In a message dated 2/22/2009 6:18:37 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, Waistline2 writes: But Lenin wrote (in State and Revolution) that the withering away of the state begins at the very instance when the proletariat ("the armed working class") takes power. The Commune-state is "a state of a new type." The soviet state, alas, though not "strangled at birth" by the Wilsons and Churchills was subjected to grave injuries that led to its violent death at the hands of the Stalinist counterrevolution in the years 1935-1939.
Shane Mage What Lenin wrote should not prevent anyone from thinking and looking - shifting through history and the facts, especially when fundamentally different interpretation exists. If the states begin to wither, why not simple state what this means and meant in the Soviet context? The Stalin regime did not over throw the state. Perhaps you mean the Soviet form, but this cannot be ascertain from is written. The state is an organization of violence, bottom line. The matter of the "Soviet form" or Workers council form of organization, a question that has fascinated me for decades, leading to studying this matter, cannot be confused with the existence of the state as an organization of violence expressing the irreconcilability of class antagonism and the rule of a class. Issues dealing with the state as a class power and instrument of violence, becomes clearer in my mind by remembering the Marxist definition of the state as the product of the irreconcilably of class antagonism. Such discussion are difficult for me because no one ever define or clarify what we mean by different terms and concepts and instead assume everyone understands concepts the same way. The Soviet state, whose name was the Soviet Power, must not be confused with and identified as "the Soviet government." The Soviet state was above all a state or the organization of violence: the organization of the proletarian class as the state power, and the task of the state as state, was to guarantee the rule of a class, with the force of arms. The Soviet state was a state of a new type because for the second time in history, this organization of violence was welded as an instrument of rule by the majority against the minority. In my opinion that is what Lenin meant, rather than the peculiar form or organization of this violence. This state as state, is very different from the meaning and role of government, which is not the organization of violence in the hands of a class, but the committee system, no matter what is peculiar form. The committee system write the day to day economic and political agenda for society as well as shape the society's constitutional laws. This included an overlapping function of suppressing the resistance of the exploiting class; of organizing a blue print for a socialist economy on the basis of the existing level of productive forces, even when such a level did not exist during the time of Lenin, and consequently was not possible. The state does not organize the plan, the blueprint precisely because it is the state, rather than the government. (Pardon, let me get a coffee, which I should not be drinking but here goes another two hours.) In the everyday practical life of people, the Soviet government (not the state) was the top section of this same state organization, its top employees, organized as bureaus composed of party and non-party people. The government may make mistakes - (the bureaus or committee system); may commit endless absurdities, atrocities and blunders fraught with the danger of a temporary collapse of the dictatorship of the proletariat - class rule; but that would not mean that the proletarian dictatorship, as the principle of the structure of the Soviet state as class rule is wrong or mistaken. This is so because the state is the embodiment of the class rule of a class. Nor is the state or government the meaning of bureaucracy. Bad policy only mean that the top leadership is bad, that the policy of the top leadership, the policy of the government, is not in conformity with the dictatorship of the proletariat and must be changed in conformity with the demands of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the rule of a class. Rule of a class is a property relation. The state first and last reason for existence is to protect the property relations of a society, by violent means. The Soviet state and the Soviet government are alike in their class nature, but the government is narrower dimensionally, and does not embrace the whole state. Nor does the state as a whole embrace the government as a whole. They are organically connected and interdependent because the state is an instrument of class rule, but that does not mean that they may be lumped together. The state must not be confused with our government, just as the proletarian class must not be confused with the top leadership of the proletarian class in government or the Soviet party. Our government in America should not be confused with the capitalist class; nor should the Senate and House of Representatives be confused with all the police departments in the country or the Pentagon as the state made organizational. In this sense Marx wrote that government serves as the executive committee - not the state, of the capitalist class, writing its economic and political agenda. The difference between the state and government is the difference between the Senate and the Pentagon. This same distinction existed during the era of Soviet Power. The Senate could be abolished overnight but that would not abolish the state or change one single molecule