Dddddd0814 at aol.com:
> Well, this seems to be a rather class-less depiction of war and the state.
> (And by "class-less" I don't mean "without style.") Wars are either fought
> between competing state interests of the same class (i.e. the imperialist
> wars I and II), while revolutions-- usually civil wars-- are fought by two
> separate classes, one in power and one not. Just because both sides posess
> weapons and use the same tactics, doesn't mean they represent the same class
> interests.
>
> But you are of course right, Gordon, in your contention that wars just confer
> state power. To be more exact, it is actually the state power of a particular
> class. But a proletarian state would be entirely different in character than
> a bourgeois state, just as a bourgeois state was different from a feudal one.
> The proletarian revolution-- i.e., the socialist permanent revolution-- is
> the final transfer of state power. Only from a socialist state apparatus can
> the level of production, distribution, and efficiency be increased to the
> extent where the state no longer needs to exist. My own study and analysis
> seems to lead me to the conclusion that neither the bourgeois capitalist
> model, nor an immediate transition to a stateless society, can advance
> production in a sustainable and meaningful way that can benefit everyone.
>
> If this sort of a revolution fails to be permanent and international-- as was
> the character of the pre-emptive proletarian revolutions in the Soviet Union,
> China, Cuba, etc., because backward economic conditions prevailed and the
> world revolutionary tide receded-- then the revolution will be a failure.
> But, revolutions have a better chance of succeeding in the advanced
> capitalist countries, where up to now proletarians have failed to seize
> power.
>
> As for the authority of war, revolution, and the state, Engels wrote
> famously:
>
> "But the anti-authoritarians demand that the authoritarian political state be
> abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to
> it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social
> revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever
> seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing
> there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will
> upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon-- authoritarian
> means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to
> have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which
> its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a
> single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people
> against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not
> having used it freely enough?
> Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't
> know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but
> confusion, or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement
> of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."
>
> (from Engels, "On Authority", 1874)
I am very surprised that you think I'm not paying attention to class war, since I believe that class war is the most fundamental act of the State. In my (perhaps fictional) political mythology, the State begins with the invention of permanent military organization, slavery, and city-building, that is, the establishment of class and permanent class war. Although the modes of class and class war have shifted many times over the millennia and become more complex, the fundamental facts of domination, oppression and exploitation have remained. That is why I asked, several times, who was to be coerced for the sake of airplanes. If the State is necessary for airplanes, for adequate production in general, I want to see the faces of the victims. When we have the actual victims on one hand, and the production on the other, we can see who balances with what.
Engels, as quoted above, Marx, Lenin and others seem to have believed that the nature of a proletarian ruling class would differ so profoundly from previously-existing ruling classes that the development of a society under its tutelage would proceed inevitably to some better, freer condition, if not a utopia. Below, I've appended some remarks by Lenin which you posted to the same general purport. I think there is there is a significant problem with this sort of description of the conflict between the supposedly oncoming dictatorship of the proletariat and the existing and constantly regenerated bourgeoisie, and that is that they treat the proletariat and the bourgeoisie almost as two separate nations, if not species.
But this is not the way things are. _Bourgeois_ and _proletarian_ refer to collections of attributes which can coexist in persons and groups of persons. Lenin complains of bourgeois intellectuals worming in to the Soviets, but the bourgeois intellectual is already in Lenin himself, in the Communist Party, as well as in their allies and opponents; this abstract set of attributes is simply a normal human response to certain sets of conditions.
Once _bourgeois_ or _proletarian_ are thought of as separate races or species -- or perhaps as devils and good fairies -- we are not far from a reversion to the sort of thing observed in Stalin's regime. That is, under pretended socialism, purges and executions worthy of a medieval pope or prince, and more, were carried out; meanwhile privileged classes were erected and diversified, especially the police, the military, and the intelligentsia. This depressed state of affairs eventually tired even its masters and was followed by goulash communism, covert and then open rebourgeoisification, and finally the complete acceptance of capitalism and the dissolution of the Soviet project. Lenin might as well have instituted a liberal capitalist social-democratic state in 1918 and saved himself, his heirs, and his country a lot of trouble.
