The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

Preface

This pamphlet is the first in a series which the ICC plans to publish on the period of transition to socialism. It contains articles which have already appeared in our press (but are no longer available in suff­icient numbers) and internal discussion doc­uments from within our organisation. The texts selected represent only a small minor­ity of the documents which circulated in the ICC. They give a good idea of the key issues in the debate and of the international dimen­sion of discussion within the organisation. For this pamphlet we have chosen texts from France, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy and the US. The texts defend divergent points of view: there are contributions defending the position finally adopted by the ICC in 1979 and others which disagree partially or wholly with this position. For all the militants of the proletarian camp everywhere in the world, who wonder whether open and honest polemics are possible within a polit­ical organisation, we hope this pamphlet will speak for itself.

The collective thought of the ICC on the period of transition is based on the prin­ciples of our political platform. The con­clusions we have reached after 10 years of discussion have their point of departure in the platform which defines our political activity:

·          the defence of marxism as the most coher­ent expression of the workers’ struggle against capitalism the rejection of anarchist theory;

·          the need for a proletarian revolution against capitalism; the rejection of econ­omic self—management theories as long as -the power of the capitalist state remains intact; the rejection of all forms of reformist ‘gradualism’;

·          the rejection of the idea that any ‘soc­ialist’ states or so—called ‘degenerated workers’ states’ exist today; the defence of the analysis of state capitalism, which is the form capitalism tends to take all over the world in its decadent phase;

·          the defence of the necessity of workers’ councils, unitary organisations of the proletariat, the only organs of the revol­utionary power of the proletariat;

·          the rejection of any political party taking power “in the name of the working class”; the defence of the role of the party within the workers’ councils;

·          the rejection of violence as a way to decide issues within the working class;

·          the rejection of “socialism in one country”; any proletarian gain in one country is bound to fail or degenerate without a generalisation and internationalisation of the struggle; the period of transition must be world—wide or it is con­demned to failure.

These brief remarks on the platform give an idea of the general orientation of our studies. The ICC does not close its eyes to the symptoms of degeneration within the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik Party even before Stalin came to the fore. The difficult questions raised by the tormented period from 1917 to 1923 must be dealt with by revolutionaries today without taboos or quasi—religious awe of ‘tradition’.

However, we do not feel that merely point­ing to the economic backwardness of Russia and the problems this brought for the revol­ution can provide us with the essential lessons to draw: no country no matter how econ­omically developed it is can maintain the life of a proletarian revolution in isol­ation.

We are convinced that the Russian revol­ution marks the definitive bankruptcy of the conception of a political party taking power in the name of the workers. Therefore, we have no illusions about any modern, ‘new— look’ versions of the practice of a state party. Any attempts in the direction of a party taking state power will inevitably end up with fatal and counter-revolutionary results as the proletarian experience in Russia shows.

At the heart of all these questions is the problem of the relation between the state which will inevitably arise in the period of transition and the working class. The plat­form of the ICC emphasises “the complexity and seriousness of the problem posed by the relationship between the organised working class and the state of the period of trans­ition”. It asserts that “in the coming period the proletariat and revolutionaries cannot evade this problem, but must make every effort to resolve it”. The platform does not go any further than this, but in 1979 the ICC adopted a resolution on this issue (see the last section—of this pamphlet).

The resolution asserts that: “On the immediate level the proletariat will have to oppose the encroachments and the pressure of the state .... On the historic level, the necessary disappearance of the state in communist society which is a perspective which marxism always defended, will not be result of the state’s own dynamic, but the fruit of the pressure mounted on it by the proletariat in its own movement forward, which will progressively deprive it of all its attributes as the progress towards a classless society unfolds. For these reasons, while the proletariat will have to use the state during the transition period, it must retain a complete indep­endence from it. In this sense, the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be confused with the state. Between these two there is a constant relation of force which the proletariat will have to main­tain in its favour: the dictatorship of the proletariat is exerted by the working class itself. through its own independent armed unitary organs — the workers’ councils. The workers’ councils will participate in the territorial soviets (in which the whole non-exploiting population is represented and from which the state struc­ture will emanate) without confusing them­selves with them, in order to ensure its class hegemony over all the structures of the society of the transitional period”.

The resolution ends with the explanation of the antagonism between the proletariat and the state by saying: “This is why we cannot talk of a ‘socialist state’ or a ‘workers’ state’ during the period of transition.”

The resolution took years of elaboration and discussion before it was adopted; it was not voted on lightly or precipitously. A draft resolution was presented and dis­cussed at the International Congress of 1977, but it was only two years later, when the organisation had reached a profound enough understanding, that a resolution was finally adopted.

The ICC did not ‘invent’ the question of the relationship between the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the period of transition. During and after the Russian experience revolutionaries tried to draw the lessons of the failure and degeneration. The comrades of the left communist movement were the most active in this effort: in Russia itself (see the International Review, Nos 8 and 9, ‘Left Communism in Russia 1918—1930’); in Germany and Holland with the KAPD (see the work of J. Appel with Canne-meyer and Pannekoek soon to be entirely translated into French after 50 years, ‘Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution’); in the Italian left in exile (see their public­ation Bilan - we hope to publish some of their articles on the period of transition in future pamphlets). Despite the weakness of these organisations in their time, the years which separate us from these efforts have practically wiped them out of the collective memory of the workers’ movement. Today’s militants come to Lenin’s State and Revolution without even knowing about the exist­ence of later studies.

The discussions in the ICC began around a text published in Internationalisme (1945-1952), ‘Theses on the Nature of the State and the Proletarian Revolution’ adopted by the Gauche Communiste de France in 1946 (reprint­ed in this pamphlet). The text comes directly out of the tradition of the Italian left and defends certain positions which are not shared by the ICC: the document speaks of a party taking power and considers that unions are still organisations with a proletarian nature both within capitalism and in the post-insurrectionary period. During its subsequent political evolution, after the writing of this text, the Gauche Communiste de France corrected these positions; it then defended the taking of power by the workers’ councils and recognised that unions had become the organs of the capitalist state in the period of decadence. These points do not in any way diminish the value of these ‘theses’ which assert the need for the work­ing class to defend itself against the state in the period of transition either through strikes or other class actions if necessary.

The ‘Theses’ were presented as a contrib­ution to the conference on the period of transition organised by Revolution Inter­nationale in France in 1972. The second text in this pamphlet, ‘The State, the Proletarian Revolution and the Content of Socialism’, was also presented at this conference. It speaks against the idea “of a state in the hands of the proletariat but whose nature remains anti—socialist” and opposes certain aspects of the ‘Theses’. The third text, ‘Problems of the Period of Transition’ (Taly) summ­arises in a general way the thought of RI at that time.

The article, ‘Problems of the Period of Transition’ (MC) was presented at the Inter­national Conference in 1975 (where the ICC was officially constituted as a unified international organisation). The text later appeared in the International Review No 1 [8]. As with all the texts dating from this period, it tries to clarify the general framework of the debate. The next text, which appeared in the same issue of the International Review, raises some disagree­ments with the previous text and defends the idea that the state in the period of trans­ition is simply identical to the workers’ councils.

‘State and Dictatorship’, written a year later, also defends the conception of a ‘workers’ state’ but in a more open and clearly-defined way.

‘The State and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, a text presented at the Second Congress of what had become the section of the ICC in France, is a recapitulation of the efforts of the workers’ movement on this question and defends the position which was later adopted by the organisation.

The ‘internal’ documents which follow were written in 1976 and 1977. Through these texts one can see how the debate in the organisation went from the general level to the more specific question of the state.
    In a second pamphlet we hope to publish the texts and articles written from 1978 to 1980. These contributions essentially deal with the question of the origin and evolution of the state in class societies as well as the role of violence in the revolution.

The question of the state in the period of transition and the relationship between it and the proletariat organised in workers’ councils has not yet been definitively dec­ided by historical experience. We cannot consider the position adopted by the ICC as a ‘class line’ dividing the defence of the bourgeois order from the interests of the proletariat. Agreement on the resolution adopted by the ICC is not a criterion for membership in our organisation. However, we are absolutely convinced that revolutionaries must become aware of the vital importance of this question and debate it openly and thoroughly. It is our generation’s task to draw the lessons of the past. What is the content of socialism? How should the prolet­ariat best organise itself and society to attain this goal? These are the crucial questions for the workers’ movement of today and tomorrow. The relationship between the workers’ councils and the state will be a life and death question for tomorrow’s victory.

We realise that this pamphlet is not easy to read; the style of the texts written for internal debate is often awkward and expresses the complexity of the question and our own limitations. We have no illusions about the ability of our organisation or any other group to entirely clarify this question on their own in isolation. The movement of revolutionary thought requires the confront­ation of ideas in order to go forward on such essential theoretical questions. The ICC has always tried to spark such a debate in the revolutionary milieu. Perhaps we have had some measure of success because Communist Programme, Battaglia Comunista, the Communist Workers’ Organisation among others, have responded with oral and written criticisms of our analyses on these questions. But this is far from enough. This pamphlet is an effort towards a dialogue with all those individuals and groups for whom marxism is not a dogma, for whom the theory of the workers’ struggle is a living reality. It is a contribution to a debate which should be carried on in the revolutionary milieu all over the world. As it was in the past, today in this period of confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, “there is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory” (Lenin).

J.A.

April, 1981

The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism

Introduction (1981) 

“The state and slavery are inseparable.” (Marx, The German Ideology)

What are we fighting for? What is the mean­ing of socialism? [1] [23] What happens the day after the revolution? How do we prevent the revolution from degenerating into totalitarianism as it did in Russia? Revolutionaries and all workers in struggle have to face these questions. Although there are no simple, fool­proof answers, there are the guidelines offered by marxist theory based on the study of the history of the class struggle.

  The goal we are fighting for - an end to exploi­tation and the creation of a classless commun­ist society - has been part of the aspirations of mankind for millennia, since the beginning of class society. This longing for an egali­tarian community has, in its religious or various other mystified forms, been an impulse behind most of the creative genius of the ages. A society without classes, without exploitation, where blind economic laws born of scarcity will no longer dictate our daily lives; where there will be no money, no market relations, no wages; a society where all of humanity will be “freely—associated producers” deciding what is to be produced, when and how. A world without want, a world of abundance for ALL where other human beings will cease to be “others” but a part of a collective community; a world united into one all over the planet where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx, The Communist Manifesto).

   “In the higher phase of communist society when the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and with it the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished, when labour is no longer merely a means of life but has become life’s principal need; when the productive forces have also increased with the all—round development of the individual, and all the wellsprings of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly—-only then will it be possible completely to transcend the narrow outlook of bour­geois right, and then only will society be able to inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme) [2] [23]

  In such terms did Marx and Engels try to define communism.

  But they also warned against the futility of trying to draw up exact blueprints for the future society and against giving “recipes for tomorrow’s cooks”. The marxist method is inoperative to explain what exact motiva­tions will dominate humanity once the class struggle has ceased to be the motor-force of history. All we can say is mostly in the negative, that mankind will finish with the “pre—history” of class society and its goals will no longer be motivated by economic sla­very. We are too far away from this point to have anything more than a glimpse of this future because our vision is deformed by our own historical limits. Nevertheless history will not end with communism. “Communism is the necessary form and the active principle of the immediate future but communism is not itself the aim of human development or the final form of human society.” (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts).

  Although the knowledge of where we aim to go cannot be exact in all details, a general un­derstanding of the movement is essential. Without it we cannot measure what means are necessary and appropriate to reach this goal. This is particularly vital in view of the monstrous lies Stalinism has inflicted on whole generations of the working class.

  Today we must not merely reconstitute the meaning of communism but we must realise that in our period of the decadence of capitalism, this goal is no longer a mere utopia. For the first time in history it is a historical possi­bility and necessity. We are the heirs of the workers of the Paris Commune, of Russia, Germany, Hungary and elsewhere, who shook the foundations of capitalism and tried to create the beginnings of a new society. We must succeed where they failed. The explosive contradictions of the capitalist system today in crisis make it imperative to react to the breakdown of the old society by taking con­crete steps towards destroying it and crea­ting the conditions for a new one. This massive process of change will not come of its own accord nor can it result from a pacifistic ‘conversion’ of the exploiters. It can only be brought about by the conscious intervention of a revolutionary class, by the proletarian revolution.

  The working class, an exploited class created by capitalism, is the only revolutionary class because its interests to fight against and eventually free itself from exploitation correspond to the historical necessity in decadent capitalism to free the productive forces from the fetters of profit relations and from the terrifying cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction—crisis to which decadent capitalism is condemned. The workers, the wage slaves of capitalism, are the grave—diggers of all slavery because they have no new exploitive system to set up to their advantage. The proletariat has no economy, no nation, no race, no privileges, nor any ownership of the means of production to defend [3] [23]. The workers’ class interest in freeing themselves can only be realised by eliminating every vestige of the economic laws of capitalism and all privilege. The proletariat is the only class under capital­ism which has an interest in destroying pri­vate property [4] [23] of the means of production. Moreover by its collective, associated labour it alone is capable of pointing to the society of the future. “In freeing itself the proletariat will free all mankind”. The proletariat will transform the vestiges of class society into collective labour, inte­grating all producers through freely asso­ciated labour, until the proletariat itself disappears as a separate class and with it, all class society.

  It is not each individual worker who is con­scious of carrying this spark or even realises as yet the potential of the present class struggle. It is the collective power of the whole international working class, united in solidarity, forged into a fighting, class-conscious unit through the experience of class struggle and driven by self—preservation to fight against exploitation that will make the international revolution against capit­alism.

  For marxists, the working class is the bearer of the international communist revolution. But communism cannot simply be decreed the day after the revolution. Society as it emerges from the shackles of the past cannot be immediately transformed into classless harmony unless we believe in the illusions of religious conver­sion, as though communism were a question of good or bad “human nature”. Human thought and action is shaped by and shapes the material conditions of man’s existence and it is these material conditions that first can and must be radically transformed by the working class.

  Thus there will inevitably be a period of transition from capitalism to communism, from the rule of capitalist productive relations to the moment when an integrated classless society has been reached. This period of transition describes by definition an un­stable society, one of constant change where all the vestiges of economic compulsion are being eliminated. The period of transition is not a stable mode of production in itself since the proletariat carries with it no “economy”; it is the bearer of the extinction of all “economy”, that is, of the management of scarcity. The period of transition is an era of constant upheaval and revolutionising in the practice and consciousness of man; it will be an essentially dynamic period of movement; if it doesn’t go forward it will degenerate.

  History has, of course, seen other “periods of transition”: from primitive communism to slave society, from slave society to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism for example. But all previous societies were ruled by an exploiting class which was overthrown by another exploiting class. The bourgeoisie, for example, developed its economic power under the domination of feudal exploiters and its political revolution was merely the crowning point of its pre—existing economic power. The bourgeois revolution proceeded country by country, with a greater or lesser degree of success.

  The proletariat, however, is the first revolutionary class [5] [23] which is not an exploiting class. It cannot develop any power base within the old society. The taking of poli­tical power by the proletariat is not, as it was for the bourgeoisie, the last act of a process of gradual economic domination. It is simply a jumping off point for the prole­tariat so that it can begin to transform the process of social production. The victorious insurrection of the proletariat is thus the first stage and not the last of its social transformation. And this transformation cannot be accomplished country by country with gaps lasting for decades, but only on a world scale. The communist revolution can only be an international revolution with a relatively simultaneous extension.

  Thus, unlike the bourgeoisie which could deve­lop under feudalism and allow for a certain backsliding and fragmentation in its long road from the ‘Third Estate’ of feudalism to the modern capitalist class, the period of tran­sition over which the proletariat will pre­side must first break the political framework of the old society, before it can develop. Furthermore any backsliding after the revolu­tion could indeed be fatal for the proletariat. The proletarian revolution must therefore begin by smashing the bourgeois state and its strangle­hold over society. But it cannot stop there.

  What will society be like just after a victor­ious political revolution? One enormous obsta­cle will have been eliminated by the dismantling of the bourgeois state, the defeat of the poli­tical power of the exploiters, the suppression of any political expression for the capitalist class and the expropriation of its main eco­nomic concentrations by the victorious revo­lutionary class. But at this stage, the working class will not be the only component of the new society. There will also be various non—exploiting classes and strata: peasants, artisans, petty bourgeois, the “middle classes” of the cities, the poor masses of the under­developed world who could not be proletarianised by decadent capitalism. These non—exploi­ting strata represent a majority of humanity who must be fed and integrated into a new community. But there is a long road to be travelled before this can be totally accom­plished. [6] [23]

  These non—exploiting strata will not be politi­cally on the side of big capital. On the con­trary these heterogeneous social formations, considering the material and spiritual misery to which they will be reduced by the crisis of capitalism, will on the whole (although by no means uniformly or even actively) identify with the anti—capitalist revolution. Neverthe­less they have no class interests which push them further than this point. Their relation to the productive forces insofar as it exists is one of individual, largely unassociated, labour. For some, the meagre privileges they enjoy or think they enjoy, on the land, as artisans, or otherwise can lead to resistance to socialisation or an inaptitude in the older generation. The proletariat must seek to convince these strata that only the proletarian way forward can provide the fulfilment of their needs materially and otherwise. Only by progressively associating labour particularly in the difficult sphere of agriculture (and through the steady—pressure of the agricul­tural proletariat) can progress be made towards the elimination of all private property.

  The fight to prevent any counter—revolution of the capitalist class, the struggle to extirpate the vestiges of the law of value, to socialise agriculture, to change the conditions and goals of social production, to fulfil human needs and develop the productive forces while raising the standard of living of the producers, of welding society into the relations of solidarity and collective work which only the proletariat as yet represents — this is the task of the prole­tariat in the period of transition.

  It certainly will not be easy. You cannot merely exhort people to change, you must pro­vide the conditions for them to change. Un­fortunately, abundance and full production of everything needed to change petty producers into a collective whole and eliminate all exchange and market relations will not be ready the day after the revolution. Capitalism does not create abundance but only a potential for the development of the productive forces once they are freed from capital’s fetters. This potential will have to be gradually rea­lised. Although much suffering can be relie­ved relatively rapidly in the areas of concen­trated proletarian strength, capitalism will leave us a world in shambles. A new social reality will have to be created — it will not be handed to us.

  Thus we have the organised proletariat in the midst of a world society demanding a gigantic transformation. Eliminating wages, socialising production and distribution, transcending the dichotomy between city and country, mental and manual labour, all the elements of this social revolution remain to be done. How?

  The key to this question lies in the economic policy of the proletariat. There is nothing else; no blind economic laws left to themselves can make the transformation. On the contrary, any subsistence of “economic laws” is a danger since it means the subsistence of market relations and the ever-present danger of degen­eration back into capitalism. The society of transition will not be capitalist, nor will the proletariat be exploited by another class. Still, until the last vestiges of any exchange between different strata or different methods of pro­duction is eliminated (meaning that different social strata have been absorbed) socialism will not yet be a reality. Only the economic policy of the proletariat, which it will decide as appropriate to its class interests, can do this job. The working class remains the motor—force of society after as well as during the insurrectional phase of the revolu­tion and it has only the consciousness of its goal and its organised strength to guide’ it.

  The working class can only implement its econo­mic policy if it has the political power to make it happen, to impose it against resistance if necessary. Although the taking of political power by the proletariat is not enough in it­self to assure the victory of communism, it is nonetheless the indispensable, crucial precon­dition for any future positive social evolution. Without the political power of the proletariat firmly established there will be no one and nothing to orient this post—insurrectional society to socialism.

  What is the dynamic of socialised production? How can we tell if it is winning out over remaining aspects of the law of value? How can we avoid the fatal trap of “production for accumulation”, which would transform the prole­tariat once again into an exploited class? Are there economic measures which can be taken almost right away which would lead in the right direction? These and other questions are raised in this pamphlet, although their further exploration must be left to future studies.

Other groups (like “Revolutionary Perspectives” in their text published in the International Review, no.1) accuse us of ignoring these other aspects of the period of transition, but this is not true [7] [23]. But the major thrust of the ICC’s discussion at this point has been to investigate the crucial question of the politi­cal power of the working class first. We are convinced that not seeing this crucial methodo­logical point is to reduce all discussion on the period of transition to idle speculation.

  This central issue of the primacy of the poli­tical power of the working class has often been referred to as the “dictatorship of the prole­tariat”. As with so many marxist terms, the Stalinist counter—revolution and leftist caricatures have so distorted their meaning that, they sound rotten to today’s ear. We are so used to the open or hidden dictatorship of capital in all its terrifyingly brutal forms that it is difficult to use such a term without conjuring up a nightmare vision of a world yet worse than the present one. In fact the dictatorship of the proletariat does imply violence, only because the oppressors and exploiters will inevitably use violence against the suppression of their privileges. We must be resolved to firmly quell all those who take up arms against the revolution [8] [23]. Socialism will be brought to birth in a violent overthrow of capitalism because the capitalist class will oppose us tooth—and—nail in a civil war. Thus the term dictatorship of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie expresses a historical reality within which our choices are limited.

  After the revolution, once the victory against the capitalist class is decisively obtained, the situation changes. The proletariat must turn to guiding and directing society so as to extirpate root and branch the foundations of classes—and class violence. Here it is a question of reducing violence to the strict minimum needed to assure. against any regroup­ment of bourgeois forces and, if necessary, to settle armed resistance to measures of socialisation. Non—exploiting strata will never be brought to socialism at gunpoint. In this phase, “the dictatorship” should be taken to mean the leadership of the proletariat as a whole within the social transformation using violence only if other strata pose armed resistance.

  Dictatorship will not mean the dictates of a party over the proletariat. Only the proletariat as a whole organised in its workers’ councils will take political power. Nor can dictatorship mean any violence against the proletariat by any part of itself. Only the most flourishing proletarian democracy within the workers’ councils, with the greatest free­dom of the press and assembly and collective decision—making, can provide the insight and strength necessary to implement a communist programme. Workers must convince each other of the road to follow - any violence within the working class is excluded because it paralyses and destroys the very links of solidar­ity and collective decision—making which are the key to socialism. No one can create so­cialism without the self—activity of the entire working class and no one can hand it to the workers on a platter. Only the col­lective practice and consciousness of the class, never divided against itself, can correct any errors.

   “The tacit assumption underlying the Lenin—Trotsky theory of the dictator­ship is this: that the socialist trans­formation is something for which a ready—made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice. This is, unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately - not the case. (...) The proletariat should and must at once undertake socialist measures in the most ener­getic, unyielding and unhesitant fashion, in other words, exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique — dictatorship of the class, that means in the broadest public form on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy. (...) Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination (...). But this dictator­ship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class——that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct in­fluence (...). But socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim’, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators.” (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolu­tion’ in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder, pp. 394-5)

  How does a proletarian dictatorship exist and react within the context of this democracy? Democracy for whom? Certainly not for the capitalist class which will be excluded from political rights and expression. For the proletariat? Definitely. But what about the non—exploiting strata? They cannot be willed away into a corner for the duration of the period of transition. The proletariat rejects the logic of capitalism in its Stalinist or fascist or hypocritically bourgeois democratic forms — a logic which proceeds by burning, shooting, drowning and slaughtering all those who oppose such policies of suppre­ssion. In the period of transition the non—exploiting strata must be associated into the process of social transformation while the material basis for the existence of classes is being eliminated. In fact, the integra­tion of these individuals into a new collec­tive consciousness is an integral part of eliminating classes. The new society cannot be built on the passivity and silence of millions.

  But these non—exploiting classes must not regroup as classes or distinct social strata because, as such, they have no class interest in socialism. They may indeed perceive the anti—capitalist status quo as more or less advantageous to them and thus they will have a distinct class interest in trying to main­tain this status quo and thus preserve their existence as classes. But the working class must know and say that any permanent ‘stabilisation’ of’ any status quo in the period of transition will halt the march towards soci­alism and condemn the entire society to re­gression. Thus it cannot be these strata and other classes organised as such which will participate in the democracy of the period of transition; if they did so then the democracy of the period of transition would become a grab—bag of different classes taking a ‘vote’ on socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat would be doomed in advance.

  How then will society be organised so that these strata can be fragmented as social classes and yet gradually integrated as indi­viduals into society? This question leads directly to the main subject of this pamphlet: the state in the period of transition.

  First of all why will there be a state and what state will exist? Although the proletariat will destroy the bourgeois state, it can­not make classes disappear immediately and so it cannot prevent a new state, modified in form and content, from appearing. A divided and conflicting social reality will inevitably find expression in a political superstructure. Politics will only die with economics because “political power is precisely the official expression of antagonisms in civil society” (Marx, Poverty of Philosophy). This new state form is not part of the communist programme as such; if there were only proletarians in the world there would be no need for a state; if there were only one class in the world, there would be no more classes any more. If we still have to suffer yet another “govern­ment of persons”, it is not of the proletariat’s choosing but of historical necessity.

  Because it is historically inevitable, this state form must be used by the workers if the working class is to orient society in its direction. The state must be used by the proletariat to protect the revolution from its opponents and to assure the cohesion of the society of transition.

  Just as the proletariat must control, lead and direct the whole society from within it, it must do the same with the state. Just as the proletariat cannot dissolve itself by decree into the rest of society in a dissolution of its class strength, so it cannot dissolve it­self into the state but must control and dom­inate it from within. The working class cannot do without the state because it will not be alone in society and cannot immediately realise its full programme. Yet it cannot forget right from the beginning of its dictatorship that the fulfillment of its programme is the elimination of all states.

   “Taken in its grammatical sense a free state is one where the state is free in relation to its citizens and is there­fore a state with a despotic government. This whole talk about the state should be dropped especially since the Paris Commune which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. The “people’s state” has been thrown in our faces by the anarchists too long, although Marx’s book against Proudhon (Poverty of Philosophy) and later the Communist Manifesto directly declare that with the introduction of a socialist order of society the state will of itself dissolve and disappear. As, therefore, “the state is only a transitional insti­tution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a “free people’s state”; so long as the proletariat still uses the state, it does not use it in the interests of’ freedom but to hold down it adversaries and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of’ freedom the state as such ceases to exist”. (Letter from Engels to Bebel, 1875, quoted by Lenin in State and Revolution and commented on in his notebook, Marxism and the State)

  What is meant by “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”? The state in the period of transition will be “a state with its worst sides lopped off”, a “semi—state”. To the extent that the ruling class is a non-exploiting class, the working class will attenuate the pernicious effects of the state as far as possible as it did in the Paris Commune: workers’ delegates and all state officials revocable at any time; destruction of any armed force separate from the control of the working class; permanent control over the state’s functioning; officials and dele­gates to be paid no more than a workers’ wage, etc.

  But if the idea that the state can be abolished by decree the day after the revolution is a figment of anarchist sentimentalism, warnings about the state, even the semi—state of the period of transition can be found throughout Marx and Engels’ writings:

   “At best it is an evil inherited proletariat after its victorious for class supremacy, whose worst victorious proletariat will have as speedily as possible, just as the Commune had to, until a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to discard the entire lumber of the state”. (Engels, Preface to The Civil War in France)

  We can only say with Lenin as he tries to rediscover and interpret the marxist position on the state up to his day in State_and_Revolution: “What a howl about ‘anarchism’ would be raised by the leading lights of present-day ‘marxism’ which has been falsified for the convenience of the opportunists, if such an amendment to the programme were suggested to them [to substitute the word Gemeinweisen/Commune for the word state].” If marxism has rejected the anarchist formulation of the ‘abolition of the state’, it is not to sing the praises of the state in the period of transition, but to defend the idea of the “withering away” of the state, of the “semi— state” which already expresses this dynamic.

  But in the complex situation of the society of the period of transition how is the proletariat to push this dynamic to its fruition, towards the disappearance of the state?

  In dealing with this question there is not much historical experience to go on. There has been the Paris Commune in one city and the Russian revolution, victorious but isolated in one country, in 1917. There are, however, important lessons to be drawn.

  Marx and Engels drew an essential lesson from the Paris Commune and modified the Manifesto accordingly: the bourgeois state cannot be “taken over” or conquered by the proletarian revolution, it must be smashed. But the Paris Commune was essentially made up of workers [9] [23]. The Commune did not have to deal with the problem of the relationship between the working class and the countryside for obvious reasons. Therefore, no contradiction was seen between the proletarian dictatorship and democracy, full participation of all non—exploiters in the state.

  Thus in 1918 Luxemburg, writing in the Russian Revolution, could mistake democracy for the Constituent Assembly! Lenin, writing on the future state and basing his analysis on the Commune, the Russian experience of 1905, and a defence of marxism against anarchism and Kautskyism referred indiscriminately to “the state of armed workers”, the “organisation of armed people (?)”, “the state of the immense majority of people”, and a “proletarian dic­tatorship shared with no one”. He, too, saw no potential contradiction between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the “widest pos­sible democracy”. There is no inkling in State and Revolution that any opposition could develop between the proletariat and “its state”. Only later, faced with the reality of the new state, did he admit the need for the workers to defend themselves to some extent against the “bureaucratically deformed” state (Cf. Trade Union Debates in the Bolshevik Party, 1920—21).

  The limits of marxism are the limits of the historical experience of the working class struggle. The limits of the Commune and 1905 in time and geographical terms meant that the problems of the proletarian dictatorship could not be seen in their full depth. The contra­dictions of the society of the period of tran­sition were not fully perceived and therefore could not be completely answered in theory. In practice, after the victorious October insurrection, Lenin and marxists of that period certainly came right up against these contradictions — and with tragic consequences.

  Lenin referred to the state in that period as a “workers and peasants’ state” — a formulation and a reality which negated the dictatorship of the proletariat. For the Bolsheviks, the dictatorship was expressed and defended mainly, if not solely, by the proletarian political party which became a state-party. Through its party, the proletariat dissolved itself into the state. But if an evil inherited from the past was destined to wither away, the only expressions that “withered away”, or more precisely were undermined by Bolshevik policy, were the workers’ councils! The state, far from having its worst sides lopped off, was strengthened not through any democracy but through a gradual absorption of civil society. It became, with Russia’s isolation, the stronghold of the state capitalist counter-revolution.

  The Bolsheviks feared coming from the White direct expressions of the counter—revolution Armies and other the bourgeoisie and defended the revolution against these dangers. They feared the return of private property through the persistence of small— scale production, particularly that of the peasantry, and they held no illusions about having eliminated the law of value. In fact, they went much too far and embraced state capitalism as a step towards socialism. But the danger of the counter-revolution did not come from “kulaks” or from the horribly massacred workers of Kronstadt and the “White plots” the Bolsheviks thought they saw behind this uprising. The counter—revolution won over the corpses of the German proletariat defeated in 1919 and it took its hold in Russia through what was supposed to be the “semi—state” of the proletariat. In a revolution isolated in one country or even on one continent for very long, the dominant mode of production in the rest of the world will inevitably assert itself.

  That an isolated revolution will be defeated is a lesson now seared into the minds of the working class. The internationalisation of the struggle is its very life’s blood. But the other new lesson which cannot be ignored, and was not foreseen, was that the counter-­revolution can come not only directly from the troops of Versailles as it did in the Paris Commune, but from the state which was supposed to represent the dictatorship of the proletariat.

   In a period of proletarian political power, a period of extreme upheaval when the prole­tariat does not have the material means to impose its programme, to keep power, because the revolution has not generalised enough internationally, the state will merely form and reform an even more alienated social cohesion on the only basis permitted by the dominant reality in the rest of the world. It is not so much the “why” that is difficult to explain, but the how. The proletariat’s experience with the state in the period of transition is so limited that this possibility was never seriously raised even theoretically before the Russian revolution. The specific Russian experience will probably never be repeated again since history does not operate on the level of endless identical repetitions. But the insights on the relationship between the proletariat and the state can only be ignored at our peril. To refuse to try to grapple with this problem is to ignore the central issue that marxism has not yet completely elucidated. Whatever other speci­fic conclusions are to be drawn from the Russian experience, the least that can be said on this question of the state is that it did not resolve the issue favourably. The proletariat was bloodily confronted with contradictions that marxist theory had not entirely foreseen.

   How is the dictatorship of the proletariat to be expressed through a new ‘democracy’? How can we avoid the state getting out of the con­trol of the workers’ councils as it did in Russia to become the embodiment of state capi­talism and the counter—revolution? How are we to impose a dictatorship of the proletariat over the state and assure against a dictator­ship of the state over the proletariat? What is the role of the workers’ councils in rela­tion to the state form and within it? Is the “semi—state” a “workers’ state”? How can the workers’ councils limit the negative effects of this “necessary evil”? There are the questions this pamphlet attempts to explore.

BASIC TEXTS 1

Theses on the Nature of the State
and the Proletarian Revolution

Gauche Communiste de France, 1946, Internationalisme

It appears to stand above classes but in reality it is the juridical expression of the dominant economic system; it is the super-structure, the political dressing of the economic rule of a given class in society.

The economic relationships between men, the formation of classes, and the place they occupy in society are determined by the development of the productive forces at a given moment. The state's only reason for being is to codify and sanction an already existing economic state of affairs, to give it a legal force which all members of society are obliged to accept. Thus the state seeks to maintain an equilibrium, a stabilisation of the relations between classes, relations which flow from the economic process itself. At the same time the state seeks to prevent any attempt of the oppressed classes to put society in question by engaging in agitation and disturbances. Thus the state fulfils an important function in society, ensuring the security and order indispensable for the maintenance of production. But it can only do this through its essentially conservative character. In the course of history, the state has appeared as a conservative and reactionary factor of the highest order, a fetter which the evolution and development of the productive forces has constantly had to confront.

