Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (25 page)

Despite the welcome visits by Krupskaya, the frustration caused by Lenin’s exile mounted, even though he was kept in touch by reading newspapers and receiving a series of messengers. His immense writings and correspondence of September, urging a more proactive policy on his party, showed the force of his pent-up anxiety. Before that, however, he reverted to the analytical mode which was second nature to him. Once more, Lenin the intellectual and professor came out ahead of Lenin the activist.

As we have seen, earlier in the year in the
Third Letter from Afar
, not to mention
The April Theses
, Lenin had been reflecting on the problem of the post-revolutionary state. Clearly, events had pushed this issue right to the top of the agenda. The revolution was evolving and, despite the apparent setback of July, Lenin believed it would continue to do so. The more it did, the more imperative it was to envisage what would happen once the existing authorities were overthrown and the masses took over. Exile at least gave him an opportunity to develop his thoughts on this crucial issue, which he did in the last of his major works,
State and Revolution
. Before analysing its content, one fundamental point, present in the very title, should not be forgotten. Lenin, in looking at the problems of transition from existing reality to socialism, chose to think first about politics. One might have expected of a Marxist, particularly at a time when economic determinism was thought to be the basis of the doctrine, that the issue of the economy might present itself. It is remarkable that, in the course of revolution, indeed throughout his life, Lenin paid far less attention to economics than he did to politics. Where economics was a focus it was, as with the work on
Imperialism
, very much tied to politics. Economic questions – what, on the day after the revolution, would be the policy towards prices and money? what would the market economy do? where would investment come from? and so on – were issues that Lenin barely considered. Where he did, he had largely offered political and institutional solutions such as amalgamating and nationalizing banks. The very title and key phrase of the new work, namely that the state machine should not be taken over but smashed, echoed Bakunin as much as Marx (even though the concept originated with Marx) and even critics in his party were not slow to point out this aspect of Lenin’s thought and he included a rather unconvincing section in
State and Revolution
in which he attempted to distinguish his ideas from anarchism.

Let us take a look at this work, mainly in order to trace Lenin’s thinking at this time. The pamphlet itself was not influential in 1917 for the simple reason that it was not published until 1918 and a small extra section, Chapter II, part iii, was added for the second edition which was published in 1919. Lenin, who had been working on the theme in 1915 and 1916, considered the item to be of some importance, so much so that he asked Lev Kamenev, in the event of his, Lenin’s, death, which was a real possibility in the pogrom atmosphere of July, to publish his notebook ‘Marxism and the State’, which had been held up in Stockholm. He was, however, able to retrieve it and work on it further and it emerged as
State and Revolution
. What was in it that Lenin considered to be so vital?

The core of the work consists of Lenin’s interpretation of Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune. The Commune (1871) took over Paris in the vacuum caused by the German siege of the city and the government’s withdrawal and collapse. It was the first example, of many the left hoped, of the people rising up and governing themselves. Incidentally, the majority of Communards (members of the Commune) were influenced by French radicals such as Blanqui rather than by Marx, hence the aura of anarchism detected by many in Lenin’s work.

The core insight, smashing the existing state rather than transforming it, opened the way up to all sorts of questions. How would one replace the legislative, administrative, judicial, police and defence functions it performed for society? Why did existing forms have to be smashed?

To answer the second question first, in Marx’s conception the state was the instrument by which the ruling class ruled. They took over the state and imbued it with the values and priorities of the ruling class. It therefore followed, in Marx’s view, that it was too tainted by its connections with the rulers to be transformed and, as the Communards had instinctively seen, its remnants had to be completely broken before a new organization, part and parcel of the mass of the population, could take its place. In addition, in the Marxist perspective, the classless society would be a stateless society so the transitional forms should also be constructed with this aim in view.

Most of
State and Revolution
is taken up with an examination of the principles behind the new organization. The point was to fuse the institutions as closely as possible with the people so they could not be used to oppress the majority – the people would not, it was assumed, repress themselves. This meant having structures fully composed of the people and fully answerable to them at all times. How would this be accomplished following the implementation of Lenin’s injunction from
The April Theses
– ‘Abolition of the police, army and bureaucracy’? The police and armed forces would cease to be ‘special bodies of armed men’ (Engels) since this was the characteristic that enabled them to be used for repressive purposes. As special, separate bodies, cut off from society, they identified with their own ethos and orders, not with their brothers and sisters in the society around them. To overcome this it was necessary that as many citizens as possible should be involved in staffing and operating them. There would be a compulsory term of service for all male citizens. The whole country would be trained in arms in order to be able to defend themselves and deprive the state of its monopoly of police and military knowledge and techniques. The people would be armed and therefore they could not be forced into submission by armed external agencies. Bureaucratic and judicial functions would also be democratized by enforcing a regular rotation of administrative tasks in which the whole population would participate. In Lenin’s words ‘Everyone would govern in turn and soon become used to no one governing.’ [SW 2 357] All officials, including delegates to representative institutions, would be subject to annual election and could be recallable at any time should a certain percentage of their constituents demand it. Salaries, too, would be pegged to the wages of an average worker. The point here was to undermine the careerist appeal of comfortable administrative jobs. While, at first, some of these principles were implemented briefly, the emerging Soviet Union was eventually characterized by their precise opposite – a tyrannous, permanent, unresponsive bureaucratic elite of Party and state officials, many of whom were paid high salaries. While we will see some of the forces bringing this about, our main concern is with the development of Lenin’s own ideas on such issues.

