[lbo-talk] The state

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Thu Mar 31 11:04:11 PST 2005


This is true,and it is why Marx, Engels and Lenin spend a lot of time discussing socialism as a transitional stage between capitalism and communism.

Some of Lenin's discussion of the problem of people who have been raised in capitalism building socialism in the following and before and after this passage in _The State and Revolution_

-block quote- In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains "the narrow horizon of bourgeois law". Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.

It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!

This may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum of which Marxism is often accused by people who have not taken the slightest trouble to study its extraordinarily profound content.

But in fact, remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society. And Marx did not arbitrarily insert a scrap of "bourgeois" law into communism, but indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society emerging out of the womb of capitalism.

Democracy means equality. The great significance of the proletariat's struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes. But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labor and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing father, from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know. But it is important to realize how infinitely mendacious is the ordinary bourgeois conception of socialism as something lifeless, rigid, fixed once and for all, whereas in reality only socialism will be the beginning of a rapid, genuine, truly mass forward movement, embracing first the majority and then the whole of the population, in all spheres of public and private life.

Chapter V: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State Presentation of the Question by Marx The Transition from Captialism to Communism The First Phase of Communist Society The Higher Phase of Communist Society

Close quote-

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm#s2

Doug Henwood But we've all grown up in a capitalist society, and bear its psychic scars. Doesn't that contaminate any anticapitalist project? If a group highly disposed towards nonhierarchical, self-governing politics can't organize a listserv, how could they organize a complex social system?

I realize I'm generalizing from a small and near-trivial example, but the inability of anything but small, ephemeral organizations to prefigure the post-hierarchical utopia is sobering.

Seems to me that the old Marxist point - we have to work with the hand we've been dealt - is compelling. Which, in this case, means working towards more just and egalitarian formal systems, and not the elimination of organizational charts.

Doug



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