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From International Socialism, No. 63, Mid-October 1973, p. 18.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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SOME OF THE parliamentary roaders have claimed that they draw ‘Leninist’ conclusions from the Chilean experience – conclusions which in no way change their uncritical support for the actions of the Popular Unity government. Volodia Teitelboim, writes in the Morning Star of 15 October, for instance, ‘that Leninist teaching on the necessity for the people to take control of the state cannot be disregarded.’ (our emphasis). By contrast Lenin himself wrote that ‘the proletariat cannot lay hold of the state apparatus and set it in motion. But it can smash (Lenin’s emphasis) everything that is oppressive, routine, incorrigibly bourgeois in the old state apparatus and substitute its own, new apparatus’ (Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 102). Below we reprint extracts from his pamphlet The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution in which he drew out the contrast between the two sorts of state. |
THE MOST PERFECT, the most advanced type of bourgeois state is the parliamentary democratic republic: power is vested in parliament; the state machine, the apparatus and organ of administration, is of the customary kind – which in practice is undisplaceable, is privileged and stands above the people.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, however, revolutionary epochs have advanced a higher type of democratic state, a state which in certain respects, as Engels put it, ceases to be a state, is ‘no longer a state in the proper sense of the word.’ This is a state of the Paris Commune type, one in which a standing army and police divorced from the people are replaced by the direct arming of the people themselves. It is this feature that constitutes the very essence of the Commune, which has been so misrepresented and slandered by the bourgeois writers, and to which has been erroneously ascribed, among other things, the intention of immediately ‘introducing’ socialism. This is the type of state which the Russian revolution began to create in 1905 and 1917 ...
Marxism differs from anarchism in that it recognises the need for a state and for state power in the period of revolution in general, and in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism in particular.
Marxism differs from the petty-bourgeois, opportunist ‘social-democratism’ of Plekhanov, Kautsky and Co. in that it recognises that what is required during these two periods is not a state of the usual parliamentary bourgeois republican type, but a state of the Paris Commune type.
The main distinctions between a state of the latter type and the old state are as follows.
It is quite easy (as history proves) to revert from a parliamentary bourgeois republic to a monarchy, for all the machinery of oppression – the army, the police, and the bureaucracy – is left intact. The Commune and the Soviets smash that machinery and do away with it.
The parliamentary bourgeois republic hampers and stifles the independent political life of the masses, their direct participation in the democratic organisation of the life of the state from the bottom up. The opposite is the case with the Soviets.
The latter reproduce the type of state which was being evolved by the Paris Commune and which Marx described as ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.’
We are usually told that the Russian people are not yet prepared for the ‘introduction’ of the Commune. This was the argument of the serf-owners when they claimed that the peasants were not prepared for emancipation. The Commune i.e. the Soviets, does not ‘introduce’, does not intend to ‘introduce’, and must not introduce any reforms which have not absolutely matured both in economic reality and in the minds of the overwhelming majority of the people. The deeper the economic collapse and the crisis produced by the war, the more urgent becomes the need for the most perfect political form, which will facilitate the healing of the terrible wounds inflicted on mankind by the war. The less the organisational experience of the Russian people, the more resolutely must we proceed to organisational development by the people themselves, and not merely by the bourgeois politicians and ‘well-placed’ bureaucrats.
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If we organise ourselves and conduct our propaganda skilfully, not only the proletarians, but nine-tenths of the peasants will be opposed to the restoration of the police, will be opposed to an undisplaceable and privileged bureaucracy and to an army divorced from the people. And that is all the new type of state stands for.
The substitution of a people’s militia for the police is a reform that follows from the entire course of the revolution and that is now being introduced in most parts of Russia. We must explain to the people that in most of the bourgeois revolutions of the usual type, this reform was always extremely short-lived, and that the bourgeoisie – even the most democratic and republican – restored the police of the old, Tsarist type, a police divorced from the people, commanded by the bourgeoisie and capable of oppressing the people in every way.
There is only way to prevent the restoration of the police and that is to create a people’s militia and to fuse it with the army (the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the entire people). Service in this militia should extend to all citizens of both sexes between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five without exception, if these tentatively suggested age limits may be taken as indicating the participation of adolescents and old people. Capitalists must pay their workers servants, etc., for days devoted to public service in the militia ...
The tasks which the proletariat must put before the people in order to safeguard, consolidate and develop the revolution are prevention of the restoration of the police and enlistment of the organisational forces of the entire people in forming a people’s militia.
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