By James Thompson

In the recent experience of the Occupy movement, the role of the state has become all too apparent. In the beginning, the movement was met with little resistance from police or other representatives of the state. However, more recently, the state has unmasked itself and the agents of the state, the police, have openly attacked peaceful Occupy movement participants and have arrested them on both a small scale and on a mass scale. Heads of Iraq war veterans have been bashed and many others brutalized by the unleashed guard dogs of state power. The irony lies in the fact that the police are working people themselves who have been coerced into attacking those people who are currently most visible in the fight for the rights of working people.

How could this happen in a “democratic” country that prides itself on “free speech”?

To understand this development it is important to understand the Marxist Leninist concept of the state.

The state serves to protect and serve the ruling class and their interests. In capitalist societies, this would be the bourgeoisie, or ownership class, ultra-wealthy, i.e. the owners of the means of production.

Democracy in capitalist societies refers to the political struggle of various capitalist parties to maintain the state which protects and serves capitalists. Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie refers to the primacy of the state which defends the interests of the wealthy class. The state will do whatever is necessary to defend the interests of its benefactors, the ruling class.

Given these concepts, one has to ask what does “free speech” mean? Obviously, “free speech” refers to the freedom of people in capitalist societies to speak freely on behalf of and in support of capitalism. Serious criticism of capitalism and its state apparatus will be met with fierce hostility, both physical and verbal.

In socialist societies, the state serves to protect the interests of working people, which is socialism. Dictatorship of the proletariat refers to the primacy of the state in defending the interests of the working class. In other words, in a properly running socialist society the state would fight for the interests of working people.

The interests of the working class and the capitalist class are irreconcilable and the class struggle continues until one class is eliminated.

In other words, peaceful protesters against capitalism will continue to get their heads bashed in as long as the capitalists are the ruling class. Legislative reforms and minute advances for the working class will be difficult if not impossible and proceed extremely slowly with many setbacks and reversals of progressive advancements as long as the capitalists are in power. Once the working class becomes the ruling class, the interests of the working people will be protected and defended. The interests, rights and freedoms of the capitalist class to exploit and oppress workers, on the other hand, will be significantly curtailed.

I believe this advancement of the interests of working people is at the heart of the Occupy movement.

The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin are instructive in understanding the relationship of the state and the class struggle.

Lenin wrote in the first chapter of State and Revolution:

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes have visited relentless persecution on and receive their teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonize them, and surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge. At the same time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement are cooperating in this work of adulterating Marxism. They omit, obliterate, and distort the revolutionary side of its teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is, or seems, acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social chauvinists are now “Marxists”-joking aside!”

Lenin goes on to quote Engels historical analysis of the concept of state:

“The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from the outside; just as little is it ‘the reality of the moral idea,’ ‘the image and reality of reason,’ as Hegel asserted. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction within 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, may not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power apparently standing above society becomes necessary, whose purpose is to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power arising out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly separating itself from it, is the state.”

Lenin summarizes:

“The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where, and to the extent that the class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”

He goes on:

“On the one hand, the bourgeois, and particularly the petty bourgeois, ideologists, compelled under the pressure of indisputable historical facts to admit that the state only exists where there are class antagonisms and the class struggle, “correct” Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the state is an organ for reconciling the classes. According to Marx, the state could neither arise nor maintain itself if a reconciliation of classes were possible. But with the petty bourgeois and Philistine professors and publicists, the state-and this frequently on the strength of benevolent references to Marx!-becomes a conciliator of the classes. According to Marx, the state is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another; its aim is the creation of ‘order’ which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the collisions between the classes. But in the opinion of the petty bourgeois politicians, order means reconciliation of the classes, and not oppression of one class by another; to moderate collisions does not mean, they say, to deprive the oppressed classes of certain definite means and methods of struggle for overthrowing the oppressors, but to practice reconciliation.”

After many years of obfuscation by the wealthy classes, the current global economic crisis and its natural born child, the occupy movement and worldwide resistance to the ravages of capitalism, have clarified the role of the state in the class war. These events make it impossible to deny the relevance of the classic teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

You can read V. I. Lenin’s State and Revolution online at:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

PHill1917@comcast.net

by V. I. Lenin

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Written:Between April 30 and May 3, 1918
First Published: 1918 in the pamphlet: N. Lenin The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, All-Russia C.E.C. Publishers; Published according to the text of the second edition of the pamphlet, 1918, collated with the manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 27, pages 314-317
Translated: Clemens Dutt; Edited by Robert Daglish
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters & Robert Cymbala
Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive March, 2002

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1. The international position of the Soviet Republic is extremely difficult and critical, because the deepest and fundamental interests of international capital and imperialism induce it to strive not only for a military onslaught on Russia, but also for an agreement on the partition of Russia and the strangulation of the Soviet power.