State and Revolution
was also remarkable for some of its other assumptions and sources. In addition to the Marx/Paris Commune core there is also a large measure of Hilferding’s ideas present. Hilferding, as we have seen, argued that capitalism was becoming organized and its essential nutrient, capital, was turning into bank capital (finance capital in Hilferding’s phrase) controlled not by entrepreneurs and owners of capital but by bank employees, its managers. Take over the banks and one would thereby take over the essence of capitalism. Lenin proposed exactly this in
The April Theses
. He developed the principle even further in
State and Revolution
arguing that all ‘political’ functions could, similarly, be reduced to accounting and control within the grasp of the average, literate intelligence.

Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, rail
ways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old ‘state power’ have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary ‘workmen’s wages’, and that these functions can (and must) be stripped of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of ‘official grandeur’. [SW 2 299]

In a memorable phrase, he claimed running the state would become a routine like the everyday operation of the post office.

A witty German Social-Democrat of the seventies of the last century called the postal service an example of the socialist economic system. This is very true … To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service so that the technicians, foremen and accountants, as well as all officials, shall receive salaries no higher than ‘a workman’s wage’, all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat – that is our immediate aim. This is the state and this is the economic foundation we need. [SW 2 304]

Marx rarely used the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but Lenin turned it into a key phrase and a key concept. Lenin quoted one of Marx’s references to it.

Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. [quoted in SW 2 332]

According to Lenin ‘Democracy for an insignificant minority, democ
racy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society.’ [SW 2 333] He added: ‘Marx grasped the
essence
of capitalist democracy splendidly when … he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.’ [SW 2 334] By comparison, ‘during the
transition
from capitalism to communism suppression is
still
necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority.’ [SW 2 336] A state is still necessary but it is a transitional one which will, says Lenin, be much less complex since the suppression of a minority of exploiters by the majority of exploited ‘is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-labourers and it will cost mankind far less.’ [SW 2 336] Such a mechanism is, Lenin continues, ‘compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population that the need for a
special machine
of suppression will begin to disappear.’ [SW 2 336] In a rare reference to the soviets he concludes that while the exploiters can only suppress the people by means of a very complex machine, ‘
the people
can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple “machine” … by the simple
organization of the armed people
(such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies …).’ [SW 2 336] Remember that, at the point of writing the final piece in August 1917, Lenin was at a point of disillusionment with the soviets as they were then constituted and had explicitly turned back to a policy of workers’ armed uprising.

In
State and Revolution
Lenin produced many classic formulae of the left. But few of them found their way into Bolshevik or Communist practice. Where attempted, many of them failed. In the early Soviet state and later in Mao’s China, rotation of administrative posts was tried but tended to bring chaos as each wave of newcomers took time to understand the job and, more or less as soon as it did, was replaced by the next set of draftees. Administrative and other tasks were, sadly, more complex than the routine of the post office. Militias, too, were soon abandoned as being undertrained to take on the tasks of modern war. However, critics of the authoritarian streak which emerged in communist societies would point less to the inadequacies of the institutions themselves and more to the communist obsession with control to explain the failure of the ultra-democratic provisions of
State and Revolution
. From our perspective of examining Lenin’s life, perhaps the most extraordinary and ironic feature is that, while he retained such ultra-democratic ideas in his head, Lenin later presided in practice over the emergence of one of the most intrusive bureaucratic state structures the world had ever seen. While we will return to this question again it is worth noting that one of the key reasons for the tension was already apparent. In
State and Revolution
Lenin assumes that a free proletarian will share his, Lenin’s, principles. It thereby follows, in Lenin’s logic, that any proletarian who disagreed was not yet free of the shackles of bourgeois thought. Lenin’s solution, before and after
State and Revolution
, was to remove the oppressive ideas, to raise the consciousness of those who disagreed until they reached advanced consciousness, that is, they saw the light and came into agreement. In this respect Lenin’s mental world resembles, may indeed have been imbibed subconsciously from, the Orthodox church which envisaged humanity unifying around the absolute truth which it possessed. Be that as it may, the chief weakness of Lenin’s intellectual system was that it provided no room for honest disagreement between individuals who were enlightened and advanced. Such enlightenment, it was assumed, would lead to harmony, not dissonance. Reality was to prove otherwise.

The manuscript of
State and Revolution
breaks off after two sentences of Chapter VII entitled ‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’. It is tantalizing that such a chapter was never written though we may infer from the rest of his writings what Lenin might have said, for instance that the 1905 Revolution lacked organized proletarian leadership and hegemony which was increasingly provided in 1917 by the Soviet, internationalist left. However, we will never know. The postscript to the first edition, written in late November 1917, explains laconically why the section was never completed: