>*Sigh*
>
>Marx did not write in the _Manifesto_ that the state is the executive
>committee of the bourgeoisie.
>
>He wrote that the executive of the modern state is a committee for
>managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie--suggesting that the
>democratically-elected legislature of the modern state is something
>else.
>
>This misquotation has served the function through the twentieth
>century of making Marx appear closer to Lenin than he in fact was...
>
>
>Brad DeLong
There is no real difference between Marx and Lenin on the theory of the
state. Lenin's "State and Revolution" was based on both the example of the
Paris Commune--the prototype for a workers state--and various writings by
Marx and Engels.
Lenin, "State and Revolution":
It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the
Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to overthrow the
government would be the folly of despair. But when, in March 1871, a
decisive battle was forced upon the workers and they accepted it, when the
uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with
the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of unfavorable auguries. Marx did not
persist in the pedantic attitude of condemning an "untimely" movement as
did the ill-famed Russian renegade from marxism, Plekhanov, who in November
1905 wrote encouragingly about the workers' and peasants' struggle, but
after December 1905 cried, liberal fashion: "They should not have taken up
arms."
Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of the
Communards, who, as he expressed it, "stormed heaven". Although the mass
revolutionary movement did not achieve its aim, he regarded it as a
historic experience of enormous importance, as a certain advance of the
world proletarian revolution, as a practical step that was more important
than hundreds of programmes and arguments. Marx endeavored to analyze this
experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it and re-examine his theory in
the light of it.
The only "correction" Marx thought it necessary to make to the Communist
Manifesto he made on the basis of the revolutionary experience of the Paris
Commune.
The last preface to the new German edition of the Communist Manifesto,
signed by both its authors, is dated June 24, 1872. In this preface the
authors, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, say that the programme of the
Communist Manifesto "has in some details become out-of-date", and the go on
to say:
"... One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that 'the
working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and
wield it for its own purposes'...."
The authors took the words that are in single quotation marks in this
passage from Marx's book, The Civil War in France.
Thus, Marx and Engels regarded one principal and fundamental lesson of the
Paris Commune as being of such enormous importance that they introduced it
as an important correction into the Communist Manifesto.
Most characteristically, it is this important correction that has been
distorted by the opportunists, and its meaning probably is not known to
nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine-hundredths, of the readers of the Communist
Manifesto. We shall deal with this distortion more fully farther on, in a
chapter devoted specially to distortions. Here it will be sufficient to
note that the current, vulgar "interpretation" of Marx's famous statement
just quoted is that Marx here allegedly emphasizes the idea of slow
development in contradistinction to the seizure of power, and so on.
Louis Proyect
(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