2) In order to fulfil its dual role as an agent of security and an agent of reaction, the state bases itself on material force, on violence. Its authority resides in its coercive capacities. It possesses an exclusive monopoly of all the existing forces of violence: police, army, and prisons.

In the struggle between classes, the state, while being the representative of the ruling class, tends to develop a certain independence. As the bourgeoisie develops its national formations, its huge concentrated economic and political units; as the antagonism between the classes reaches higher and higher levels; as the rivalry between the great capitalist states intensifies; the state is forced to develop its coercive forces to the very limit in order to maintain order. Internally it forces the proletariat and other labouring classes to put up with capitalist exploitation, while formally and juridically recognising the freedom of the individual; externally it guarantees the frontiers of the area of economic exploitation against the greed of other capitalist groupings and enlarges them at the expense of other states.

Thus, in the decadent epoch of capitalism when the horizontal and vertical division of society and the struggles engendered by this division have reached a culminating point in human history, the state has also reached a zenith in its development as an organism of coercion and violence.

Having its origin in the historic necessity for violence (the use of coercion being the precondition for its growth), the state tends to resort independently to violence as a means of preserving its own existence. From being a means, violence becomes an end in itself, undertaken and cultivated by the state, which thus negates by its very nature any form of society which goes beyond violence as a way of regulating relations between men.

3) In the complexity of the contradictions which blossom and grow with the development of the capitalist economy, the state is constantly obliged to involve itself in every area of life: economic, social, cultural, political; in the private life of each individual and in his relations with society on a local, national, or world-wide scale.

In order to cope with its immense social obligations, the state has to call upon the services of an ever-growing mass of people, removing them from all productive activity and creating a social stratum apart, with its own interests, whose speciality and responsibility is the maintenance of the governmental and state machine.

An important section of society (10% and perhaps more) thus constitutes an independent social stratum (politicians, the judiciary, the police and the army) with its own economic interests, living parasitically off society, their exclusive sphere of interest being the state apparatus. This social stratum, beginning as servants of society in the hands of the ruling class, tends because of its size and above all because of its place in society at the head of the state machinery, to free itself more and more and to put itself forward as the master of society, assimilating the ruling class into this tendency. It has an exclusive monopoly of the public finances, the right to dictate and interpret laws, and the material force of violence with which to apply these laws in its own interests.

Thus we see the emergence of a new privileged social stratum which derives its material existence from the existence of the state, a parasitical and essentially reactionary stratum concerned with the perpetuation of the state, relatively independent, but always associated with the class whose economic system is based on the exploitation of man by man and whose main principle is the perpetuation of human exploitation and the protection of its economic and social privileges.

4) The development of technology and of the productive forces can no longer be imprisoned in the bourgeois principle of the private ownership of the means of production. Even capitalist production is obliged to violate the sacrosanct principle of private ownership and to have recourse to the capitalist nationalisation of certain branches of the economy, such as the railways, the post, and to some extent aviation, the merchant marine, metal-lurgy, and the mines. State intervention increasingly makes itself felt throughout the economy, and this is obviously done to safe-guard the capitalist system as a whole. More-over, in the class struggle between the conflicting forces in society, between classes and economic groupings, the state can only play its role as a representative, mediating force by supporting itself on a material, economic, independent, solid base.

In this historic evolution of capitalist society the state takes on a new character, a new role – that of the state as boss. While maintaining and even accentuating its political functions, the capitalist state has evolved on the economic terrain towards state capitalism. Either the state levies part of the surplus-value generated in the sectors where private ownership of the means of production still exists, just like any other capital (bank or finance); or it directly exploits state-owned sectors as a single collective employer in order to create surplus value. This surplus value is shared out among the functionaries of the state (except for the part which is capitalised by being reinvested in production) according to the ranks and privileges they have obtained.

The economic tendency towards state capitalism, while being unable to reach complete socialisation and collectivisation within capitalist society, is nevertheless a very real tendency which, to some extent, frees the state from playing a strictly instrumental role and gives a new economic character as a collective, anonymous employer which collectively extracts surplus value.

Although the private ownership of the means of production was the fundamental basis of the economic system of capitalism and remains so today, it can, in the final phase of capitalism, undergo profound modifications without threatening the basic principles of capitalist economy. Far from signifying the end of the system, the more or less large-scale nationalisation of the means of production is in perfect accord with the system and can even be the condition for the system's survival, providing that the fundamental principle of capitalism still exists: that is to say the extraction of an ever greater mass of surplus value from the working class for the benefit of a powerful and privileged minority. The fundamental opposition between the capitalist economy and the socialist economy does not therefore reside in the private possession of the means of production. While socialism is incompatible with the private ownership of the means of production, the absence of private ownership (although an indispensable precondition for the creation of a socialist economy) is by no means in itself identical to socialism, since reality has demonstrated how capitalism can accommodate itself to the nationalisation of the means of production by moving towards state capitalism. The fundamental opposition between the capitalist economy and socialism is to be found:

1. in the motive force and aim of production. Under capitalism this is the quest for a greater and greater amount of surplus value; the aim of socialism, on the other hand, is the satisfaction of the needs of society and its members.
2. in the fact that under capitalism, in the immediate redistribution of the products and values created, a smaller and smaller fraction of the values created are given over to consumption, the largest part being reinvested in order to expand production. Under socialism, an increasing proportion of the values created is immediately consumed by the producers. That part of the values produced which is directly consumable must tend to increase in relation to the part which is invested in production in order to contribute to the process of reproduction.

Thus, far from representing any weakening of capitalist society, the state's growing tendency towards economic and political independence merely serves to transfer the economic power of capitalism to the state by elevating the latter until it becomes the real seat of power in capitalism. In reaction to the proletariat and its historic mission of creating a socialist society, the capitalist state takes on the appearance of a Goliath. By its very nature the state represents the whole past history of humanity, of all the exploiting classes and reactionary forces in history. Its very character, as we have shown, being one of conservatism, violence, bureaucracy, the defence of privileges and of economic exploitation, it is the incarnation of the principle of oppression and is irreconcilably opposed to the principle of liberation, incarnated by the proletariat and by socialism.

5) Up until now all new classes have simply substituted their domination and privileges for that of other classes; the economic development of the new class unfolded slowly and over a long period prior to the establishment of its political hegemony. Because their economic interests (which coincided with the development of the productive forces) were the interests of a minority, of a single class, their power developed within the old society, first of all on the economic level. It is only after reaching a certain degree of economic development, after economically supplanting or partially absorbing the old ruling class, that the political power, ie the state and the juridical system, came to sanctify the new state of affairs. The bourgeoisie developed its economic domination over a long period, strengthening the power of merchant capital. It was only when the bourgeoisie had achieved its economic domination over the old feudal society that it carried out its political revolution. The bourgeois revolution had to break the resistance of feudalism and its ideological superstructure because feudal law had become a fetter on the development of the productive forces; but it did not destroy the state. Because the underlying principle of the state is the defence of exploitation of man by man, the bourgeoisie merely had to seize hold of the state machine and continue to use it in its own class interests. The revolutionary process in previous societies was, thus, as follows:

1. the economic rise and strengthening of the new class within the old society;
2. its economic domination, a peaceful economic revolution;
3. a violent political revolution sanctifying the economic state of affairs;
4. a maintaining of the state apparatus in order to use it in the interests of the new class;
5. a gradual absorption of the old ruling classes who live on within the new ruling class. 

6) However, unlike the other classes in history, the proletariat does not possess any wealth, any instrument of labour, any material property. It cannot build any economic system inside capitalist society. Its position as a revolutionary class resides in the objective evolution of society, which makes the existence of private property incompatible with the development of the productive forces and makes the continued production of surplus value an impossibility. Capitalist society is faced with an insufficient market for the realisation of the surplus value it creates. The objective necessity for a socialist society, insofar as  socialism is the dialectical solution to the internal contradictions of the capitalist system finds in the proletariat the only class whose interests coincide with the needs of historical evolution. This last class in history, posses-sing nothing, having no privileges to defend, complies with the historic necessity for the suppression of all privileges. The proletariat is the only class which can carry out this revolutionary task of suppressing every privilege, all private property, of liberating the productive forces from their capitalist fetters and developing them in the interests of humanity. The proletariat does not and cannot have any economic policy inside the capitalist system. 

The proletariat has no class economy to set up before or after the revolution. In contrast to other classes, and for the first time in history, the revolution of the proletariat begins as a political revolution which precedes and creates the conditions for a social-economic transformation. The economic liberation of the proletariat is an economic liberation from the fetters of all class interests; it is the disappearance of all classes. The proletariat, liberates itself by liberating the whole of humanity, by dissolving itself into the latter.

The state, the incarnation of class rule and economic oppression, cannot be conquered by the proletariat in the classic sense. On the contrary, the first step towards the proletariat's emancipation is the revolutionary destruction of the state. Not having any economic power, nor any economic property, the proletariat draws its strength from the consciousness which it acquires from the objective historical laws of the economic process. Its strength lies exclusively in its consciousness and its capacity for organisation. The class party, which crystallises the consciousness of the class, represents the indispensable precondition for the realisation of the proletariat's historic mission, just as its unitary organs of struggle represent its practical material capacity for action.

Because other classes in history had economic power in society, they could more or less do without a party; they were themselves hardly conscious of where their actions were leading, and they identified themselves with the state, the incarnation of privilege and oppression. But at every moment of its activity as a class, the proletariat comes up against the state – the proletariat is the historical. antithesis of the state.

The conquest of the state by an exploiting class in a given country marked the end of a historical process and was the last revolutionary act of that class. The destruction of the state by the proletariat is simply the first revolutionary act of the class, which opens the way for the proletariat and its party towards a whole revolutionary process, leading at first to the world revolution and then on the economic terrain to the creation of a socialist society.

7) There is a great historical gulf between, on the one hand, the level attained by the productive forces, which have entered into conflict with the capitalist system, and which have to go beyond the framework of that system, and on the other hand, the level of development necessary for the advent of socialist society, for the full satisfaction of the needs of everyone in society. This gulf cannot be wiped out by a simple programmatic declaration, as the anarchists believe, but must be bridged on the economic terrain by an economic policy, the economic policy of the proletariat. This is why theory posits the inevitability of a historic period of transition between capitalism and socialism – a transition period in which political power, and not economic power, is in the hands of the revolutionary class. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The development of the economic foundations of socialism is the political task of the proletariat and its party and cannot be undertaken on a national terrain, but only on a world-wide scale. Capitalism is a world system. The world domination of capital ensures that the economic development of the different sectors of the world economy and of different branches of industry can only take place within the limits imposed by the interests of capital.

In other words, the development of different sectors and branches of the world economy is being severely handicapped. Socialism, on the other hand, is based on a very high economic development of all sectors of the world economy. The liberation of the productive forces from their capitalist fetters by the proletarian revolution in all countries is, therefore, the first precondition for the economic evolution of society towards socialism.

The economic policy of the proletariat develops on the basis of the generalisation of the revolution onto the world scale; its content resides not in a one-sided affirmation of the development of production, but essentially in the establishment of a harmonious rhythm between the development of production and a proportional rise in the living standards of the producers.

The period of transition expresses an economic continuity with the pre-socialist epoch in the sense that it cannot yet satisfy all the needs of society and contains within it the necessity of continuing accumulation. But any policy which bases itself on the maximum accumulation in order to expand production has no proletarian content and is simply the continuation of the capitalist economy. The economic policy of the proletariat, therefore, is based on a necessary accumulation which is compatible with, and conditioned by, the improvement of the workers' living standards, with a relative and progressive increase in variable capital.

After its victory over the bourgeoisie, the proletariat on the one hand becomes the politically dominant class, which with its class party assures its class dictatorship throughout the period of transition in order to lead society towards socialism; on the other hand, the proletariat remains a class in production which has particular immediate economic interests to defend and it must, therefore, continue to make these interests prevail through its own economic organisations – the unions – and its own methods of struggle – the strike – throughout the period of transition.

8) The revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state, the instrument of class domination, does not mean that the economic power of the enemy class has been destroyed or that it has disappeared. The expropriation and socialisation of the key sectors of production are the first, indispensable measures of the proletariat's economic policy. The existence of backward sectors of the economy, particularly in agriculture, do not permit an immediate transition to a socialist economy or a total abolition of private property. Socialism cannot be built by mere decrees; it is the fruit of a long economic process in which the methods of socialism have to combat and defeat the methods of capitalism on an economic terrain.

The existence of these backward economic sectors, the inevitable survival of private property, represents a real danger: the soil of economic conservatism, of consolidation and regeneration of those social forces which stand in the way of the movement towards socialism.

The period of transition is a period of bitter struggle between capitalism and socialism; in this struggle the proletariat will have the advantage of having won political power but this is not an automatic guarantee of its final victory. The outcome of the struggle, the guarantee of the proletariat's final victory resides exclusively in the strength of consciousness in the class and its ability to translate this consciousness into practical politics.

Any political mistake, any tactical error will strengthen the position of the class enemy. The elimination of the political formations of the class enemy, of its organisations and press, is an indispensable measure for breaking its resistance. But this is not enough. The proletariat must above all safeguard the independence of its own class organisations, preventing them from being deformed by taking up tasks and functions which do not correspond to their real nature. The party, which represents the consciousness of the historic mission of the class and of its final goal, exercises the dictatorship in the name of the proletariat; the trade union, the unitary organ of the class which expresses its economic position and which has to defend the immediate interests of the class, must not identify with the state or become integrated into it.

As a social institution, the state set up after the victory of the proletarian insurrection remains alien and hostile to socialism.

Expropriation and nationalisation, the problems of managing the economy, the historic unpreparedness of the labouring classes and the proletariat to direct the economy, the need to have recourse to technical specialists, to men who come out of the ranks of the exploiting classes and their servants, the disastrous state of the economy following the civil war, all these are historical factors which will tend to strengthen the state machine and its fundamental characteristics of conservatism and coercion. The historic necessity for the proletariat to make use of the state must not lead to the fatal theoretical and political error of identifying this instrument with socialism. The state, like a prison, is not the symbol of socialism, nor of the class whose mission is to create it: the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat expressing the will of the revolutionary class to crush the resistance of the enemy and to ensure the movement towards a socialist society also expresses its fundamental opposition to the idea and the institution of the state. The Russian experience, in particular, has demonstrated the theoretical falsity of the idea of the workers' state, the idea of the proletarian nature of the state, the error of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilisation by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state.

In the beginning of the transition period, the proletariat will be forced to make use of instruments bequeathed to it by the whole past history of humanity, a history of violence and class rule. The state is such an instrument; it is the very symbol of violence, plunder, and oppression. The proletariat inherits this instrument and can only use it on the condition that:

1. It recognises and proclaims the anti-socialist nature of the state and at no time identifies itself with it; it must constantly stand against the state with its own class organs, the party and the unions, ensuring that the state is under the perpetual vigilance and control of the whole class.
2. It attenuates the pernicious effects of the state as far as possible, as in the Paris Commune (cf Engels, Preface to The Civil War in France).

The Russian experience has amply vindicated Marx and Engels' warnings concerning the dangers of the state and the need to take measures against these dangers.

These measures include: the working masses electing representatives who are revocable at any time; destruction of any armed force separate from the people and its replacement by the general armament of the proletariat and the toiling classes; the widest possible democracy for the working class and its organisations; vigilant and permanent control by the whole class over the functioning of the state; state functionaries to be paid no more than a work-man's wage. Such measures must cease to be mere formulae; they must be carried out to the letter and strengthened as far as possible by complementary social and political measures. History and the Russian experience, in particular, have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist. If the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, the state will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a reborn capitalism.

THE TRADE UNIONS
AFTER THE REVOLUTION

By increasing productivity the development of technology diminishes the labour-time necessary for the reproduction of labour power. Under capitalism greater productivity does not tend to reduce labour-time nor to create a proportional improvement of the workers' living standards. On the contrary, the capitalists' search for greater productivity is carried out purely and simply to increase the production of surplus value.

The conflict between capital and labour, constant capital and variable capital, capitalism and the proletariat, is centred round an economic problem; the role of the two forces in production is based on a fundamental antagonism which gives rise to a continuous class struggle. In this struggle against capitalism, the proletariat organises for the defence of its immediate interests through an association of all those who are exploited: the trade union.

However much the trade unions have come under the influence of the agents of the bourgeoisie, ie the reformist bureaucracy, whose policies sabotage and deflect the role of the unions, they remain organs of the class as long as they maintain their independence from the capitalist state.

This period of transition between capitalism and socialism under the political dictatorship of the proletariat expresses itself on the economic terrain in an energetic policy which aims to diminish class exploitation, to constantly increase the proletariat's share in the national income, to alter the relationship between variable capital and constant capital in favour of the former. This policy cannot simply be based on programmatic declarations of the party; still less is it the prerogative of the state, the organ of coercion and of management. This policy can only find a guarantee and a real expression in the working class itself, through the pressure which the class exerts over society, through its opposition to, and struggle against, all other classes.

Trade union organisation under capitalism represents a tendency towards the regroupment of the class against exploitation, which is constantly being held back and blocked by the influence and repression of the ruling bourgeoisie. It is only after the revolution that the trade union organisations will really become the unitary organisations of the class, regrouping all the workers without exception. Only then will the unions really be able to undertake the defence of the proletariat's immediate economic interests.

13) The role of trade union organisations after the revolution does not derive simply from the fact that they are the only organisations that can undertake the defence of the proletariat's immediate interests, even though this in itself is enough justification for complete freedom and independence for the trade unions and for the rejection of any subordination or integration of the unions into the state. But more than this, the trade union organisations are an extremely sensitive living barometer which can quickly show whether the main trend in society is towards socialism (through the proportional increase of variable capital) or towards capitalism (through a much larger proportional growth of constant capital). When there is any oscillation in economic administration towards capitalist policies (as a result of economic pressures which come from immature conditions and from surviving non-proletarian classes), the proletariat, by means of its independent union organisations and its specific struggles, will have to react and intervene thereby providing a social counter-weight which will push economic policy back onto a socialist path.

To give trade unions the role of managing the economy will not eliminate the essential problems that arise out of this economic situation. This would not solve the difficulties which are engendered by a real lack of maturity in the economy, but such a role would deprive the proletariat and its organisations of their freedom. It would destroy the proletariat's capacity to exert the pressure necessary both for the defence of its immediate interests and for guaranteeing a socialist policy for the economy.

After the revolution, the trade unions will reflect much more clearly the level of consciousness that the whole class has reached and will provide a milieu for the political education of the masses. Communists draw their inspiration from the conception that the defence of the revolution and the building of socialism cannot be achieved by the will of a small elite, but finds its strength only in the political maturity of the proletarian masses. Violence exerted against the proletarian masses, even if it aims at guaranteeing progress towards socialism, can in no way provide such a guarantee.

Socialism cannot be a rape of the proletariat, created against its will. Socialism can only be based on the consciousness and will of the working class. Communists reject all methods of violence within the proletariat because such methods stand in the way of any movement towards socialism, because they obstruct the class from attaining an understanding of its historic mission. Within the unions communists will fight for full freedom of expression and political criticism. It is among the proletariat organised in the unions that communists will fight for their political positions, against all the tendencies which reflect the persistence of of bourgeois and petty bourgeois influences within the proletariat and within certain backward strata of the class. Freedom for factions and tendencies within the unions, freedom of speech and of the press for all the currents inside the unions: these are the conditions which will enable the class party to recognise and evaluate the level of consciousness in the masses, to guarantee the movement towards socialism through the political education of the masses, to verify its own policies and to correct them when necessary. The relationship between party and class is simply the relationship between the party and the unions.

15) Any tendency to reduce the role of the trade unions after the revolution; any pretence that the existence of a “workers’ state” means the end of freedom to engage in union activity or strikes; any advocacy of merging the unions with the state through the theory of handing economic administration over to the unions, which seems revolutionary but which in fact leads to an incorporation of the unions into the state machine; any position which, however revolutionary its intentions, calls for violence within the proletariat and its organisations; any attempt to stand in the way of the broadest workers' democracy and the free play of political struggle and of factions within the unions, any such policies are anti-working class. They falsify the relationship between party and class and weaken the proletariat's position during the transition period. The duty of communists will be to energetically denounce and fight against all these tendencies and to work for the full development and independence of the trade union movement, which is an indispensable condition for the victory of socialism.

MANAGEMENT OF THE ECONOMY

It is only through practical study that we will be able to find the necessary solutions to any situation that may arise. Following Marx and Engels, we can today only give a broad outline, the general principles of economic management during the transition period, basing ourselves mainly on the experience of the Russian revolution.

17) The achievement of socialism demands a very advanced development of technology and of the productive forces. Following the victory of the revolution, the proletariat will not have a fully developed technology at its disposal. This is not because the revolution is premature; on the contrary, the development of the productive forces has reached its limit under capitalism. This fact justifies the assertion that the objective conditions for revolution are present. Capitalism has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces and must be destroyed. It is up to the proletariat to conduct a policy which will allow a full development of the productive forces so that socialism can become an economic reality.

The development of technology and of the productive forces is the basis of the economic policy of the proletariat. This requires an accumulation of part of the values produced in order to improve, intensify and ensure an expanded reproduction. But socialism is not simply a result of the speed with which the productive forces develop; the rhythm of the movement towards socialism will be subordinated to, and limited by, the concrete possibilities given by the real economic and political situation.

18) The management of the economy can at no time be separated from the development of the political struggle of the class, and this means on an international scale. A revolution that is victorious in one country cannot simply seek to develop its own economy, independently from the struggle of the proletariat in other countries. The Russian revolution has given us historic proof of the fact that the attempt to develop the economy in Russia outside of an ascendant movement of the revolution in other countries led Russia into a policy of compromise with world capitalism, a policy of external pacts and economic agreements and internal concessions. These compromises turned out to be just so many ways of economically propping up a capitalism in open crisis, saving it from collapsing. But at the same time, these compromises had a deeply disturbing effect on a proletariat which was in the throes of a revolutionary struggle (the secret Rapallo Treaty of 1920 between the Soviet state and German militarism for example).

The economic agreements which were aimed simply at achieving a partial strengthening of the country of the revolution in fact led to a political and economic reinforcement of capitalism, an overturn in the balance of class forces in favour of capitalism. Thus the country of the victorious revolution accentuated its isolation and lost its only ally, the only guarantee of its ultimate development: the international revolution. It ended up as a political and economic force diverted by the growing pressure of its historic enemy and reabsorbed into the capitalist system.

The economic policy of the proletariat in one country cannot aim at the resolution of that country's economic difficulties or at overcoming underdevelopment within the narrow framework of one country. The future of that economy is indissolubly linked and directly subordinated to the development of the international revolution. Any internal economic policy must be of a provisional character and essentially aimed at helping the international revolution.

19) The Russian experience has also shown that the attempt to accelerate the rhythm of production beyond a proportionate development of consumption will lead to the production of goods destined for destruction. This is in line with the general tendency of world capitalism in its decadent phase which can only ensure the continuation of production by setting up a war economy.

Against this policy of speeding up industrial development as much as possible, of sacrificing the immediate interests of the proletariat in order to build a war economy, a genuine proletarian economic policy will be based on a rate of growth which is proportionate to the consumption requirements of the producers, and will therefore aim at the production of consumer goods immediately necessary for the satisfaction of workers' needs.

Accumulation will not be based on the criterion of developing industry as quickly as possible, but will be fixed at a rate which is compatible with the progressive satisfaction of immediate needs. The fundamental principles of economic management will be the production of basic necessities, and the gradual harmonisation of the various branches of production, particularly between town and country, industry and agriculture.

20) As long as the productive forces have not reached a level of development which can do away with small-scale production in every branch of the economy, there can be no question of the complete and immediate disappearance of the intermediary classes, of the artisans and small peasants.

After the revolution the proletariat will only be able to collectivise the developed and concentrated sectors of industry, the key industries, transport, banking, big landed property. It will expropriate the big bourgeoisie. But small private property will continue to exist and will only be abolished through a long economic process. Alongside the socialist sector of the economy there will still be a private sector of small producers. The economic relations between these sectors will probably take many different forms, from socialist relations to co-operativist ones, and to the free exchange of commodities between the state and the small-holders and even between the individual, isolated producers themselves. Problems of production, of exchange, prices, markets and money will also take many different forms. The economic policy of the proletariat will have to take this situation into account, rejecting bureaucratic violence as a way of regulating the economic life and basing itself solely on the real possibilities of absorbing private production through the development of technology. It will aim at the elimination of private property and the isolated producer through the incorporation of these social strata into the great family of the proletariat.

21) The management of social and economic life requires a centralised organism. The theory which would give each group of producers the task of managing their own enterprises is a reactionary petty bourgeois utopia. The development of technology requires the participation of the great mass of workers, their co-operation in the productive process.

Production in each branch of the economy is intimately linked to the whole of national and international production. It calls for the setting in motion of immense forces and for systematic planning, and only a centralised administration can ensure this. Otherwise one would have to transform each member and group of society into so many small proprietors, each with their own antagonistic interests, which would mean a return to the epoch of simple commodity production long since wiped out from history by the development of industry. Socialist society will engender its own organs of social and economic administration. In the period of transition, the function of economic management can only be undertaken by the political power which emerges from the revolution and which, under the control of the entire working population, will manage and direct the economy.

The broadest, most effective, and most direct participation of all the workers at every level of the new power will be the only way of ensuring that the economy is under the management of the workers themselves. The Paris Commune gave us the first example of this new kind of state, while the Russian revolution reaffirmed this first attempt and gave it its definitive form in the organs of representation of all the workers at their workplace and in their localities: the councils or soviets.

22) Everyone who works will participate in the elections to the organs of direction and management, to the councils. Only those who do not work or who live off the labour of others will be excluded. The interests of all the working masses will be expressed in the councils, including those of non-proletarian strata. The proletariat, because of its consciousness, its political strength, the place it occupies at the industrial heart of the economy, because of its concentration in the towns and factories, having acquired a sense of organisation and discipline, will play a preponderant role in the whole life and activity of the councils, and will give leadership and direction to the other strata of the labouring population.

In the councils, the proletarians will for the first time learn the art of administering society for themselves. The party will not impose its economic policies on the councils through decrees or by claiming some divine right. It will have to make its conceptions and policies prevail by proposing them, defending them, and submitting them to the approval of the masses organised in the councils or soviets, relying on the councils of workers and on the workers' delegates to the central councils to bring its class policies to a successful conclusion.

23) Just as the relationship between party and class is expressed through the trade unions, so the relationship the proletariat and its party have with the other labouring classes is expressed through the councils or soviets. Just as violence within the class can only falsify its relationship with the party, so there must be a rejection of violence in the relations between the proletariat and the other labouring classes or strata. These relations must be based on full freedom of expression and criticism within the councils of workers' and peasants' delegates.

In a general sense, violence as a method of activity in the hands of the proletariat will be indispensable for destroying the rule of capitalism and its state, and for guaranteeing the victory of the proletariat against the resistance and violence of the counter-revolutionary classes during the civil war. But apart from this, violence can play no part in the constructive task of building socialism. On the contrary, it runs the risk of deviating the proletariat's activity, of falsifying its relationship with the other labouring strata, and of distorting its capacity to find class solutions to the problems which confront it, solutions which can only be based on the development of the political maturity of the masses.

Gauche Communiste de France, Marc Chirik.

Printed in Internationalisme n°9 (April 1946)

Reprinted in Bulletin d'Etudes et de discussion de Révolution Internationale, n°1

In the period of decadence when the private bourgeoisie has been replaced by the state bourgeoisie, the confrontation between the working class and the “state-boss” is always a direct one. After the 1914-18 war, during the revolutionary period in the developed Western countries, marxists could not conceive of any tactical compromise between the proletariat and the middle classes because the middle classes had either been proletarianised by the development of capitalism, or, as was the case for those remnants from the past such as merchants or landlords, they were – as strata – simply pillars of the counter-revolution.

At the end of the imperialist war, the only international alternative was either the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Dictatorship of Capital. There was no room for the so-called third road of the “democratic state of the whole people”. Lenin's main error was to make a universal theory out of the special case of Russia. In Russia, the workers benefited from the peasants' neutrality (more than their active support) at the time of the October Revolution, but this was solely in relation to the problem of peace which Kerensky's bourgeois government obstinately refused to settle.

In fact, as soon as the Bolsheviks were forced to impose a tax-in-kind in order to feed the workers and the Red Army, the peasants as a class became the main supporters of reaction (the White Armies and the Entente) or of an archaic regionalism (the Makhnovist movement). The substitution of the democratic workers' and peasants' dictatorship for the dictatorship of the proletariat was the first step towards abandoning any extension of the international revolution.

The proletariat allowed its political power to be compromised by the immediate economic interests of the peasantry, particularly by carrying out the Bolshevik slogan of “the land to the peasants!” Faced with these errors of the Russian Communist Party, Gorter, in his Reply to Lenin, was right to say: “The workers of Western Europe are alone; For only a very thin layer of the poor petty bourgeoisie will help them. And this layer is economically insignificant. The workers must bear the weight of the revolution alone. This is the great difference with Russia.”

If the proletariat is faced with the need to take economic measures such as the tax-in-kind, it must obviously explain its reasons to the representatives of the non-exploiting classes in the Soviets, and do everything in its power to take conciliatory measures. At no time can there be any question of sharing, or even giving up, a part of the political power guaranteed to the proletariat by its consciousness and its majority within the organs of government (Soviets), as well as by its own organisation into factory councils and the Party. Only in this way will the proletariat fully exercise its dictatorship thanks to a state which is “proletarian”, but is always oriented towards its primordial historical tasks, and is therefore a “semi-state”.

All these theoretical clarifications are necessary, since today there is a great confusion among revolutionaries about the relationship between the state and the proletarian dictatorship. This text will try to contribute to a clarification of this question; it was written because the one presented to the February 1972 meeting was unsatisfactory and contained certain contradictions. In fact, although the resurgence of class struggle has been obvious since May '68, the ideological weight of the counter-revolution still weighs heavily upon us. This weight can also be felt in the 1946 text of the Gauche Communiste published in Internationalisme, a split from the French Bordigist fraction, written in a period of rampant Stalinist ideology, and therefore unable to profit from the proletarian renewal. We should be able to recognise the historical and theoretical value of this effort at theoretical reflection, given the unfavourable conditions in which it was written, but we also have to underline its mistakes and its weaknesses.

Thus, the main focus of the text's argument rests on the experience of the Russian revolution which is, indeed, of the greatest political importance as a historical reference. However, this reference, apart from the class lessons that can be drawn from it, is given an absolute value when it comes to examining the degeneration and counter-revolution that followed. The text's whole viewpoint, its whole argument, suffers from the trauma that the proletarian defeat in Russia – followed by the setting-up of state capitalism in the name of socialism – represented for revolutionaries: The overall analysis is therefore affected adversely, and in the discussions and the presentation of texts at the February meeting, the explanations of comrades who defended this text were often confused. For example, the text says:

History and the Russian experience, in particular, have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist. If the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, the state will become the stronghold, the rallying-point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a reborn capitalism.

While we may agree with the first statement (ie that its final goal does not allow the proletariat to identify itself with an instrument created to perpetuate the class division of society), it is hard to understand what comrades mean by “a state in the hands of the proletariat, which remains anti-socialist by nature”! In fact, apart from the description of it as "anti-socialist", the text tells us nothing about this state's class nature. Once the seeds of the bourgeoisie's political power have been uprooted, we might ask what is the basis for the real existence of this state, this new form of government of society?

The text appears to lean towards a state representing classes, or, in other words, towards actually abandoning any expression of the proletariat's political domination! The term “vigilance” that follows indicates a conception tinged with anarchism, or, at any rate, springing from a singularly subjective analyses of the counter-revolution. It seems that the state is almost considered as an evil in itself, a curse, and that its historical necessity has been forgotten. In reality, it was the identification of the Bolshevik Party and the Russian state, and its monstrous effects on the proletariat which plays here the role of a “sword of Damocles”, and which troubles the analysis of our comrades. The mistakes of Leninism, and the sordid deceptions of Stalinists and Trotskyists alike, are responsible for our present-day lack of clarity and theoretical confusion.

While we must condemn the identification of Party and State, and even of the State and the Proletariat, we must nonetheless say clearly that, in order to exercise its class dictatorship, the proletariat is forced by the resistance of the previous ruling class, to create new centralised forms of the “government of persons” within which it has majority control. In this way it will really control social life, that is to say, without sharing its political power with other classes, and by stamping the forward path towards communism on every decision taken during the transition period.

Thus, at the same time as it creates a new form of “state” (in the sense of a “government of persons”!) which will be the expression of proletarian political domination and of the necessity for the development of the socialist mode of production, its historical nature compels the proletariat to transform the whole of political life (extension of democracy, negation of its own existence, the end of classes) insofar as the economic realisation of Communism is carried out throughout the transition period. We can thus talk of the extinction of any and all forms of government, and so of the state.

From the moment of the seizure of power, the proletariat's domination is expressed through a semi-state; this is why it is immensely important to grasp the theoretical and practical meaning of these two words, as Lenin said in State and Revolution before he identified the “dictatorship of the proletariat” with the “dictatorship of the Party”. The real danger comes from the monopolisation of political power within the proletariat by a layer of specialists and intellectuals, supported by non-proletarian tendencies with-in the organisms of the workers' government. At this point the dictatorship of the proletariat as a class weakens, and it is then that the state ceases to be the form of government of the transitional society, and strengthens itself to be used by the new bourgeoisie for the solid maintenance of society's class divisions. The dictatorship of the Party then represents the political structure of state capitalism.