Only the intensification of the imperialist slaughter of the peoples in Western Europe and the imperialist rivalry between Japan and America in the Far East paralyse, or restrain, these aspirations, and then only partially, and only for a certain, probably short, time.

Therefore, the tactics of the Soviet Republic must be, on the one hand, to exert every effort to ensure the country’s speediest economic recovery, to increase its defence capacity, to build up a powerful socialist army; on the other hand, in international policy, the tactics must be those of manoeuvring, retreat, waiting for the moment when the international proletarian revolution—which is now maturing more quickly than before in a number of advanced countries—fully matures.

2. In the sphere of domestic policy, the task that comes to the forefront at the present time in conformity with tho resolution adopted by the All-Russia Congress of Soviets on March 15, 1918, is the task of organisation. It is this task, in connection with the new and higher organisation of production and distribution on the basis of socialised large-scale machine (labour) production, that constitutes the chief content—and chief condition of complete victory —of the socialist revolution that was begun in Russia on October 25, 1917.

3. From the purely political point of view, the essence of the present situation is that the task of convincing the working people of Russia that the programme of the socialist revolution is correct and the task of winning Russia from the exploiters for the working people have, in main and fundamental outline, been carried out, and the chief problem that comes to the forefront now is—how to administer Russia. The organisation of proper administration, the undeviating fulfilment of the decisions of the Soviet government—this is the urgent task of the Soviets, this is the condition for the complete victory of the Soviet type of state, which it is not enough to proclaim in formal decrees, which it is not enough to establish and introduce in all parts of the country, but which must also be practically organised and tested in the course of the regular, everyday work of administration.

4. In the sphere of the economic building of socialism, the essence of the present situation is that our work of organising the country-wide and all-embracing accounting and control of production and distribution, and of introducing proletarian control of production, lags far behind the direct expropriation of the expropriators—the land owners and capitalists. This is the fundamental fact determining our tasks.

From this it follows, on the one hand, that the struggle against the bourgeoisie is entering a new phase, namely: the centre of gravity is shifting to the organisation of accounting and control. Only in this way is it possible to consolidate all the economic achievements directed against capital, all the measures in nationalising individual branches of the national economy that we have carried out since October; and only in this way is it possible to prepare for the successful consummation of the struggle against the bourgeoisie, i.e., the complete consolidation of socialism.

From this basic fact follows, on the other hand, the explanation as to why the Soviet government was obliged in certain cases to take a step backward, or to agree to compromise with bourgeois tendencies. Such a step backward and departure from the principles of the Paris Commune was, for example, the introduction of high salaries for a number of bourgeois experts. Such a compromise was the agreement with the bourgeois co-operatives concerning steps and measures for gradually bringing the entire population into the co-operatives. Compromises of this kind will be necessary until the proletarian government has put country-wide control and accounting firmly on its feet; and our task is, while not in the least concealing their unfavourable features from the people, to exert efforts to improve accounting and control as the only means and method of completely eliminating all compromises of this kind. Compromises of this kind are needed at the present time as the sole (because we are late with accounting and control) guarantee of slower, but surer progress. When the accounting and control of production and distribution is fully introduced the need for such compromises will disappear.

5. Particular significance now attaches to measures for raising labour discipline and the productivity of labour. Every effort must be exerted for the steps already undertaken in this direction, especially by the trade unions, to be sustained, consolidated and increased. This includes, for example, the introduction of piece-work, the adoption of much that is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system, the payment of wages commensurate with the general results of the work of a factory, the exploitation of rail and water transport, etc. This also includes the organisation of competition between individual producers’ and consumers’ communes, selection of organisers, etc.

6. The proletarian dictatorship is absolutely indispensable during the transition from capitalism to socialism, and in our revolution this truth has been fully confirmed in practice. Dictatorship, however, presupposes a revolutionary government that is really firm and ruthless in crushing both exploiters and hooligans, and our government is too mild. Obedience, and unquestioning obedience at that, during work to the one-man decisions of Soviet directors, of the dictators elected or appointed by Soviet institutions, vested with dictatorial powers (as is demanded, for example, by the railway decree), is far, very far from being guaranteed as yet. This is the effect of the influence of petty-bourgeois anarchy, the anarchy of small-proprietor habits, aspirations and sentiments, which fundamentally contradict proletarian discipline and socialism. The proletariat must concentrate all its class-consciousness on the task of combating this petty-bourgeois anarchy, which is not only directly apparent (in the support given by the bourgeoisie and their hangers-on, the Mensheviks, Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, etc., to every kind of resistance to the proletarian government), but also indirectly apparent (in the historical vacillation displayed on the major questions of policy by both the petty-bourgeois Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the trend in our Party called “Left Communist”, which descends to the methods of petty-bourgeois revolutionariness and copies the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).

