertions of his entire corpus, he dismisses the notion that workers

can function without being under the control of state managers as

“anarchist dreams.”[32]

Here, the state-as-elite-rule makes a hasty return. Leninism has quietly

snuck undemocratic governance into the back door of the dictatorship of

the proletariat, unseen because he defines the new regime in terms of

whether the workers hold guns—not who commands them. Even if the people

are armed, who directs their activity? Are they participants in

collective decision-making or recipients of orders? Weapons or no

weapons, it was never the legionaries, conscripts, or knights who ruled

the states of class societies present and past, but the senators,

ministers, and kings. There may be rule by the whole working class, or

there may be rule by a special stratum of decision-makers, but not both.

And once Lenin is firmly in power, these ambiguities immediately give

way. In a practical essay written in 1918 for the purpose of orienting

his new government, he writes, the “revolution demands—precisely in the

interests of its development and consolidation, precisely in the

interests of socialism—that the people unquestioningly obey the single

will of the leaders of labour.”[33] In the same passage Lenin states,

“Given ideal class-consciousness and discipline on the part of those

participating in the common work, this subordination would be something

like the mild leadership of a conductor of an orchestra.” Yet he goes on

to add, “It may assume the sharp forms of a dictatorship if ideal

discipline and class-consciousness are lacking.” Lenin, of course,

leaves it up to his own discretion how “mild” his one-man rule is going

to be, saying it depends upon whether or not the people are sufficiently

“disciplined.”[34] We’ve moved a long way from the rule of all over

all.[35]

The Bug in the Dialectic

So, let us take up again the initial question: why have we not seen the

state wither away? Reconsider Engels’s formula: The state exists to

control class conflict. If by the power of the workers the state seizes

all property, then all is held in common and classes cease to exist—and

therefore the state’s architecture of coercion no longer serves any

purpose.

Here is the flaw in the formula—the bug in the dialectic. If by the

power of workers, the state seizes all property, then all is held in

common and classes cease to exist. Unless the structure of the state is

fundamentally transformed, such that the people rule directly through a

system of radical democracy, with no special strata to make decisions on

their behalf, state ownership of the entire economy isn’t common

ownership of the economy. It is just ownership by those who control the

state. Then all is held in common simply does not follow from a program

of nationalizing industry. If the state does not cease to be a state,

there remains an elite class who command the labor power of others, and

class conflict proceeds apace.[36]

“Class,” after all, means the existence of different and opposing

relationships to the means of production. State ownership of the means

of production is not the abolition of class, because most people work

for the state while a smaller group commands their labor by wielding

state authority. Even if they call themselves workers, these new elites

are set apart with their own particular class interests: the privileges

of their status, their vantage point removed from the experience of the

workers they command, and most fundamentally their authority over the

labor of others.

This managerial class not only has distinct interests in direct conflict

with a transition to communism, which would require them to relinquish

their special status; they also hold the power to defend those interests

against agitation from below. When conflicts between workers and party

leaders arise, the latter can simply rely on state repression to uphold

their decisions and their social position. As this is not a classless

society, neither is it to be a stateless one.

No less a Leninist than Leon Trotsky, long beholden to the idea that

“nationalized property equals socialism,” later warned in The Revolution

Betrayed of this tension between state ownership and the people:

The new constitution – wholly founded, as we shall see, upon an

identification of the bureaucracy with the state, and the state with the

people – says: “… the state property – that is, the possessions of the

whole people.” This identification… becomes the source of crude

mistakes, and of downright deceit, when applied to the first and still

unassured stages of the development of a new society…

State property becomes the property of “the whole people” only to the

degree that social privilege and differentiation disappear, and

therewith the necessity of the state. In other words: state property is

converted into socialist property in proportion as it ceases to be state

property. And the contrary is true: the higher the Soviet state rises

above the people, and the more fiercely it opposes itself as the

guardian of property to the people as its squanderer, the more obviously

does it testify against the socialist character of this state

property.[37]

If only Trotsky—the butcher of Kronstadt himself—had internalized this

lesson sooner.

