When workers run the state

JUST BECAUSE, as Bones Husley argues in response to Paul D'Amato, "a state is required to create and enforce a capitalist mode of production" does not mean by extension that every state necessarily does so ("Vanguards and state power"). In fact, a kind of state is also required to abolish the capitalist mode of production.

Before going any further, I think that it's important to establish a clear definition of the state. In State and Revolution, Lenin offers this:

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

In other words, if you have a society that includes two classes of people whose interests are fundamentally and necessarily opposed, such as capitalist and wage worker, lord and serf, or master and slave--in general exploiter and exploited--a state is necessary to maintain this society with its relations of production, in these cases to establish and preserve the dominance of the exploiting class over the exploited.

The flip side is that if you have a society where there is a state, then that society must be split into classes with opposite interests. The state, then, is an instrument for the domination of one class over another, for the subordination of the interests of one class to those of an opposing class.

In the class societies mentioned above, the state has existed to enforce the rule of an exploiting minority over an exploited majority. So in these societies the state takes a form separate from the mass of people, as a "special body of armed men [and women]": police, intelligence agencies, the military, prison guards, etc.

But what happens in the wake of a revolution that brings the working class--the majority of people--to political power in a country when that class organizes and arms itself to protect against counterrevolution and help the revolution to spread, both to other countries and to the economic sphere?

History has shown that the world capitalist class will stop at nothing to prevent workers from taking or maintaining political power, as the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the brutality of the counterrevolutionary White armies and foreign invaders from several imperialist countries following the Russian Revolution of 1917 are testament to. The working class will need to defend itself.

It doesn't make much sense to argue that a revolution could, in a flash, abolish all capitalist economic relations of production in the world. The world is a big place, with billions of people in it, and the organization that is required to meet the daily needs of all of these people, especially in its anarchic and insufficient capitalist form, is immensely complex.

CAPITALISTS ARE not going to simply hand over their factories and stores. So how does the working class take them over? How do they enforce their class interests to liberate themselves, opposite those of the capitalists who would continue to exploit them?

As Marx wrote, "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes," but first must "smash it." So the first thing to say is that the working class can't simply take over the state as it is.

What replaces this? Lenin continues, pointing to example of the Paris Commune:

The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine "only" by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this "only" signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type...It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance...The organ of suppression, however, is here the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage slavery. And since the majority of people itself suppresses its oppressors, a "special force" for suppression is no longer necessary!

In this sense, the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfill all these functions, and the more the functions of state power are performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the existence of this power.

What Marx called "the dictatorship of the proletariat," the working class in power in a society that still has capitalists (whose interests are opposite those of the workers), requires a "state." But this is qualitatively different than any state that has come before it, so much so that Engels referred to it as a "semi-state."

Extensive measures are taken by the mass of workers to prevent the rise of a privileged, entrenched bureaucracy and to ensure that these institutions are truly accountable to the will of the majority: the replacement of the standing army and police, elected representatives subject to instant recall and paid average workers' wages, etc.

It's a tool for the dominance of one class over another, so it still fits Lenin's definition of the state, but in this case the dominant class is the majority of society. All previous states have existed primarily to preserve the rule of an exploiting minority, which relies on the labor of the majority to accumulate their wealth. These states seek to protect these social relations of exploitation, to preserve the relations of production which give rise to the need for these states.

The institutions of working class rule, the rule of the exploited majority, have a primary aim: the abolition of exploitation. This is really the opposite of the capitalist state (or that of any class society) in that rather than preserving the social relations on which it is based the working class "semi-state" seeks to overturn them, thereby doing away with its own usefulness by doing away with all classes, with the antagonism between exploiter and exploited, and with all of that the very need for a political state at all.

Once the expropriation of the capitalists is complete, there is no need for this "semi-state," so it "withers away." Political power is no longer necessary, which is what Engels was referring to as quoted by Hulsey at the end of his response.

I'm not sure exactly what Hulsey means by "revolutionary social institutions" or "societal involvement," but my guess is that he's referring to the institutions of the working class, the exploited, and their involvement in society, not that of the exploiters.

In that case, Hulsey is simply calling for a working class state by another name--the very answer to Paul D'Amato's question of how a new society can be built, which Hulsey claims Lenin was incapable of providing.
Gary Lapon, Northampton, Mass.