Iron discipline and the thorough exercise of proletarian dictatorship against petty-bourgeois vacillation—this is the general and summarising slogan of the moment.

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Endnotes
[1] Six Theses on the Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government were written by Lenin on instructions of the All-Russia C.E.C. after his report on the immediate tasks of the Soviet government had been discussed at a meeting of the All-Russia C.E.C. on April 29, 1918. Lenin’s theses were unanimously approved by the Party Central Committee on May 3, and on May 4 the Presidium of the All-Russia C.E.C. sent them out to the local Soviets with a circular letter stating that Lenin’s theses “should form the basis of the work of all Soviets”.

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ORIGINAL FRENCH ARTICLE: Lire et relire Lénine, pour préparer l’avenir

by Jean Salem, philosopher, interviewed by Laurent Etre

Translated Friday 6 May 2011, by Hervé Fuyet and reviewed by Henry Crapo

Jean Salem, is professor of philosophy at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Jean Salem is notably the author of “Lénine et la révolution”, published by Encre marine, 2006.
Jean Salem:

In the present major crisis of capitalism, even when one is tempted to pretend to ignore the rise of the extreme right and other symptoms of despair, we do discern a need for a political perspective – a need that is expressed here and there in the world in very different mobilizations. The works and actions of Lenin, a major thinker of the Revolution, will be instructive in this search. I can see in his works six theses which seem to have retained all their pertinence.

1. The Revolution, first of all, is a war.

Lenin compared politics to military art, and stressed the need to ensure the existence of organized, disciplined revolutionary parties : because a political party is not just a think-tank (French Socialist Party leaders: thank you for the show!).

2. For Lenin, as well as for Marx before him, a political revolution is also, and above all, a social revolution, that is to say a change of status for classes into which society is divided.

This means that it is always appropriate to question the true nature of the State, of the “Republic”. Thus, the crisis of autumn 2008 clearly demonstrated how, in the leading centers of capitalism, the State and public money could be used to serve the interests of banks and a handful of privileged people. The state, in other words, is most surely not “above classes”.

3. A revolution is a series of battles, and it is up to the vanguard party to provide, at each stage of the struggle, slogan and watchwords adapted to the situation and to its potential.

Because it is neither the mood attributed to the “people” nor the “opinion” allegedly measured by pollsters that are able to develop such slogans. When, at the climax of a succession of days of demonstrations, 3 million people are in the streets (which is what has happened in France at the beginning of 2009), there is a need to offer them a perspective other than yet another meeting between union leaders. Otherwise, the movement runs out of steam, and it discourages those who waited in vain for an indication of the precise nature of the objectives and the way to reach them …

4. The major problems of people’s lives are always settled by force, Lenin also emphasized.

“Force” does not necessarily mean, far from it, open violence or bloody repression against the other side! When millions of people decide to converge in one place, such as Tahrir Square in central Cairo, and indicate that nothing will force them to back up in the face of a hated power, it is already fully a matter of force. According to Lenin, it is crucial to dispel the illusions of parliamentary and electoral cretinism, leading, for example, to the situation we are in presently in France: a “Left” geared almost entirely toward electoral campaigns, from which the masses of citizens, rightly, expect .. almost nothing. 


5. Revolutionaries must not despise the struggle, contenting themselves with reforms.

Lenin was certainly aware that at certain times, a given reform can be a temporary concession, or a decoy, with the consent of the ruling class, better to put to sleep those who try to resist it. But he considers, nevertheless, that reform is most of the time a new leverage for the revolutionary struggle.

6. Politics, finally, since the dawn of the twentieth century, begins when and where there are millions, even tens of millions of people involved.

In formulating this sixth thesis, Lenin sensed that revolutionary situations will tend to develop increasingly in colonial or semi-colonial dominated countries. And indeed, since the Chinese Revolution of 1949 till the independences in the 1960s of the last century, History has largely confirmed the latter prediction.

In short, one should read Lenin,
especially after the flood generated by “the end of real socialism”. Let’s read and reread Lenin again and again, to better build the Future!

http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article1761

EDITORIAL: Happy birthday, Lenin! 

by: PWW/NM Editorial Board

The following is an editorial written in 2006 when this publication was a 20-page print weekly called People’s Weekly World and Nuestro Mundo. While the global movement for socialism continues to assess the incredible gains people won after the 1917 Russian Revolution, and, ultimately, the fatal weaknesses that ended socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the ideas of Vladimir Lenin still carry currency today. Happy birthday, Lenin!