These problems are, at least in part, a consequence of the fact that

Marxism lacks a clear political theory. The state is seen as but an

empty stage, upon which the agents of the class struggle may speak their

lines and advance the plot. As a result, what many Marxists call

dialectical materialism is instead a variety of idealism—a belief that

so long as they have the correct ideas, the leaders of a dictatorship

will take the correct path. But what of the interests and antagonisms

built into the state form, structured by who commands whose labor and

who benefits from it? The stage is no empty vessel; its shape shapes the

story. Like the feudal manor, slave plantation, private firm, or any

other institution of hierarchy, the state has a logic unto itself.

No structure of minority rule can be a container for rule by the whole

of society; this circle cannot be squared. Too often Marxist discourse

shrouds this dilemma of the “workers’ state” with tenuously stacked

layers of political representation: the class speaks for the whole of

society, the party speaks for the class, the central committee speaks

for the party, and the party leader speaks for the central committee.

Each degree of separation is held together by dubious democratic

accountability, or in most cases by rhetoric alone. Such farcical

“representation” serves only to disempower working people.

The arrival of socialists to power, even those with the most noble

democratic intentions, does not ensure that the working class will

govern society, for the working class is not itself in power. To return

to Hal Draper, “Yes, we want the rule of the proletariat; but that does

not mean the rule of a man or a clique or a band or a party; it means

the rule of a class.”[38]It is of course the central thrust of the

politics of social ecology that this quandary cannot be overcome without

revolutionizing the structures of public governance, abolishing

representative rule itself in favor of confederal direct democracy.

Without direct democracy, these contradictions can never be

unraveled.[39]

The Road to Communism Is Direct Democracy

The question of nationalizing industry—as opposed to municipalizing,

cooperatizing, or other forms of democratic social control—is a debate

to be had within the movement. But it must be recognized that state

ownership and central planning are not in themselves socialism; they are

not the road to communism. It is direct democracy that is the

fundamental ingredient, the “form of freedom” that opens the door to a

classless future. There can be no revolutionary dictatorship of the

proletariat without power being vested in forms of deliberation and

decision-making resting with the people themselves. Direct democracy is

what separates the stagnation of proclaimed workers’ states, whether

Marxist-Leninist or social-democratic, from a transition to

communism.[40]

In part, we can attribute this theoretical weakness on the part of Marx

and Engels to their scientism and consequent love affair with necessity.

Newtonian physics shows us that objects in motion have no say in the

matter: the outcomes of their paths are determined by necessity. Marx

and Engels too thought in terms of laws of motion, and believed they had

discovered those of history. The following century, Hannah Arendt noted

that the very language of “revolution” itself is of mechanistic,

astronomical origin, and chastised viewing society’s progression through

this “notion of irresistibility, the fact that the revolving motion of

the stars follows a preordained path and is removed from all influence

of human power.”[41] It was never enough for Marx and Engels to project

forward what we—as revolutionaries, as the working class, as human

beings—should do, to bring about this better future. The earnest moral

outrage of the young Marx aside, the lasting framework of Marx’s

philosophy of history casts all in terms of what will, what must come to

pass. Thus in the Marxist story of the future, the state is not

abolished, it withers away.

But replacing the state with radical democracy is not an assured,

necessary outgrowth of the development of capitalism. It is what

Bookchin terms a potentiality, the seeds of which are planted in the

human soil, in need of protection and nurturing. It will require

deliberate, conscious action on the part of organized masses, which may

be redirected into mistakes of the past or into dead ends not yet

encountered. Lenin stated that when “the majority of the people itself”

is armed, a “special force for suppression” becomes unnecessary. But

this is not what occurred in Paris in 1871, nor in similar popular

revolutions since. Standing armies weren’t suddenly superfluous; they

had to be actively disarmed. The organized power of ordinary people,

cradling dreams of a freer tomorrow, dissolved the authority of the

state into their own organs of radical democracy. Whether such a

democratization is the cumulation of an extended, steady struggle to

wrest power from elites or a dramatic clash that at last boils over

between the people and their rulers, it must be the work of our own

hands. There is, simply put, no mechanism nor precedent for the state to

just wither away—it is we who must wither the state.