The formation of this bureaucracy, and the spreading grasp of the state, are conditioned by the ebbing of the revolution's extension on an international scale, and thus of the objective conditions that favour its extension. (cf. the role of bourgeois ideology in the Western countries, which despite the exacerbation of the crisis leading up to 1929, pushed the workers into frontism, trade-unionism and parliamentarism in the revolutionary wave following the First World War. See Pannekoek's 1920 text World Revolution and Communist  Tactics).

This international aspect has to be made clear in order to mark the distinction between our position and that of the council communist current (Mattick, Korsch, Socialisme ou Barbarie and Pannekoek himself), who made the mistake of attributing all the causes of bureaucratisation to the intelligentsia. They in fact denied the favourable conditions opened up by the 1914-18 war, and hence denied any possibility of setting-up the proletarian dictatorship.

Thus we can say that the proletarian semi-state can become a new capitalist state if the proletariat's power is seized from it by force (repression in Petrograd in 1918, Red Army, militarisation of labour, Kronstadt 1921), or if the organisms representing this power, and which guarantee its transitional form, (Soviets=semi-state) during the “lower phase of socialism” are destroyed or reduced to the role of a rubber stamp (“Resolution on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution”, IInd Congress of the Communist International, and later the Stalinist Constitution of 1936).

The state becomes openly the instrument of the domination of the possessing class: its power of coercion completes its “collectivised” exploitation of the proletariat; its police and armed gangs can physically exterminate any germ of revolution. The Russian experience shows us, then, the reverse of what the comrades affirm in their quotation. At no point is it simply because “the proletariat's political vigilance weakens” that the state, which had been “in its hands” abruptly becomes, owing to this lack of surveillance, “the expression of the dispossessed classes, of a reborn capitalism”. A whole process of internal struggle within the proletariat, which remains a danger right up to the world-wide seizure of power, is thus necessary before the governmental expression of the class (the semi-state) is to be transformed into a state against the proletariat.

There are two sides to this process: on the one hand, an interruption in the unification of class consciousness within the Soviets (which from the start contain elements of heterogeneity due to the presence of non-proletarian labouring strata); on the other, a strengthening of the power of the Communist Party – theoretically the most conscious element of the class – which, from being simply a part of the class, starts to claim to represent the whole class.

The "Bolshevik" theses on the role of the Party presented to the IInd Congress of the Communist International indicate very clearly the existence of this process:

The rise of the Soviets as the main historically-determined form of the dictatorship of the proletariat in no way detracts from the leading role of the Communist Party in the proletarian revolution. When the German 'Left' Communists say (see their appeal to the German proletariat of 14 April, 1920, signed 'Communist Labour Party of Germany') that 'the party, too, is more and more adapting itself to the Soviet idea and assuming a proletarian character' – 'dass auch die Partei sich immer mehr dem Rategedanken anpasst und proletarishchen Charakter annimmt' (Kommunistiche  Arbeiterzeitung, n°54), they are expressing the commonly-held idea that the Communist Party ought to dissolve itself into the Soviets, that the Soviet can replace the Communist Party. This idea is fundamentally incorrect and reactionary... The history of the Russian Communist Party, which has held power in a huge country for three years, shows that the role of the Party does not decrease in the period after the seizure of power, but, on the contrary, increases greatly.[1]

In this quotation we find. the perfect illustration, not only of the substitutionism of the Party's power for that of the proletariat, but above all of the identification of Party and State at the expense of the revolutionary expression of proletarian power: the Soviet semi-state. In fact, the KAPD did not defend the idea of the Party's disappearance, but of a role for the Party equivalent to the practice and organisation of the class itself (factory committees). This is why, along-side the evolution of consciousness in the Soviets (and only on this condition), the Party was to “proletarianise” itself, thus guaranteeing the passage from all forms of transitional government (the semi-state) to the complete disappearance of all government, of any state.

In conclusion, we quote a passage from the comrades' text which we feel totally contradicts their general thesis (that the Soviets are not the only government in the period of transition: a state “in the hands of the proletariat”). We identify with the whole of the following formulation, which shows again despite all its errors and contradictions, the elements of historic and revolutionary value contained in this 1946 text:

Everyone who works will participate in the elections to the organs of direction and management, to the councils. Only those who do not work or who live off the labour of others will be excluded. The interests of all the working masses will be expressed in the councils, including those of non-proletarian strata. The proletariat, because of its consciousness, its political strength, the place it occupies at the industrial heart of the economy, because of its concentration in the towns and factories, having acquired a sense of organisation and discipline, will play a preponderant role in the whole life and activity of the councils, and will give leadership and direction to the other strata of the labouring population. In the councils, the proletarians will for the first time learn the art of administering society for themselves. The Party will not impose its economic policies on the councils through decrees or by claiming some divine right. It will have to make its conceptions and policies prevail by proposing them, defending them, and submitting them to the approval of the masses organised in the councils or soviets, relying on the councils of workers and on the workers' delegates to the central councils to bring its class policies to a successful conclusion (all emphasis is my own)

The Soviets are thus, at the same time the expression of a government (a state form) and of the preparation for the withering away of all government: we must call them a 'proletarian semi-state' (for the proletariat is the dominant force and the last revolutionary class, which in affirming itself prepares its own negation as a class).

Guy Sabatier, September 1972

Excerpts from the text printed in the Bulletin d'Etude et de discussion de Révolution Internationale n°2 (May 1973)

The following text is a report of a meeting held by the group Révolution Internationale in February 1972. The subject under discussion was “the content of socialism”. This was the first time the group as a whole had dealt with such a subject. The aim of the meeting was not to pretend to end up with a ready-made, immutable theory on what the content of socialism should be, but rather to open up the discussion, to begin dealing with the problem by studying the experience of past revolutions and the theories put forward by revolutionaries throughout the history of the workers' movement. This text takes up the main ideas that emerged from the discussion.

Two tendencies appeared: the first defending the “classic” idea that, during the period of transition, the workers' councils take on the tasks of the state, that they are the “workers’ state”. The second tendency saw the necessity and inevitability during the period of transition of a state which would be linked to, but distinct from, the workers' councils. The state can be considered as an instrument, not of society's revolutionary transformation, but rather of the consolidation of the gains of the revolution: victory in the struggle against the bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not to be confused with the state; to be able to ensure progress towards the socialist transformation, the working class must maintain its freedom of action and the independence of its class organs – the workers' councils – that are the instruments of its dictatorship.

It is obvious that this discussion remains open, and that such a difficult subject cannot at this point be made a “principle” of the group. Nonetheless, the debate takes place within a certain framework; there is no place in the group for “Leninist”/state-capitalist theories that claim to solve the problems of the transitional period by means of a party-state.

On the content of socialism

The historical evolution of the idea of the content of socialism

To deal with the problems that will occur during the “transitional phase” – in other words the period between the day after the revolution (the seizure of power by the international working class) and the definitive realisation of communism (classless society) – it is useful to review briefly the theory of socialism's evolution from the beginning of capitalism.

In fact, revolutionaries' conceptions of the content of socialism have folloWed the evolution of the class struggle. For revolutionaries, there is no such thing as an “immutable theory” or an “absolute truth”; their theories have consequently developed thanks to their permanent confrontation with reality, and to the strengthening and enrichment which each experience of the working class has brought with it.

Thus, at the beginning of the 19th century, owing to the “extreme youth” and inexperience of the working class, revolutionaries had an entirely idealist conception of socialism, which they depicted as an ideal world of harmony and justice that could be reached by peaceful evolution. Their criticisms of bourgeois society, despite their accuracy, remained on a moral and ethical level. For them, the revolution was simply a question of “good will” and moral principles; they believed in a peaceful evolution from capitalism to communism through the creation and subsequent proliferation of little communes and phalansteries (Owen, Fourier, etc: Utopian socialism). Inevitably, these theories led into a dead-end, as did those of Proudhon, who thought the workers' emancipation from their exploitation could begin within capitalist society by means of associations of producers producing and exchanging goods “at their fair price”. These theories were shown to be utopian because they saw the transition from capitalism as being immediately realisable simply through human will. For the utopian socialists, socialism remained an abstraction, in the realm of ideas, because they did not see the real subject of socialist transformation – the working class. Proudhon, who wanted to spare the working class its wage slavery did not see the road to its emancipation – the class struggle. All these theories simply denied any problem of a period of transition to socialism.

Historical Materialism

Historical materialism raised for the first time the historical necessity of capitalism's disappearance and the establishment of Socialism ceased to be communism a simple question of morality and will, to be understood instead as the last and inevitable step in the "history of class struggle". Historical materialism gave the good intentions of the utopian socialists an explanation and a scientific basis. For Marx and marxists, the course of history is determined, not by ideas and human will, but by the development of the productive forces. The development of the productive forces within capitalist society comes into conflict with the capitalist superstructure and relations of production. This creates the basis not only for the possibility of the appearance of a new society, but its necessity.

With the appearance of historical materialism, it also became clear that capitalism will be destroyed, not by “men of goodwill”, but by a class, the working class, called upon to carry out this task. It will be the subject of history, for only this class will have an interest in – and capacity for – the liberation of the productive forces from  their capitalist fetters, and the establishment of a society no longer dominated by commodity relationships, a society which will eliminate the domination of man by man.

There is no continuity between previous societies and communism (the “end of the reign of necessity, and the beginning of the reign of freedom”). This is why the passage from capitalism to communism will not be accomplished overnight. The proletarian revolution will not immediately set up a new society, but will open a period of social and economic transformation, and of maturation in the class; this is the period of transition that Marx had already called the “lower phase” of communism, or “socialism” and which would precede the “higher phase” of communism.

Since Marx's time the theory of the content of socialism has been extended, particularly by Lenin (in State and Revolution), by the Russian experience,[1] and by the studies of comrades of the Dutch Left – who attempted a serious study of the problem, but limited it to the level of an isolated industrialised country when in fact the conditions for revolution can only exist and ripen on the international level.

The object of our discussion today is to outline the problems that will face the proletariat after the revolution; we say “outline” the problems advisedly since it is obvious here that we are only trying to contribute to a discussion and study of a problem which has always been posed for revolutionaries, and which will continue to be posed until history itself has dealt with it.

In the discussion among revolutionaries about the society of the future, its ultimate, class-less phase, arouses little debate; indeed with our alienated vision, we cannot even imagine what problems will be posed then. We have only a few general guidelines:

• the economy will cease to have an autonomous existence and will be controlled by mankind.
• work will no longer be a "curse". - there will no longer be any contradiction between society and the individual… in a world without classes, the “new man” will be integrated into an ever more harmonious society.

By contrast the “transitional society” which must lead up to this “ideal society” raises innumerable problems; it will bear the burden of putting an end to capitalism and preparing for communism. To do this, the proletariat must act in a way that goes against everything we have seen in the past. For the transitional society, as its name implies, is not a fixed society, to be established, but must undergo a permanent transformation in order to resolve the enormous contradictions that will weigh on it after the revolution.

The main problems and contradictions after the revolution

As we have said, the proletariat's seizure of power, in itself only opens up a period when it will have to pave the way for the establishment of a classless society.

To claim – as many revolutionaries do today – that the proletariat's seizure of power will lead directly to the creation of a new society or that it will resolve all problems, is to imagine that problems can be eliminated by closing your eyes to them. This attitude does not take reality into account and thus leaves a free rein to the many dangers that will lie in wait on the forward march of the revolution.

The primary task of a working class power in any country will be to hasten the revolutionary process in other countries, as an absolute condition for its own existence. The transformation of society is only possible on an inter-national scale, and there can be no such thing as a “socialist economy”, or “self-management” in one country. The fundamental job at the start of the world-wide civil war will be to extend the revolution to other sectors and other countries.

Once the revolution is won, the working class will find itself in a precarious situation to say the least: it has to hold on to power, while at the same time:

• its class consciousness is far from being unified;
• it will be the only class to defend the interests of socialist transformation;
• other classes and social strata will still exist (the peasantry, craftsmen, petty bourgeoisie) which, while they may take part in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, have no class interest in the socialisation of production. These strata, although they are not exploiters, will tend towards an opposition to the proletariat and the maintenance of individual production and commodity relationships.
• these classes cannot simply be “eliminated” by violence. They will necessarily have a role to play in post-revolutionary society. In the short term the proletariat will have to come to terms with these classes in order to set in motion a dynamic that will transform the material basis of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie (proletarianisation of parasitic strata, integration of craftsmen into production, encouragement of collectivisation in the countryside).

These classes have to be won over, integrated and assimilated through an ideological struggle and a transformation of the economic base that only the proletariat can carry out. These transformations cannot all be pushed through overnight. There will be a whole period before these classes can be integrated into the proletariat, and by the same token, before class society can be eliminated. This is the definition of the period of transition. Until these classes have disappeared, exchange relationships will persist, and the danger of a retreat will menace the revolution's forward march.

The problems of the co-ordination of production and distribution will have to be resolved. Planning on more than a merely local scale will be necessary.

The problem of the two-thirds of humanity that suffers from famine and chronic under-nourishment has to be solved. In short, the revolution must be world-wide, while at the same time the working class is in a minority on a world scale.

Nor must we ignore the fact that it is impossible to know what state the economy will be in at the end of the civil war. Large-scale destruction may well be followed by a period of shortages and scarcity.

These are only a few of the problems that will face us. Our aim is to offer a realistic conception of the revolution instead of a utopian one.

Because of the working class' weak position after the revolution, menaced by external threats (the economic situation, the balance of class forces) as well as internal ones (the weight of bygone ideologies, the lack of political unification), the danger of a "return" to capitalism will be multiplied tenfold. As revolutionaries we have to estimate these problems as well as possible, so as not to be "taken by surprise", and to try to limit the damage.

We know that the main difficulty of the period of transition will be a situation where the working class has demonstrated in practice its will to destroy the capitalist system in all its forms, and yet is unable to do so overnight, for the reasons we have indicated above; this is the nub of the problem of the transitional society; this is a phase of constant tug-of-war within society between a tendency to immobility, the preservation of the status quo or retreat, and a tendency – which only a conscious and independently organised working class can guarantee--towards a permanent overcoming of this situation, towards the construction of a classless society.

Why a state? 

The primary task of the revolutionary working class is in no way to ensure the survival of this hybrid, divided society that it will inherit from capitalism. Its mission goes far further, and to give it this role which does not belong to it would be to shackle it. Nonetheless, this task of ensuring the survival and functioning of this interim society must be carried out.

Whether we like it or not, a state will emerge after the civil war, since classes (peasantry, petty bourgeoisie) will still exist in the transitional society. The proletariat must lead a class struggle for the transformation of this society, and yet at the same time it is impossible to deprive these strata of all social expression, of all representation in social life. The state will be the expression of the contradictions within the transitional society. Like all states it will consolidate the gains of the past struggle (the victory of the revolution against the bourgeoisie) and its role will be to keep the class struggle in the transitional society within a framework which does not endanger this society's existence. But, unlike the states of the past, its purpose will not be to enshrine a new economic class domination, for the working class is not an exploiting class and has no privileged economic interests to defend.

The state of the transitional period will disappear when classes have disappeared. It is highly likely that the proletariat will have to take extreme care to ensure, by force if necessary, that the state does not become independent in relation to the rest of society. The class must be aware that the danger of a return to capitalism will come in part from this state itself, from this scourge inherited from a world divided into classes, this double-edged weapon that it will have to use in the same way that cobalt is used to treat cancer. 

In no way is the state of the transitional society the bearer of the revolution; it appears as the product of a certain situation and a certain balance of forces between the working class and other classes, which do not share the working class' interest in the revolution (remember that we speak always on the international level). Since it is the product of this state of affairs, it will tend to try to perpetuate this situation, to hinder the movement towards the elimination of the other classes. Contrary to what Lenin thought, it is by nature antithetical to the struggle for human liberation.

Historically, we have seen that at the moment of the insurrection, the state is identified with the unitary organs of the working class – the soviets. The state-soviet problem is posed luring the second phase (when the problems of the management of society and the maintenance of public order appear); the whole of society has to be kept alive, while at the same time there are only workers in the soviets. Identifying the workers' councils with the state, as do both Councilists and Leninists, is to miss the fact that:

1. The proletariat's historic task cannot be identified with the state. The proletariat alone is the bearer of socialism, of a communist programme that will lead to the disappearance of classes. In the midst of the immediate reality, the proletariat must always defend the movement's final goal. The state is only a temporary compromise in a still divided society. The proletariat's aim is not to guarantee the existence of "states", but to overthrow the status quo, to be able to march towards socialism.
2. A workers' "state" is a contradiction in terms. The working class does not build "states" because it is not an exploiting class. A state is inevitable in the period of transition, but it does not emerge from the working class. The state can be a danger for the proletariat; it may try to tie the workers' hands and make them "work for others". The working class must be free to carry out its policies, and this includes the right to strike against the dictates of the state. To confuse the state with the proletariat leads to the aberration of a "workers' state" that forbids the workers to rise against it.
3. Trying to identify the proletariat with the state only dilutes the strength of the working class by uniting it with other classes that do not defend the same interests. The proletariat's dictatorship operates through its independent organisms – the workers' councils – and its class role within the state will depend on the balance of forces with other classes and the degree of consciousness and vigilance of the workers.

As we said above, the great difficulty of the period of transition is precisely that it is transitional. In other words, its evolution will constantly be threatened by immense counter-tendencies – and for this evolution to be blocked will inevitably mean degeneration and a return to capitalism. We might say that the transitional period will for a long time be located at a constantly modified distance between capitalism and communism, as long as the state has not completely disappeared. If revolutionaries do not properly grasp the dynamic of this period, they will be guilty of the most serious mistakes.

Although the only function of the transitional society's state will be to fulfil the most practical of tasks to ensure this society's survival, this will not prevent it from being marked by the most reactionary and tendencies towards stasis; it could become an active organ of the counter-revolution. It is precisely the struggle against its counter-revolutionary tendencies that makes it absolutely necessary that the working class does not "relax", that its maturity, strengthening, radicalisation, and unification continue to develop within its councils. The working class must be on the alert to parry the slightest sign of counter-revolution, must ensure that the revolution stays on the right course, and must, if need be, be prepared to take up arms again against this very state.

It seems obvious that to guarantee the submission of this state, a certain number of measures have to be taken:

• the workers organised in councils have the power of decision over all the state's measures; none are taken without their agreement and active participation;
• the workers have a monopoly of arms, and must be prepared to use them against the state if necessary;
• the workers are represented in the state in the highest proportions that the balance of class forces makes possible;
• all members of the state are delegated and instantly revocable; the workers' representatives account before the councils for every action they carry out;
• the workers' councils decide on the changes to be carried out within the state, and within society itself, taking account of the evolution of the balance of class forces. Their attitude towards other classes might be described as: "We make compromises with you because for the moment we cannot do otherwise. But our aim is to eliminate the conditions of your existence as a class as rapidly as possible".

This "destruction" of the other strata in society will be possible all the more quickly as the productive forces are developed. The working class' first concern will be to integrate all strata of society into socialised production as rapidly as possible. It goes without saying that this integration will not be a matter of forcing everybody to work in the kind of factories that exist today, but that the nature, the aims, and the forms of production will-have to be profoundly altered immediately after the seizure of power.

Thus, although it will not be possible to set up the classless society immediately after the revolution, and although it will be necessary to take account of other, non-revolutionary classes, it will be possible – and necessary – to take socialist measures (ensuring the path to socialism) straight away; as many "points of no return" will have to be passed as rapidly  as the situation permits. For example, while in the first stages the distribution of products may unavoidably be carried out under some kind of monetary form – as long as non-socialised sectors persist – the primary concern will be to aim at the collectivisation of distribution, the suppression of the market, of wage-labour, and, obviously, of the law of value.

We criticise the system of "labour vouchers"[2] (a kind of "money" representing a given labour time, and which an individual might use to acquire consumer goods, also priced in labour time) since this system tends to perpetuate the idea of the working class as a mass of individuals who receive the necessities of life as a function of their individual labour. In fact, whatever the measures taken during the transition period, what matters is above all their orientation and the break they represent with the old system.

The guiding orientation for every measure taken must be the tendency towards production for the satisfaction of needs and not for accumulation as under capitalism, towards a constant rise in workers' living standards, and the reduction of labour time through the integration of other strata into associated labour. Labour must cease to be a scourge, a "buying back of your own life", and instead encourage relationships of solidarity among workers. We think that it is necessary to establish as quickly as possible the collectivisation and free distribution of all articles necessary to human life (food, clothing, etc), above all in the industrialised sectors where the working class is strong, and where the socialisation of consumption will necessarily be able to proceed more quickly.

The best guarantee against an eventual degeneration of the revolution are those economic and political measures that tend more and more to subject the economy and the productive forces to immediate human need. This is the guiding light that must constantly orientate the period of transition, the only one that can show us the way towards the "reign of freedom", towards the society of man.

Taly

Printed in the Bulletin d'Etudes et de discussion de Révolution Internationale, n°8 (July 1974) Notes: 1.  2.

It is always with the greatest caution that revolutionaries have raised the question of the period of transition. The number, the complexity, and above all, the newness of the problems the proletariat must solve prevent any elaboration of detailed plans of the future society; any attempt to do so risks being turned into a strait-jacket which will stifle the revolutionary activity of the class. Marx, for example, always refused to give "recipes for the dishes of the future". Rosa Luxemburg insisted on the fact that with respect to the transitional society we only have "sign posts and those of an essentially negative character".

If the different revolutionary experiences of the class (the Paris Commune, 1905, 1917-20), and also the experience of the counterrevolution clarify a certain number of problems that the period of transition will pose, it is essentially regarding the general framework of these problems and not the detailed manner of solving them. It is this framework that we will attempt to bring out in this text.

The Nature of Periods of Transition

Human history is made up of different stable societies linked to a given mode of production and therefore to stable social relations. These societies are based on the dominant economic laws inherent in them. They are made up of fixed social classes and are based on appropriate superstructures. The basic stable societies in written history have been: slave society, Asiatic history, feudal society and capitalist society.

What distinguishes periods of transition from periods when society is stable is the decomposition of the old social structures and the formation of new structures. Both are linked to a development of the productive forces and are accompanied by the appearance and development of new classes as well as the development of ideas and institutions corresponding to these classes.

The period of transition is not a distinct mode of production, but a link between two modes of production--the old and the new. It is the period during which the germs of the new mode of production slowly develop to the detriment of the old, until they supplant the old mode of production and constitute a new, dominant mode of production.

Between two stable societies (and this will be true for the period between capitalism and communism as it has been in the past), the period of transition is an absolute necessity. This is due to the fact that the sapping of the basis of the existence of the old society does not automatically imply the maturation and ripening of the conditions of the new. In other words, the decline of the old society does not automatically mean the maturation of the new, but is only the condition for it to take place.

Decadence and the period of transition are two very distinct phenomena. Every period of transition presupposes the decomposition of the old society whose mode and relations of production have attained the extreme limit of their possible development. However, every period of decadence does not necessarily signify a period of transition, in as much as the period of transition represents a step towards a new mode of production. Similarly ancient Greece did not enjoy the historical conditions necessary for a transcendence of slavery; neither did ancient Egypt.

Decadence means the exhaustion of the old social mode of production; transition means the surging up of the new forces and conditions which will permit a resolution and transcendence of the old contradictions.

The Differences Between Communist Society and Other Societies

To delineate the nature of the period of transition linking capitalism and communism and to point out what distinguishes this period from all preceding periods, one fundamental idea must be kept in mind. Every period of transition stems from the nature of the new society which is arising. Therefore, the fundamental differences which distinguish communist society from all other societies must be made clear:

a) All earlier societies (with the exception of primitive communism which belongs to prehistory) have been societies divided into classes. Communism is a classless society.

b) All other societies have been based on property and the exploitation of man by man.

Communism knows no type of individual or collective property; it is the unified and harmonious human community.

c) The other societies in history have had as their basis an insufficiency in the development of the productive forces with respect to man's needs. They are societies of scarcity. It is for that reason that they have been dominated by blind economic, social and natural forces. Humanity has been alienated from nature and as a result from the social forces it has itself engendered.

Communism is the full development of the productive forces, an abundance of production capable of satisfying human needs. It is the liberation of humanity from the domination of nature and of the economy. It is the conscious mastery by humanity of its conditions of life. It is the world of freedom and no longer the world of necessity which has characterised man's past history.

d) All past societies brought with them anarchronistic vestiges of past economic systems, social relations, ideas and prejudices. This is due to the fact that all these societies were based on private property and the exploitation of the labour of others. It is for this reason that a new class society can and must necessarily be born and develop within the old. It is for the same reason that the new class society, once it is triumphant, can continue with, and accommodate, vestiges of the old defeated society, of the old dominant classes. The new class society can even associate elements of the old dominant class in power. Thus slave or feudal relations could still exist within capitalism and for a long time the bourgeoisie could share power with the nobility.

The situation in a communist society is completely different. Communism retains no economic or social remnants of old society. While such remnants still exist one cannot speak of communist society: what place could there be in such a society for small producers or slave relations, for example? This is what makes the period of transition between capitalism and communism so long. Just as the Hebrew people had to wait forty years in the desert in order to free themselves from the mentality forged by slavery, so humanity will need several generations to free itself from the vestiges of the old world.

e) All previous societies, just as they have been based on a division into classes, have also necessarily been based on regional, geographic, or national-political divisions. This is due primarily to the laws of unequal development which dictate that the evolution of society--while everywhere following a similar orientation--occurs in a relatively independent and separated fashion in different sectors with gaps of time which can last several centuries. Thus, unequal development is itself due to the feeble development of the productive forces: there exists a direct relation between the degree of development and the scale on which this development occurs. Only the productive forces developed by capitalism at its zenith, for the first time in history, permit a real interdependence between the different parts of the world.

The establishment of communist society immediately has the entire world as its arena. Communism in order to be established requires the same evolution at the same time in all countries. It is completely universal or it is nothing.

f) Based on private property, exploitation, the division into classes and into different geographical zones, production in previous societies necessarily tended towards the production of commodities with all that followed in the way of competition and anarchy in distribution and consumption solely regulated by the law of value, through the market and money.

Communism knows neither exchange nor the law of value. Its production is socialised in the fullest-sense of the term. It is universally planned according to the needs of the members of society and for their satisfaction. Such production knows only use values whose direct and socialised distribution excludes exchange, the market and money.

g) Divided into antagonistic classes, all previous societies could only exist and survive through the constitution of a special organ--appearing as if above society--in order to maintain the class struggle within a framework beneficial to the conservation and the interests of the dominant class: the state.

Communism knows none of these divisions and has no need of the state. Moreover, it could not tolerate within it an organism for the government of man. In communism there is only room for the administration of things.

Characteristics of the Period of Transition

The period of transition towards communism is constantly tainted by the society from which it emerges (the pre-history of humanity) yet also affected by the society towards which it tends (the completely new history of human society). This is what will distinguish it from all earlier periods of transition.

a. Previous Periods of Transition

Periods of transition until now have in common the fact that they unfolded within the old society. The definitive proclamation of the new society--which is sanctioned by the leap that a revolution constitutes--comes at the end of the transitional process itself. This situation is the result of two essential causes:

• Past societies all have the same social, economic basis--the division into classes and exploitation, which reduces the period of transition to a simple change or transfer of privileges but not to the suppression of privileges.
• All these societies, and this forms the basis of the preceding characteristic, blindly submit to the imperatives of laws based on the low development of the productive forces (the reign of necessity). The period of transition between two such societies is thus characterised by a blind economic development.

b. The Period of Transition towards Communism

It is because communism constitutes a total break with all exploitation and all division into classes that the transition towards this society requires a radical break with the old society and can only unfold outside of the old society.

Communism is not a mode of production subject to the blind economic laws opposed to mankind, but is based on a conscious organisation of production which permits an abundance of the productive forces which the old capitalist society cannot attain by itself.

c. What Distinguishes the Period of Transition towards Communism?

• The period of transition can only begin outside of capitalism. The maturation of the conditions of socialism requires as a prerequisite the destruction of the political, economic and social domination of capitalism in society.
• The period of transition to communism can only be begun on a world scale.
• Unlike other periods of transition, in the period of transition to communism the essential institutions of capitalism-state police, army, diplomatic corps--cannot be utilised by the proletariat. They must be completely destroyed.
• As a result, the opening of the period of transition is essentially characterised by the political defeat of capitalism and by the triumph of the political domination of the proletariat.

"In order to convert social production into a large and harmonious system of co-operative work there must be general social change, changes in the general conditions of society which can only be realised by means of the organised power of society--the state power--taken from the hands of the capitalists and the landowners and transferred to the hands of the producers themselves" (Marx, Instructions on Co-operatives to the Delegates of the General Council at the First Congress of the First International at Geneva).

"The conquest of political power has become the first task of the working class" (Marx, Inaugural Address to the First International).

d. The Problems of the Period of Transition

The world generalisation of the revolution is the first condition for the opening of the period of transition. The question of economic and social measures necessary to particularly protect isolated socialisations in one country, one region, one factory or among one group of people is subordinated to the world generalisation of the revolution. Even after a first triumph of the proletariat, capitalism continues its resistance in the form of a civil war. In this period everything must be subordinated to the destruction of the power of capitalism. This is the first objective which conditions any later evolution.

One class and one class alone is interested in communism: the proletariat. Other productive and exploited classes can be drawn into the struggle that the proletariat wages against capitalism, but they can never as classes become the protagonists and bearers of communism. Because of this, it is necessary to emphasise one essential task: the necessity for the proletariat not to confuse itself with, or in dissolve itself into, other classes. In the period of transition the proletariat, as the only revolutionary class invested with the task of creating the new classless society, can only assure the completion of this task by affirming itself as an autonomous and politically dominant class in society. The proletariat alone has a communist programme that it attempts to carry out and, as such, it must retain in its own hands all political and armed force: it has the monopoly of arms. In order to accomplish its tasks the proletariat creates organised structures: the workers' councils based on factories, and the revolutionary party.

The dictatorship of the proletariat can be summarised in the following terms:

• the programme (the proletariat knows where it is going);
• its general organisation as a class;
• armed force.

The relations between the proletariat and the other classes in society are as follows:

• Vis-à-vis the capitalist class and the old rulers of capitalist society (MPs, Congressmen, high functionaries, the army and the Church): total suppression of all civil rights and exclusion from political life.
• As regards the peasantry and artisans, that is, independent and non-exploiting producers who constitute the major part of society, the proletariat cannot eliminate them totally from political life, nor at the outset, from economic life. The proletariat will necessarily be led to find a modus vivendi with these classes while at the same time pursuing a policy aimed at the dissolution and integration of these classes into the working class.

If the working class must take account of these other classes in economic and administrative life; it must not provide them with the possibility of any autonomous organisations (press, parties, etc.). These numerous classes and strata are integrated into a system of administration based on territorial soviets. They will be integrated into society as citizens, not as a class.

With regard to those social strata which in present day capitalism occupy a distinct place in economic life, such as the liberal professions, technicians, functionaries, intellectuals (what is called the 'new middle class'), the attitude of the proletariat will be based on the following criteria:

• these classes are not homogeneous. Their highest strata are fundamentally integrated into the capitalist function and mentality, while their lowest strata have the same function and interests as the working class.
• the proletariat must act, therefore, in such a way as to accentuate this already existing separation.

The transitional society is still a society divided into classes and so there will necessarily arise within it that institution peculiar to all societies divided into classes: the STATE. With all the limitations and precautionary measures with which we will surround this institution (functionaries will be elected and revocable, their consumption will be equal to that of a worker, a unification will exist between the legislative and executive functions, etc.), and which make this state into a 'semi-state', we must never lose sight of the state's historic anti-socialist, and therefore anti-proletarian and essentially conservative, nature. The state remains the guardian of the status quo.

We recognise the inevitability of this institution which the proletariat will have to utilise as a necessary evil in order to: break the resistance of the waning capitalist class and preserve a united administrative, and political framework in this period when society is still rent by antagonistic interests.

But we categorically reject the idea of making this state the standard-bearer of communism. By its own nature ("bourgeois nature in its essence"--Marx), it is essentially an organ for the conservation of the status quo and a restraint on communism. Thus, the state can neither be identified with communism nor with the proletariat which is the bearer of communism. The proletariat is by definition the most dynamic class in history since it carries out the suppression of all classes including. itself. This is why, while utilising the state, the proletariat expresses its dictatorship not through the state, but over the state. This is also why the proletariat can under no circumstances allow this institution (the state) to intervene by violence within the class, nor to be the arbiter of the discussions and activities of the class organs - the councils and the revolutionary party.

On the economic plane, the period of transition consists of an economic policy (and no longer a political economy) of the proletariat with a view to accelerating the process of universal socialisation of production and distribution. But the realisation of this programme of integral communism at all levels, while being the goal affirmed and followed by the working class, will still be subject to immediate, conjunctural and contingent conditions in the period of transition which only pure utopian voluntarism would ignore. The proletariat will immediately attempt to advance as far as possible towards its goal while recognising the inevitable concessions it will be obliged to tolerate. Two dangers threaten such a policy:

• the idealisation of this policy, presenting it as communist when it is nothing of the sort
• the denial of the necessity of such a policy in the name of idealistic voluntarism.

Some Measures of the Period of Transition

Without pretending to establish a blueprint for these measures we can, at least, try to give a general idea:

• Immediate socialisation of the great capitalist concentrations and of the principal centres of productive activity.
• Planning of production and distribution--the criteria of production must be the maximum satisfaction of needs and no longer of accumulation.
• Massive reduction of the working day.
• Substantial rise in the standard of living.
• The attempt to abolish remuneration based on wages and on its money form.
• Socialisation of consumption and of the satisfaction of needs (transportation, leisure, meals, etc).
• The relationship between the collectivised sectors and sectors of production which are still individual--particularly in the countryside--must tend towards an organised collective exchange through co-operatives, thus suppressing the market and individual exchange.