More than 60 years ago, the great African American poet Langston Hughes wrote:

Lenin walks around the world.

Frontiers cannot bar him.

Neither barracks nor barricades impede.

Nor does barbed wire scar him.

Lenin walks around the world.

Black, brown, and white receive him.

Language is no barrier.

The strangest tongues believe him.

Lenin walks around the world.

The sun sets like a scar.

Between the darkness and the dawn

There rises a red star.

Hughes was writing about Vladimir Lenin, a leader of the Russian Revolution — the world’s first socialist revolution. April 22 is the anniversary of Lenin’s birth.

Lenin took up scientific socialism where its founders, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, left off. He analyzed imperialism, a phase of capitalism he said was characterized by huge monopolies, the dominance of big banks and the carving up of the world among the great capitalist powers.

The growth of the transnational corporations and the ruthlessness of many imperialist governments, with the U.S. at the fore, show that Lenin’s analysis was right. The war in Iraq is a prime example. It’s a war for U.S. corporate control of resources, especially oil.

But Lenin didn’t stop there. He underlined the need of workers in the imperialist countries to see their own self-interest in allying with the peoples of oppressed nations.

He noted that the exploiters of those countries were the same exploiters of workers in the oppressor nations. Seeing the need to end that shared exploitation, he called for changing the slogan “Workers of the world unite” to “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite.”

That slogan still rings true today. For those of us in the U.S., it calls upon us to fight to bring our troops home, to demand no permanent bases in Iraq, and that reparations be paid to help the Iraqi people rebuild a secure and sovereign nation.

The contribution that Lenin made to the theory of imperialism was immense, as were his other contributions, like the need for a political party that represents the interests of the working class and allies, known in many countries, including this one, as the Communist Party.

Lenin still walks around the world — in the struggles for workers and oppressed people to be free from poverty, exploitation, war and racism — and to join together to build a better world.

by V. I. Lenin, July 11, 1919. First Published: Pravda No. 15, January 18, 1929. Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29, pages 470-488.

Comrades, according to the plan you have adopted and which has been conveyed to me, the subject of today’s talk is the state. I do not know how familiar you are already with this subject. If I am not mistaken your courses have only just begun and this is the first time you will be tackling this subject systematically. If that is so, then it may very well happen that in the first lecture on this difficult subject I may not succeed in making my exposition sufficiently clear and comprehensible to many of my listeners. And if this should prove to be the case, I would request you not to be perturbed by the fact, because the question of the state is a most complex and difficult one, perhaps one that more than any other has been confused by bourgeois scholars, writers and philosophers. It should not therefore be expected that a thorough understanding of this subject can be obtained from one brief talk, at a first sitting. After the first talk on this subject you should make a note of the passages which you have not understood or which are not clear to you, and return to them a second, a third and a fourth time, so that what you have not understood may be further supplemented and elucidated later, both by reading and by various lectures and talks. I hope that we may manage to meet once again and that we shall then be able to exchange opinions on all supplementary questions and see what has remained most unclear. I also hope that in addition to talks and lectures you Will devote some time to reading at least a few of the most important works of Marx and Engels. I have no doubt that these most important works are to be found in the lists of books and in the handbooks which are available in your library for the students of the Soviet and Party school; and although, again, some of you may at first be dismayed by the difficulty of the exposition, I must again warn you that you should not let this worry you; what is unclear at a first reading will become clear at a second reading, or when you subsequently approach the question from a somewhat different. angle. For I once more repeat that the question is so complex and has been so confused by bourgeois scholars and writers that anybody who desires to study it seriously and master it independently must attack it several times, return to it again and again and consider it from various angles in order to attain a clear, sound understanding of it. Because it is such a fundamental, such a basic question in all politics, and because not only in such stormy and revolutionary times as the present, but even in the most peaceful times, you will come across it every day in any newspaper in connection with any economic or political question it will be all the easier to return to it. Every day, in one context or another, you will be returning to the question: what is the state, what is its nature, what is its significance and what is the attitude of our Party, the party that is fighting for the overthrow of capitalism, the Communist Party—what is its attitude to the state? And the chief thing is that you should acquire, as a result of your reading, as a result of the talks and lectures you will hear on the state, the ability to approach this question independently, since you will be meeting with it on the most diverse occasions, in connection with the most trifling questions, in the most unexpected contexts and in discussions and disputes with opponents. Only when you learn to find your way about independently in this question may you consider yourself sufficiently confirmed in your convictions and able with sufficient success to defend them against anybody and at any time.

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