---

Author Biography

Mason Herson-Hord is an organizer and writer in Detroit, MI. He is on

the coordinating committee of Symbiosis and lead organizer for the Motor

City Freedom Riders, a metro Detroit organization of bus riders

organizing for transit justice. He is also a board member of the

Institute for Social Ecology. His work, focusing primarily on

movement-building and ecological philosophy, has been published in In

These Times, The Ecologist, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory , Socialist

Forum, and the Journal of World-Systems Research.

[1] Ralph Milliband, “Lenin’s The State and Revolution” (The Socialist

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/lenin-state-and-revolution-miliband.

[2] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring/Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in

Science (New York, International, 1939), 306–307. All quoted words in

this paragraph are pulled from the epigraph fromabove.

[3] In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx distinguished

between the first, or “lower,” stage of communism, in which the working

class has full command of the economy but where access to what is

produced is still conditional on how much one works, and the second, or

“higher,” stage of communism, in which all inequality and injustice has

been fully eradicated and society is at last organized around the

principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to

their need.” In the transition from the lower stage to the higher stage,

the workers’ state brings society’s productive forces to maturity and

steadily sheds the lingering elements of capitalism. It is here that we

may note an inkling of doubt in Engels’s formula, with suggestion that

transition to statelessness might not be so immediate after all, that a

state may persist under “lower stage communism” for an indefinite

period. It should also be noted that in the industrialized world and

arguably in most “developing” countries as well, we are now currently

technologically capable of providing for the needs of all while working

far less. Reducing working hours indeed appears to be an urgent

ecological necessity.

[4] It is also unclear why technological development is presumed to be

only a capitalist- or state-driven possibility, such that this could

never be carried out by the association of free producers. See, for

example, how self-directed collectivization of enterprise during the

Spanish Civil War increased output by 20% in a six-month period (Ronald

Fraser, The Blood of Spain, London, Pimlico, 370). But that is a

discussion for another time.

[5] During the Stalin era, “wrecking” was a specific criminal charge for

any acts serving to undermine the Soviet economy, including complaining

about one’s working conditions (which allegedly damaged workers’

morale). The label of “wrecker” was used to enforce labor discipline and

absolute obedience to Party directives, while casting a wide net for

repression of political opponents. “Capitalist roaders,” according to

Mao, were those of the capitalist class who sought the restoration of

capitalism from within the Communist Party itself. Mao condemned

Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, as a capitalist roader.

[6] Joseph Stalin, Mastering Bolshevism, Marxist Pamphlets No. 1(New

York, New Century Publishers, 1937), 12, 27.

http://collections.mun.ca/PDFs/radical/MasteringBolshevism.pdf.

[7] “Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

on the Great Proletarian Political Revolution” (1966).

https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/cc_gpcr.htm.

[8] One may note that the Communards of Paris, the architects of that

first dictatorship of the proletariat, in fact smashed the guillotine

into pieces and burned that symbol of state terror before an enormous

cheering crowd. Such should be all revolutionaries’ feelings towards the

terror.

[9] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and

the State (1884),280.

[10] Louis Auguste Blanqui was a French revolutionary socialist and

contemporary of Marx’s (1805–1881). Unlike most socialists, Blanqui did

not believe in the importance of mass movements, but rather thought the

revolution should be carried out by a small band of conspirators, who

would establish a temporary, autocratic dictatorship (in the common

contemporary sense of the term) to redistribute society’s wealth.

[11] Hal Draper, The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to

Lenin (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1987).

https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/hal-draper/article2.htm.

[12] Engels, The Origin of the Family, 280.

[13] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), 26.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/civil_war_france.pdf.

[14] Friedrich Engels, 1891 Introduction to The Civil War in France by

Karl Marx (1871).

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm.

In addition to The Civil War in France, other important sources on the

Paris Commune are Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary

of the Paris Commune (London and New York, Verso Books, 2015), Murray

Bookchin, The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary

Era, Volume 2 (London and New York, Cassell, 1998), and Carolyn J.

Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune

(Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2004).