M.C. Revolution Internationale/France April 1975

Re-printed in ICC pamphlet The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (1981)

We consider this text to be a tool for further work and not a complete and final statement. Certain positions are simply affirmed, others are traced in outline. However we are convinced that it can constitute a basis for a correct discussion of ‘the period of transition'.

In German Ideology Marx wrote:

"The revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class over­throwing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all that muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."

However the proletarian insurrection, the confrontation with and armed assault upon bourgeois power, while being indispensable necessities, are only the first, inevitable steps of a dynamic process which must in the end lead to the triumph of communism, of the classless society in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

The proletarian revolution is a "political revolution whose essence is social. The revolution is a political act. Socialism cannot be realized without revolution. It necessitates this political act to the extent that it needs to destroy and to dissolve. But it throws off its political envelope from the beginning of its organizing activity, as soon as it pursues its own goals, as soon as it reveals its essence." (Marx, 1844)

The political act is, therefore, the victorious eruption of a class born and forged within the very entrails of capitalism. The affirmation of this class, which in emancipating itself, will emancipate the whole of humanity.

The proletariat constitutes itself as the new ruling class through the revolution, not in order to establish new relations of oppression by one class over another, but to suppress "all the inhuman conditions of life of the existing society and which it suffers in its own condition".

The overthrow of bourgeois power is not yet communism, but only the first step in a more or less long and difficult process.

"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolution­ary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme)

In the history of the communist movement of the proletariat, two occasions have arisen in which the bourgeois state has been overthrown and the proletarian dictatorship established: the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution.

These two experiences were defeated, the first directly by force of arms in a generalized massacre, the second in bloodbaths no less important but less ‘visible; in a slow degeneration of the initial objectives, their potential smothered by the absence of a revolution in the West: condemned to take on tasks which were not their own, the combativity of the proletariat saw itself reduced to a more and more passive resistance: in the case of Russia, it was a slow reflux (and thus less obvious than the defeat of the Commune) carried out the name of communism (and this was the greatest tragedy of all), which led to the shame of Stalinism.

"It was easy to make the revolution in Russia. It was more difficult to continue it." (Lenin)

The resolution of the Russian ‘enigma', the reasons for its degeneration, led groups of revolutionaries to try to resolve the problems posed by the ‘period of transition, but they were too closely connected with the experience of Russia (where the question of proletarian power and of the way to communism could be posed and not resolved).

Contrary to what as revolutionaries, Lenin and Trotsky thought, it was impossible for the revolution to dig itself in for years, - decades: the dictatorship of the proletariat derives from the combativity of the class or it represents nothing. Kronstadt and the agitation in Petrograd were the first signs of the split which was set up between the immediate demands of the class and a still proletarian power which tried to resist them.

The drama of the Russian revolution cannot be understood outside the context which condemned to impotence the Bolshevik Party and a Lenin who had once written State and Revolution and who was now forced to admit:

"The machine is getting out of the hands of those who are wielding it: one could say that there is someone in the saddle guiding this machine, but that the latter is following a direction other than that which was wanted, being guided by a secret hand, an illegal hand. God alone knows to whom it belongs, perhaps to a speculator or a private capitalist, or both together. The fact is that the machine is not going in the direction desired by the one who is supposed to be running it, and sometimes it goes in the opposite direction altogether." (Political Report of the Central Committee to the Party, 1922)

"Only the struggle will decide, in the last analysis, how far we will be able to advance, only the struggle will decide what part of this great task, what part of our victories we will definitely be able to consolidate. He who lives through it will see." (For the IV Anniversary. of the October Revolution, 1921)

The whole course of events in Russia led people to speak of a ‘Workers' State' or a ‘proletarian state'. It is necessary to point out that in the twenties these terms were synonymous with the "dictatorship of the proletariat". The proletarian state which was discussed at that time was a:

"New apparatus completely different from the contemporary state, not only because there is no longer any need for a distinction between the represen­tative apparatus and the executive apparatus as in the bourgeois state, but above all because of the fundamentally different structure of the two, itself a consequence of the opposition between the historic tasks to be carried out, tasks which have been decisively clarified by the proletarian revolutions from the Paris .Commune to the Russian republic of soviets." (Il Communista, February, 1921)

Subsequently these ‘synonymities' became autonomous to the point where one could speak of ‘taking the place of the class' and of a class which didn't ‘understand' all that ‘was done in its own interests'. The writings on the withering away of the Commune-State took on a sinister ring in the face of the growth of this anonymous force representing the power of capital.

Marx, after the Paris Commune, left us with some memorable words in which he expressed, in the best possible way, the essence and the nature of the communist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. We must return to him in order to lay the basis of our perspective.

Marx, correcting what he had written twenty-five years before, wrote:

"The working class cannot content itself with taking over the state machine as it is, in order to make it serve its own ends. In fact the state is bourgeois as such and not simply because its cogs are in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The state is not a neutral, but a class instrument. However what makes an apparatus bourgeois is not the bourgeois origin of the personnel who command it, but its own nature as an apparatus opposed to the rest of society." (Marx, The Civil War in France)

The communist revolution, in the course of its affirmation, gives life to insti­tutions which are different from those of the bourgeoisie by their very nature, such as the Commune and the soviets.

The Commune was: "The political form, discovered at last, in which the economic emancipation of labour could be worked out." The class struggle did not finish with the political victory of the class: "The Commune does not do away with class struggles,..... it creates the rational medium in which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and human way ... It begins the emancipation of labour, its great goal." (Ibid)

The class from whom power has been appropriated cannot be abolished by decree: it survives; it tries to reorganize itself politically. The proletariat will not share power with anyone, it will exercise its dictatorship in order to fight all those who are opposed to the measures which undermine economic privilege.

The first step of the proletarian dictatorship towards the abolition of wage labour will consist (in the obligation of all to work (generalization of the proletarian condition), and in the simultaneous reduction of labour time. This is already the end of the separation between manual labour and intellectual labour.

The advancement of this process in real, material terms is vital for the proletarian power; the strengthening of the latter is at once the premise and the guarantee of progress towards the final goal: communism. -

"Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, of human self-­estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (ie human) being - a return become conscious and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development. This communism is..... the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution." (Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

On the basis of what we have just said, we criticize:

- the position according to which it is the party which takes power and is confuse with the state because of its possession of a clear vision of the revolutionary perspective, etc etc.;

- the position which speaks of the proletarian state as an instrument, as an expression of the class, but which conserves all the characteristics of the state and where only the name and the leadership have changed;

- the position according to which, alongside the proletarian dictatorship a state is necessary, a provisional compromise in a society divided into antagonistic classes.

We advocate, after the destruction of bourgeois power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the victorious working class which appropriates by force all rights of other classes and which admits no mediations of any kind, a political and social moment which lives and nourishes itself in the coming to consciousness of greater and greater masses.

Rivoluzione Internazionale

December, 1974

The following text is an attempt to put for-ward a general conception of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat without trying to come to any definite conclusions. It is a contribution to the present discussion on the period of transition dealing with the basic question of the form and content of the proletarian dictatorship. A more detailed explanation, especially of the more problematic points, will be under-taken in another document.

The state arises in order to prevent classes  with conflicting economic interests from tearing themselves and society apart in fruitless struggles.

3) An essential principle of marxism is that the struggle between classes is decided not on a legal terrain, but through force and violence. The state is a special organ of repression: it is the centralised use of violence by one class against another. The political state, even (or rather, above all) the parliamentary democratic state, is an instrument of violent domination. The state apparatus makes permanent use of coercive methods in order to control the exploited class, even when it does not appear to resort to material force in the form of police repression, but simply uses the threat of violent sanctions or the legal code (even if unwritten) instead of having to bother with armed repression and bloodshed.

4) As an organ of violence, the state is characterised by the establishment of a public power. This power is indispensable because ever since classes arose the armament of the entire population has been an impossibility. From the very beginning every state created a coercive force, "special bodies of armed men" which could make use of the prisons and other modes of compulsion. Various historical revolutions have shown how the class that has been overthrown tries to reconstitute its former instruments of rule (the armed force which had been taken from it), and how the new ruling class sets up new organisations of this kind, or perfects the old ones, in order to prevent the restoration of the old ruling class and with it any threat to the new relations of production.

6) We have rooted the existence of the state in the division of society into classes. Just as the latter is not an innate characteristic of human society, the state has not eternally existed. There have been social formations without classes and without states and the development of the productive forces, which is now being held back by the very existence of classes, will remove any need for a state and make it gradually disappear. As Engels said: "The society that will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers will put the whole machinery of the state where it belongs; into the Museum of Antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe." However, prior to the classless, stateless society, in between capitalism and communism there will be a period of transition, a period of economic transformation of society. The transitional society is still a class society and as such will inevitably give rise to a state and a dictatorship.

7) The state is the special organisation of power, the organisation of violence which serves to keep a given class in subjugation. The proletariat needs the state to suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie. This repression can only be carried out by the proletariat since it is the only revolutionary class, the only class able to unite the whole labouring and exploited population under the banner of the revolution. Thus the revolutionary activity of the proletariat must lead to its political rule, to its dictatorship – the conquest of power which the proletariat does not share with anyone and which is based directly on the armed strength of the class itself. The bourgeoisie can only be overthrown if the proletariat becomes the ruling class, liquidates the inevitable resistance of the exploiters, and organises all the labouring and exploited masses for the socialist transformation of the economy. The proletariat needs a state apparatus, a centralised organ of violence, both to suppress the desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie and to lead the overwhelming majority of the population – peasants, petty-bourgeois, “new middle classes”, semi-proletarians – in the struggle for communism.

8) Since the state arose out of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, since it is a power "more and more alien" to society, it is clear that the emancipation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the suppression of the state power created by the ruling class which is the manifestation of this "alien" character. This is because the proletarian struggle is not a struggle inside the state and its organs, but a struggle outside of, and against, the state – against all its manifestations and forms. The proletarian revolution begins with the annihilation of the bourgeois state. However, after this act of destruction there will still be a need for a form of political state. It is one of the new forms of proletarian rule necessary for a working class faced with the task of violently extirpating the privileges of the bourgeoisie and organising the productive forces so as to liberate them from their capitalist fetters. Contrary to the position of the anarchists – who (while having the undeniable merit of proposing the destruction of the bourgeois state) thought it was possible to do without any form of organised power once this had been achieved – the Russian revolution has demonstrated the necessity of a political state (a structure of social violence). Since the communist transformation of society will be a long drawn-out process and not an immediate achievement, the suppression of the exploiting class and the integration into socialist production of all the non-proletarian classes and strata will also take a long time and cannot be achieved through physical massacre. During the period of transition the revolutionary state will have to operate, which means – as Lenin had the honesty to say to the pacifists and other petty-bourgeois romantics with their nostalgia for democracy – that it will have an army, a police force, and prisons. Obviously this also means that there can be no confusions about the character of this transitional state, which cannot defend the interests of several classes but of one only, and which cannot be the instrument of a vague conglomeration of several classes and social strata, but is the specific tool of one single class, of the ruling class. It is for this reason that one can and must speak of a proletarian state which is one of the indispensable forms of the proletarian dictatorship. With the progressive elimination of private property and commodity relations the need for political restraint will be diminished and the proletarian state will tend to disappear.

9) We now have to look at the actual form of the proletarian state. There are certain similarities between the proletarian state and the states which have preceded it in history – similarities which allow us to use the word state in all these cases – while at the same time there are important differences in the proletarian state, differences which make it a moment in the disappearance of the state. As we have seen, the proletarian state is the instrument the proletariat uses to repress the enemy class. The proletarian state will also give the transitional society the administrative framework which, since it is still a class society, it cannot spontaneously generate. The revolutionary state, in such a way as to prevent any confusions about its class character, will enable the non-proletarian classes and strata to express their immediate interests to the exclusion of the bourgeoisie which will be deprived of all its rights and means of expression. These tasks presuppose the existence of armed bodies and functionaries. Therefore there is a formal identity between the operation of the proletarian state and that of previous states. However, there are substantial differences between the state of the proletariat and the state of previous class societies, differences which have their origin in the proletariat's specific mission. The proletariat does not exert its dictatorship in order to build a new society of exploitation and oppression, nor to defend any economic privileges. The proletariat has no economic privileges to defend and its only interest as a class is in the real socialisation of production and the creation of communism. These characteristics affect the form and content of the proletarian state:

1. The lack of any economic base in society makes the proletariat "the class of conscious-ness". It is impossible for the proletariat to delegate responsibility for its political dictatorship to a body of specialists. The working class as a whole wields political power (and military power, ie the general armament of the proletariat) through its own class organs, its centralised organs of poli-tical rule: the workers' councils. Thus the proletariat itself carries out state functions. Moreover, it builds a state in its own image: it suppresses all the privileges that were inherent in the operation of all previous states (through the equalisation of remuneration and rigorous control of functionaries who are elected and revocable at any time), as well as eliminating the separation between representative and executive organs which is a characteristic of parliamentarism. For all these reasons – the state functions of the councils and absolute control over the state by the class as a whole both of which tend to eliminate the "alien" character of the state apparatus – we can talk about a proletarian semi-state.
2. From the beginning of the transition period the proletariat undertakes the economic transformation of society. There is a correlation between the development of communism and the disappearance of the state. As Engels said about the state:

When ultimately it becomes really representative of society as a whole, it makes itself superfluous As soon as there is no longer any class of society to be held in subjugation; as soon as, along with class domination and the struggle for individual existence based on the anarchy of production hitherto, the collisions and excesses arising from these have also been abolished, there is nothing more to be repressed which would make a special repressive force, a state, necessary (…) The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not 'abolished', it withers away[2]

It is only in a communist society when the resistance of the capitalists has finally been liquidated, when the capitalists have disappeared and there are no more classes (ie distinctions between members of society based on their relationship to the social means of production), only then will the state cease to exist, and only then will it be possible to talk about freedom. However, the process of withering away of the state begins as soon as the proletariat undertakes the integration of other social strata into socialised production, the "communisation of social relations". This is why we can characterise the proletarian state as a semi-state that is in the process of withering away.

Sam

Extracted from an article in the International Review n°6 (July 1976)

In the Platform adopted at the First Congress of the ICC in January 1976, the question of the relationship between the proletariat and the state in the period of transition remained "open":

The experience of the Russian Revolution has shown the complexity and seriousness of the problem of the relationship bet-ween the class and the state in the period of transition. In the coming period, the proletariat and revolutionaries can-not evade this problem, but must make every effort to resolve it.[1]

It is in the context of this effort that the Second Congress of Révolution Internationale has approached the question and tried to formulate a resolution which sums up the point reached in the discussion so far. But the question which has been raised is of a programmatic character. Since the ICC Platform is the only programmatic basis for all sections of the Current, it goes without saying that only the general Congress of the ICC has the competence to decide about any possible changes in the Platform. Thus by taking up a position on the resolution on the period of transition, the Second Congress of RI will not be altering the programmatic basis of RI; just like any other section of the ICC, RI does not have a distinct programmatic basis from the Current as a whole.

The limits of the discussion

Before going into the complex problems of the period of transition, it would be useful to distinguish three main areas of discussion:

• The general specificities which characterise the period of transition from capitalism to communism and which distinguish it from other historical periods of transition.
• The relationship between the revolutionary class and the rest of society during the period of transition; in other words the problem of what is meant by the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and, consequently, what must be the relationship between the revolutionary class and the state during the transition period.
• Questions about all the concrete “economic” measures for the transformation of social production.

Revolutionaries must try to give an answer to all these problems. However, ever since Marx and Engels first laid down the bases of “scientific materialism”, revolutionaries have been aware that they must be conscious of the tremendous limitations imposed by the very limitations of proletarian experience in this area. Otherwise they risk losing themselves in the kind of speculations which Marx dismissed contemptuously as "recipes for the dishes of the future". The extent of these limitations was underlined by Marx in 1875 in his Critique of the Gotha  Programme:

…what transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present functions of the state? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state.

This same awareness was expressed by Rosa Luxemburg in 1918 in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution:

Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions which only have to be applied, the practical realisation of socialism as an economic, social, and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future. What we possess in our programme is nothing but a few signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that... (socialism) has as its pre-requisite a number of measures of force against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways.

Beyond these general limitations, the resolution is bound by the objectives it sets for itself. It does not claim to make a synthesis of everything that has been clarified by revolutionaries on the period of transition. In particular, the resolution does not go into the question of the economic measures for the transformation of social production. On the one hand, it includes the positions which were acquired by the workers' movement before the experience of the Russian revolution and which have shown themselves to be genuine class frontiers: on the other hand it includes a number of positions concerning the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition. These positions have been derived mainly from the Russian revolution, and although they are not in themselves class frontiers, they are lessons sufficiently developed by historical experience to be an integral part of the programmatic basis of a revolutionary organisation. These fundamental class frontiers are: the inevitability of a transition period, the primacy of the proletariat's political activity as the precondition and guarantee of the transition towards a classless society; the world-wide character of this transformation; the specificity of the power of the working class, in particular the fact that the proletariat, in contrast to other revolutionary classes in history, has no economic basis within the old society, and therefore does not fight for political domination in order to consolidate itself as an economically ruling class, but in order to put an end to all economic domination by abolishing classes themselves; the impossibility of the proletariat using the bourgeois state apparatus and the necessity for its destruction as a precondition for the establishment of proletarian political power; the inevitability of a state during the period of transition, even though this state will be profoundly different from all other states in history. These positions already represent a categorical rejection of all the social democratic, anarchist, self-management, and modernist conceptions which have always been present in the workers' movement, but which are today pillars of the counter-revolution.

On the basis of these fundamental class positions, the resolution goes on to define, primarily from the experience of the Russian revolution, certain aspects of the relationship between the proletariat and the state during the transition period. Thus we have an understanding of the inevitably conservative nature of the transitional state; the impossibility of the proletariat or its party identifying themselves with this state; the necessity for the working class to conceive of its relationship to this state (in which it participates as a politically ruling class) as being a relationship of force: "domination over society is thus its domination over the state"; the necessity for the existence and armed strength of the working class' own specific organisations: only the working class is organised as a class in this period and the state can have no coercive power over the proletariat's own organisations. These positions enable us to reject the mystifications which served as a basis for "the counter-revolution which developed in Russia under the direction of a degenerating Bolshevik Party" and which are defended today by all the Stalinist and Trotskyist currents as a theoretical justification for identifying state capitalism with socialism. The content of this resolution thus represents a real safeguard against all the erroneous conceptions which the proletariat could encounter in its coming world-wide assault on the capitalist system. However, no matter how important these positions might be for the future struggles of the class, we must under-stand the real limits of this acquisition today.

The historic experience which gave rise to these positions dealing with the relationship between class and state in the transition period are still much too rare and specific for the conclusions that can be drawn from them to be considered class lines by revolutionaries today. Class lines are positions which establish a clear point of demarcation between the bourgeois camp and the proletarian camp. They cannot be drawn up by revolutionaries on the basis of insufficient historical experience or in anticipation of the future; they can only arise on the empirical basis provided by the very history of proletarian struggle, which must be sufficiently clear to supply us with lessons that are “beyond discussion”.[2]

It is therefore necessary to underline how very limited are the points which we can consider as definite gains on this question: the rejection of the identification of the proletariat or its party with the transitional state; the definition of the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state as being one of the dictator-ship of the class over the state, and never the state over the class; the defence of the autonomy of the proletariat's own organisations in relation to the state, as being the precondition for the real autonomy and strength of the proletarian dictatorship.

These points are still inevitably abstract and general. They are simply "a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that". The precise forms in which they will be put into practice inevitably remain “new territory” which only experience will allow us to open up. A precondition for the effectiveness of a revolutionary organisation is not only understanding what it knows and can know, but also what it does not and cannot know. This can only come from its ability to show a real programmatic rigour and to grasp the fundamental lessons provided by the living struggle of the proletarian masses.

The problem of the relationship between class and state in the history of the workers' movement

The general lack of knowledge about the history of the workers' movement, which has been aggravated by the organic break between the revolutionaries of today and the former political organisations of the class, have led some to think that the analysis presented in this resolution is somehow a “discovery” or an “originality” of the ICC. A brief summary of the way this question has been tackled (one might even say “discovered”) by revolutionaries since Marx and Engels will soon show how wrong this view is.

In the Communist Manifesto, which did not yet make use of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat”, the "first step in the revolution of the working class" is defined as raising "the proletariat to the position of ruling class, [winning] the battle of democracy". This conquest refers in fact to the apparatus of the bourgeois state which the proletariat must use in order: "…to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the-hands of the state, ie of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible". Even if the idea of the ultimate disappearance of the state was already put forward in The Poverty of Philosophy; even if the idea of the inevitable existence of a state during the "first step of the revolution of the working class" is present in the Manifesto, the actual problem of the relationship between the working class and the state during the period of transition was hardly touched upon. It was the experience of the Paris Commune which really began to allow the problem to be more fully understood through the lessons that Marx and Engels drew from it: the necessity for the proletariat to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus, the setting up of a completely different apparatus which was "no longer a state in the proper sense of the word" (Engels), since it was no longer an organ for the oppression of the majority by the minority. That this apparatus was still burdened with the weight of the past was clearly underlined by Engels who defined it as a "necessary evil":

…an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worse sides the victor-ious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.[3]

However, despite an intuitive awareness of the necessity for the proletariat to distrust this apparatus inherited from the past (the proletariat, Engels said, "must safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment"), and probably because the extremely short and circumscribed experience of the Paris Commune did not make it possible to really pose the problem of the relationship between the proletariat, the state, and the other non-exploiting classes in society, one of the ideas which came out of the Commune was the identification of the proletarian dictatorship with the transitional state. Thus, three years after the Paris Commune, Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Programme:

Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

This was the theoretical basis which Lenin reformulated in the concept of the “proletarian state” in State and Revolution; and it was on this basis that the Bolsheviks and the Russian proletariat established the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1917.

This attempt at proletarian power confronted the most enormous difficulties – the over-whelming majority of peasants in Russian society, the immediate necessity to wage a merciless civil war, the international isolation of Russia, the extreme weakness of a productive apparatus destroyed by the First World War and then the Civil War. All this was to dramatically highlight the problem of the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state.

The grim reality of these events was to prove that it was not enough to baptise the state as “proletarian” for it to serve the revolutionary interests of the proletariat; that it was not enough to place the proletarian party at the head of the state (to the point where it became totally identified with it) for the state machine to follow the course on which even the most dedicated revolutionaries wanted to set it.

The state apparatus, the state bureaucracy, could not be the expression of proletarian interests alone. As an apparatus whose task was to ensure the survival of society it could only express the survival needs of the moribund Russian economy. What marxists have said from the very beginning was powerfully vindicated: the imperatives of economic survival imposed themselves mercilessly on the policies of the state. And the economy was a long way from being influenced in any proletarian direction. Lenin had to admit this powerless-ness at the Eleventh Congress of the Party, one year after the NEP had begun:

You communists, you workers, the politically enlightened section of the proletariat, which undertook to administer the state, must be able to arrange it so that the state, which you have taken into your hands, shall function the way you want it to (…) the state is in our hands: but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted in this past year? No! (…) How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired.[4]

The identification of the proletarian party with the state did not lead to the state being subordinated to the revolutionary interests of the proletariat, but to the subordination of the party to the Russian state. Under the pressure of the survival needs of the Russian state, which the Bolsheviks saw as the incarnation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the “proletarian bastion” that had at all costs to be defended, the Bolshevik Party ended up subordinating the tactics of the Communist International to the interests of Russia (for example, alliances with the big European social-chauvinist parties in an attempt to break out of the cordon sanitaire which was strangling Russia); it was this pressure which led to the signing of the Rapallo Treaty with German imperialism; and it was to prevent any weakening of the power of the “proletarian” state apparatus and in the name of this state, that the Kronstadt insurgents were crushed by the Red Army. As for the working masses, the identification of their party with the state led to their vanguard being cut off from them precisely when they most needed it, while the idea of identifying their power with the power of the state rendered them powerless and confused in the face of the growing oppression of the state bureaucracy.[5] The counter-revolution which reduced the dictatorship of the proletariat to ashes had arisen out of the very organ which for decades revolutionaries had thought could be identified with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The long process of drawing out the lessons of the Russian experience began right from the beginning of the revolution itself. The first theoretical reactions came in the midst of an unavoidable confusion; they were limited to attacking partial aspects of the problem and unable to grasp the essence of the question in the tumult of a revolution whose signs of degeneration began to appear right from the start. Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on The Russian Revolution in 1918, which criticised the identification of the dictator-ship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party, as well as warning against any limitation of working class political life by the state, contained already the germs of a critique of the transitional state. Rosa Luxemburg, although she still considered this transitional state as a “proletarian” state, and although she still retained the idea of the "seizure of power by the socialist party", pointed out the only way of "lopping off the worse sides" of this "evil", the state:

…the only effective means in the hands of the proletarian revolution are: radical measures of a political and social character, the speediest possible transformation of the social guarantees of the life of the masses – the kindling of revolutionary idealism, which can be maintained over any length of time only through the intensely active life of the masses themselves under conditions of unlimited political freedom.[6]

In Russia and within the Bolshevik Party itself the development of the state bureaucracy, and thus of the antagonism between the proletariat and the state power, provoked early on various reactions, such as that of Ossinsky's group, or later on the Miasnikov’s Workers' Group. These groups, by questioning the rise of the bureaucracy were already raising, albeit in a confused manner, the question of the nature of the state and its relationship to the class.

But it is probably the polemic between Lenin and Trotsky at the Tenth Congress on the question of the unions that most sharply posed the problem of the state. Against Trotsky's idea of more and more integrating the workers' unions into the state in order to deal with economic difficulties, Lenin defended the necessity to safeguard the autonomy of the proletariat's organisations so that the workers could defend themselves against "the nefarious abuses of the state bureaucracy". Lenin even went so far as to say that the state was not a "workers' state, but a workers' and peasants' state with numerous bureaucratic deformations". Even though these debates took place in a milieu of general confusion (Lenin considered his differences with Trotsky to be questions of contingency, not of principle), they were nevertheless authentic expressions of the proletariat's search for answers to the problem of the relationship between its dictatorship and the state. The Dutch and German Lefts continued along the path laid down by Rosa Luxemburg concerning the development of the state bureaucracy in Russia. Having been forced to confront the problem of the degeneration of the international policies of the Communist International, they were also led to elaborate a critique of what they called 'state socialism'. However, the work done by Jan Appel in collaboration with the Dutch Left on the Basic Principles of Communist Production and Distribution was mainly concerned with the economic aspects of the transition period. Concerning its political aspects they tended to repeat the fundamental ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. The theoretical basis for a more profound understanding of the problem was posed above all by the work of the Italian Left in exile, in particular the articles by Mitchell published from Bilan n°28 onwards (March-April 1936). While retaining a “Leninist” position on the quasi-identity between party and class, Bilan was the first to assert clearly the pernicious character of any identification between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition. At the same time Bilan stressed the importance of the class and its party remaining autonomous from the state. Taking up some of Rosa Luxemburg's ideas, Mitchell saw the vitality of the proletariat's own organs as the necessary antidote to the "worst sides" of the state:

"But in the middle of the most terrible contingent difficulties, the Bolsheviks did not consider the Soviet state as 'an evil inherited by the proletariat… whose worst sides the victorious proletariat… cannot avoid having to lop off as much as possible', but as an organism which could be completely identified with the proletarian dictatorship, ie with the Party. The result of this important modification was that the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat was no longer to be the Party, but the state; and through the ensuing reversal of roles the latter found itself in a course of development which led not to the withering away of the state but to the reinforcement of its coercive and repressive powers. Once an instrument of the world revolution, the proletarian state was inevitably converted into a weapon of the global counter-revolution. Although Marx, Engels, and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, the Russian Revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the proletariat, sterilised them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution devoured its own substance.[7]

Bilan's analysis still contained hesitations and weaknesses, in particular its analysis of the class nature of the transitional state, which it still characterised as a 'proletarian state'. These understandable hesitations and inadequacies were transcended in the analysis of Internationalisme in 1946 (see the article “The Nature of the State and the Proletarian Revolution” republished in RI's Bulletin d'Etude et de Discussion, n°1, January 1973). Basing itself on an objective analysis of the economic and political nature of the period of transition, Internationalisme clearly asserted the non-proletarian, anti-socialist character of the transitional state.

The state, insofar as it is reconstituted after the revolution, expresses the immaturity of the conditions for a socialist society. It is the political super-structure of an economic base which is not yet socialist. By its very nature it is opposed to and hostile to socialism. Just as the period of transition is a historically inevitable stage which the proletariat has to go through, so the state is for the proletariat an unavoidable instrument of violence which it must use against the dispossessed classes but with which it cannot identify itself…

The Russian experience in particular has demonstrated the theoretical falsity of the idea of the workers' state, of the proletarian nature of the state, and of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilisation by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state.[8]

Internationalisme drew from the experience of the Russian revolution the vital necessity for the proletariat to exert a strict and permanent control over the state apparatus, which at the slightest reflux would become the principal force of the counter-revolution:

History and the Russian experience in particular have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist and which, as soon as the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a reborn capitalism.[9]

Still impregnated with certain conceptions held by the Italian Left from which Internationalisme had evolved, especially on the question of the party and on the trade unions, but clearly aware that the subject of the revolution was the working class, Internationalisme defended the necessity for total political freedom for the class and its class-wide organs (a role it still thought the unions could play) in relation to the state. In particular, Internationalisme condemned any use of violence by the state against the class. It was also the first to develop a real understanding of the link between economic and political problems during the transition period:

This period of transition between capitalism and socialism under the political dictatorship of the proletariat expresses itself on the economic terrain in an energetic policy which aims to diminish class exploitation, to constantly increase the proletariat's share in the national income, to alter the relationship between variable capital and constant capital in favour of the former. This policy cannot be based simply on the programmatic declaration of the party; still less is it the prerogative of the state, the organ of coercion and administration. This policy can only find a guarantee and a real expression in the class itself, through the pressure which the class exerts over society, through its opposition to and struggle against all other classes…

Any tendency to reduce the role of the trade unions after the revolution; any pretence that the existence of a “workers' state” means the end of freedom to engage in union activities or strikes; any advocacy of fusing the unions with the state, through the theory of handing economic administration over to the unions, which seems revolutionary but which in fact leads to an incorporation of the unions into the state machine; any position which, however revolutionary its intentions, calls for violence within the proletariat and its organisations; any attempt to stand in the way of the broadest workers' democracy and the free play of political struggle and of fractions within the unions: any such policies are anti-working class. They falsify the relationship between party and class and weaken the proletariat's position during the transition period.

The duty of communists will be to energetically denounce and fight against all these tendencies and to work for the full development and independence of the trade union movement, which is an indispensable condition for the victory of socialism.[10]

It was the achievement of Internationalisme to have provided the general theoretical framework in which the question of the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the period of transition could finally be posed in a solid and coherent manner. Situated firmly within this process, the resolution presented to the Congress is to be seen as an attempt to reappropriate the principal gains of the workers' movement on this question and as an effort to continue the unending work of deepening the programmatic basis of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle. We can see that this resolution is in no way a 'discovery' of the ICC. But we must also understand the weight of responsibility which the revolutionary organisation is taking on its shoulders by attempting to assume its inheritance.

R.V. Révolution Internationale/France

Printed in the International Review, n°8, (December 1976)

To begin with, we must recognise the importance of the problem of the period of transition. The platform itself points this out in the section concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat:

The experience of the Russian revolution has shown the complexity and seriousness of the problem of the relationship between the class and the state in the period of transition. In the coming period, the proletariat and revolutionaries cannot evade this problem, but must make every effort to resolve it.

It is obvious that the fundamental questions of the period of transition will be resolved by the proletariat in the course of the revolution, and that the questions which revolutionaries debate today can only be resolved in the period of transition itself. As Marx always held, there are no recipes for dishes of the future and no blueprints that can be worked out today; however, revolutionaries must endeavour to reach the clearest possible understanding of vital questions – such as the period of transition – today. And the only basis on which to develop any of the questions on which class lines have been drawn, or where there have been important acquisitions made as a result of workers' struggles, is the concrete historic experience of the working class.

As a basis for the present discussion, Rosa Luxemburg's The Russian Revolution where she wrote on the period of transition in relation to the Russian revolution, is very useful:

Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions which have only to be applied, the practical realisation of socialism as an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future. What we possess in our programme is nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that. Thus we know more or less what we must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a socialist economy. But when it comes to the nature of the thousand concrete, practical measures, large and small, necessary to introduce socialist principles into economy, law and all social relationships, there is no key in any socialist party programme or textbook. That is not a shortcoming, but rather the very thing that makes scientific socialism superior to the utopian varieties. The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, a historical product,, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realisation, as a result of the developments of living history, which just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part, has the fine habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satis-faction, along with the task, simultaneously the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase (proclamation). It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force--against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building-up, the positive cannot. New territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts.[1]

It is only the living experience of the proletariat that can give revolutionaries any guide-lines for understanding the period of transition, and this concrete expression is the Russian revolution, which has bequeathed certain lessons to the proletariats which can and ought to be incorporated into the platform of the proletariat's revolutionary organisation. However, these lessons on the state do not constitute class lines separating the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (it should be obvious that the experience of the proletariat is too limited and fragmented to draw class lines in this case), but there are lessons of the working class's experience which revolutionaries must draw out.

In the case of the period of transition, beyond the class lines which have been drawn in our platform, there are certain lessons which are a result of thorough discussion and analysis of the concrete experience of the Russian revolution, and these lessons basically constitute a warning to the proletariat against false conceptions and a guide for it as it begins a new period of revolution.

