The State and Revolution is a book written by Vladimir Lenin and published in 1918, just after the Russian Revolution, considered by many to be his greatest contribution to political theory. Lenin defines the bourgeois state as “a special organisation of force” and “an organisation of violence for the suppression of some social class”. Drawing on earlier work of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Lenin investigates theoretical questions about the existence of the state after the proletarian revolution. Lenin also defends Marx’s theory of communism, and Marxism generally. The State and Revolution describes the inherent nature of the state as a tool for class oppression. Whether a dictatorship or a democracy, according to Lenin the state is always the social-control means of the ruling class.
In The State and Revolution Lenin makes extensive reference to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This term was coined by Karl Max and Friedrich Engels and refers to a situation after the revolution in which the working class holds political power. The term ‘dictatorship’ is derived from the Latin dictatura, a constitutionally sanctioned office for a magistrate in the Roman Republic. It is important to note that the term carried a somewhat different meaning 150 years ago. Whereas today we associate the term ‘dictatorship’ with authoritarianism, Marx and Engels used it to mean something closer to what we would refer to today as a centralized government. Thus ‘government of the proletariat’ is perhaps a better rendering of what Marx and Engels were actually referring to.
The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 transformed the interpretation of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ concept from a theoretical debate into a practical political question. Lenin defined ‘dictatorship’ as power won and maintained by force, unrestricted by any law. This interpretation, and the reality of the Soviet regime, fixed the term’s modern meaning as a one-party state and triggered a final, decisive split in the international Marxist movement. The sharpest conflict over the term broke out between Lenin and the German Marxist Karl Kautsky in 1918, with the latter condemning the Bolshevik regime for suppressing other socialist parties, abolishing the Russian Constituent Assembly, and ruling by force without a democratic mandate.
Lenin responded by defending the Bolsheviks’ actions as necessary, and deriding Kautsky’s democracy as “bourgeois democracy” and a betrayal of the revolution. The German Marxist Rosa Luxembourg offered a third perspective, defending the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary actions whilst criticizing their dictatorial policies. In response, Lenin doubled down on his position, stating that the dictatorship of the proletariat was impossible “through an organisation embracing the whole of that class” and could, therefore, “be exercised only by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class”. By the end of the Russian civil war in 1920, the dictatorship of the proletariat had been transformed, in both theory and practice, into dictatorship of the party.
It is open to debate whether Lenin’s definition of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ represented sharp break between, or a development of, Marx and Engel’s conception. According to the American social activist Hal Draper, a dictatorship of the party was the exact opposite of what Marx and Engels had envisaged. And the British philosopher Robert Ware contrasts Marx and Engels’ conception of a dictatorship by the proletariat with Lenin’s view of a state that acts for the proletariat in a dictatorial manner. On the other hand, the American political scientist John Ehrenberg contends that for all three thinkers, the concept described the political power required to lead a comprehensive social revolution and break the old bourgeois state in favour of a new, more democratic form.
I do not feel sufficiently qualified to pick a side in this debate. In any case, a more pertinent question to ask is what impact Lenin’s interpretation had on the material conditions of the working class. Proponents of Lenin’s conception might point to the fact that he led a successful proletarian revolution in Russia, whereas his detractors – Kautsky and Luxembourg – did not do the same in their home nation of Germany, despite the fact that the German revolutionary movement was arguably stronger in 1918 than the Russian movement had been in 1917. But it could also be argued that Lenin’s interpretation paved the way for Stalinism and all the horrors that unleashed. I will return to this question in a future blog post.
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