[15] Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917) in Essential Works

of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings, ed. Henry M.

Christman (New York, Dover Publications, 1987), 301.

[16] Letter from Engels to Bebel (March 18–25, 1875), first published by

Bebel in Volume II of his memoirs (Aus miner Leben) in 1911.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm.

[17] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 320.

[18] The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin similarly described the Paris

Commune as “a bold and outspoken negation of the State” (“The Paris

Commune and the Idea of the State,” 1871).

[19] Indeed, according to Nicolai Sukhanov’s eyewitness account (The

Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record, trans. Joel Carmicael, New

York, Harper and Brothers, 1984, 269–285), Lenin’s first stop after

getting off the train at the Finland Station was Bolshevik headquarters,

to give a two-hour speech to Party leaders laying out the ideas of The

State and Revolution, shocking the orthodox Marxists with his heretical

“purely anarchist schema” (Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 282). As a

result, a significant number of Russian anarchists (most famously Victor

Serge) actually joined the Bolshevik Party, with the rationale that the

most radical Bolsheviks were by that point effectively anarchists. In

“Listen, Marxist!,” (1969,

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bookchin/1969/listen-marxist.htm),

Murray Bookchin writes, “Indeed, much that passes for ‘Marxism’ in State

and Revolution is pure anarchism—for example, the substitution of

revolutionary militias for professional armed bodies and the

substitution of organs of self-management for parliamentary bodies. What

is authentically Marxist in Lenin’s pamphlet is the demand for ‘strict

centralism,’ the acceptance of a ‘new’ bureaucracy, and the

identification of soviets with a state.”

[20] So central was the Commune to Bookchin’s political thought that he

dubbed his mature politics “Communalism.”

[21] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 301. Lenin also writes that “we

[the workers as a whole] shall reduce the role of state officials to

that of simply carrying out our instructions” (ibid 307). This is

functionally identical to Bookchin’s views on the distinction between

policy-making (the deciding authority of the assembly) and

administration (which may be delegated to select recallable

individuals).

[22] In fact, in that previously cited letter to Bebel (footnote 16),

Engels suggested banishing the word “state” altogether, as a term whose

usage sowed more confusion than it illuminated, to be replaced with

Gemeinwesen, a German word that can mean “community,” “commonality,” or

“commune.” It seems that my frustrations about antagonistic discourses

talking past each other may have been shared.

[23] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 287.

[24] Anarchist pacifists notwithstanding, this is of course not at all

what anarchists take “abolish the state” to mean. As Bookchin responds

in “Listen, Marxist!,” “Nor did the anarchists of the last century

believe that the abolition of the state involved ‘laying down arms’

immediately after the revolution, to use Marx’s obscurantist words,

thoughtlessly repeated by Lenin in State and Revolution.” An unfortunate

quality of Marxist critiques of anarchism is persistent

misrepresentation. Despite its brilliance in other ways, The State and

Revolution is frequently quite shameless in this regard. By way of

illustrative example, Lenin spends paragraphs battling the “federalism

of Proudhon” as a political form inferior to Marxism’s centralism. Some

pages later, as if to pretend that his extended discussion of the

political forms put forward by anarchists never took place, Lenin

claims, “The utopians busied themselves with ‘discovering’ political

forms under which the socialist transformation of society was to take

place. The anarchists dismissed the question of political forms

altogether” (The State and Revolution, 312). These displays of

intellectual dishonesty only muddy our theoretical waters still further.

[25] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 320.

[26] We should keep in mind that the means of violence have also been

fundamentally transformed. The abolition of standing armies and the

redistribution of arms to democratic militias is a category shift, a

change in kind; it may not be quite correct to say that one aspect of

state-ness is abolished in the dictatorship of the proletariat while the

other endures intact. And indeed, according to Lenin, the supersession

of elite rule by direct self-governance of the working class sets

society on the path to abolishing organized violence as such. As a

directly democratic society dissolves class distinctions, the means of

violence, such as they are, become increasingly obsolete and may

eventually be set aside.

[27] Murray Bookchin, “Anarchism, Power, and Government.”

http://new-compass.net/articles/anarchism-power-and-government.