One of the dangers that an organisation of revolutionaries can fall prey to, and one which must be guarded against is any kind of dogmatism on the question of the period of transition. The dogmatism of the Communist Workers' Organisation (Great Britain), which insists that the blueprint for the period of transition exists in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Pro-gramme, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletarian state, bars any discussion of the concrete experience of the Russian revolution and sees any departure from that dogma as the crossing of class lines. It is this type of approach which must be  guarded against, for any dogmatic outlook which disregards the concrete experience of the working class is condemned to failure, and failure in one of the most important tasks for which the revolutionary organisation of the proletariat exists: to provide a warning to the proletariat, to provide signposts, to argue for a revolutionary programme, which is based on the experience of the proletariat within the workers' councils.

The fundamental outlook revolutionaries must have at the beginning of this discussion is that there is no dogma, there are no blueprints, there is only the proletariat's experience.

o0o

Between two modes of production there has al-ways been a period of transition. To define more clearly this period:

The period of transition is not a distinct mode of production, but a link between two modes of production – the old and the new. It is the period during which the germs of the new mode of production slowly develop to the detriment of the old, until the point at which they supplant the old mode of production and constitute a new, dominant mode of production.

Between two stable societies (and this will be true for the period between capitalism and communism as it has been in the past), the period of transition is an absolute necessity. This is due to the fact that the exhaustion of the conditions necessary for the existence of the old society does not automatically imply the maturation and ripening of the conditions of the new society. In other words, the decline of the old society does not automatically mean the maturation of the new society, but is only the conditions for this maturation to take place.[2]

The bourgeoisie, in the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism, acquired its economic basis within the shell of feudal society and the bourgeois revolution was only the culmination of that period of transition. In the case of communism and for all the reasons that the above text points out, for all the reasons that constitute the fundamental difference between communism and all other societies, it is clear that the period of transition from capitalism to communism only begins with the seizure. of political power by the proletariat – with the overthrow of the bourgeois state – and culminates with the creation of communism.

Revolutionaries must analyse what the concrete tasks of the period of transition from capitalism to communism will be, not in a dogmatic way nor through a vague sense of the construction of the human community but concretely. And as a basis to this analysis it can be said,  that there are three basic tasks which proletariat must face after its seizure of political power on a world scale and they are:

1. to eradicate the remnants of class society and to integrate all of the non-exploiting strata and classes into socialised production;
2. to develop the productive forces on a world scale so that they are adequate to the satisfaction of all the needs of humanity – not only the biological needs, but all vital needs;
3. to organise the production and distribution of use-values on a socialised basis.

As a word of warning, it is important to note that these tasks cannot primarily be carried out through violence. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie and all bases of its power is a question of violence and this lesson is burned into the hearts and souls of the working class But to undertake the Herculean tasks which face it during the period of transition, the working class cannot rely on violent measures. The concept held by the Communist Workers' Organisation that the proletariat will integrate non-exploiting classes, and order the development of the productive forces at the point of a gun, reflects a real misunderstand-ing of the role of violence in the construction of communism. The use of violence against these strata is unfortunately something the proletariat may have to engage in, always with great hesitation and care. It may have to use it occasionally; it may have to use it against the peasants and the lumpen-proletariat, but it is never something that constitutes the basis for carrying out the tasks of the period of transition.

There are two basic characteristics to the period of transition which revolutionaries have to recognise and which indicate the course which the proletariat has to take. The first is that the basis of the political dominance of the proletariat – or the dictatorship of the proletariat – has to be concretised through some organised or institutional expression of the proletariat, some expression of its historical existence and some institution or body which will constitute the very basis for the thrust towards communism. These bodies are the workers' councils, which constitute the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the proletarian party which plays an indispensable role within the dictatorship of the proletariat. The second characteristic of the period of transition is the persistence of the divi-sion of society into classes – classes which have antagonistic and divergent interests. No matter what weight this or that stratum of society will have on the morrow of the insurrection – of the civil war – there will be a class society which will persist through-cannot out the period of transition. Capitalism cannot, as the modernists urge, create a universal class, it cannot proletarianise everyone so that even the functionaries of capital become wage slaves and proletarians, and it is because of the persistence of classes with antagonistic interests that a state will arise. These are the two basic characteristics of the period of transition that the proletariat and revolutionaries will have to contend with.

To better understand the nature of the state in the period of transition, it is beneficial to see what marxists such as Engels have written on the question. His Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State shows that the state arises within all class societies and that it has two basic functions. The first is coercion: it is the organ for the oppression of the majority by the minority. Secondly, the state has the task of preserving the status quo, of preventing society from tearing itself apart and disintegrating under the weight of the class antagonisms which exist within it. It is important to stress, as Engels did, that the state is a conservative institution, the conservative institution par excellence quite apart from its coercive functions.

When marxists have discussed the state in the period of transition – from the experience of the Paris Commune onwards – they have referred to it as a semi-state. The Commune-state was in fact a semi-state because the coercive task of a state was largely removed from it in the sense that it was no longer the organ of the exploitation or oppression of the majority by the minority. The Commune-state was a semi-state because the whole apparatus of coercion passed into the hands of the overwhelming majority, because its functionaries were elected and revocable and their remuneration and consumption were at no higher a level than that of the average worker. All of these measures create a state which is qualitatively different from any state which has existed in the past, but nonetheless, even a Commune-state must carry out the historic function of a state: the preservation of the status quo.

The Commune-state was an institution elected not only by the working class, but by all the citizens of Paris on the basis of geography, of neighbourhoods. While the bourgeoisie was barred from participation, the petty-bourgeoisie and artisans were not, and its extension throughout France would have also brought with it the peasants. From this it is clear that the Commune-state was certainly not the sole expression of the proletariat.

Although Marx referred to the dictatorship of the proletariat and the workers' state, and the Commune-state synonymously, a closer examination will reveal that the Commune-state could not have been the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is recognised by Engels in his introduction to Marx's Civil War in France, where he wrote that the state is a scourge, an evil inherited from bourgeois society. It is a scourge the proletariat cannot do without, but a scourge against which it always has to be on guard, and Engels had no doubt that the state was not the expression of the historic interests of the proletariat in its thrust towards communism. This warning of Engels' is something Lenin overlooked in writing State and Revolution, by going directly to Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and The Civil War in France and continuing to refer to the workers' state and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the same words. The possible outcome of the Paris Commune and how the Commune-state would have co-existed with the dictator-ship of the proletariat we cannot tell for the bourgeoisie crushed the revolution in a few weeks, but we do have this concrete experience of the proletariat, and the wealth of experience and lessons of the Russian revolution on which to base our discussions.

In drawing the lessons of the Russian revolution one inescapable fact stands out: the state was the instrument and the organ of the counter-revolution. This fact was recognised too late by revolutionaries of the time – including the Left Communists. Within the workers' movement the counter-revolution was always seen as arising from two sources and as having its expression in two types of institutions. It was either brought from the outside through White Armies, through invasion by the other capitalist states, or as the Dutch and German Left and even Lenin himself thought, it would come from the peasants or the petty bourgeoisie, or even out of the NEP, or out of the reconsolidation of the bourgeoisie and individual property which revolutionaries were familiar with.

While the revolutionary movement expected the counter-revolution from these two sources, Rosa Luxemburg warned that the proletariat had to have independent organs to express itself, to guard its own interests, and some of the Left Communists in Russia such as Ossinsky also pointed out that the proletariat had to guard against bureaucracy and against the state apparatus. Unfortunately, there was no real development or elaboration of these warnings and it was only at the time when the state was decapitating the working class that revolutionaries began to realise that the state created by the revolution was itself the instrument of the counter-revolution, and the fact that prevented their realisation of this sooner was that they had all accepted the identification of the state with the proletariat.

The argument is possible that the Russian state could crush the working class because it wasn't a workers' state, but a party-state, and while it is true that the identification of party and dictatorship of the proletariat held by the Bolsheviks was a considerable factor in the degeneration of the Russian revolution, it would be premature to conclude that the only problem of the Russian revolution and of the future revolution is the identification of the party and the state. This argument, which holds that there is no possibility of the state becoming an instrument or organ of counter-revolution if the working class as a whole and not the revolutionary party are identified with the state, underestimates the need for the proletariat to maintain its autonomy from the state – which even Lenin recognised, as seen in his debate with Trotsky where he stated that unless the proletariat had its own autonomy, unless it had the right to bear arms and unless it had the right to strike, it would be defenceless against the state apparatus which appeared to be an organ of the working class, but which seemed to be driven by someone other than the proletariat.

While the degeneration of the Russian revolution may be attributed to the fact that the Party constituted itself as the state, it would be facile to conclude, before making a thorough analysis of the experience, that this was the only problem. What is then overlooked is that a state by its nature is a conservative institution and has to reflect the antagonistic interests which exist in objective reality. The state in the period of transition by its nature tends to con-serve and preserve the institutions and the social relations in the period of transition, while the proletariat's task is to constantly overthrow those relations. In this situation, no one organ can express those two contradictory interests: preservation of the status quo and destruction of the status quo. This leads to the conclusion that the proletariat's historical thrust towards communism cannot be expressed by a state apparatus, but only by those organs of its dictatorship, and by its party.

Unless the dictatorship of the proletariat can prevent the state from constituting itself as a coercive apparatus against the proletariat, the Russian revolution will repeat itself again, and a counter-revolution will take place again because the simple fact is that the destruction of the last bourgeois is no guarantee against counter-revolution. The capitalist mode of production can arise with-in any state bureaucracy, from within any party institution. If society is organised on the basis of the law of value and if the destruction of production based on this law does not proceed quickly then there is always the possibility of counter-revolution, and it is the state which would be the apparatus of the counter-revolution.

Because the proletariat cannot prevent the state from arising, for there is a vital need to temporarily live among the antagonistic interests in the period of transition – as much a need as the need of the proletariat to constantly overthrow the social relations which persist from class society – and because it is obvious today that the state was the instrument of the counter-revolution in Russia, revolutionaries must take seriously, and analyse fully, the possibility that the proletariat and the state cannot be identified, that the proletariat must have, not only its autonomy from other classes, but from the state apparatus itself.

McIntosh Internationalism/USA-Canada November 1976

Definition: When the class conscious world proletariat has overthrown the bourgeois order on a world scale, when all states have been over-thrown, when all opposing armies have been defeated, in short, when the “civil war” has been won, then, by definition, the so-called period of transition has begun.

Caveat: The period of transition is so far ahead of us that we should not expect to be able to guess at its detailed characteristics with great precision. Much of our discussion must inevitably be based on supposition, conjecture and surmise. The speculative nature of the question, its historical remoteness and its potential divisiveness, all argue for a slow and careful approach to the discussions.

Specific suggestions 

2) The time-consuming nature of the discussion process, confounded as it is with delays due to the slowness of the international mails, the time needed for digesting material and composing a coherent view, and so on, makes it necessary to avoid haste, and to avoid committing the organisation to an 'official position' before the discussion has time to mature. Fortunately, the press of historical events does not impel the world proletariat, nor us, to an immediate pronouncement on the state in the period of transition, just yet.

The “State”

The institution we call “the state” has a long evolutionary history. The precise form and function of the “state” differs as society evolves so that it would be un-historical to say "the state is always thus and never else”. Nevertheless, we know that at the heart of the “state” lies of the notion of class 'domination over society as a whole, thus when we come to the period of transition, the important question will be "what are the classes and who has power over society as a whole?".

The state in the period of transition

When the proletariat “wins” the civil war, it would seem fair to say that the proletariat exists as a class, that is:

1. it has a specific economic function (it is the source of all value);
2. it has a historic mission (to develop fully the forces of production – to end the reign of scarcity, to institute production for use, etc);
3. it has at least some degree of class consciousness (by virtue of the fact that it posed the question of proletarian power on a world scale);
4. and it has an organisational expression (the workers' councils or soviets, if the past is any guide, but perhaps some new form will emerge through struggle).

What powers will be in the hands of the working class? Surely a monopoly of “the means of violence” will belong to the victorious proletariat. (This is almost a matter of definition since it is assumed that all opposing armies have been defeated.)

It seems fair to assume that the proletariat will occupy and hence control all factories, and will directly control most transportation such as railways, buses, trucks, etc. Control of production of fuel, spare parts, maintenance and other indirect control will vastly add to the proletariat's power.

Telegraph, telephone, TV, major radio stations and major newspapers will also be in the hands of the proletariat. Control of fuel, access to machinery, fertiliser, transportation, silage, processing and distribution will in-sure control over most of whatever portion of the agricultural sector is not already con-trolled directly by proletarians working in 'farm-factories'.

So, if the question is: "Is there a state in the period of transition?", we answer: "Yes, the dictatorship of the proletariat wields state power". If the question is: "Is there a state outside of the workers' councils?", we answer: "No, the dominant position of power in society is held by the proletariat, whose mode of organisation is the workers' councils."

Problems of the period of transition 

Does the picture of proletarian power painted above add up to “instant communism”? Are there no threats to proletarian power or serious obstacles in the path to communism?

Establishing production for use is a formidable undertaking. The best will in the world will not enable the proletariat to reorganise production and distribution so that the material needs of all can be satisfied at a high level with perfect equity, all in the twinkling of an eye. Such things take time. If there are serious delays, bunglings, equivocations and ineptitudes in the basic tasks of reorganising production and fully integrating the other strata, then there is a danger that the high level of class consciousness needed for such a task might not be maintained and developed. If the working class grows apathetic, if the workers' councils are “captured” by self-serving cliques or by local or region-al interests, if measures antithetical to the working class as a whole and to the historic mission of totally re-organising production are taken and allowed to stand unchallenged, then it is possible that the workers' councils can cease to be in fact workers' councils, and can be transformed into organs of state power over the proletariat, a counter-revolutionary development.

Conversely, if the victorious proletariat rapidly provides itself and all of society with real improvements, if the unleashing of progressive social forces is felt everywhere, then optimism and enthusiasm will feed on itself. The improvement in general conditions after years of slow decay and after the disruptions and upheavals of the civil war period will certainly help take the wind out of the sails of whatever opposition forces still exist, and will add to the stability and energy of the new regime.

Who will have the final responsibility and authority to close a factory, to open a factory, to institute a new work method, or to institute a new product? Surely only the proletariat. In the period of transition, therefore, it seems likely that one class, the proletariat, which has an objective economic function, subjective class consciousness, and a historical mission, will have predominant power over society as a whole by virtue of its military, economic and political strength. An-other name for the dominant position of the proletariat over all of society is the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

In short, the tasks are difficult, the dangers real, and the best hope lies in as rapid and thorough a re-organisation of production as is feasible.

Comments on some ideas under discussion

The notion that there must be some state apparatus which is in some sense outside the dictatorship of the proletariat is vague, confusing and contradictory. It is vague because the constituency, powers and relationship of such a creature to the proletarian dictatorship is never clear. It is confusing because the hypothetical state is sometimes seen as subservient to the proletarian dictatorship and at other times a creature of unspecified other classes. It is contradictory because in a struggle between opposed classes, preponderant power can belong to none or to one, but never to both; thus the existence of the proletarian dictatorship logically excludes a non-proletarian state, given that the civil war is finished.

Another problem under discussion is the possibility of the apparatus of proletarian dictatorship assuming such a degree of autonomy that the revolution is undermined. There is, of course, some degree of autonomy in any human institution; the question is how much and what correctives are available? The insistence on thorough-going democracy, an egalitarian characteristic of the working class in motion, seems to be the discovered form of the class's approach to the problem of keeping its organisations thoroughly its own. In the end, no merely formal rules,'or bureaucratic devices, can substitute for enthusiastic and highly developed class consciousness.

In establishing the alleged danger of institutional autonomy, it is argued that the demise of the Russian revolution was due, in large part, to the behaviour of the Russian state, which is conceived to have been contrary to the intention, and outside the control of, the Bolshevik Party. Whatever the merits of this remarkable thesis, it deserves to be discussed in its own right in the context of the Russian revolution, not simply taken as 'proved' and plunked down into the context of the state in the period of transition, a stage which the Russian revolution never attained. Some say that in the period of transition the proletariat will "still be an exploited class and will not derive economic power directly from the productive process". How can the proletariat, which controls production, fail to derive economic power from the productive process? Possession of the factories, a monopoly of arms and class conscious organisation add up to overwhelming economic and political power in the hands of the proletariat. A victim may be exploited if he is confronted with overwhelming force or superior cunning. Surely no one will have the advantage over the victorious proletariat in either area.

Some propose that the “state” will consist of “regional councils” which have “no power whatsoever in society”. How a creature with no power whatsoever in society can hope to either repress or mediate is not explained. Why the term “state”, which usually carries with it some notion of rulership, should be applied to such a flaccid organ is also not explained. It is claimed that "the state can only belong to an exploiting class". Historically, the only states which ever existed belonged to exploiting classes, but we are postulating the rule of the proletariat, a non-exploiting, though ruling, class.

A state, insofar as it has a universally applicable definition, is the sum of all the institutional forms which express and maintain the class domination of the ruling class over society as a whole. The sum of all the institutions which express and maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat are, by definition, the proletariat's state. To say that there there is no such thing, then, as a proletarian state, is either to deny the possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or to drastically redefine the meaning of the word “state” in mid-sentence.

Y.B.-E.M. Internationalism/USA-Canada (April 1977)

In opposition to the draft resolution on the state in the period of transition, which asserts that there is no mode of production in the transition period, the Toronto comrades state that: "When the workers dominate politically, they dominate the economy since they already have the levers of production, literally, in their own hands". And: "Socialised production is the mode of production, that is, production of use values, the communist mode of production in embryo".

But the domination of the economy mentioned by these comrades is nothing of the kind. The development of technology, of a planned abundance of the productive forces throughout the world, that is the material base of the communist mode of production. “Political domination” on the other hand, is the precondition for this future material abundance which will be the hallmark of a communist society. But this political domination and its concomitant economic policy does not mechanically produce such development of the productive forces, and neither is there a constant and immediate ratio created between the political control of the class and its ability to increase labour productivity.

Actually, the Toronto comrades are talking about a sort “workers’ control” of the economy in the transitional period. And they even label this control with the term “mode of production”. This conception, however reveals a certain lack of comprehension as to the nature of the proletariat and the complexities of the transition period.

As long as classes exist, as long as there's a socialised sector, the proletariat cannot have a real sustained, “economic” power in society. Just because labour power is no longer a commodity, just because the bourgeoisie and its state have been overthrown, doesn't mean that the proletariat has “economic power”. Its task is to develop the productive forces along socialist lines, and it has to confront all the remnants of previous class societies before it can really accomplish this task. Before this goal is achieved, it is ludicrous to present the obvious economic instability of production in the socialised sector as a “mode of production”, as “communism in embryo”.

Even the fast tempo of the development of the productive forces in the transition period doesn't allow us to talk about a “growing economic power” of the proletariat. This tempo itself will be determined not so much by the will of the proletarian dictator-ship, but by the concrete limitations imposed by a transitional society, by a social context still plagued and deformed by scarcity, dislocations and ravages of the civil war, etc. The tempo, the rhythm, is thus subordinated to external factors. How can we speak of “economic domination”, therefore, when this “domination” will itself be dominated at a given moment, or at least conditioned, by the hybridity of a transition period?

Of course, it will be easy to throw around triumphalist illusions about the “self-managed sector”, even about “socialism”, “embryonic communism” and other confusions. But revolutionaries must combat these illusions mercilessly, because they can only cloud the real nature of the period and the dictatorship. By talking irresponsibly about an alleged “economic domination”, in fact, what we would be saying is that the proletariat has economic power in a society which is still in many respects capitalist (simple commodity production, for example, enormous fragmentation of social life, etc). In reality, the proletariat in the socialised sector would only have what amounts to a materially hybrid power, continuously deformed by outside pressures beyond its purely economic control. The potentiality of this power would still have to flower, mainly through a rational economic policy subordinated to the proletariat's political needs. It won't help if we call this state of affairs “embryonic communism” when reality could still tragically bring about an “embryonic capitalism” and the counter-revolution.

Whether the proletariat will develop the productive forces sufficiently as to abolish itself and all the other classes will depend on its political hegemony over the whole of the transitional society. That consciousness will arise out of its historical and actual condition as an economic and revolutionary class, not directly out of the unstable socialised sector, or from empty edicts about “economic domination” or communism in embryo. Laws are never superior to the economic reality which gives rise to them.

Thus the capacity of the proletariat to increase the volume and quality of use values for its own consumption, a process which is related to the integration of the rest of humanity into productive labour, depends essentially on the proletariat's class consciousness, ie its political self-awareness. This self-activity is expressed in turn by the proletariat's ability to maintain the life of its organs of class rule, in a state of permanent vigilance, ready and able to debate and clarify the final goals of the proletarian revolution. And this also depends on the ability of the class to convince, cajole and persuade other labouring elements of society that their future also lies in their identification with, and integration into, the proletariat.

The material, cultural resources of the proletariat will grow and unfold to unprecedented heights if its economic policies develop without great difficulty. But at any given moment in the transition, the material, “economic” scope of the socialised sector is by definition insufficient for the completion of these tasks. To speak of the “economic domination” of the proletariat under such conditions would amount to considering that the proletariat either:

1. has already accomplished its tasks of creating communism, or,
2. that the class has its own mode of production merely because it has access to its socialised sector, and that therefore 'communism in embryo' can co-exist within a sea of simple commodity production and social fragmentation.

Either of these conclusions will tell the proletariat to acquiesce, to give in to the status quo, to accept the permanence of the transition period and thus weaken the dictatorship in relation to the state and other strata. In the period of transition, the substance of communism is not, however, manifested through the 'control' by the producers of the means of production. These new relations of production are still based on an insufficient material base as long as the rest of humanity is not part of a collectivised social organism. The realm of freedom that the proletariat will construct will be for all, not for itself as a still alienated social category. The development of free time, the elimination of the division of labour, of the differences between mental and manual labour, between town and country, all these tasks require the future uninterrupted participation of the whole of society.

J. McIver World Revolution/Great Britain (May 1977 )

7) In its turn the proletariat will use an instrument of restraint without which it can't repulse the attacks, and disperse the forces, of the counter-revolution. It must smash the furious resistance put up by the bourgeoisie against its own expropriation. The greater and more desperate its resistance, the more in-flexible the proletarian dictatorship will have to become. In extreme circumstances, it will even be forced to unleash the Red Terror as history has already shown us in all revolutions from the Commune to October. In a time of civil war, it is understandable that he who doesn't wish to be annihilated will try to annihilate his adversary. The aim isn't to destroy human life, but to preserve the life of those in one's own camp.

8) The dictatorship of the proletariat, otherwise called the semi-state of the proletariat, succeeds the old state which has been dismantled. The marxist definition of the state as "the central organ of that class which dominates all other classes" is as true today as it ever was in relation to the proletariat. It is in no way contradicted by the experience of October, or by Nazism, or fascism. This Commune-state is not communism, but the dictatorship of a class that is not yet working under conditions of freedom, nor in conditions of its own choosing. This dictatorship relies on the arming of the proletariat, and not on any institution produced by democratic consultation among the whole of the population. The proletarian revolution has substituted a system of soviets for a decrepit parliamentarism; the proletarians have expelled at bayonet point the learned assemblies constituted through democratic means. Bourgeois legality has been pulverised under the weight of the proletariat.

10) In this sense, the necessity for a "semi-state" does not negate the communist character of the proletariat, just as the establishment of the proletariat as the ruling class is not synonymous with the emergence of a new exploiting class. In opposition to the anarchist, who is deprived of any dialectical conception, and for whom the state is on principle a "depravity", the revolutionary is forced to admit its necessity for the proletariat, and to address the question maturely. If he does not, he will make the same mistake as the libertarians and flounder on the question of power. The destruction of the bourgeois state removes a decisive obstacle blocking the establishment of new relations of production. But since socialism cannot be realised without revolution, ie without the use of violence, there must be a state of the revolutionary class to open the way for socialism, destroying by conscious political activity the previous conditions of exploitation.

11) The bourgeoisie was a class which was only partly held in check by Absolutism; its revolution consisted in breaking down its isolation from political power. so that its most eminent representatives could be raised to the privileged sphere of government, and thereby set the seal on its decisive economic power. But the proletariat in its revolution does not organise a dominant party within society at the expense of the whole of that society. The proletariat, because of its subjection, possesses a universal character. Hence it doesn't make any claim to its own rights, since it doesn't have any as an exploited class. What makes the proletarian revolution a political revolution with a social core, is the nature of its prime mover, the proletariat. The proletariat sheds the political skin of its movement when it begins its constructive activity. For the first time in history a political revolution precedes and creates the conditions for a social transformation. The secret of the extinction of the state lies in the realisation of the political, economic and social measures which weld together the necessary and indispensable conditions for withering away of the state: the growth and expansion of the production of social wealth. In liberating itself, the proletariat liberates the whole of humanity. The emancipation of the proletariat is the emancipation of humanity. The revolution cannot be realised without the suppression of the proletariat: the proletariat cannot be negated without the realisation of communism.

14) With the aid of universal suffrage, the bourgeoisie spread the ideological fiction of the egalitarian principle of the participation of all classes (“the people”) in the development of the state. Thus it managed to hide the true nature of the state in the eyes of the exploited classes while at the same time crushing the first autonomous movements of the working class. In contrast, the proletariat will loudly proclaim the class purpose of the new state. This state will not be a parliamentary arena which will allow the political activity of every party to take place "in complete freedom". It will not sanction a compromise between them. It will be the expression of a relation of force and will openly proclaim itself to be so. No class other than the proletariat will be allowed to carry arms composed; no council of strata not living by their own work will be tolerated. Chronologically in history, the formation of the class preceded that of the state, rights follow and concretise fact. The lawful edicts of the semi-state will place all the exploiting strata outside the law and they will be considered hostages of war. In order to vanquish the counter-revolution, we may have to consider means of conciliation with the peasant strata to ensure they bear the burden of the civil war. But this is in no way a division of power. The role of the semi-state in relation to them consists in mobilising all the exploited in the general work of implementing communism. It will not use and exercise violence blindly, but in the case of resistance on their part, the proletariat must strive to develop in them a consciousness of the need for socialism.

While directing the vast mass of the non-proletarian working population into the sector of socialised production, the dictatorship must remain vigilant, and guard against every possible vacillation.

15) If violence must be used energetically against the bourgeoisie, and with a certain caution and circumspection against the intermediate strata, it must be strictly excluded from the relations within the life of the revolutionary class, the proletariat. Within the class that defends and embodies the revolution, no recourse to coercive means can be tolerated at any time. No halt can be allowed in the life of the political bodies which are concerned with, and are orientating themselves towards, the programme of the communist revolution. Faced with a possible outbreak of conflict arising between the proletariat and the state, the role of communists must be to raise the whole of the working class to the level of the communist vanguard. The banner of the revolution will be indelibly defiled if the state of the dictatorship ever uses violence against the proletariat. As soon as the problem of the use of violence is posed in these terms, the problem of the degeneration of the revolution is posed. To avoid the recurrence of the tragedy of Kronstadt, the only guarantee of victory is the triumph of the proletariat on a world scale.

16) A state with a transitional character like that of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is destined to wither away, cannot confine itself to a collection of stable rules in an unchangeable constitution. Given that the revolution cannot be subsumed into a simple formal question, it follows that the counter-revolution cannot derive from, or find its origins in, the Bolshevik conception of the state. Contrary to the belief of the anarchists, the state has no “inherent” nature. Nor does it represent a “neutral” organ above classes and independent of their struggles, as the reformists and revisionists of the IIIrd International believed. Once again, it is the organism and the extension of the class. No good will come from avoiding the question.. the dictatorship of the proletariat constitutes a state. But, like the Commune, and the October revolution, it is the state of the vast majority against an infinitesimal minority of exploiters, who are deprived of all rights. For the first time the working class governs itself; for the first time there is no enforced participation in social life, but a conscious and voluntary cohesion.

If the revolution does not break out, or does not advance into other countries, the International, as much as the workers' state, will be engulfed in a rapid flood of degeneration. As the International represents the highest crystallisation, the most perfect elaboration of consciousness, so the workers' state is the "finally discovered form" within which, and through which, the proletarians will assemble and work to generalise their class interests, which are those of the whole of humanity.

Between the communist international and the workers, state, there is no essential antagonistic relationship. The workers' state is the result of the victory of the movement at the level of a given country, but it is also the realisation of the entire international proletariat – the first episode in the tumultuous progress of the world revolution across the stage of history. By the same token, it is the surpassing of the national limitations imposed on the proletariat by the division of the world into nations, blocs and continents.

As a consequence of the counter-revolution, after the victory of Stalinism and the total change in political orientation arising from the fatal theory of socialism in one country, there was a schism, a separation of the relations linking the workers' state to the Communist International. This constituted a barrier to the International's absolute and autonomous control of the state.

A true representation of the vanguard, the true enrichment of the ideological heritage of the workers' movement, demands and depends on the full and total preservation of these two fundamental acquisitions: the world party and the workers' state.

R.C. Révolution Internationale France, May 1977

1) INTRODUCTION 

This text originates from the discussion going on throughout the ICC, and in particular from a recent meeting in London, which seemed to this writer, at least, to throw a number of points of disagreement into sharp relief. Up till now it has generally been agreed that there are two positions on the state: the “majority” position adopted in the resolutions of Révolution Internationale, World Revolution and Internationalisme at their Congresses, and the “minority” position defended primarily by S. and M. of Internationalisme. However, since the appearance of S. and M.'s text, further discussions and a text from comrade YB of Internationalism have made it clear that wider disagreements exist. While S. and M. insist on the proletarian nature of the state in the transitional period (ie, that it is a “workers' state”), YB appears to be suggesting that the workers' councils are the repositories of state power when he answers "no" to the question "is there a state outside the workers' councils?" since "the dominant power in society is held by the proletariat whose mode of organisation is the workers' councils". These are two apparently different positions – one claiming the proletarian nature of the state, the other claiming the state nature of the councils – but, in fact, each represents the reverse side of the other. They spring from the same mistake, which was so disastrous in Russia, that of confusing the revolutionary, transforming role of the workers' councils with the reactionary, conserving nature of the transitional state. This text will try to consider three aspects of the problem:

1. historical comparisons with previously existing states;
2. the relationship of the proletariat to the transitional state;
3. the relationship of the proletariat to other classes and strata.

o0o

2) To what extent can historical comparisons be made between the transitional state
and states existing in other epochs?

Much of the discussion between “minority” and “majority” bas revolved around the historical question of whether the state is reactionary or not “by nature”. To each side of the argument, the other appears to be adopting a mechanistic viewpoint. Those who say, for example, that the state "must be defined concretely as the instrument of a ruling class which is either progressive or reactionary according to the historic epoch" (Internationalism/Toronto) consider that the state cannot be thought of as an abstract “thing in itself”, while those who defend a view of the state as being inherently conservative reply – with equal justice – that its relationship to the ruling class is not such as to make it automatically “progressive” when the ruling class is so.

However, this discussion, though of interest, can degenerate very quickly into sterility; it can never be resolved and, in fact, does little to clarify the nature of the transitional state. We must be absolutely clear that there is no precedent for the period of transition and that the state in this period will be fundamentally different from all other states.

First, in the relationship between the state and the rest of society. The bourgeois state is rooted in capitalist society, and is at one with it. It is the social relationships of capital which give form and substance to the state. In this sense, it is an expression of the whole of society, because the whole of society is organised around the capitalist mode of production. As Internationalism/Toronto put it: "Capitalism is an exploitative social system which is violent at its heart" and if the bourgeois state is essentially violent, it is because the production relations of capital are essentially violent. This is not the case in the period of transition; here the relations of production, while still at first dominated by the law of value, are not subsumed under a dominant class. On the contrary, for the first time in history, an exploited class holds political power, which it must constantly assert against the tendency of the law of value to re-establish itself. There is thus a fundamental disunity between the existing relations of production and the ruling class, such as has never existed in any previous society. The bourgeois state, for example, knew no transitional period; the bourgeoisie seized political power only when its economic power, its mode of production, was already firmly established.

Given this disunity, it is clearly wrong to say as S. and M. do, that: "A given ruling class rules through the state and uses it to defend its interests against the interests of other classes, to ensure the spread, the development, the preservation of its particular relations of production, against the danger of the restoration of the former relations, or the destruction of its own" (my emphasis). The working class does not have its own relations of production. On the contrary, its sole aim is to overthrow completely those very relations which define its existence. The workers' aim in the transitional period, far from being to solidify society in its immediately post-revolutionary form, is to engage in a permanent revolution against that society, to replace the domination of value and commodity exchange with the free association of producers in a society without classes. Thus we can readily see that there is a separation between the ruling class and the rest of society. The proletariat is totally opposed to the society over which it exercises political control. The two tendencies will find their appropriate forms in the state and the workers' councils.

3) The proletariat’s relationship to the state

Although we must be wary of facile historical comparisons, they can nevertheless give us some idea of the functions of the state in the transitional period. Basically, we can say that the transitional state will, like all states, embody the existing social relations in a concrete juridical form. But what are these social relations? Immediately after the revolution they will essentially be those of capitalist society; to be sure, the bourgeoisie will no longer exist as a class, the proletariat will no longer be exploited – but production will still be dominated by exchange and the law of value, and other classes will still exist, not yet integrated into the productive process. All those forces tending to drag society back into the nightmare of capital will find their expression in the state, which – by virtue of its “legalisation” of existing forms, will naturally tend to maintain and strengthen them – in other words, to return to state capitalism.

