(The State and Revolution by V I Lenin is available from Bookmarks, price £2.50.)
We are constantly told by politicians and the media that we need a strong state to 'uphold the law', 'keep the peace' and 'protect the vulnerable'. But in fact the true role of the state is neither benevolent nor independent. Instead it reflects the class nature of society and, as Lenin puts it, 'the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms'.
Lenin sat down to study this question in the crucial months leading up to the October revolution in Russia in 1917. The resulting pamphlet, The State and Revolution, is a reassertion of the writings of Marx and Engels which Lenin said had to be 'excavated' from the distortions of those who claimed to be upholding their ideas, yet who in reality had dismissed them.
When Lenin wrote this pamphlet the arguments that the state could be an organ for the reconciliation of classes, or that socialists could take over the state and wield its powers in the interests of the majority, were being used to defend the provisional government installed by the 1917 February revolution in Russia and to reject pushing the revolution forward to full workers' power.
Lenin set out to show that the capitalist state was an instrument of class rule, and had grown up with the rise of class society and private property with the sole purpose of upholding the elite at the top of society at the expense of the vast majority of people at the bottom, who control and own virtually nothing. He showed that the state can both physically smash resistance to the system and, preferably for the ruling class, who want a stable system to operate in, can regulate conflicts by legal and social sanctions.
For as capitalism has developed and the structures have become more complex, the state becomes more than just 'bodies of armed men' - the army, police and prison service - but also includes the judicial system, civil service, education system and welfare state. This development of the modern state has encouraged the belief that it is a structure standing above society as an independent adjudicator or even benefactor. Although many of these aspects of the state are beneficial to workers they can be double edged. They primarily exist to maintain a healthy, skilled and socialised workforce but as the system goes deeper into crisis they can play an increasingly repressive role.
Having established that, whatever its make up, the state is wedded to the capitalist system it upholds, Lenin goes on to support Marx's conclusion that any successful workers' revolution would have to completely destroy every organ of the capitalist state because it cannot be transformed into a tool for the construction or functioning of a socialist society. Marx and Engels felt this was such an important point that they made a correction to the Communist Manifesto after the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 when the communards made the first courageous attempt to set up a workers' state. As a result of this example Marx wrote, 'One thing especially was proved by the Commune that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes".' But what has caused the most misunderstanding is what Marx then proposed should be put in its place - a workers' state, or the controversial phrase 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'.
The word 'dictatorship' has caused the most confusion, yet when it was used by Marx and Engels, and later Lenin, it did not have the negative connotations it has today.
So the workers' state is ordinary workers arming themselves to defend the fledgling revolution from the remnants of the old ruling class. But unlike the old capitalist state, it is based on genuinely democratic principles. It does not have a separate standing army and a massive bureaucratic structure with special privileges and no accountability. For now the day to day running of society will be directly controlled by the mass of ordinary people through elected workers' councils with instantly recallable delegates. These are structures which would be infinitely more democratic than anything any parliamentary system has been able or willing to produce.
Finally, Lenin makes it quite clear that this state is not a permanent structure and will only be needed until any stubborn elements of ruling class opposition have been beaten and no longer pose a threat to the building of a socialist society.
As this creation of a new way of organising society by and for the vast majority develops and gains momentum then the need for any sort of state, or 'organ of class rule', diminishes. As factories, transport, education, housing, health, in fact all aspects of society, become run by workers, so the workers' state will no longer be needed and will gradually fall out of use and disappear or 'wither away'.
Lenin counters those who dismiss this view of a stateless society as utopian:
'There is nobody to be suppressed - "nobody" in the sense of a class, in the sense of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population... We do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses by individual persons, or the need to suppress such excesses. But in the first place, no special apparatus of suppression is needed for this; it will be done by the armed people itself as readily as any crowd of civilised people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman being assaulted. And secondly, we know that a fundamental social cause of such excesses...is the exploitation of the masses, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excess will inevitably "wither away".'
Lenin's writings on the end of the state were interrupted by the struggle to turn this vision of a socialist society into a reality - the 1917 October revolution. The seventh chapter had only a title - 'The experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917' - but, as he writes in explanation of its incompletion, 'It is more enjoyable to go through the "experience of the revolution" than to write about it.' This unfinished pamphlet still provides us with some of the clearest and most powerful arguments for the need for socialist revolution today.