So how does this relate to the Lenin's willingness to get involved in a corrupt parliament, or Engels's enthusiasm for the seizure and maintenance of authority? Lenin seems to believe that because bourgeois and proletarians, or liberals and socialists, are two separate species, methods don't matter very much, ends overcome means; as long as the proletarian _species_ prevails, socialism and then communism will arrive, because this is the intrinsic nature of the species. But if bourgeois and proletarian are not species at all, but merely sets of attributes, then they are present and struggle within everyone. And if _that_ is the case, then means count, because as one participates in bourgeois practices one becomes bourgeois, one gives power to the bourgeois within oneself. Class, class war, national war, imperialism, police violence, racism and so forth follow, like overtones generated from a fundamental vibration of domination and oppression.
And in fact it is the latter that we observe in history. So what is to be done, if we desire to end the class war and can't do it by means of class war? The answer must be different means, means which exclude class and State from the beginning, which rely not on violence but on peace, freedom, equality, autonomy, and truth. At the same time, the means must involve not merely thought and rhetoric, but direct engagement with material actuality -- because otherwise we have no more than an esoteric hobby. These seem to me to be the requirements of any movement which is going to finally abolish slavery, and there are a variety of praxes which accord with them, of which I have already written.
In the middle of the 19th century, one could delude oneself into believing that a little transitional violence, a little temporary authority, would advance us toward a better world. Today, anyone who reads history ought to know better.
-- Gordon
---------------------------------------------------------
> from Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
> (from Appendix, part IV)
>
> The childishness of those who "repudiate" participation in parliament
> consists in their thinking it possible to "solve" the difficult problem
> of combating bourgeois-democratic influences within the working-class
> movement in such a "simple", "easy", allegedly revolutionary manner,
> whereas they are actually merely running away from their own shadows,
> only closing their eyes to difficulties and trying to shrug them off
> with mere words. The most shameless careerism, the bourgeois utilisation
> of parliamentary seats, glaringly reformist perversion of parliamentary
> activity, and vulgar petty-bourgeois conservatism are all unquestionably
> common and prevalent features engendered everywhere by capitalism, not
> only outside but also within the working-class movement. But the
> selfsame capitalism and the bourgeois environment it creates (which
> disappears very slowly even after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie,
> since the peasantry constantly regenerates the bourgeoisie) give rise to
> what is essentially the same bourgeois careerism, national chauvinism,
> petty-bourgeois vulgarity, etc. -- merely varying insignificantly in
> form -- in positively every sphere of activity and life.
>
> You think, my dear boycottists and anti-parliamentarians, that you are
> "terribly revolutionary", but in reality you are frightened by the
> comparatively minor difficulties of the struggle against bourgeois
> influences within the working-class movement, whereas your victory --
> i.e., the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the conquest of political
> power by the proletariat -- will create these very same difficulties on
> a still larger, an infinitely larger scale. Like children, you are
> frightened by a minor difficulty which confronts you today, but you do
> not understand that tomorrow, and the day after, you will still have to
> learn, and learn thoroughly, to overcome the selfsame difficulties, only
> on an immeasurably greater scale.