As the workers' councils act to undermine the capitalist mode of production, to transmute its leaden substance into communist gold, the state will, of course, crystallise new advances in suitable legal shapes. But clearly, as long as the proletariat is able to maintain its political control, it will always be in advance of the state. Thus the class will, of necessity, find where it is in permanent conflict with where it was – that is to say, the state. Since the councils represent a principle diametrically opposed to that represented by the state it is confusing and dangerous in the extreme to label the state “proletarian” or to attribute the state's specific juridical functions to the councils. It freezes the class into what can only be a temporary moment; the period of transition is unstable – it is possible to go forward or back, but never to stand still.

4) The relationship of the proletariat
to other classes/strata.

In many of the texts produced by the “minority” far too much emphasis is placed on the role of violence in the workers' relations with other classes. While the whole of bourgeois society is based on the continual violence of exploitative relations of production, the same cannot be said of the proletariat. Its aim is to integrate the whole of society into productive labour – and this can't be done at the point of a gun. The political dominance of the workers is not primarily a matter of armaments (after all, during the civil war, the councils will have to dominate politically a state with a Red Army far more powerful than the workers' militias), but of its greater ability to see into both future and present, to understand them, and to convince the peasants and petty bourgeois that their interests lie in the same direction (although as individuals, rather than as classes).

There must, therefore, be an arena in which, so to speak, the delegates of the councils can meet the delegates of other strata elected from the territorial sections. Although the territorial delegates will not be organised as class representatives, and the state will give no juridical recognition to other classes, it is nevertheless obvious that other classes will be present in the state apparatus. Thus despite the workers' hegemony over the state, it is again misleading and dangerous to label it proletarian.

5) Finally, why does the ICC discuss so exhaustively what at first sight may appear to be a mere semantic difference of definition?

In the end, it is because the question of the 'workers' state' has been of crucial importance  in the workers' movement, and will be so again. The confusion between the state and the dictator- Ship of the proletariat was merely a part of the  horrible disaster of substitutionism – whose other side was the identification of the dictatorship of the party with that of the class. In the years to come, we will see increasingly frenetic leftist propaganda for the establishment of a “workers' state” to consolidate capital's control over the workers. In the transitional period, the idea of the “workers' state” will be used in many attempts to draw the councils under the hegemony of the state. It is vital that the ICC should prove itself capable of “pointing the way forward” by defending the firm distinction between the revolutionary organs of the working class – the councils – and the essentially conservative state over which the councils must exercise their control, and whose basis they will continually subvert and destroy.

Len Black World Revolution/Great Britain May-1977

Introduction

This text is meant to be a reply to objections raised against us when we speak of the “state as a class organ”, or “as a progressive element in certain periods”. It is also an attempt to clarify and concretise our understanding of the general nature of the state. Our concept of this is exactly the same as that expressed in the two marxist texts that deal with the question: The Origins of the Family, Private  Property and the State, and State and Revolution. Both of these we draw on a great deal, as we are basically in complete agreement with these two works.

We believe that the position defended in this text preserves a continuity, although a critical one, with Bilan's analysis on the state (particularly the articles “Party-State-International”). Bilan's position differs from that developed-by Internationalisme in 1946 with which we disagree. Although there exists in these two Left Communist Groups a mutual concern to understand the state – they both tried to draw the lessons from. the defeat – their interpretations are not the same (Bilan reaffirms the marxist doctrine of the state which makes the state "the instrument and the extension of a class”). This text is not a direct response to the present stage reached by the discussion. It sets out, however, the most important points of our position on the general nature of the state which we still defend.

This text does not actually tackle the central question: the analysis of the proletarian state. Nevertheless, we believe that this discussion is justified in that it poses the conditions for the analysis (the general precedes the particular).

The general question of the state

1. The Historic Origins of the State

In order to clarify the problem of the state, we must return to its origins. No one in the ICC questions the existence of the state as the result of historic development and consequently, that it is a passing, transitory phenomenon. Nevertheless, other considerations are necessary if we are to tackle the origins of the state. Certain comrades hold that "the state arises spontaneously" and they give this conception an automatic character (the state emerges independently of the will of classes). For them, the state "constitutes the superstructure which reflects the infrastructure of society" (a definition which they use to deny the idea that the transition state could be proletarian). We believe that this conception is insufficient. It fails to take into account the important fact that the class precedes the state, that it is a given class which gives a form to the historic necessity for a state moulded in its own interests.

In order to explain the thesis that the state is the extension of a class and not simply the “product of society”, we must return to the last phase of barbarism. At first glance the latter would seem to invalidate the claim that classes precede the state (and especially that the state is the instrument of a class). In fact, in this period, the gentile constitution (clan or kinship groups in primitive society) did not yet coincide with the existence of an exploiting class although a certain ordering of social life was already established, a certain hierarchy of tasks existed within the gens and there was an obvious continuity in the allocation of tasks undertaken by its members. Military functions and those connected with organising work tended to be passed on hereditarily, without the formality of an election. This development was linked to the progressive emergence of family collectives, some of which, because of the growth of their material wealth, gained a power that gradually increased. This could be seen as an early form of the state, composed of individuals who undertook organisational functions and who were charged in the name of the community with the direction of defence and the command of society.

In order to show why the gentile constitution could not give rise to a state apparatus – even a rudimentary one, and that the latter arose only after the disintegration of blood ties – we must understand the significance of the gentile constitution. The gens represented an economic unity in which the privilege of undertaking tasks necessary to the collectivity fell to individuals who, far from acquiring a position of privilege and ease, found themselves exposed to the gravest dangers while the principles of common property still ruled the mode of production. Lafargue, in his work on the Origins of Property, writes:

It is a mistake to believe that the functions of a chief at first constituted an enviable privilege: on the contrary, it was a heavy and dangerous responsibility. The chiefs were held responsible for everything. A famine to the Scandinavians was a certain sign of the anger of the gods: the fault was attributed to the king sometimes put to who was disposed and death. His responsibilities were so little sought after that election by the popular assembly could be avoided only by incurring banishment and the severe penalty of watching the destruction of one's home, the sacred and inviolate family possession[1]

We can see that the gentile constitution had nothing in common with a state organ which pre-supposes the use of the latter with the aim of preserving and increasing domination within society. The state and the gentile organisation were incompatible and the former developed only upon the ruins of the latter. In this way, along with the development of the productive forces, the germs of the destruction of the gentile constitution also developed. Engels shows that in order for this to be realised:

Only one thing was missing: an institution that would not only safeguard the newly-acquired property of private individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile order,[2] would not only sanctify private property, formerly held in such light esteem, and pronounce this sanctification the highest purpose of human society, but would also stamp the gradually developing new forms of acquiring property, and consequently, of constantly increasing wealth, with the seal of general public recognition; an institution that would perpetuate, not only the newly-rising class division of society, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing classes and the rule of the former over the latter. And this institution arrived. The state was invented.[3]

As an illustration of the early development of the state:

...all this can nowhere be traced better, at least in its initial stage, than in ancient Athens. How the state developed, some of the organs of the gentile constitution being transformed, some displaced, by the intrusion of new organs, and, finally, all superseded by real governmental authorities, while the place of the actual 'people in arms' defending itself through its gentes, phratries and tribes was taken by an armed 'public power' at the service of these authorities and, therefore, also available against the people[4]

Engels goes on to say that a "public power distinct from the people is an essential characteristic of the state". Elsewhere, he shows that this power must take the sub-division of territory, and no longer kinship groupings, as the basis for its social organisation (we will return to these characteristics, which seem fundamental to us, later). In Athens the appearance of the state, the formation of a private army and police force, the division of citizens according to territory, was a progressive movement brought about by successive legislative codes. This evolution was determined at first by the fact that:

…powerful families (…) began to constitute by virtue of their wealth as a group outside of their gens, a distinct and privileged class

and secondly:

that the division of labour between husbanders and artisans had become strong enough to contest the superiority, socially, of the old division into gentes and tribes[5]

The state was created when classes gained a definitive formalisation:

How well this state, now completed in its main outlines, suited the new social conditions of the Athenians was apparent from the rapid growth of wealth, commerce and industry. The class antagonism on which the social and political institutions rested was no longer that between the nobles and the common people, but that between slaves and freemen, dependents and citizens.[6]

In order for the state to develop it was essential to break gentile ties as they were incompatible with a monetary economy and with the domination of one group over another and this was what the different constitutions in ancient Athens came to in the end. So the period of barbarism was transcended. The communal form of property that existed in the period of barbarism reflected the situation in which the as yet primitive nature of the means of production (hunting and fishing) did not reveal needs beyond those for basic foods. With the arrival of industry, of exchange, and of money, a glimpse of more sophisticated needs appeared. At the same time it became impossible to satisfy the needs of the whole of society and there came into existence at first certain families, and later certain classes, who wished to (and were able to) monopolise the means of production. In this manner, the need for the state arose; the need for an organ that could sanctify the domination of the master class and the subjugation of all other social strata.

Between this organ and the dominant class very close bonds were formed; bonds which could only be broken by the weakening of the ruling class itself. In fact, the appearance of the state is by by no means an automatic product of economic conditions:

the social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, however, of these individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people's imaginations, but as they actually are, ie, as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.[7]

In other words history does nothing; it is classes which concretise historic necessity and which create their institutions. This exact formulation is important because it shows up the mistake of crude evolutionist theories which turn the superstructure of society into the absolute reflection of its infrastructure, and see history as simply a process independent of the creation of classes. Marxism, on the other hand, asserts that "the history of society up to the present day has been the history of class struggle". It is the division of society into classes which necessitates the appearance of the state and it is a definite class, the most powerful class (deriving its power from its economic pre-eminence, as do exploiting classes, or from its consciousness and its organisation, as does the proletariat) which erects a statist structure able to defend its interests. So, in Athens, the nobility constructed and directed the emerging state, and recruited mercenaries to help preserve its economic privileges. Later, with the decline of the power of the aristocracy, slave-owners subsequently came to take over the state apparatus, not by destroying the old apparatus initiated by the nobles, but by seizing it through corrupt means and violently purging those who remained faithful to their old masters. We see here the two means by which a class can win state power; either it completely creates its own organ, or it "takes over" the state structure that already exists and restructures it from within.

From the historical considerations we have outlined above, we can draw out two points which seem to us to be fundamental to a marxist approach to the state:

1. It is the instruments of production (the development of the productive forces) which establish the conditions for the division of society into classes.
2. It is then classes that give life to the state.

It is this "hierarchical" approach that Marx had in mind when he broached the question of right and the state:

My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the Eighteenth century, embraces within the term 'civil society'; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy.[8]

The relationship that flows from the class state is no mere coincidence nor accidental fact, but, as we have seen, class precedes the state, the former is the immediate result of the phase of social evolution where a monopoly of production becomes necessary and allows the implementation of one class' domination, while the state then emerges to give form, in the sense of a strengthening of this domination, to the organisation of the whole of society. Thus we arrive at a definition of the state. It is an instrument which serves to place a particular class in power and then maintain that power.

Which class? This is a question which must be asked before continuing. At present, confusion arises concerning the problem of the relationship of the class to the state because of a failure to distinguish between those classes destined to play a historic role and those social classes which, despite an apparent economic homogeneity, are not destined to play an autonomous role in history. This confusion is doubled when one considers the relationship of non-homogeneous strata to the state.

The structure of production will give rise to different classes and social strata, the latter emerging as a result of the division of labour and the forms within which the appropriation of the means of production takes place. Class divisions are a direct and automatic product of the structure of society and the struggle which unfolds for control and possession of the means of production. But amongst all these classes, there exist those which are specifically destined to make a revolution while others are without any particular destiny. In this way the struggle of the slaves was inconsequential as far as the succession of social forms is concerned. It was the economic uselessness of slavery which brought about its disappearance and its replacement by serfdom. The class earmarked to play a role in history represents a synthesis within which there are both economic and historic elements. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are such classes because they synthesize a particular economic position which corresponds to certain relationships to the means of production: capitalist private property or, with the proletariat, real socialisation. It is, therefore, these classes which can bring about the necessary synthesis that are destined to play an active part in the development of history. Also the class struggle is above all the struggle between such fundamental classes. In each historic epoch, the struggle unfolds between two radically opposed types of society and not between classes struggling within the same framework and limited by their own economic interests. The two classes which are in fundamental opposition to each other within a society do not fight for political domination because once a class has conquered this, it is able to ensure the expansion of its own economic interests. The battle basically unfolds on a wider issue: the construction of a new society or the preservation of the old one. The experience of capitalist domination is the best confirmation of this:

Its society is not the result of a simple co-ordination of the several economic interests of the component parts of its class, but a co-ordination which embraces the whole of society and which forces those elements of the ruling, exploiting class to restrict their contingent interests in order to ensure the survival of society as a whole. State intervention in the economy is intended to preserve capitalist society as a whole by controlling, in order to discipline, the economic freedom of certain groups – not the least of which is the capitalist class itself[9]

In the pitiless struggle to sustain an old society or to create a new one, intermediate, formations, even classes, are inevitably swept aside and attached to one or other of the main opposing classes. In this way each society can be understood historically in terms of the predominating ideas of the ruling class, which draws to it all aspects of social life on a world scale. Seen in this light, the position of the state can be clearly understood. As Engels says:

…the state was the official representative of the whole of society, its synthesis into a visible entity, but it was so only in so far as it belonged to the class, which, for the time being, represented the whole of society

As one cannot speak of a "fundamental class"  except where there exists the historic possibility for a class to identify its evolution and its economic and social interests with the interests of society itself, the state that arises as an expression of this identity within the historic situation of the class struggle, is, and always will be the organ of a class playing a historical role, and never of an intermediate formation.[10]

2. The role and significance of the state

We have already mentioned that "the state was the organ of a class". It now remains to prove and formulate this more precisely. In his pamphlet State and Revolution, Lenin, drawing upon Engels, expressed an idea. concerning the , significance of the state, which is fundamental to marxism:

The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where, and to the extent that class antagonisms objectively cannot be reconciled [11]

How can a system containing such strong internal contradictions survive? In other words, what gives stability to a society built upon the division of the whole of social life into irreconcilable classes? The answer is obvious. If such a society exists, there must also exist something which cements the divisions and subdues the class struggle (in a crude way on a physical level; in a more subtle way on the ideological level).

In short, an organ which dominates not only everything, but above all men, is an organ indispensable to the preservation of society. This organ is the state; its role is, precisely, to cushion society, to protect it from explosion. But this does not tell us how the state does this. Does it encourage a dialogue between the classes? This hypothesis is out of the question because the state could neither arise, nor continue its existence, if reconciliation, the “dialogue” between classes, were possible. Will a neutral organ emerge, one that is above society, arbitrating between antagonistic classes by means of force? This hypothesis deserves more attention than the first.

Of course, if we are arguing from a materialist perspective, we do not recognise the existence of elements placed above society and above classes. But aren't certain comrades putting this forward as a possible statist form, ie for the state which will succeed the capitalist state? Thus, the position which says it is "absolutely pointless to try to label the transitional state with an epithet such as 'of the people', 'inter-classist', or 'proletarian’" (see the draft text proposed by Internationalisme), isn't this position providing a perfect description of a state which stands above classes?[12] From a purely abstract point of view, a “third force” could effectively discipline classes which were confronting one another. But where would this “third force” find its material base, from where would it get its resources and consciousness in a determinist and historic sense?

A pure abstraction can never tell us the answer to this. This hypothesis of the 'third force' is untenable unless we drop all reference to marxism. Engels does justice to the “state existing outside classes” in a number of places. And the following passage taken from The Origins of the Family in no way contradicts what we say:

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

Engels quite clearly states that the state is over society in "appearance" only; it becomes "increasingly estranged" from society only in "appearance". In one sense the state also becomes "increasingly estranged from society" in a very real way. If we consider the whole of the population, if the word "society" is used to denote the latter, then the state becomes "more and more estranged" in as far as it becomes, in the case of the bourgeois state, an organ for the defence of a fraction of the population which diminishes in size, against an enlarging majority of the population. However, Engels gives no credence to the idea of a “third force”. This is borne out by the following passage, which is found several pages further on in his book:

As the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but as it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.

Although this formulation is insufficient as a definition of "the general nature of the state", it adequately indicates the gist of Engels’ thinking on the subject. The state is clearly defined as the organ of one of the classes in struggle which represses by all means in its power the adversary class. From the direct use of violence to the creation of a complex ideological web, we might add.

This would seem to be an elementary truth. However, it is precisely from such a-simple truth that the greatest confusions develop. And so we find the following definition: "…it is also an instrument of mediation between classes".[13] Or elsewhere:

The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State shows that the state arises within all class societies and that it has two basic functions. The first is coercion (…) Secondly, the state has the task of preserving the status quo, of preventing society from tearing itself apart and dis-integrating under the weight of the class antagonisms which exist within it. It is important to stress, as Engels did, that the state is a conservative institution, the conservative institution par excellence, quite apart from its coercive functions.[14]

And so, we are all forced by the weight of incontestable historic fact to recognise that the state is an organ of class domination, an instrument of violence in the hands of one class, an instrument which serves to subdue the adversaries of this class. But, at the same time, this realisation is undermined by the addition of a second definition which is, in fact, a pure and simple negation of the first. All the texts which have been written to date in the Current in an attempt to show the anti-proletarian nature of the state in the period of transition, adopt, with different nuances, the same approach. They give, in reality, two definitions of the state: one showing that the state is an instrument of a class and then another showing it to be a mediating organ, an organ that is "reactionary by nature". It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that the two aspects of this definition are incompatible. The state cannot be, simultaneously, an organ of a class, while serving as a "mediator". A mediator is, by definition, someone who stands between two combatants, who reconciles them, who attenuates the contradictions and promotes a compromise solution. We have already demonstrated the absurdity of the view while asserting that the state cannot be "neutral or stand above society". For WR, this blatant contradiction is resolved in the following way: "The state has never arisen out of the sole desire of a ruling class, but has been an emanation of society in general and because of this has become the instrument of the ruling class".[15]

What does it mean to say that the state is "an emanation of the society in general"? As society is divided into classes, this can only mean that all classes to some degree make their contribution to the state and meet each other within the state, which in some way represents the "unity of society", and which attempts to preserve society as a whole. So the function of the state would be to protect this "society in general"… "to preserve the existing social relations, to maintain the balance of forces between classes, in a word the status quo".[16] But what is this "society in general"; this "balance of forces between classes"? It is a particular society in which there is a preponderance of one class and a disequilibrium in the balance of forces between the classes. Only in understanding these things can we draw out the significance of the state. We cannot ignore the fact that it is the instrument of one class. As for the "unity of society", this can only be an illusory unity. As long as conflicting interests and the struggle between classes exist, it is impossible for an organisation to exist that unites all citizens in the interest of all citizens. Bourgeois democracy, for example, pretends to have managed this "unity". In fact, it has merely introduced a means of preserving its privileges in a form suitable to the specific power of the bourgeoisie and its dictatorship over the majority. As soon as the notion of a “mediator” is introduced, one is forced back to the idea of reconciling classes, however desperately one may try to defend oneself.

According to Engels and Lenin, the state is an organ for the oppression of one class by another. It is the creation of “order”, to legalise and strengthen this oppression by restraining the class struggle. What comes out of WR's conceptions is that this “order” is actually the reconciliation of classes and not the oppression of one class by another. To restrain the conflict means to reconcile and not "to take certain ways and means of struggle from the oppressed classes in the fight to overthrow that oppression" (Lenin).

WR refuses to acknowledge:

1. that the state is the repressive organ of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its opposite (ie with the class that confronts it);
2. That class domination categorically excludes reconciliation between classes;
3. that an organ which enables a class to dominate society cannot at the same time be a "mediator" between classes.

Therefore, the comrades arrive at the conclusion that the interests of all classes are given expression in the state, that the function of the state is to "preserve" the equilibrium.

From this has followed the notion of the "defence of the status quo". As the state never has a pure class nature, but represents "society in general", it necessarily defends "the existing economic situation". In fact, classes form conscious relationships within the economic process; these relationships affect political relationships which are a direct reflection of the economic positions held by these classes. And in order to maintain the political balance of forces in society ("to stabilise the class struggle"), the "economic status quo" must be defended. It is in this way that the state is "reactionary by its nature". If the society is progressive it is so in spite of the state. Because the infrastructure determines the superstructure, the state is compelled to legalise each economic modification and particularly the development of a class "within the infrastructure". It is in this sense that the state cannot play a progressive role. This is what WR seems to us to be saying. In the text by Internationalisme quoted above, which at heart is rooted in an identical conception even though it has been written in defence of a resolution which says the exact opposite, they get to the point of practically admitting that "the state can play a progressive role (…) but it does so only in so far as it legalises an already existing economic situation, in which case it expresses the forward movement of a privileged position in the economy of one class at the expense of another". The fact seems to have escaped Internationalisme that in marxist terms the function of an organ constitutes its essence, that an organ which plays a progressive role cannot be "reactionary by nature". But Internationalisme hasn't really accepted the idea that the state can play a progressive role. Its role is limited by the comrades to being a "legalisation", an "expression", that is to say a purely passive reflection and not an active role. In the main the comrades share the view elaborated by Internationalisme in 1946:

In the course of history, the state has appeared as a conservative and reactionary factor…, a filter which the evolution and development of the productive forces has constantly had to confront[17]

In opposition to this conception, we offer another. In all class-divided societies, the dominant class exercises its dictatorship, openly or more subtly, over the other classes in society, with the intention of preserving its class interests and of safeguarding or developing the relations of production to which it is tied. These are the foundations and conditions of its dictatorship: a definite class which exercises its domination by means of an intermediary – the state – and uses the latter to defend its interests against the antagonistic interests of the other classes to ensure the extension, the development and the preservation of the specific relations of production against the danger of the restoration of the old ones, or the destruction of the new ones. In the context of this framework, the state can, in certain historic periods, play an obviously progressive role (and not merely in a “passive” way but above all in an active way). From a marxist point of view, the bourgeois state, for example, is at certain moments a progressive instrument, specifically when it represented a force organised against feudal resistance from within it, and its enemies from without, and supported the establishment of modern institutions upon the ruins of pre-capitalist societies. It was not only useful, but indispensable to the bourgeoisie to attack those institutions which obstructed the appearance of large factories and more advanced farming methods by means of state decrees and the use of violence (which belongs to the state). The marxist dialectical conception of the state, that it is revolutionary in certain periods, conservative or counter-revolutionary in others, is such because the state is the extension and the instrument of social classes which appear, come to fruition, and disappear. The state is progressive or counter-revolutionary according to the historical activity of the class upon the development of society's productive forces (accordingly, it tends to hinder or encourage their development). so, in each ascendant phase of a mode of production, and particularly at a new society's birth (when it has just emerged out of the old), the state takes an active part in economic life, ending in the destruction of that which is hindering development in a new form, taking part in the expansion of the new relations of production (as we have already demonstrated at the moment of its birth). An extreme example of this situation is the development of Japanese capital:

Like the large industrial countries of Europe, present-day Japan developed out of feudal society. But whereas the trans-formation of European nations lasted several centuries, in Japan this took place over a matter of tens of years. It was only after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 that Japan to abolish feudalism and to create a modern political and social structure. It was the Japanese state that created an industrial base by speeding up and even forcing its development. Japan never went through a period of liberal capitalism (…) Because of the specific structure of Japanese society, characterised by the dominant position held by the state, by a high degree of industrial concentration as well as by feudal remnants in the field of agriculture, the army occupied a key position, the higher echelons of the army came from industrial families, the old strata of feudal aristocracy and Samurais (…) The Japanese armies played a far larger, more direct part in imperialist expansion than the armies of European imperialists (…) And so the rapid development of state capitalism and that of Japanese imperialism took place together.[18]

We can now summarise the essential points of our position on the general nature of the state.

An essential principle of marxism is that the class struggle is decided not on the basis of right, but on the basis of force. The state is a private organ of repression; it is the centralised use of violence by one class against another. The political state, even and above all when it is democratic and parliamentary, is an instrument for violent domination. The state apparatus is constantly using coercive means to subdue the dominated class even if it doesn't appear to use implacable material force, that of the police or any other repressive apparatus, but rather simply threatens to use violent sanctions, a simple legal measure (even an uncoded one), without armed struggle and without bloodshed.

First of all Stirner transforms the state into a person, into “the Mighty One”. The fact that the ruling class establishes its joint domination as the public power, as the state, Sancho interprets and distorts in the German petty bourgeois manner as meaning the “state” is established as a third force against this ruling class and absorbs all power in the face of it.[19]

In opposition to the conception of the “third force”, we want to add another quote from Marx: "…the state is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests, and in which the whole of civil society of an epoch is epitomised" (Ibid). And on the bourgeois state: "Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the state has become a separate entity, alongside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests"[20]

The main characteristic of this institution of the dominant exploiting class, which distinguishes it from other institutions belonging to the same class, is its universality. The state organ is the largest class institution where all its force is concentrated and where the instruments of oppression and repression are gathered. other words, it is the institution where the dominant class is organised as a class and not as factions or small groups of the class. Consequently, if the state is the instrument of a class, the extension of that class, an organisation for the control of the common affairs of this class as a whole; if it represents this class established as a ruling class, it reveals itself as progressive or reactionary according to whether this class is acting progressively or reactionarily, according to whether it is revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, according to whether the class which is organised as a class for itself within the state is contributing to the development of the productive forces, or alternatively is violently opposing the development of humanity.

This global definition is only partly useful for the proletarian transitional state (because of its, historical specificities). When applied to the workers' state, and more generally to the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is not enough to give us the key to this institution and its political regime.

S. & M. Internationalisme/Belgium May 1977

The discussion going on now about the resolution concerning the state after the victory of the proletarian revolution must not be seen as some sort of speculation on an abstract theme. The theoretical work of a political group is different from that of a bourgeois centre for scientific research. The latter is composed of specialists who study this or that discipline by placing themselves “outside it”. Their “objectivity” resides in their professed “neutrality”. Research is a professional business. Their scientific scruples are of a professional nature to the extent that their activities are connected to their earnings. The theoretical elaboration of a revolutionary group involved in the class struggle is quite different. It is not “neutral”, its research is frankly partisan. This does not however mean that it has no objectivity. On the contrary, the objectivity of a revolutionary group is based on an understanding of living reality which makes it better able to wage its struggle.

The theoretical work of the workers' movement is derived from the historical struggle of the working class, and it is never really finished because each new experience brings new lessons which allow and demand a readjustment of theory; precisions which will sharpen the theoretical weapons of the class and make them more effective in the struggles to come.

The question of the state is very important to the theoretical work of the workers' movement, for three reasons:

1. The working class had already reached a certain level of development when society entered into a period of social convulsions and bourgeois revolutions. The problem of political power, of the state, was at the centre of these revolutions in which the workers played an active part allied with the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, they already showed that a class existed with distinct interests that were opposed to those of the bourgeoisie (the Diggers in England, the Enragés and the Égaux (the Equals) in France, the Communist League and the Workers' Association in 1848 in Germany).
2. Under capitalism, the state has reached the highest point of its historical function. Thus right from its birth and throughout its development, the workers' movement has been forced to confront the state and to deal with the more general problem of its nature and the reason for its existence.
3. Because of this, the problem of the organisation of society and of the state was to become crucial for the working class as soon as as it saw the possibility for its emancipation and the advent of a new society.

The Equals put forward the need to struggle for the conquest of the state. This response was still very general and somewhat ambiguous, but it had the merit of clearly posing the necessity for armed revolutionary struggle. With the Utopians, there was a new approach to the problem: the affirmation that the state would be eliminated in a socialist society in which the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things.

As the bourgeois revolution drew near in Germany in the early 1840s, the debate on the state came up again and this allowed the young Marx and his friends, already moving towards communism, to make an implacable critique of Hegel's idealist conceptions which held that the state was the incarnation of the Idea. Although their critique was still enveloped in philosophical terminology, they pointed out that the state like all social, political, or ideological superstructures was only the reflection of the real, material, profane world in which men lived. In the last analysis, the mode of production – the economy – was the basis of the whole social edifice. They showed that the state was a historical product arising from the dislocation of the old primitive community and the division of society into antagonistic classes. They also showed that the state was intimately linked to the reigning mode of production and the classes which represented it, and that it had gone through modifications by adapting itself to changes in the mode of production. They drew out the universal characteristics of this institution in all class societies: the tendency for it to separate itself from, and raise itself above, society, thus creating a conflict be-tween the state and civil society. They pointed out its tendency to create a particular, parasitical, social organism – the bureaucracy.

The events of the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 provided an exceptionally rich treasury of experiences and lessons which allowed the Communist League to denounce and make a definite break with opportunist currents like that of Louis Blanc who believed that it was possible to participate in bourgeois governments. In the light of these experiences, the League also completely changed its policy towards the party of bourgeois democracy in Germany. The feebleness of the democratic bourgeoisie, which in Germany seemed incapable of carrying out its own revolution, as well as the coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte, allowed revolutionaries to be more precise about the relationship between the state and the economically dominant classes in society. At the same time, marxists categorically condemned policies like those of Lassalle, who envisaged the possibility of the working class gaining the support of “arbitrating” states – Bonapartist or Bismarckian – in its struggle against the bourgeoisie. The Paris Commune was an experience of the highest importance and its lessons served as a basis for marxist revolutionaries to decisively clarify their theory of the state. Its main lesson was that, contrary to the hitherto dominant idea about the “conquest” of the state by the working class, the latter could not conquer the state or use it, but had to destroy it. This new conception was an immense step forward in revolutionary thought, finally doing away with the false idea of conquering the state which had been introduced by the followers of Babeuf, continued by the Blanquists, and which the marxists themselves had held to for decades. Against the anarchists and their chatter about anti-authoritarianism, the Commune showed the falsity of the federalist conception of socialism, and was a triumph for the idea of the necessary unity and centralisation of the new society. Finally, the Commune showed the inevitability of the  appearance of the institution of the state, an institution which Engels referred to as an evil inherited from societies of the past, an evil whose worst sides the proletariat would have to lop off.

Following this rich experience, the passionate debates on the lessons of the Commune and the work of Morgan, caused Marx and, in particular, Engels to begin further theoretical research into the problem of the state, into its shrouded origins and development throughout history, and its relation with society and with the ruling and the exploited classes (The Origins of the Family, Anti-Dühring, The Peasant War in Germany, and various Prefaces and letters). The draft of the Gotha Programme provided Marx, once again and for the last time, with the opportunity to return to the subject. He pointed out, among other things, the inevitability of a more or less long period of transition between capitalism and communism, with all its attendant problems: the management of the economy, production and distribution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the state. Although in these theoretical works we can find an extremely clear understanding about the historical function of the state, its links and identification with exploiting classes, its absolutely antagonistic position towards the proletariat, a grasp of the problem of the state in the period of transition only appears in certain important, but mainly negative, indications necessarily limited by the lack of living practice.

It was the first part of this understanding which constituted the definitive acquisition of marxist theory defended by the Left of the IInd International against the repeated attacks of opportunism – the Millerand’s acceptance of ministerial rank, the revisionism of Bernstein, the reformism of the trade unions and the final treason of Social Democracy with the war and the revolution of 1917.

With the outbreak of the revolution, and Social Democracy's sordid distortion of the revolutionary marxist position on the state (ie that it must be destroyed from top to bottom because even in its most democratic form, it is the instrument for the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie), the restoration of Marx and Engels' thought on the state was felt to be an urgent necessity by all revolutionaries. This task was taken up by Lenin, whose, book State and Revolution based itself on the texts of Marx and Engels and was a remarkable restatement of their ideas on what should be the proletariat's attitude towards the capitalist state machine. With Lenin's State and Revolution, ambiguity was no longer possible, or tolerable, on the question of the relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeois state. This henceforward marked a class frontier between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. Lenin's book is essentially concerned with this concrete, practical, immediate need of the revolution – as its title indicates – and was not a general study of the state, its origins and historical evolution. If he touched on these problems, it was only in passing and only if this helped him illustrate his main thesis – ie that the capitalist state is nothing but the class dictatorship of capital which the proletariat has to destroy. And this was the great and lasting merit of Lenin's book.

On the eve of the insurrection, Lenin was compelled to pose the problem of the state after the revolution. At this level, he had very little to add to the generalities already put forward by Marx and Engels after the Commune. He highlighted the main measures for limiting the worst aspects of the state: the election and revocability of functionaries, equal remuneration, etc. But the more Lenin tried to take his thought forward, the more his formulations became vague and even contradictory. We know that Lenin didn't finish his book. Not only because of the lack of time, but for much deeper reasons. As he said in the postscript he wrote to State and Revolution on November 30th, 1917; "It is better and more useful to go through 'the experience of the revolution' than to write about it".

The experience was not long in coming, and in light of it, how tragically naive those pages which Lenin dedicated to describing the functioning of the semi-state and its idyllic relationship with the proletariat and society in general seem today. While the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat seems clear, the various definitions of the state after the revolution, which is sometimes identified with the dictatorship of the proletariat, seem ambiguous and contradictory: Commune-state, workers' state, state of the majority, people's state, workers' and peasants' state, etc... Reducing the state, as Lenin did, to an expression of armed force doesn't deal with the whole problem and all its complexity. The least that can be said is that this is a way of ignoring the enormous complexity of the problem of the state and the diversity of its functions. And what can we say about this incredible simplification of the state apparatus, which Lenin introduced when he wrote that even the meanest cook could run it! All his ideas present the period of transition in general, and the problem of the state in particular, almost like a social harmony containing no great difficulties. All these ideas were to vanish like smoke in the face of harsh reality. This is how Lenin, deprived of his naive visions, described the reality of the functioning of the state, five years later:

"The fault lies in our own state apparatus. We have inherited the old state machine and this is our misfortune. The state apparatus often works against us…

Later he writes:

"In fact, it happens very often that here at the summit where we have the power of the state, the apparatus functions better rather than worse, whereas at the bottom things often go against what we want. At the summit of the power structure we have, we do not know exactly how many, but at least a few thousand, and at the most tens of thousands, of our own people. But at the base of the hierarchy, hundreds of thousands of former functionaries that we have inherited from the Tsar and bourgeois society are working, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, against us"[1]

This is still obviously not the core of the problem of the state, but even at this level we can ask what happened to the simple cooks Lenin counted on in 1917 to run the state? What happened? Did Russia run out of cooks?

