The statist revolution

"The state and revolution" is Lenin's most well known work, perhaps alongside "What is to be done". It was written in 1917, and published in 1918. Strictly speaking, the work is unfinished. In a postscript, Lenin explains that the October revolution forced him to discontinue the work. Famously, he then adds that it's more satisfying to actually make a revolution, than to simply write about one!

"The state and revolution" is Lenin's most "democratic" and "libertarian" work. He calls for a radically democratic state, a state which is no longer a state in the strict sense of that term, a semi-state based on the immense majority of the working people, which administers society directly without a bureaucracy, while overthrowing the tiny minority of exploiters and oppressors. In other words, Lenin calls for something akin to the Paris Commune. He hardly mentions the Bolshevik Party.

In reality, Lenin and the Bolsheviks created a very different kind of state after the October revolution. It became a one-party regime, over which workers and peasants had little or no influence. The state became centralized and all-powerful, expressing the interests of a new bureaucratic class. At no point did Soviet Russia resemble the radically democratic semi-state of Lenin's book "The state and revolution".

Some defenders of Lenin claim that this was due to the Civil War. Even if we accept this, it's still a refutation of Lenin, since he discusses civil war in "The state and revolution". There, he argues that the armed people could conduct such a war while still keeping the radically democratic form of their state. Besides, Lenin started building the authoritarian-centralized state immediately after the revolution, not waiting for the Civil War to start. The acting Russian government, the Council of People's Commissars or Sovnarkom, may have been nominally appointed by the soviets, but in practice it was a self-contained organ ruling by decree. For most of its existence, it consisted solely of Bolsheviks. Note also that the economic centralization started before the Civil War, with the Sovnarkom appointing the Vesenkha, the administrative organ charged with running Russian industry. The factory committees (organ of local workers' control) were soon squeezed out. Thus, Soviet Russia entered the Civil War with the centralized state apparatus already in place. Admittedly, the Sovnarkom was for a short period actually a coalition government between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, but this was mostly a tactic from Lenin's part. The entire logic of Bolshevism pointed in the direction of centralist, one-party rule. See all other writings by Lenin!

Of course, it would be silly to expect perfect democracy during a revolution or civil war. The American Civil War and its aftermath wasn't perfectly "democratic", and neither was the civil war in 1980's Nicaragua. Yet, neither the Union nor Sandinista Nicaragua ever developed into bureaucratic one-party states. The South under Radical Reconstruction came close, but it immensely extended the democratic rights and liberties of the Black population. Indeed, Blacks in the Reconstruction South had more freedom than Russians in the Soviet Union!

Those who claim that the Russian Civil War tragically made Lenin's visions come to naught, downplay both his previous record as an unregenerate state socialist, and the experiences from other civil wars. The real problem starts already with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who (quite honestly) believed it was possible to combine a centralized, planned economy complete with "industrial armies" with a radically democratic state based on "cheap government" directly by the working masses and their armed militia. (A strange combo of Saint Simon and Thomas Jefferson!) Real life has showed that this combination is impossible, or at the very least very, very improbable. If the state takes over the entire economy, i.e. virtually everything, democracy usually "withers away". Sandinista Nicaragua was democratic during the war against the contras, but note that they had a mixed economy, rather than a completely centralized command economy. The South during Radical Reconstruction wasn't state socialist either. The classic promise of the Union to the Blacks was "40 acres and a mule", i.e. "petty-bourgeois" private property.

"The state and revolution", being a rather straight exegesis of Marx and Engels, is also marked by their naïve ideas. Lenin eloquently describes how a centralized state apparatus, controlling the entire economy, will almost immediately start to "wither away" and "die", how such a state would make state administration run as smoothly, cheaply and efficiently as the German Post Office (!), how democracy will be denied only to a small minority of former exploiters, making such a state the most democratic hitherto known, etc. On a funnier note, Lenin also attempts to exegete the rather peculiar Marxist terminology about "the withering away of democracy under communism", a phrase I'm sure future dissidents could use very much to their (ironic) advantage...

Did Lenin believe a single word of what he was saying in "The state and revolution"? I for one doubt it. The work simply doesn't fit the rest of the Leninist corpus. I think it was intended as a work of propaganda during a period when the Bolsheviks needed the support of the majority in the soviets. (I don't doubt that the October revolution as such had broad popular support.) Perhaps Lenin believed in his work as a kind of ideal. The actual dynamics, not just of the revolution and the civil war, but also of the attempts to create an entirely centralized, state-run economy, made the Bolsheviks stray from the course laid down in "The state and revolution".

In effect, they made a statist revolution.