>
> Under Soviet rule, your proletarian party and ours will be invaded by a
> still larger number of bourgeois intellectuals. They will worm their way
> into the Soviets, the courts, and the administration, since communism
> cannot be built otherwise than with the aid of the human material
> created by capitalism, and the bourgeois intellectuals cannot be
> expelled and destroyed, but must be won over, remoulded, assimilated and
> re-educated, just as we must -- in a protracted struggle waged on the
> basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat -- re-educate the
> proletarians themselves, who do not abandon their petty-bourgeois
> prejudices at one stroke, by a miracle, at the behest of the Virgin
> Mary, at the behest of a slogan, resolution or decree, but only in the
> course of a long and difficult mass struggle against mass
> petty-bourgeois influences. Under Soviet rule, these same problems,
> which the anti-parliamentarians now so proudly so haughtily, so lightly
> and so childishly brush aside with a wave of the hand -- these selfsame
> problems are arising anew within the Soviets, within the Soviet
> administration among the Soviet "pleaders" (in Russia we have abolished,
> and have rightly abolished, the bourgeois legal bar, but it is reviving
> again under the cover of the "Soviet pleaders" [40]'). Among Soviet
> engineers, Soviet school-teachers and the privileged, i.e., the most
> highly skilled and best situated, workers at Soviet factories, we
> observe a constant revival of absolutely all the negative traits
> peculiar to bourgeois parliamentarianism, and we are conquering this
> evil -- gradually -- only by a tireless, prolonged and persistent
> struggle based on proletarian organisation and discipline.
>
> Of course, under the rule of the bourgeoisie it is very "difficult" to
> eradicate bourgeois habits from our own, i.e., the workers', party; it
> is "difficult" to expel from the party the familiar parliamentary
> leaders who have been hopelessly corrupted by bourgeois prejudices; it
> is "difficult" to subject to proletarian discipline the absolutely
> essential (even if very limited) number of people coming from the ranks
> of the bourgeoisie; it is "difficult" to form, in a bourgeois
> parliament, a communist group fully worthy of the working class; it is
> "difficult" to ensure that the communist parliamentarians do not engage
> in bourgeois parliamentary inanities, but concern themselves with the
> very urgent work of propaganda, agitation and organisation among the
> masses. All this is "difficult", to be sure; it was difficult in Russia,
> and it is vastly more difficult in Western Europe and in America, where
> the bourgeoisie is far stronger, where bourgeois-democratic traditions
> are stronger, and so on.
>
> Yet all these "difficulties" are mere child's play compared with the
> same sort of problems which, in any event, the proletariat will have
> most certainly to solve in order to achieve victory, both during the
> proletarian revolution and after the seizure of power by the
> proletariat. Compared with these truly gigantic problems of
> re-educating, under the proletarian dictatorship, millions of peasants
> and small proprietors, hundreds of thousands of office employees,
> officials and bourgeois intellectuals, of subordinating them all to the
> proletarian state and to proletarian leadership, of eradicating their
> bourgeois habits and traditions -- compared with these gigantic problems
> it is childishly easy to create, under the rule of the bourgeoisie, and
> in a bourgeois parliament, a really communist group of a real
> proletarian party.
>
> If our "Left" and anti-parliamentarian comrades do not learn to overcome
> even such a small difficulty now, we may safely assert that either they
> will prove incapable of achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat,
> and will be unable to subordinate and remould the bourgeois
> intellectuals and bourgeois institutions on a wide scale, or they will
> have to hastily complete their education, and, by that haste, will do a
> great deal of harm to the cause of the proletariat, will commit more
> errors than usual, will manifest more than average weakness and
> inefficiency, and so on and so forth.
>
> Until the bourgeoisie has been overthrown and, after that, until
> small-scale economy and small commodity production have entirely
> disappeared, the bourgeois atmosphere, proprietary habits and
> petty-bourgeois traditions will hamper proletarian work both outside and
> within the working-class movement, not only in a single field of
> activity -- the parliamentary -- but, inevitably, in every field of
> social activity, in all cultural and political spheres without
> exception. The attempt to brush aside, to fence oneself off from one of
> the "unpleasant" problems or difficulties in some one sphere of activity
> is a profound mistake, which will later most certainly have to be paid
> for. We must learn how to master every sphere of work and activity
> without exception, to overcome all difficulties and eradicate all
> bourgeois habits, customs and traditions everywhere. Any other way of
> presenting the question is just trifling, mere childishness.
>
> May 12, 1920