The differences between the beguiling predictions of State and Revolution and the post-revolutionary reality could only grow clearer each day, and this showed up the immaturity of revolutionary thought on the state in the period of transition as it had existed on the eve of October. Lenin talked about the state in anguished terms:

Our state apparatus is to a considerable extent a survival of the past and has undergone hardly any serious change. It has only been slightly touched up on the surface, but in all other respects it is a most typical relic of our old state machine.[2]

The whole reality of soviet power after October, the growing conflict between the working masses and the state, gave the lie to the idyllic thesis of State and Revolution, and showed that not only had the problem of the state in the period of transition not been resolved, it hadn't even been posed in the correct terms. The debate on the unions showed just how much the problem of the state and its relation to the class had been distorted, when a proposition was put forward – seriously advanced and debated in a Congress of a Communist Party – to militarise the working class. Lenin's redefinition of the state as a “workers' and peasants' state with bureaucratic deformations”, which he put forward against the idea of militarising the class in the name of the "workers' state", came closer to reality, but it was more of a reaction than a real analysis of the state in the period of transition. The situation rapidly developed and we can see now that the counter-revolution took place not against the state, but through the state, through the strengthening of the state against the working class.

The mystification represented by the idea of the workers' state and its defence was to play as important a role as anti-fascism in mobilising the workers of the world to fight in the second imperialist war. This reality forced the Left Communists to return to the heart of the problem of the state, its nature and its function in the proletarian revolution.

We have tried to point out the long road travelled by revolutionaries in their search to understand the theoretical basis of the state in general, and the state of the transition period in particular. It was an extremely difficult and arduous road, and its contours have only become clear slowly, in the course of the journey itself. Our intention here was not to provide a detailed chronological history, but simply to demonstrate its complexity, its incompleteness, and the dangers involved in it. We say this in opposition to those comrades who, out of a fear of novelties, believe they can remain on the solid ground of “orthodox marxism” by sticking to the letter of texts written by Marx, Engels and Lenin, rather than to the spirit behind their approach. In doing so, such comrades take up their incomplete thoughts rather than following their example of elaborating the revolutionary theory of the class in the light of new experience. And though the whole tragic experience of the revolution and the counter-revolution calls into question the notion of the “proletarian” state, these comrades, in order to remain faithful to the dead letter of orthodoxy, prefer not to see the dangers of the state, to minimise them to the point of erasing them and even making an apology for the state itself.

In their concept of the proletarian state, the comrades are simply making a virtue out of necessity. Forgetting Engels' warnings about the state being an evil inherited by the proletariat from the past, they sing praises to the state and find all kind of virtues in it. Their enthusiasm for these newly discovered virtues is so great that it applies not only to the “proletarian” state, but to the state “in general”, to all states which at a given moment were “agents of progress”. We will have to turn from the state in the period of transition to the state in general, to the state in the past, its nature and its functions. We are forced to go down this path.

Let us say straight away that, with all the necessary reservations, there is certainly a continuity between the state in general and the state in the period of transition, not in the virtues that the comrades think they have discovered, but in what Engels referred to as an “inheritance”, as a continuity of an evil. Having said this, these comrades' thesis can be summed up as follows:

1. the state is simply the power of coercion and repression of a class, of which it is the prolongation;
2. as such, it follows the evolution of this class; progressive when the class is progressive; repressive when the class is repressive;
3. however, it sometimes happens that the state precedes the class and is to some extent the precursor which prepares the way for the new progressive class.

As is often the case, the error is not in what is said, but in what is not said. A half-truth can indicate an error as much as a complete lie. This is the case with proposition (a) regarding the definition of the state. When asked: "Is the state a power of coercion and repression?", all revolutionaries, marxist and even non-marxist, would answer "yes" without hesitation. But is the state only that? Any serious marxist would answer "no". Coercion and repression are certainly part of the essence of the state, but not the whole essence. What applies to private property can be applied to the state. The development of private property was a fundamental precondition for arriving at capitalism, and has been so mixed up with it that the habits of language have led to a complete identification between the two, as if they were synonymous. For a long time this did not involve any major inconvenience. But it was enough for private property to tend to give way to the formation of an impersonal, anonymous capital for some people, those stuck in a literal orthodoxy, to interpret this as a tendency towards the disappearance of capitalism. It's the same with the coercive force of the state. Against democrats of all hues, we have so emphasized that the state can't be separated from coercion that some of us have forgotten that coercion can exist and has existed without the state, and have made violence and coercion the only aspect of the state. It's a bit like the obtuse bourgeoisie Marx attacked so sarcastically in the Communist Manifesto, who, after hearing that the communists were for the community of goods, concluded that the communists wanted the community of women. Certain marxists after hearing that the proletariat will necessarily use violence, conclude that the proletariat will “build” a state, and mix up (to the point of making an identification between) the proletariat, its class dictatorship, and the existence and function of the state.

At first sight, it's rather surprising that M. and S. have gone to so much trouble to prove to us that the state is neither outside, nor above, society and that it doesn't precede the existence of classes. These are banalities. What windmills are our Don Quixotes attacking here? Who among us has ever held the position they are attacking? Underlying all this is the idea that the state is simply the prolongation of a class: each class creates its state like God creating man ex nihilo in his own image. And why, after all, shouldn't the proletariat also create a state for itself? And thus we have the proof of the identity between the proletariat and the state in the period of transition. To support his argument, S. takes us back to the origins of the state where he juggles with the state and the class, like the Sophists did with the dilemma of the chicken and the egg. He takes us back to gentile society and there strolls about with such nonchalance that he might as well be promenading in the Place de la Concorde. For M. and S., history has no secrets. Just like a sheet of music, the notes of history are neatly arranged in the right order. Their vision is more or less as follows: in gentile society there was no state although a certain hierarchical division of functions was already present. And this gave rise to a development which ended in the formation of classes. The slave-holding class, the most powerful of these classes, got together and decided to set up a state to keep the slaves in line. Things happened in a similar way with the feudal and the capitalist state. It's clear, simple, no more complicated than that.

Marx and Engels were also familiar with the Place de la Concorde, but they explored history with a bit more care. Let's recall Engels' classic definition of the state in his Origins of the Family:

The state 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 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.[3]

We can see how broad Engels' way of looking at the development of the state was. We're a long way from the following type of schematic simplification:

(society) => (Class) => (Ruling Class) => (State)

in which the state is merely a grandson or even great-grandson of society.

For Engels, the state is directly "the product of society at a certain stage of development", when "this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself". No society can survive and maintain itself in such a situation; it would lead to its ruin if it allowed the classes to “consume” each other and society as a whole. In order to avoid such a social catastrophe, society has to find a solution: not a solution in the sense of a conscious, concerted act, but as a need imposed on it, not coming from the outside but from the inside, from the very entrails of society. It's not a question of conciliation, of mediation between the antagonistic interests which divide society. It's a question of providing a social framework, a social “order”, necessary to maintain – or as Engels put it – moderate conflicts within the limits of this order. The accredited guardian of this “order” – in the broadest sense of the word all the administrative, political, juridical, ideological and artistic superstructures secreted by society out of its own needs – is the state. When we study the origins of the state, how it emerged out of gentile society, the question isn't to ask whether it precedes the formation of classes. The point is to avoid making a mechanistic link between class and state, not because classes didn't precede the state, but because this is a narrow, incomplete, simplified way of formulating the problem, which leaves out the whole complexity of historical reality. We don't want to give a talk on ethnography, but we must recall the main characteristics of gentile society: it was fundamentally a natural society: on the one hand it was dominated externally by nature, by natural forces such as the climate, vegetation, and game; on the other hand, it was constituted and organised internally on the basis of natural ties – blood ties. These natural elements underlay its internal unity and cohesion. Its life and economic activity were directed towards immediate consumption – gathering, hunting and fishing. Little or no division of labour existed, even though a division of functions began to appear in its higher stages:

• no private property;
• a necessary community of goods;
• a long, slow process of the development of the productive forces – the discovery of domestication and stock-breeding, the development of agriculture;
• the development of the division of labour, of exchange, of hoarding, of accumulation, of wealth leading to private property;
• wars of pillage, the need for defence, public works;
• the end of the matriarchal family – the domination of women by men;
• demographic development;
• the possibility of using labour power to produce a surplus;
• and thus slavery;
• the formation of castes and of divergent and antagonistic interests.

This whole evolution could no longer be contained in the framework of gentile society and led to the dislocation of the community. This dislocation was simultaneously, and dialectically, the liberation of man from his total dependence on nature, since he could now produce what he needed to survive, and – with the end of the old cohesion – the loss of man's unity, the beginning of the new era of the alienation of man by social forces that he himself had created.

The loss of its former cohesion and unity and the conflicts between antagonistic interests now constituted into classes, left a vacuum which society, like nature, could only abhor. It became an imperious necessity for society to reconstitute cohesion and unity on a new basis in the midst of all these convulsions. This new basis was no longer grounded on blood ties, but on territorial demarcations; it involved the recognition and submission to new economic structures – exploitation, classes. And finally, the whole was encapsulated in a social superstructure, a power based on its own material force, on an armed force henceforward separated from society, in a word, the state.

As we can see, this vision is both broader and deeper and takes in much more of the complexity of the problem than the simple statement that "the state is the prolongation of the class", even though the first contains the latter. We can, of course, find such a terse definition of the state in marxist literature, but in order to understand it, we must always situate it in its context and take all the circumstances into account to see what such a definition is trying to prove and against what adversary it's being used. To say, for example, that "the glass is half-full" is a static, dead assertion and it gives us no sense of movement, of the direction taken by this movement, and what we can expect from it. On the other hand, if we say "the glass is still half-full or already half-full; already half-empty or still half-empty", we can immediately and clearly see the movement, the intentions and concerns of the speaker – what he is trying to show us – and the extent to which he has succeeded in doing so. It's not a question of reading words and copying them down. It's a question of knowing how to read, because a word in itself can be used to say the opposite of what the author intended to say. To remain faithful to the idea of the text one is citing, one has to know how to interpret it and to put the whole thing into its proper context.

If we're going to refer to State and Revolution for example, we have to understand what Lenin was trying to say, and whether he succeeded in saying it or not.

Lenin didn't attempt to give Kautsky a lesson on the origins of the state. He assumed, quite rightly, that the latter was as familiar with the subject as he was. What Lenin was trying to do was to show that Kautsky was a renegade from his class, a renegade outside marxism, who was deforming the whole essence of marxism. And Lenin succeeded masterfully in doing this. Against Kautsky's conceptions, Lenin only wanted to show one thing: that the state was directly linked to the exploiting classes in order to hold down the exploited classes. Like a bulldog, Lenin grabbed hold of Kautsky on this one point and didn't let go of him. Other aspects of the problem he only discussed in passing. That's why in the present discussion it's senseless to refer to the anti-Kautsky Lenin.

What are M. and S. trying to show us? That the state in the period of transition is “proletarian”, or as they would put it, that the state is a “prolongation” of the proletariat? And in order to prove this, they take us on a tour of gentile society (with Bilan as our guide). We are taken on this tour just like tourists are taken round Paris: "Here is Notre Dame, built in… On your right is the Sainte Chapelle where Marie Antoinette stayed before her execution…, on your left is the Place de Concorde…". S. teaches us how gentile society gave rise to a class, the slave-masters, and this class gave rise to an institution called the state which had the function of keeping the slaves down by force. That's the lot. The whole historical drama that mankind has lived through: the destruction of the “natural world”, the beginning of the era of social alienation and all that this brought with it – classes, exploitation, struggles and revolutions, the state – of this S. says very little. The whole thing is presented as a storm in a teacup, when in fact we are dealing with the transition in human history from the primitive thesis to the antithesis which negated it, and which has lasted for thousands of years, until the conditions have been developed for this in turn to be negated by the synthesis, the re-constitution of the human community.

Before responding to the question of how this historical drama is to be resolved, we must first of all say that the bearer of the “solution” is not the one who poses the problem. In the social sphere, at the level of great historical changes, it's generally the other way round. And now, we can see with Engels, the answer to the problem posed:

As the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but as it arose at the same time in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.

A few passing remarks: first, a class is an economic definition and it is a marxist postulate that only economically dominant classes can become politically dominant. This only works in one direction. This has to be said against Burnham and Socialisme ou Barbarie which both claimed that the state bureaucracy could become an economically dominant class, thus creating a new “bureaucratic society”. Secondly, the passage from the economic domination of a class to its political domination is a law throughout the period of class society. This period goes from the end of gentile society to the end of capitalism. This law doesn't apply to the proletariat because its revolution opens up a new era in human history, which will not have any room for economic domination. It's thus a profound theoretical error to talk, as certain texts do, about “the proletariat also becoming economically dominant”. Dominating the economy and being economically dominant are two distinct things. An economically dominant class can only be a class which exploits and oppresses the dominated class. This is an absolute logical contradiction. in relation to the proletariat. Thirdly, this same theoretical error leads to an amalgam that says it is irrelevant, whether a class derives its power and domination from political or economic sources. As we have seen, the laws which regulate the pre-socialist era, and the “laws” of socialism, are not identical, but fundamentally different. In the pre-socialist era, laws derive only from an economic source, whereas in the period of transition the proletariat cannot have any economic source to its rule. It is meaningless to try to apply the laws of one era to another.

To go back to our subject and the text quoted previously, we can see that Engels makes a distinction between the source of the problem (society) and the bearer of the solution (the economically dominant class), but we will return to this later. It's worth saying that after carefully posing the problem and before giving an answer, Engels used these five words: "it is, as a rule", a formulation which has a restrictive application (elsewhere in the same quotation, Engels uses the term "in general" which has the same restrictive meaning).

Why such restriction? Because the general laws and concrete conditions in which it is applied are not necessarily identical – in reality they only come together rarely (without being a scientist, I think it's possible to find the same thing in all scientific disciplines). We are a long way from the simplification which holds that the state always corresponds to the economically dominant class and is its exact image. Like all ideological, political, juridical and other superstructures, the state also generally “lags behind” the changing reality of the infrastructure. According to their links with the infrastructure and other circumstantial factors, superstructures take a more or less long time to decompose, before vanishing completely. Superstructures certainly play a great role in society, but essentially a negative and conservative one by their very nature. They represent the past, dead time which weighs so heavily on living man.

As for the state, its conservative role is particularly strong, because this role is closely linked to supporting and defending classes which have lost their dominant position, but still have an extremely strong economic position in society. We can see some modes of production surviving for a long time and even reappearing in certain historical circumstances favourable to them and the classes which represent them. An example: slavery had long disappeared in Europe, yet countries such as England which had already gone beyond feudalism and were fully developed capitalisms, became the champions of slavery. Liverpool became a flourishing centre of the slave trade between Africa and America.

Slavery went on until the first decade of the second half of the nineteenth century, by which time even backward Tsarist Russia had abolished serfdom. If such backward movements are possible even at the level of the infrastructure, why should we be surprised at what happens at the superstructural level of the state? The whole of history shows that the state is always behind the development of the social base, never in advance of it. We don't want to give a history lesson. Other comrades can take up this theme and give more examples; it's enough to recall the lengthy and predominant influence of the landowners over the state in England, even though the industrial bourgeoisie had been the economically dominant class for a long time. It's enough to recall that the German bourgeoisie endured the political domination of the Prussian Junkers and the Bismarckian state until 1918. Counter-examples can be reduced to the Absolute Monarchy, or to Peter the Great, and are simply ridiculous.

Why is it the economically dominant classes which "as a rule" bring the "solution"? The answer is contained in the question itself. Let's quote Engels again:

The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its summation in a visible corporation; but it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself, in its epoch, represented society as a whole.[4]

It's time to conclude, although many things have been left unsaid. We will have the opportunity to go back to these points. I simply wanted to respond to the question posed about the origin of the state and make a few adjacent remarks.

To sum up:

1. The state is the sign that society is divided into antagonistic, irreconcilable interests. It is the product of society. It is the false unity of a broken community and the condition for the survival of society. The state is an institution which incarnates and materialises non-unity and tends to maintain and to conserve the life of society in this framework. Maintaining this framework becomes the raison d'etre, the social function of this institution; and this institution will last as long as society is divided, whatever class dominates the economic structure of society.
2. At different stages, as modes of production and the classes connected to them dominate society, these classes tend to regroup together and dominate the superstructures, and in particular the political superstructure – the state. Seen at this level, the state appears as the instrument of exploiting classes in general.[5]
3. To carry out this function in the midst of the class struggle, and with the aim of holding down the exploited class, the state relies on a material force, armed power, which it monopolises, and partially on economic power. It thus acquires its own force and tends to elevate itself above society, to dominate it.

This leads to a growing opposition between the state and civil society. The state gets stronger at a time when the general historic era of class society is reaching its end. This also applies to the decline of each class society within this era (the Absolute Monarchy, etc).

State capitalism is the high point of the historical existence of the state: it is a political and economic power unified in a totalitarian manner. It is the domination and absorption of civil society.

o0o

The proletarian revolution signifies the necessity to do away with class divisions. It's the beginning of the end of the institution which personifies this kind of society: the state.

All previous revolutions merely perfected and strengthened the state machine. The proletarian revolution will go in a different direction – not towards identification with the state, but towards a greater and greater distinction from it, towards its active, accelerated “withering away”.

This is the essence of the draft resolution presented to the IInd Congress of the ICC.

Marc Chirik, Révolution Internationale / France, June 1977

Some of our recent discussions seem to have lost track of the aim of this whole debate. With all the different exegeses on "gentile" society, the dissertations on absolute monarchy and the scholastic war of quotes back and forth, we risk losing sight of the fact that the ICC did not embark on these discussions to show off our reading notes or to rival academic treatises on “the state”. We are trying to shed some light on questions which will become extremely urgent and tangible in a moment of revolution and we do this from a direct commitment to the revolutionary process.

At this point, it would be useful to restate the central point at issue in the debate: Should the working class (the workers' councils) consider its class' interests identical to the state which it will dominate in the post-revolutionary period?

To eliminate a certain ambiguity which has cropped up: the ICC Draft Resolution affirms the inevitable appearance of a state in the transitional society, a state which will in no way be "separate" from the working class. On the contrary, it will be under the domination of the working class. The Resolution does not talk about a "mediator-state" or an "inter-classist" state. These formulations alien to the Resolution itself have been used by some comrades to defend it, but these formulations are entirely incorrect. They undoubtedly crept in because comrades wanted to stress that the workers' councils are not the only constituent elements of the new society and therefore of the new state. However, these formulations implicitly deny the proletarian dictatorship over the state and completely confuse the fact that only the proletariat will be represented in the state as a class (the other members of the transitional society will only have a geographical representation through territorial councils or soviets). These confusions over terms are very significant because they show how any exaggeration in a theoretical debate can quickly undermine any attempt to deal with complexity. As others have already pointed out, there is a ruling class in the transitional state, the proletariat, but it is not a ruling class just like all the others in history because it does not dominate its own economy but seeks to destroy all "economy". Nor will the proletariat passively allow the state to "mediate" against its decisions and interests. The proletariat will have to use the state as far as possible to further its interests while taking into account the realities of immediate social organisation and its needs. Here is the crux of the problem: why introduce the idea of "as far as possible"? Why isn't the state necessarily the proletariat's willing handmaiden? If "inter-classism" and "mediator-state" now are clearly agreed not to be the position stated or defended by the Resolution, we can, on the one hand, stop attacking this straw man, and on the other, move on to more rigorous thinking. At the heart of the Resolution is the recognition of the difference between the workers' councils, organs of the working class, indissolubly linked to the realisation of the communist programme, and the territorial “soviets”, organs of the transitional state, regrouping the whole of society without the exploiters, and within which the workers' councils will intervene to impose their class dictatorship. In this context the following questions have to be posed:

• should we erase this distinction by diluting the class in the whole membership of the transitional society (all the non-exploiting toiling strata)?
• or, should we insist that the proletariat, faced with the transitional state, will say "The state – c'est nous."?
• or, on the contrary, should the proletariat be on guard against the identification of its class interests with the state?
• should the proletariat attempt to dominate the state or are the socialist revolution and the state identical?

These difficult questions are new to the workers' movement since the experience of the October revolution. Of course marxists before 1917 wrote about the state in general and about the state in the period of transition, but these  precise questions were never really posed in marxist literature before 1917 and could not have been; still less can we find a complete answer to these questions right now.

Taking the draft Resolution as a point of departure, we would like to reply to some of the objections comrades have raised.

The objections

1. This is not a new question. “Orthodox” marxism has an answer to the problems of the state in the period of transition.

Marx and Engels wrote about the state as a social institution in the different stages of history to concretise the theory of historical materialism. Their main aim was to denounce mystifications about the state being “the reality of the moral Idea”, the incarnation of “Reason” in Hegelian terms, the incarnation of “Evil” in anarchist terms, or more generally a social abstraction which existed eternally. In The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels attempted to show that the state was not eternal but:

"the product of 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."

The state is the superstructural expression of a lost and now alienated social unity. It is the official sanction, the legalisation of social relations in favour of the economically dominant class.

But Marx and Engels never made a systematic synthesis of the state in history (except to some extent in relation to its origins); the richness of their thought lies essentially in the answers they made to political adversaries and the analysis of the historic events of their time. Although they developed a general vision of the state in exploiting societies – and we shall come back to this in order to reply to comrades who reduce this to unilateral simplifications – on the state in the period of transition to socialism we will only find a few scattered passages in their writings, the main aim of which was to draw the lessons from the struggles of 1848 and from the Commune.

Concerning the post-revolutionary state, Marx and Engels established the general framework of the discussion without being able to clarify all its aspects. In the first place their writings after the Commune established the fundamental point that it was necessary to completely des-troy the bourgeois state, to reject the illusory idea that the proletariat could seize hold of the old state machine. This was the "precondition for any peoples' revolution" wrote Marx in April 1871. Marx and Engels posed the historical necessity of a period of transition from capitalism to socialism, which would be opened up by the proletarian revolution. In this period of transition, when society was still divided into classes, a state would inevitably arise and it would not disappear until classes disappeared. During this period of social transformation, the proletariat would constitute itself as the ruling class: "The state, ie the proletariat organised as the ruling class" (The Communist Manifesto). However, Engels wrote that:

"the state is… at best, an evil inherited by the proletariat"

Furthermore, this state referred to was only a 'semi-state', a 'Commune-state' to the extent that it was the state of the 'immense majority', the realisation of democracy. Marx and Engels were led to make their ideas more precise in the analysis of the Commune, but this brief experience in one city was not sufficient to provide answers to all the problems. If the Commune had generalised across France, the vague idea of territorial 'Communes' would have made way for more precise formulations about the relationship be-tween the proletariat – a minority class – and the immense majority of the population.

In Marx and Engels' work we find a general framework, ideas about economic policy, certain warnings about the state, but it would be a waste of time to try to find even in their clearest thoughts a complete answer to the problem of the state after revolution.

In State and Revolution, Lenin reaffirmed marxist thought on the state as it had been formulated up to 1914; he makes a resume of it, highlighting certain aspects, but he didn't go beyond it and couldn't have gone beyond it prior to the experience of the October revolution. The whole book is aimed against the IInd International; against the idea of the gradual and peaceful conquest of the bourgeois state. While we must recognise the importance of this work, the debate in the ICC at the moment is not about whether or not we should destroy the bourgeois state! As for the transitional state, Lenin relied on Engels and saw it essentially in the light of the struggle against the bourgeoisie:

Engels: "As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one's adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a free peoples' state."

Lenin: "The toilers need a state only to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat is in a position to direct this suppression."

Lenin: "The proletariat absolutely must wield state power in order to suppress the resistance of the exploiters."

In the light of the experience of the revolutionary wave of 1917 we can see that the sole raison d'etre of the transitional state is not just the struggle against the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, the insurrection is actually carried out by the proletariat alone, by the armed workers' councils, without a full "state". And even though the necessity for an extended civil war poses the question of the state, it would be wrong to conclude that during the civil war the state is simply a military question or that once the civil war is over the whole problem will be resolved. On the relationship between the proletariat and the other members of transitional society, Lenin only had some general formulations:

"the proletariat must organise all the toiling and exploited economic order."

"democracy for the immense majority of the people."

He talked quite correctly about "the political rule of the proletariat, its dictatorship, power shared with none", but added that this would “rely directly on the armed force of the masses”, or on "…the combined force of the majority 2L the people, of the workers and the peasants". The erroneous idea of "the workers' and peasants' state", the "democratic state" was not gone into in any depth in Lenin's book. The distinction between the proletariat and the other members of society was not dealt with theoretically because its importance had not been shown in practice. or Because of such omissions, or rather because of the hazy theoretical conception about the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the general population, Lenin could have a lot of illusions about the “easy” functioning of the transitional state. His ideas about the simplification of the functions of state power, about a state which would lose all hierarchical and privileged characteristics, now seem, alas, very naive in the face of historical experience.

Again, Lenin based himself on Engels in Anti-Dühring:

"The proletariat seizes state power and turns the means of production into state property. But in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat (!) 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 – that is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state."

Lenin remarked that this was the proof that the state would wither away of itself! Later on, this same erroneous idea would serve to support the use of state capitalism by the “workers' state” in Russia (as Lenin had already said in State and Revolution: "a single state trust").

The tragic irony of State and Revolution is that the two main dangers of the state which Lenin underlined in his book (thinking that the few measures of the Commune would be enough to eliminate them) – the state as an armed force separate from the population, and bureaucratisation – would be exactly the ones which developed the most after the October revolution. To summarise then, marxism is not and cannot be an “orthodoxy”. Above all, on-the question of the post-revolutionary state, it will do no good to just take the letter of all the formulations of Marx, Engels and Lenin, or to pretend that all questions on the period of transition are completely answered in their work. It's not a question of “innovating marxism”, but of completing the theoretical gaps and correcting errors of the past that are a result of the limits of the historic period prior to 1914. To try to stick to an orthodox marxism is simply to deny the debate and to imprison oneself in a sterile dead-end which is completely alien to the method of marxism.

2. You are too obsessed by the Russian Revolution.

The foundation stone of historical materialism is the capacity to synthesize the lessons of historical experience. Certain comrades think that it is enough to repeat after Marx and Engels the lessons of the Commune, but we find very little that is concrete in the objections which refer to the October revolution and, in general, to the whole experience of the revolutionary wave of 1917-27. People talk about the “Commune-state” as though there had never been such a thing as the “Soviet-state”. And for others, it's easier to turn their backs and take refuge in the sphere of abstractions.

Obsessed with the concrete experience and failure of the Russian revolution? Yes, and with good reason! What are the main aspects of the experience of Russia, of the state of transition?

a) Against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat carried out the insurrection on its own. Directly after the seizure of power we see the Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets nominate their “central committee”, essentially the emanation of the working class, although from the beginning there were soldiers of peasant origin in it. These first soviets seem to be close to the idea held by certain comrades that the state will be the emanation of one class only, but in reality this wasn't yet the state. Very quickly, at the end of 1917, the territorial soviets generalised across the country and the Congress of Soviets to which the central government was responsible became an amalgam of the whole population, without effective distinction between the working class and the whole of soviet democracy.

Later on in the Constitution of the Soviet State, delegates from the peasants were elected in the ratio of 1 to 125,000 peasants and the delegates from workers in the towns 1 to 25,000 workers. This measure did not really ensure a numerical hegemony and still less a political hegemony, which fell into the hands of a state-party. But this measure, in its spirit rather than its form, showed the concerns and difficulties of the transitional state.

The transitional state, the state of the territorial soviets, of democracy for the immense majority, will clearly not be composed solely of the workers' councils. The needs behind the formation of a state will make themselves felt very quickly and will demand a much clearer distinction of the workers' councils within the territorial soviets so that the working class can realise its pro-gramme.

b) During the course of the revolution, the unitary organs of the class (councils, factory committees) became more and more marginal in favour of the state organs; the revolutionary party of the working class became a state party, a spoke in the wheel of the territorial state. Far from seeing the concretisation of State and Revolution, the opposite happened: the strengthening of the state, of its power over the means of production outside the working class, the development of a privileged bureaucracy which managed the economy.

c) The different measures taken during the Russian revolution were evidence of an enormous confusion and of constant zig-zags. To the extent that a general line emerged, it was state capitalism under the auspices of the “workers' state”. The state of Russia embarked upon “economic emulation”, one-man management to increase productivity, and finally, the militarisation of labour. The tendency towards socialism, characterised by production to satisfy immediate needs and to raise the living standards of the working class was never able to develop, and the dominant tendency was more and more production for accumulation.

The soviet state became the Russian national state and this whole social, economic, and political process culminated in a confrontation between the state, which had come out of the revolution, and working class, in strikes and at Kronstadt. The soviet state and the party which had  been integrated into it became the stronghold of the counter-revolution.

 In the face of all of this, there are comrades who think it is enough to simply reply that the October revolution was isolated internationally and therefore condemned. They are kicking in an open door because we all agree on this; it is in the ICC platform. But to say that Russia was caught in a limited and finally impossible situation and stop there is to abandon any attempt to draw any lessons from the Russian revolution. It's a way of avoiding the problem. "How" the internal contradictions expressed themselves within the revolutionary bastion sheds some light on what we must be careful of tomorrow when, indeed, the revolution will have a chance to spread.

Other comrades think they can reply simply by saying: in Russia the Bolshevik Party took power in place of the class. Why do these comrades think they have to repeat the platform to us? We are firmly convinced of this. But is it enough?

That socialism can't be brought about by a minority of the class – this is another open door. The theoretical problem we are faced with is the following: it's not so much the Bolshevik Party which determined the degeneration of the territorial state, but rather the integration of the party into the state machine, so that it identified itself with the needs of the state, which led to the downfall of the party and will lead to the downfall of the working class tomorrow.

The fact that the class party was in the state shooting down the workers, instead of being with the working class at Kronstadt, without doubt definitively weakened the working class and the International. But the problem is still: Does the transitional state = the working class? Is it that "the state, c'est nous"?

In the debate on the unions in 1920, it was precisely this question which was really at issue. Against Trotsky who said clearly "the state is the class", and against the Workers' Opposition who said "the state will be the class if the unions are integrated into it", only Lenin, despite a completely inadequate analysis at best, said that the state – with or without the unions – is not “us”.

Obviously we can't reply to this debate in the same terms as the past… the whole debate was off-course from the outset because the working class was equated with the unions and not the workers' councils which had been emptied of most of their proletarian content by then as a result of their integration into the state, etc. But behind the "letter" of the debate there remains the general spirit: will the state be “us” by definition or must we take measures to defend the proletariat's dictatorship over the state?

We can say that today in the ICC we are all more or less agreed that the working class will be the only class armed as a class during the period of transition: this is a new idea for “orthodoxy” a new distinction in marxism which has always talked vaguely about “the general arming of the people”. Why this crucial position for protecting the autonomy of the class if it isn't against the state? One has to take one's reasoning to its conclusions.

If the problem can be resolved simply by saying that the party won't take power, why then talk about the arming of the proletariat and the rejection of relations of violence between the state and the class? If “the state, c'est nous” then Lenin was right to talk about the “general arming of the people” without any distinction, and then we are leaving the door wide open to the Kronstadts of tomorrow.

Only the resolution on the period of transition responds in a coherent way to this concern with the armed political autonomy of the working class, a condition sine qua non of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

3. "It is a given class, the most powerful class (whether it derives its power from an economic base like exploiting classes or from its consciousness and its organisation, like the proletariat) which sets up a state structure appropriate to the defence of its interests"[1]

If we follow this reasoning to its conclusion, we would end up erasing the specificity of the whole transitional state and the wholly new historical evolution opened up in the period of transition to socialism. For M. and S. it matters little whether a ruling class is an exploiting class (a class dominating the economic structure) or whether it is a class which can only rule politically! Its relationship with the state remains the same. According to them in the post-revolutionary period, the state and the workers' councils will be two different functions of the same class, functions which by definition can't be antagonistic. This idea is put forward even more clearly in the text by RC, for whom "the state is the organ, the prolongation of the class"... "The workers' state is the historically discovered form in which and through which the proletarians regroup and act to put forward their general class interests."

This is where the confusion can lead us – to an open apology for the state! If there is a “historically discovered” form for defending the immediate and historic interests of the working class, it is and will remain throughout the whole revolutionary and transitional period the workers' councils and not the state. The state will have to wither away, giving ground to the wider and wider extension of the workers' councils which will become the organisation of "free and equal producers". The workers’ councils don't wither away, they expand to integrate the whole of society and one day become "the administration of things" in a classless society. YB/EM'S idea that the workers' councils run the risk of degenerating isn't very illuminating. The working class doesn't degenerate: the workers' councils may disappear in a defeat but the counter-revolution isn't the working class. The degeneration of the revolution will be expressed by the strengthening of the state, and the weakening of the autonomy of the workers' councils.

To go back to this apology for the state as "the form of organisation of the proletariat", to this simplistic identification between class and state in all historical circumstances, let's look at what distinguishes the "semi-state" in the period of transition from other states in history.