[28] Murray Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities (Montreal and New

York, Black Rose Books, 1992), 285.

[29] David Harvey, “Listen, Anarchist!: A personal response to Simon

Springer’s ‘Why a radical geography must be anarchist’” (2015).

http://davidharvey.org/2015/06/listen-anarchist-by-david-harvey/. Harvey

here quotes from Bookchin’s essay “The Communalist Project,” published

in The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct

Democracy (London and New York, Verso, 2015).

[30] I should note that with closer examination this distinction falls

apart on its own terms, at least for the case of the Free Territory

(also known as Makhnovia), which was defended through organized violence

by the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine.

[31] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 346.

[32] ibid, 307.

[33] Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” April 28,

1918. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm.

Here, Lenin invokes Engels, from his short essay “On Authority” (1872).

Engels wrote, “But the necessity of authority, and of imperious

authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a

ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend

on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.”

[34] ibid.

[35] It should furthermore be noted that despite the enduring legacy of

Leninism as being for the destruction of the bourgeois state’s

bureaucracy, it is not actually clear that anything resembling this took

place in Russia. In Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917–1922 (Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press, 1979, 51), T.H. Rigby argues that there was

“high level of continuity in the central administrative machine of the

Russian state” such that administrative changes brought by the

Bolsheviks “were scarcely greater than those sometimes accompanying

changes of government in Western parliamentary systems.” The

commissariats of the new state were in almost all cases simply renamed

ministries from the Tsarist regime, staffed by the same bureaucrats but

now headed by Bolshevik Party leaders. In practice, this was in fact a

matter of (to use Marx’s phrase) “lay[ing] hold of the ready-made state

machinery.”

[36] There is an extensive literature on the class society of the Soviet

Union and other regimes led by Communist Parties. See, for instance,

Michael Albert’s discussion of the “coordinator class” who rule over

workers in a centrally planned economy (Albert, “Beyond Class Rule Is

Parecon,” 2012); Paul Mattick’s introduction to Anti-Bolshevik Communism

(1978), which argues that state ownership under Communist rule

constituted a “modified capitalist system” (“[S]tate-control of the

economy…exercised by a privileged social layer as a newly emerging

ruling class, has perpetuated for the…labouring classes the conditions

of exploitation and oppression”); and the broader literature of the

International Left Opposition, the Johnson-Forest Tendency, et. al.,

which broke from Trotsky to diagnose the Soviet Union as “state

capitalism.”

[37] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and

Where Is It Going, trans. Max Eastman, 1936.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch09.htm.

[38] Draper, The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

[39] There is a vast literature on competing visions of how specifically

the principles of direct democracy are to be institutionalized in (and

on the way to) a liberated society, which are beyond the scope of this

essay to discuss in any detail. The traditions of anarcho-syndicalism

and council communism both maintain that all economic decisions should

be made by the workers of those industries, coordinated through

cooperative federations. Little emphasis is placed on the political

sphere outside of production. Murray Bookchin and others have instead

advocated for bringing production into politics, placing economic

decisions under the control of the community as a whole. Hybrids of

these two basic models abound. For an overview of anarcho-syndicalism,

see Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (London,

Secker and Warburg, 1938). For reflections on council communism, see

Paul Mattick, “Council Communism” (1939),

http://libcom.org/library/council-communism-mattick, and Anton

Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils (Oakland, AK Press, 2002). For an in-depth

discussion of worker control versus community control, see Howard

Hawkins, “Community Control, Workers’ Control, and the Cooperative

Commonwealth” (Society and Nature, 1993). Existing models of direct

democracy to scale should also be considered, which include (among

others) democratic confederalism’s council system in the Autonomous

Administration of North and East Syria, the caracoles and juntas de buen

gobierno in Zapatista-controlled territory in Chiapas, and the grama

sabha in Kerala’s system of People’s Planning.

[40] In The State and Revolution, Lenin notes, “The more complete

democracy becomes…the more rapidly does the state begin to wither away”

(349).

[41] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, 1963, p. 47. Penguin Books, London

and New York.