Removed from the day-to-day direction of his party and probably resigned to the probability that he would never have another opportunity to seize power, Lenin devoted his attention to the long-term objectives of the Communist movement. He resumed work on the essay on Marx and the State, which he would publish the next year under the title State and Revolution. It was to be his legacy to future generations, a blueprint for revolutionary strategy after the capitalist order had been overthrown.
State and Revolution is a nihilistic work which argues that the Revolution must destroy root and branch all “bourgeois” institutions. Lenin begins with citations from Engels to the effect that the state, everywhere and at all times, has represented the interests of the exploiting class and reflected class conflicts. He accepts this proposition as proven and elaborates on it exclusively with reference to Marx and Engels, without referring to the history of either political institutions or political practices.
The central message of the work derives from the lessons which Marx had drawn from the Paris Commune and formulated in Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:
The parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen, along with the means of repression, the means of centralization of state power. All revolutions have perfected this machine instead of smashing it.*
Marx rephrased the argument in a letter to a friend:
If you look into the concluding chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare the next attempt of the French Revolution: not to transfer from one set of hands to another the bureaucratic-military machine, as was done until now, but to smash it.98
Nothing that Marx wrote on the strategy and tactics of revolution etched itself more deeply on Lenin’s mind. He often quoted this passage: it was his guide to action after taking power. The destructive fury which he directed against the Russian state and Russian society and all their institutions found theoretical justification in this dictum of Marx’s. Marx provided Lenin with a solution to the most troublesome problem confronting modern revolutionaries: how to prevent the successful revolution from being undone by a counter revolutionary reaction. The solution was to liquidate the “bureaucratic-military machine” of the old regime in order to deprive the counterrevolution of a ground in which to breed.
What would replace the old order? Again referring to Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, Lenin pointed to such mass-participatory institutions as communes and people’s militias that offered no haven to cadres of reactionary civil servants and officers. In this connection, he predicted the ultimate disappearance of the professional bureaucracy: “Under socialism, all will govern in turn and quickly become accustomed to no one governing.”99 Later, when the Communist bureaucracy grew to unheard-of proportions, this passage would be flung in Lenin’s face. There is no question that Lenin was unpleasantly surprised and greatly worried by the emergence in Soviet Russia of a mammoth bureaucracy: it was probably his main concern in the final year of life. But he was never under the illusion that the bureaucracy would vanish with the fall of “capitalism.” He realized that for a long time after the Revolution the “proletarian dictatorship” would have to assume the shape of a state, with all that this implied:
In the “transition” from capitalism to communism, repression is still necessary, but it is already the repression of the minority of the exploiters by the majority of the exploited. A special apparatus, a special machine of repression, the “state,” is still necessary.100
While working on State and Revolution, Lenin also addressed the economic policies of a future Communist regime. This he did in two essays written in September, after the Kornilov Affair, when Bolshevik prospects unexpectedly improved.101 The thesis of these essays is very different from that of his political writings. While determined to “smash” the old state and its armed forces, Lenin favored preserving the “capitalist” economy and harnessing it in the service of the revolutionary state. We shall discuss this subject in the chapter devoted to “War Communism.” Here suffice it to say that Lenin derived his economic ideas from reading certain contemporary German writers, notably Rudolf Hilferding, who held that advanced or “finance” capitalism had attained a level of concentration at which it became relatively easy to introduce socialism by the simple device of nationalizing banks and syndicates.
Thus, while intending to uproot the entire political and military apparatus of the old, “capitalist” regime, Lenin wanted to retain and use its economic apparatus. In the end, he would destroy all three.