For the first time in history we shall have a state dominated by a class that is not economically dominant, a non-exploiting class: this is a living contradiction. If there were only proletarians in post-revolutionary society, there would be no state at all. Unfortunately, the transitional society will still be divided into classes, and there will be a partial survival of the law of value, private property, and exchange. And a class which can't draw any privileges from economic laws, a class whose historic mission is to eliminate all private property in the means of production, has to dominate this society politically and be the revolutionary class. The ruling class will be the revolutionary class after as well as before its revolution! It's a situation which is completely unique in history. And people still think it's enough to say:

Historically the only states which ever existed belonged to exploiting classes, but we are postulating the rule of the proletariat, a non-exploiting, though ruling class[2]

It's easy enough to postulate! In the past an exploiting class necessarily dominated the social superstructure to the extent that it dominated the economic structure through blind laws of which it was itself unconscious; hence the identification between the interests of the economically dominant classes and the state. When its economic domination weakened, the exploiting class took refuge in the strengthening of the state, until the point arrived in the decadence of the last exploiting society, capitalism, when the state took on the function of managing the economy (state capitalism).

In the future, the proletarian ruling class won't have its own economy to set up, or any economic forces on which to base itself, nor any blind laws working in its favour. On the contrary, such blind laws as survive will work against the politically dominant class. The ruling class won't be the master of the economic structures but all the same it will have to politically dominate social organisation so that its dictatorship can transform everything. In this situation the interests of the ruling class, the proletariat, can't automatically be identified with the state; above all this class will have to protect itself against any errors in its economic policy, errors which will manifest themselves in the strengthening of forces antagonistic to the class, by a strengthening of the expression of these classes in the state. This class, in contrast to all previous ruling classes, must guard against the usurping of economic management by the state “in its name”. It must struggle to constantly reduce the role of, and need for, the state.

4. "Who will have the final responsibility and authority, to close a factory, to open a factory, to institute a new work method, or to institute a new product? Surely only the proletariat?

If we could reply with the same happy certainty that "only the proletariat" will dominate the economy, we could stop worrying our heads over the period of transition. But although we will be able to expropriate big capital and most industrial enterprises, there still remains a whole sector of small production, artisans, agriculture, still dominated by private property. However large this sector is in this or that bastion, wherever the revolution first breaks out, these sectors will still exist on a global scale and they will in some ways oppose the suppression of their privileges. Moreover, as the comrades say themselves, decadent capitalism has not created the basis for a society of abundance directly after the revolution. We have got to deal with those sectors because we can't do away with them immediately; but to avoid further difficulties in areas where some comrades see no problem, it still has to be said that the proletariat won't “own” the factories, the means of production, either individually or collectively as a class. The proletariat possesses nothing and can't create islands of socialism. On the contrary, there has to be global planning of the needs of society, and this isn't just a question of having a “monopoly on spare parts”. The proletariat will have to resist making concessions which could reverse the tendency towards the immediate satisfaction of the needs of society and lay the basis for an economy where the productive forces are developed for their own sake and we draw the benefits from this in some hazy “tomorrow”. The economic policy of the proletariat won't run on its own wheels. If the class simply plays the role of controlling the means of production such as they exist today, it won't be able to socialise the means of production for society as a whole; it can only liberate itself once all economic laws have been abolished.

When comrades S. and M. ask "from where will this third force (their way of seeing the counter-revolution coming through the state) derive its material force, from where will it derive its resources and its consciousness from a historical and determinist point of view?", they are asking, in fact, where the danger of the state opposing itself to the working class comes from. Since the policy of the class is not predetermined, but is constantly adapting itself, any error will manifest itself in a strengthening of the economic structures which the proletariat is trying to eliminate from history. The state will strengthen itself as the expression of economic structures which haven't yet been socialised, of those privileges which still remain, and as the expression of the planning of difficulties an economy which is still heterogeneous. It's fine for those who deny any problems in advance, but the difficulties of the greatest social transformation in history can't be resolved by simplistic formulas.

5. "The class = the state"

We’ve already seen that this identification of the proletariat with the transitional state, as though recent history had never happened, really can't stand up; although in the past the interests of the ruling class were completely realised within the state, this doesn't apply to the future.

But to defend their objections, the comrades have gone off in search of new axioms to add to the historical materialist view of the state in history. Thus we are told that the state is a motor-force in history – in this upside-down theory the superstructure determines the economic base – or that the state is a progressive force when the class which dominates the economy is in its ascendant phase. This theory is, in fact, linked to the first since it takes the active role of the state as proof that the state goes through ascendant and decadent phases just like classes. On the contrary, although a given form of the state can be more or less appropriate to the rule of a class (the republic being the most appropriate to the ascendant bourgeoisie, for example), the state by its nature follows the transformation in technology and the productive forces. Not only does the state remain vulnerable to retrograde classes even in an ascendant epoch, it in no way regroups the “vanguard” of the ruling class. It is constantly subjected to pressure from the most advanced sector of the ruling class linked directly to the process of production. In any case, it's hard to see why people should try to find this needle in a haystack because the period of transition won't have a stable mode of production, thus neither an ascendant nor a decadent phase.

In the hope that other comrades will complete these remarks, we can conclude by saying that it's not surprising that those who identify class and state in the period of transition, those who sing hymns to the state or who see everything as a bed of roses, should make the mistake of seeing our ideas as “anarchist”. On the contrary, while recognising the inevitability of the transitional state but affirming that it must be dominated by the working class, we don't make the state the bearer of the communist programme. The idea that “the state, c'est nous” means diluting the workers' councils in the territorial soviets; means reducing. working class autonomy instead of strengthening it, and disarming the class in the face of the dangers of the transition period. Just as there is no “proletarian, economy” or “proletarian society” or “proletarian culture”, there is no “proletarian state”.

J.A. Révolution Internationale/France June 1977

The platform of the ICC contains the essential acquisitions of the workers' movement concerning the conditions and content of the communist revolution. These acquisitions can be summarised as follows:

1. All hitherto existing societies have been based on an insufficient development of the productive forces in relation to the needs of men. Because of this, with the exception of primitive communism, they have all been divided into social classes with antagonistic interests. This division has led to the appearance of an organ, the state, whose specific function has been to prevent these antagonisms from pulling society apart.
2. Because of the progress in the development of the productive forces stimulated by capitalism, it has become both possible and necessary to transcend capitalism with a society based on the full development of the productive forces, on the abundant satisfaction of human needs: communism. Such a society will no longer be divided into social classes and because of this will have no need of a state.
3. As in the past, between the two stable societies of capitalism and communism there will be a period of transition during which the old social relations will disappear and new ones put in their place. During this period, social classes and conflicts between them will continue to exist, and so therefore will an organ whose function is to prevent these conflicts endangering the existence of society: the state.
4. The experience of the working class has shown that there can be no organic continuity between this state and the state in capitalist society. For the period of transition from capitalism to communism to get under way, the capitalist state has to be completely destroyed on a world scale.
5. The world wide destruction of the political power of the bourgeoisie is by accompanied by the global seizure of power by the proletariat, the only class capable of creating communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat over society will be based on the general organisations of the class: the workers' councils. Only the working class in its entirety can exert power and under-take the communist transformation of society: in contrast to previous revolutionary classes it cannot delegate power to any particular institution or to any political party, including the workers' parties themselves.
6. f) The full exercise of power by the proletariat presupposes:
   • the general arming of the class,
   • a categorical rejection of any subordination to outside forces,
   • the rejection of any relations of violence within the class.
7. The dictatorship of the proletariat will carry out its role as the lever of social transformation:
   • by expropriating the old exploiting classes,
   • by progressively socialising the means of production,
   • by conducting an economic policy which aims at the abolition of wage labour and commodity production and the growing satisfaction of human needs.

The platform of the ICC, basing itself on the experience of the Russian revolution, underlines "the complexity and seriousness of the problem of the relationship between the class and the state in the period of transition". It considers that "in the coming period, the proletariat and revolutionaries cannot evade this 'problem, but 'must make every effort to resolve it." This resolution is part of that effort.

I. The specificity of the transitional period capitalism to communism

The period of transition from capitalism to communism has a certain number of features in common with previous transition periods. Thus, as in the past:

• the period of transition from capitalism to communism does not have its own mode of production, but is an intertwining of two modes of production.
• during this period there is a slow development of the seeds of the new mode of production to the detriment of the old one, until the new completely supplants the old.
• the dying away of the old society does not automatically mean the maturation of the new one; it is simply the precondition for this maturation. In particular, although the decadence of capitalism expresses the fact that the productive forces can no longer expand within the framework of capitalist society, these productive forces are still insufficient for communism and therefore have to be further developed during the period of transition.

The second common feature which should be pointed out is that all periods of transition point towards the society which is going to emerge at the end. To the extent that communism is fundamentally different from all other societies, the transition to communism has a number of unprecedented characteristics:

1. It is no longer a transition from one exploiting society to another, from one form of property to another, but leads to the end of all exploitation and of all property.
2. It is not carried out by an exploiting class which owns the means of production, but by an exploited class which has never possessed and will never – not even collectively – possess its own economy or means of production.
3. It does not culminate in the conquest of political power by a revolutionary class which has already established its economic rule over society; on the contrary it begins with and is conditioned by this conquest of power. The only rule that the proletariat can exert over society is of a political and not of an economic nature.
4. The political power of the proletariat will not aim to stabilise an existing state of affairs, preserve particular privileges or maintain the existence of class divisions; on the contrary it will seek to continually overturn the existing state of affairs, to abolish all privileges and class divisions.

II. The state and its role in history

Following Engels' own terminology:

• the state is not a power imposed on society from outside, but is a product of society at a given stage in its development;
• it is a sign of the fact that society has entered into insoluble contradictions, is rent into an irreconcilable conflict between classes with antagonistic economic interests;
• it has the function of moderating the conflict, of maintaining it within the limits of “order”, so that the antagonistic classes and society itself are not consumed in sterile struggles;
• having emerged from society, it places itself above it, and constantly tends to conserve itself and become a force alien to society;
• its role of preserving “order” identifies the state with the dominant relations of production and thus with the class which embodies these relations: the economically dominant class, which guarantees its political domination through the state.

Marxism has thus never considered the state to be the ex nihilo creation of the ruling class, but as the product, the organic secretion of the whole of society. The identification between the economically dominant class and the state is fundamentally the result of their common interest in preserving the existing relations of production. Similarly in the marxist conception, one can never consider the state as a revolutionary agent, an instrument of historical progress. For marxism:

• the class struggle is the motor force of history;

• whereas the function of the state is to moderate the class struggle, and in particular to the detriment of the exploited class.

The only logical conclusion which can be drawn from these premises is that in any society the state can only be a conservative institution par excellence. Thus, while the state in all class societies is an instrument which is indispensable to the productive process in that it guarantees the stability needed if production is to continue, it can only play this role because of its function as an agent of social order. In the course of history the state has operated as a conservative and reactionary factor of the first order, an obstacle which the evolution and development of the productive forces has constantly come up against.

In order to be able to assume its role as an agent of security and of conservation the state has based itself on a material force, on violence. In past societies, it has had an exclusive monopoly of all existing forces of violence: the police, the army, the prisons. Since its origin lies in the historic necessity of violence, since the conditions for its own development are to be found in its coercive functions, the state tends to become an independent and supplementary factor of violence in the interests of its own preservation. Violence is transformed from a means into an end in itself, maintained and cultivated by the state; by its very nature this violence is antithetical to any form of society which tends to go beyond violence as a way of regulating relations between human beings.

III. The state in the period of transition to communism

During the period of transition the division of society into classes with antagonistic interests will give rise to a state. This state will have the task of guaranteeing the basis of this transitional society both against any attempt to restore the power of the old exploiting classes and against any disintegration of the social fabric resulting from conflicts between the non-exploiting classes which still subsist.

The state of the period of transition has a certain number of differences from previous states:

• for the first time in history, it is not the state of an exploiting minority for the oppression of the majority, but is on the contrary, the state of the majority of exploited and non-exploiting classes against the old ruling minority;
• it is not the emanation of astable society and relations of production, but on the contrary, of a society whose permanent characteristic is a constant transformation on a greater scale than anything else in history;
• it cannot identify itself with any economically dominant class because there is no such class in the period of transition;
• in contrast to states in past societies, the transitional state does not have a monopoly of arms. For all these reasons marxists have talked about a “semi-state” when referring to the organ which will arise in the transition period.

On the other hand, this state still retains a number of the characteristics of past states. In particular, it will still be the guardian of the status quo, the task of which will be to codify, legalise and sanction an already-existing economic order, to give it a legal force which has to be acknowledged by every member of society. In this sense the state remains a fundamentally conservative organ which will tend:

• not to favour social transformation but to act against it;
• to maintain the conditions on which its own life depends: the division of society into classes;
• to detach itself from society, to impose itself on society and perpetuate its own existence and its own privileges;
• to bind its existence to the coercion and violence which it will of necessity use during the period of transition, and to try to maintain this method of regulating social relations.

This is why from the beginning, marxists have always considered the state of the period of transition to be a “necessary scourge” whose “worst sides” the proletariat will have to “lop off as much as possible”. For all these reasons, and in contrast to what has happened in the past, the revolutionary class cannot identify itself with the state in the period of transition.

To begin with, the proletariat is not an economically dominant class; either in capitalist society or the transitional society. During the transition period it will possess neither an economy nor any property, not even collectively: it will struggle for the abolition of economy and property.

Secondly, the proletariat, the communist class, the subject which transforms the economic and social conditions of the transitional society, will necessarily come up against an organ whose task is to perpetuate these conditions. This is why one cannot talk about a “socialist state”, a “workers’ state”, or a “state of the proletariat” during the period of transition.

This antagonism between the proletariat and the state manifests itself both on the immediate and the historical level.

On the immediate level, the proletariat will have to oppose the encroachments and pressure of a state which is the representative of a society divided into antagonistic classes.

On the historic level, the necessary disappearance of the state in communist society, which is a perspective which marxism has always defended, will not be the result of the state's own dynamic, but the fruit of the pressure mounted on it by the proletariat, which will progressively deprive it of all its attributes as the movement towards a classless society unfolds.

For these reasons, while the proletariat will have to use the state during the transition period, it must retain a complete independence from it. In this sense the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be confused with the state. Between the two there is a constant relation of force which the proletariat will have to maintain in its favour; the dictator-ship of the proletariat is not exerted through or in the state, but over the state.

IV. Concrete relationships between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state in the transition period

The experience of the Paris Commune, and of the revolution in Russia during which the state became the main agent of the counter-revolution, have shown the need for a certain number of measures which will make it possible:

• to limit the “worst sides” of the state,
• to guarantee the full independence of the revolutionary class,
• for the proletariat to exert its dictatorship over the state.

a) The limitation of the most pernicious characteristics of the transitional state is effected by the fact that:

• the state is not constituted on the basis of a specialised stratum, the political parties, but on the basis of delegates elected by local territorial councils and revocable by them;
• the whole organisation of the state categorically excludes the participation of exploiting classes and strata, who will be deprived of all political rights;
• the remuneration of the members of the state, the functionaries, can never be more than that of the workers.

b) The independence of the working class is expressed by:

• its programme;
• the existence of its class parties, which in contrast to bourgeois parties, can neither be integrated into the state, nor take on any state function without degenerating and completely losing their function in the class;
• the self-organisation of the proletariat as a class in the workers' councils, which are distinct from all state institutions;
• the arming of the proletariat.

This independence is defended against the state and the other classes in society:

• by the fact that the proletariat will forbid them from intervening in its own activity and organisations;
• by the fact that the proletariat will retain its capacity to defend its immediate interests through a number of means including strikes.

c) The dictatorship of the proletariat over the state and society as a whole is based essentially:

• on the fact that the other classes are forbidden to organise themselves as classes;
• on the proletariat's hegemonic participation within all the organisations upon which the state is founded;
• on the fact that the proletariat is the only armed class.

IInd Congress of the ICC

We must take into account the impossibility of arriving at a transitional phase with notions that are fixed, complete, which don't allow any logical contradiction and which exclude any idea of transition.[1]

A) The period of transition from
capitalism to communism

1) The succession of modes of production; slavery, feudalism, capitalism, did not, properly speaking, undergo periods of transition. The new relations upon which the progressive social form was being built were created inside the old society. The old system and the new coexisted (until the second supplanted the first) and this cohabitation was possible because between these different societies there was only an.antagonism of form, all remained in essence exploitative societies. The passage from capitalism to communism differs fundamentally from all previous societies. Communism cannot emerge within capitalism because between the two societies there is not only a difference of form, but equally a difference of content. Communism is no longer a society of exploitation, and the motive force of production is no longer the satisfaction of the needs of a minority. This difference of content excludes the coexistence of the two of them and creates the necessity for a period of transition during which the new relations and the new society are developed outside capitalism.

2) Between capitalist society and communist society there is a period of revolutionary transformation from one to the other. This transitional period is not only inevitable but also necessary to complete the immature material and spiritual conditions inherited by the proletariat from capitalism (an immaturity which precludes the immediate establishment of communism at the end of the revolution). This period is characterised by the fusion of two social processes, one dismantling the relations and categories belonging to the system in decline, the other building relations and categories relevant to the new system. The specificity of the epoch of transition resides in this: the proletariat which has conquered political power (by the revolution) and guaranteed its domination (by its dictatorship) engages in the systematic and uninterrupted overthrow of the relations of production and the form of consciousness and organisation dependent on those relations. During the intermediate period, using political and economic measures, the working class develops the productive forces left as the heritage of capitalism while under-mining the basis of the old system and laying the basis of new social relations. The proletariat will produce and distribute goods in such a way as to allow all the producers to realise the full satisfaction, the free expansion, of their needs.

B) The political regime in
the period of transition

3) For capitalism, the substitution of its privileges for feudal privileges – the epoch of bourgeois revolutions – was able to accommodate itself to a lasting coexistence between capitalist and feudal states and even pre-feudal states without altering or suppressing the basis of the new system. The bourgeoisie, on the basis of a gradual attainment of its economic position, did not have to destroy the state apparatus of the dominant class; it was able to gradually take it over. It did not have to suppress the bureaucracy, nor the police, nor the permanent armed forces; it simply had to subordinate these instruments of oppression to its own ends, because its political revolution (which was not always indispensable) merely concretised an economic hegemony and juridically substituted one form of exploitation for another. Things are different for the proletariat, which, having no economic base and no particular interest, cannot be content with taking over the old state apparatus. The period of transition cannot begin until after the proletarian revolution, whose essence is the global destruction of the political domination of capitalism and, primarily, of bourgeois nation states. The seizure of general political power in society by the working class, the institution of the global dictatorship of the proletariat, precedes, conditions and guarantees the advance of the economic and social transformation.

4) Communism is a society without classes, and, consequently, without a state. The period of transition, which does not really develop until after the triumph of the revolution at the international level, is a dynamic period which tends towards the disappearance of classes, but which still experiences the division into classes and the persistence of divergent interests and antagonisms in society. As such, there must inevitably arise a dictatorship and a form of political state. The proletariat cannot make up for the temporary insufficiency of the productive forces left over by capitalism without resorting to constraint. In fact, the transitional epoch is characterised by the necessity to discipline and regiment the evolution of production, to expand production in such a way as to allow the establishment of a communist society. The danger of the restoration of the bourgeoisie is also a result of this insufficiency of production and of the productive forces. The dictatorship and the use of the state are indispensable to the proletariat, which is faced with the necessity to direct the use of violence to root out the privileges of the bourgeoisie, to dominate it politically, and to organise in a new way the forces of production that are gradually being liberated from the fetters of capitalism.

C) Origins and role of the state in history 

5) In all societies divided into classes, in order to prevent the classes with opposed and irreconcilable interests from destroying each other, and at the same time consuming the whole of society, there arise superstructures, institutions, whose pinnacle is the state. The state is born to maintain class conflicts within certain limits. This does not mean that it can manage to reconcile antagonistic interests on a terrain of “democratic” understanding, nor that it can play the role of “mediator” between classes. As the state arises from the need to discipline class antagonisms, but as at the same time it arises in the midst of class conflict, it is in general the state of the most powerful class, which has imposed itself politically and militarily on the historic balance of forces, and which, through the intermediary of the state, imposes its domination.

"The state is the special organisation of a power" (Engels), it is the centralised exercise of violence by one class against the others, and has the task of providing society with a political framework which conforms to the interests of the ruling class. The state is the organ which maintains the cohesion of society, not by realising a so-called “common good” (which is completely non-existent), but by carrying out all the tasks involved in the rule of a given class, at various levels: economic, juridical, political, and ideological. Its own role is not only one of administration, but above all, the maintenance, by violence, of the conditions of domination of the ruling class over the dominated classes: it is to assure the extension, the development, the conservation of specific relations of production, against the dangers of restoration or destruction.

6)Whatever the forms that society, classes, and the state may take, the role of the latter always remains fundamentally the same: the assurance of the domination of one class over the others. The state is not then "a conservative organ by nature". It is revolutionary in certain periods, conservative or counter-revolutionary in others because, far from being an autonomous factor in history, it is the instrument, the extension, the form of organisation of social classes which are born, mature and disappear. The state is tightly bound to the cycle of the class and so is proved to be progressive or reactionary according to the historic relation of the class to the development of the productive forces and of society (depending on whether it favours or acts as a fetter on such development).

It is necessary to be wary of holding on to a strictly 'instrumentalist' vision of the state. By definition a class weapon in the immediate conflicts of society, the state is affected in turn by those same conflicts. Far from being simply the tributary of the will of the ruling class, the state apparatus sustains the pressure of various classes and various interests. Both the economic framework and the political and military relations of force intervene to determine the actions of the state (and the possibilities for its evolution). It is in this sense that the state "is never in advance of the existing state of affairs". In fact, if in certain periods the state allows progressive classes to exercise political power in order to extend their relations of production, it is constrained – in these same periods and in pursuit of the same aims – to defend the new society against internal and external dangers, to bind together scattered aspects of production, of distribution, of social, cultural and ideological life; and it must do this with means which do not always and necessarily emerge from the programme of the revolutionary class, from the basic tendencies of the nascent society.

Thus, it is necessary to consider that the formula 'the state is the organ of a class' is not, formally speaking, a response per se to the phenomena which have determined it, the philosopher's stone which lies at the bottom of all enquiry; but it does mean that the relations between class and state are determined by the function of a given class[2]

D) The need for soviets as the state power of the proletariat

7) The state which succeeds the bourgeois state is a new form of organisation of the proletariat, by virtue of which it transforms itself from an oppressed class into a ruling class and exercises its revolutionary dictatorship over society. The territorial soviets (of workers, poor peasants, soldiers…) as the state power of the proletariat, signify:

• the attempt by the proletariat, as the only class which is the bearer of socialism, to struggle for the organisation of all the exploited classes and strata;
• the continuation, with the help of the soviet system, of the class struggle against the bourgeoisie, which remains most powerful class even at the beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat, even after its expropriation and political subordination.

The proletariat still needs a state apparatus, as much for repressing the desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie as for directing the mass of the population in the struggle against the capitalist class and for the establishment of communism. There is no need to idealise this situation:

The state is only a transitional institution which will be used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one's adversaries by force; it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people's state: so long as the proletariat still uses the state, it does not use it in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries.[3]

8) A product of the division of society into classes, of the irreconcilable nature of class antagonisms, the dictatorship of the proletariat is distinguished however from the power (and thus the state) of past ruling classes, by the following characteristics:

a) The proletariat does not exercise its dictatorship with a view to building a new society of oppression and exploitation. In consequence, it has no need, like old ruling classes, to hide its aims, to mystify other classes by presenting its dictatorship as the reign of "liberty, equality, and fraternity". The proletariat resolutely affirms that its dictatorship is a class dictatorship; that the organs of its political power are the organs which serve by their activity the proletarian programme, to the exclusion of the programmes and interests of all other classes. It is in this sense that Marx, Engels, Lenin and the fraction spoke – and had to speak – not of a state "of the majority of exploited and non-exploiting classes" (the encapsulation of the intermediate formations in the state is not synonymous with a division of power), not of a "non-class" state, or a "multi-class" state (ideological and aberrant concepts), but of a proletarian state, a state of the working class, which will be one of the indispensable forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

b) The domination of the majority, organised and directed by the proletariat, over the minority, dispossessed of their prerogatives, renders useless the maintenance of a bureaucratic and military machine; the proletariat puts in its place both its self-arming – to smash all bourgeois resistance – and a political form which allows it (and eventually the whole of humanity) to progressively take over the management of society. It suppresses the privileges inherent in the functioning of the old states (levelling of salaries, rigorous control of functionaries through election and permanent revocability) and the also the separation, enforced by parliamentarism, between legislative and executive organs, From its formation, the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat ceases to be a state in the old sense of the term. For the bourgeois state is substituted the soviets, a semi-state, a commune-state; the organisation of the rule of the old class is replaced by institutions essentially different in principle.

E) Withering away or strengthening
of the state?

…if the state, instead of withering away, becomes more and more despotic, if the mandates of the working class bureaucratise themselves, while the bureaucracy erects itself over society, this is not only for secondary reasons, such as ideological survivals of the past, etc; it is by virtue of the inflexible necessity to form and maintain a privileged minority, as long as it is not possible to assure real equality[4]

Until the dis-appearance of the state, until its reabsorption in a society that administers itself, the state continues to have this negative aspect; a necessary instrument of historic evolution, it constantly threatens to direct this evolution not to the advantage of the producers, but against them and towards their massacre.

F) The proletariat and the state

10) The specific physiognomy of the workers' state devolves as follows:

• on the one hand, as a weapon directed against the expropriated class, it reveals its 'strong' side;
• on the other hand, as an organism called forth not to consolidate a new system of exploitation, but to abolish all exploitation, it uncovers its “weak” side (because in unfavourable conditions it tends to become the pole of attraction for capitalist privileges). That's why, whilst there cannot be antagonisms between the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state, they can arise between the proletariat and the transitional state. With the foundation of the proletarian state, the historic relationship between the ruling class and the state finds itself modified. It is necessary to consider that:

a) the conquering of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the existence of the workers' state, are conditions which are advantageous to the world proletariat, but not an irrevocable guarantee against any tendency to degeneration;

b) if the state is proletarian, this in no way means that there could be no need or possibility for the proletariat to enter into conflict with it, or that no opposition to state policies can be tolerated;

c) contrary to past states, the proletarian state cannot synthesize, concentrate in its apparatus, all the aspects of the dictatorship. The workers' state is profoundly different from the unitary organ of the class and the organ which regroups the vanguard of the proletariat. This differentiation operates because the state, in spite of the appearance of its greater material power, has, from the political point of view, less possibility of action. It is many times more vulnerable to the enemy than the other worker organs. The proletariat can only compensate for this weakness by its class politics, its party and the workers' councils through which it exercises an indispensable control over the state's activities, develops its class consciousness, and ensures the defence of its interests. The active presence of these organisms is the condition for the state to remain proletarian. The foundation of the dictatorship resides not only in the activities of the workers' councils and the party (proscription of violence within the class, permanent right to strike, autonomy of the councils and the party, freedom of tendencies in these organs), but also that these organs must have the means to resist an eventual metamorphosis of the state, should the latter tend not towards its disappearance, but towards the triumph of its despotic tendencies.

G) On the dictatorship and the tasks of the workers' state

11) The role and aim of capitalism determines the role and aim of its different state forms: to maintain oppression for the profit of the bourgeoisie. As for the proletariat, it is again the role and aim of the working class which will determine the role and aim of the proletarian state. But in this case, the policy of the state is no longer an indifferent element in determining its role (as was the case for the bourgeois and all preceding classes), but an element of the highest importance, on which will depend its basic function in the world revolution, and by definition, the conservation of its proletarian character.

12 ) A proletarian policy will direct economic policy towards communism only if that development is given an orientation diametrically opposed to that of capitalism, only if it aims for a progressive, constant raising of the living standards of the masses. To the degree that the political situation allows, the proletariat must press for a constant reduction in unpaid labour, which, in consequence, will inevitably lead to the rhythm of accumulation becoming considerably slower than that of the capitalist economy. Any other policy will necessarily lead to the transformation of the proletarian state into a new bourgeois state, following the pattern of events in Russia.

13) In any case, accumulation cannot be based on the necessity to combat the economic and military power of the capitalist states. The global revolution can only come out of the ability of the proletariat of all countries to fulfil its mission, out of the world-wide maturation of the political conditions for the insurrection. The working class cannot borrow from the bourgeoisie its vision of a "revolutionary war". In the period of the civil war the struggle will not be between proletarian states and capitalist states, but between the world proletariat and the international bourgeoisie. In the activity of the proletarian state, the economic and military sphere are necessarily secondary.

14) The transitional state is essentially an instrument for political domination and cannot be a substitute for the international class struggle. The workers' state must be considered a tool of the revolution, and never as a pole of concentration for it. If the proletariat follows the latter course, it will be forced to make compromises with its class enemies, whereas revolutionary necessity imperatively demands a ruthless struggle against all anti-proletarian groupings, even at the risk of aggravating the economic disorganisation resulting from the revolution. Any other perspective, which takes as its point of departure so-called “realism”, or a “law of unequal development”, can only undermine the foundations of the proletarian state, and lead to its transformation into a bourgeois state under the false guise of “socialism in one country”.

15) The dictatorship of the proletariat must ensure that the forms and procedures for control by the masses are many and varied, so as to prevent any shadow of degeneration and deformation of soviet power. It must have the aim of continuously weeding out “the tares of bureaucracy”, an evil excrescence which will inevitably accompany the period of transition. The safeguard of the revolution is the conscious activity of the working masses. The true political task of the proletariat lies in raising its own class consciousness, just as it transforms the consciousness of the whole of the labouring population. Compared to this task, the exercise of constraint through the policy and administrative organs of the workers' state is secondary (and the proletariat must take care to limit its most pernicious effects). The proletariat must not lose sight of this: that "so long as (it) still uses the state, it does not use it in the interests of freedom, but in order to hold down its adversaries".

S, RC, Ry, M, P, JL, RJ, AF.

The Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism
 

Resolution accepted at the 3rd Congress of the ICC (1979)

During the period of transition the division of society into classes with antagonistic interests will give rise to a state. Such a state will have the task of guaranteeing the advances of this transitional society both against any ex­ternal or internal attempt to restore the power of the old exploiting classes and main­taining the cohesion of society against any dis­integration of the social fabric resulting from conflicts between the non—exploiting classes which still subsist.

       The state of the period of transition has a certain number of differences from previous states:

1.     For the first time in history, it is not a state in the service of an exploiting minority for the oppression of the majority, but is on the contrary, a state in the service of the major­ity of the exploited and non—exploiting classes and strata against the old ruling minority.

2.     It is not the emanation of a stable society and relations of production, but on the contrary of a society whose permanent characteristic is a constant transformation on a greater scale than anything else in history.

3.     It cannot identify itself with any economi­cally dominant class because there is no such class in the society of the period of transi­tion.

4.     In contrast to states in past societies, the transitional state does not have a monopoly of arms.

For all these reasons, marxists have talked of a “semi-state” when referring to the organ that will arise in the transition period.

On the other hand, this state still retains a number of the characteristics of past states. In particular, it will still be the guardian of the status quo, the task of which will be to codify, legalise and sanction an already exist­ing economic order, to give it a legal force which has to be acknowledged by every member of society.

In the period of transition, the state will tend to conserve the existing state of affairs. Be­cause of this, the state remains a fundamentally conservative organ that will tend:

a)     not to favour social transformation but to act against it;

b)     to maintain the conditions on which its own life depends: the division of’ society into classes;

c)     to detach itself from society, to impose itself on society, to perpetuate its own existence and to develop its own pre­rogatives;

d)     to bind its existence to the coercion and violence which it will of necessity use during the period of transition, and to try to maintain and reinforce this method of’ regulating social relations;

e)     to be a fertile soil for the formation of a bureaucracy, providing a rallying point for elements coming from the old classes and offices which have been destroyed by the revolution.

This is why from the beginning marxists have always considered the state of the period of transition to be a “scourge”, a “necessary evil”, whose “worst sides” the proletariat will have to “lop off as much as possible” (Engels). For all these reasons, and in contrast to what has happened in the past, the revolutionary class cannot identify itself with the state in the period of transition.

To begin with the proletariat is not an econom­ically dominant class, either in capitalist soc­iety or the transitional society. During the transition period it will possess neither an economy nor any property, not even collectively: it will struggle for the abolition of economy and property. Secondly, the proletariat, the communist class, the subject which transforms the economic and social conditions of the tran­sitional society, will necessarily come up against an organ whose task is to perpetuate these conditions. This is why one cannot talk about a “socialist state”, a “workers’ state” nor a “proletarian state” during the period of transition.

This antagonism between the proletariat and the state manifests itself both on the immediate and the historic level.

On the immediate level, the proletariat will have to oppose the encroachments and the pressure of a state which is the manifestation of a society divided into antagonistic classes. On the historic level, the necessary disappearance of the state in communist society, which is a perspective which marxism always defended, will not be the result of the state’s own dynamic, but the fruit of the pressure mounted on it by the proletariat in its own movement forward, which will progressively deprive it of all its attributes as the progress towards a classless society unfolds. For these reasons, while the proletariat will have to use the state during the transition period, it must retain a complete independence from it. In this sense the dic­tatorship of the proletariat cannot be confused with the state. Between the two there is a constant relation of force which the prole­tariat will have to maintain in its favour: the dictatorship of the proletariat is exerted by the working class itself through its own independent armed unitary organs: the workers’ councils. The workers’ councils will partici­pate in the territorial soviets (in which the whole non—exploiting population is represented and from which the state structure will emanate) without confusing themselves with them, in order to ensure its class hegemony over all the structures of the society of the transitional period.