that is class rule. Likewise to flatten "everything" into the concept "Soviet state" = the state+ the government, + the party, + the class, + the self organization of the workers arising as product/by product of 1905, confuses matters terribly, in my opinion. This "flattening" of everything prevents one from unraveling the essence of the "Soviet form" of government; Soviet form of workplace/territorial organization; Soviet form of Solider's and peasants organizations; which is not identical with the meaning of the Soviet form of the state. American democracy is a bourgeois democracy but this tell us virtually nothing about how the government organizes the democracy and even less about the state. All the above kinds of Soviet organizational forms have the same class essence. Why? Because of the government and states class essence. The government is an executive committee administering on behalf of a class and workers councils define themselves in an environment where proletarian class rule exists. Tyranny, real and perceived, does not define class as a property relations and as class expresses a historically specific stage of development of production. To abolish these forms of organization, i.e., the Soviet form, does not = abolishing the state or the class essence of the state or = changing the property relations. The Soviet form of the state is strictly a question of the rule of a class and how this class blocks the operation of the unrestrictive law and value as an expression of class rule; how it organizes its organization of violence and then . . . then . . .! uses the government as the instrument - committee, to enforce Constitutional laws - the laws, that prevent wealth accumulation from being converted into ownership of the means of production; and unleashing the resultant competition between capital. In addition government, not the state, is charged with all the basic modern functions of any other government. Things like the water supply or the electricity grid, keeping the trains running and so on. These are not the arena or reasonability of the state or expresses it essences as function and reason for existing. The the day-to-day policy of the Soviet government - (not the state), basically amounted to the ways and means by which the class aims of the proletarian dictatorship could be realized in a peasant country. The proletarian state was needed in order to crush the resistance of the exploiters, to organize a socialist economy, to abolish classes, etc. under conditions where abolishing class was not possible. What was abolished was the class antagonism. Here the word antagonism does not mean violence but in the way Marx and Engels used the term. The Soviet government was needed, in addition to all this, to chart the ways and means (the day-to-day policy), without which the accomplishment of these tasks would be unthinkable in a country, where the proletariat constitutes a minority, and the peasantry the overwhelming majority. The reason one section of communists felt the party had replaced the state is because, a). the absolute top members of government also welded/wielded power as party members b.) the power of the state was also wielded by party member, often the same persons. Here is what would becomes a source of and acute expression of bureaucratism, but this configuration is not the source of bureaucracy. "A workers' state is an abstraction. Actually, what we have is, firstly, a workers' state with the peculiarity that the population of our country is not predominantly working class, but peasant; and, secondly, a workers' state with a bureaucratic distortion" (Lenin). Finally Engels wrote: Society thus far, operating amid class antagonisms, needed the state, that is, an organization of the particular exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited class in the conditions of oppression determined by the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom or bondage, wage-labor). The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its concentration in a visible corporation. But it was this only insofar as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for its own time, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, of the feudal nobility; in our own time, of the bourgeoisie. 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 the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state." (end quote) The Soviet state as class rule, was not murdered or died or was put to death by the Stalin regime . . . . . Unless one can show in clear simple terms how the class rule of the proletariat was put to death; shattered, and another state was consolidated and released the unrestricted law of value and its operations, reconstructing Soviet society on a capitalist basis in 1939. Something indeed happened in the Soviet Union under the Stalin regime including the loss of the Soviet form, but that is not the meaning of the state and state power. Here is why I am reluctant to address such questions because one must start at the beginning. And this is not even the beginning but explaining my understanding of the difference between the state and government; the Soviet form and why the Soviet form was not the dictatorship of the proletariat but an organizational form of the dictatorship. Please forgive long sentences and bad articulations. Then nothing was said of bureaucracy, its origins and growth and how it is to be combated today. Whew. WL. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. **************Need a job? Find an employment agency near you. 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