- Marie de France, Bisclavret

Stealing The Clothes Of Marxism

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Table of Contents:

1. Intro

2. Finding the Clothes

   1. The Communist Manifesto

   2. The Civil War in France

   3. Critique of the Gotha Programme

3. Lenin’s State and Revolution

4. Tearing Lenin’s Nose

5. Concluding Remarks

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Intro

Drawing from different textual analyses by myself, Chris Wright, Nick Rogers, Paresh Chattopadhyay, Werner Bonefeld and others on Lenin’s The State and Revolution, I will attempt to explain everything that is wrong with Lenin’s conception of the transformation of capitalism into socialism. Before I begin my exposé, however, readers should be well aware of Lenin’s intentions in The State and Revolution.

In the preface to the first edition, Lenin writes:

First of all we examine the theory of Marx and Engels of the state, and dwell in particular detail on those aspects of this theory which are ignored or have been distorted by the opportunists. Then we deal specially with the one who is chiefly responsible for these distortions, Karl Kautsky, the best-known leader of the Second International (1889-1914), which has met with such miserable bankruptcy in the present war.

The entire purpose of the pamphlet was to examine the theory of Marx and Engels on the state. For Lenin, Karl Kautsky was stealing the clothes of Marxism1, so that it would never be able to return to its true revolutionary form again. In order to solve this, Lenin sought to find these clothes to bring Marxism back. What exactly were these garments? The words of Marx and Engels. He was not making an attempt to develop new theories on the state, but to revive specifically Marx and Engels’ theories. When communists make the claim that, in The State and Revolution, Lenin was developing the theory of Marx, or that he was incorporating new experiences into Marxism, it is exceedingly wide of the mark.

Lenin failed to find the clothes of Marxism, and really made them harder to find than Kautsky did. It is up to the Marxists of today to recover these garments of Marxism and to clothe it, returning it to its revolutionary form. Given this, it would be important to expound on Marx and Engels’ theories on the transformation of capitalism into socialism2, which is where this essay begins its maiden voyage.

Finding the Clothes

The Communist Manifesto

Perhaps it would be for the best to begin this section chronologically. When Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels in 1848, he wrote:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Marx predicted in 1848 that, in order for the communist revolution to succeed, the proletariat needed to centralize the instruments of production into “the State.” This state, Marx writes, is the proletariat organized as the ruling class. However, in the 1872 preface to the Manifesto, Marx writes:

in view of the practical experience gained … in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”

Given this retraction of certain parts of the Manifesto, we can conclude that anything written regarding the state that contradicts Marx’s later works on the Paris Commune can be discarded.

The Civil War in France

After the Commune, Marx made clear that there were multiple lessons to be learned from it. Now, for Marx, the state was not an empty vehicle to be occupied by a class seizing power, but instead the form of existence of a social relation. Instead of having a fetishized conception of the state, Marx viewed the capitalist state as a mode of existence of the capital-labor relation. He writes in the completed version of The Civil War in France:

At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the State power stands out in bolder and bolder relief.

With this lesson of the Commune, Marx argued that the proletariat “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”3 In reality, Marx claims, the opposite was true of the Commune. In a Draft of The Civil War in France, Marx writes:

This [Paris Commune] was, therefore, a revolution not against this or that, legitimate, constitutional, republican or imperialist form of State power. It was a revolution against the State itself, of this supernaturalist abortion of society, a resumption by the people for the people of its own social life.

The anti-statist position of Marx in this text cannot be understated, and throughout the entire draft he launches an unbridled attack on that “horrid machinery of class domination.”4

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Nowhere does Marx or Engels use the term “workers state,” except one time to mock the term itself.5 Neither do they use the term “commune-state” or “semi-state.” In reality, Marx said in his 1871 Speech on the Seventh Anniversary of The International that “The Commune could not found a new form of class government.” Marx continues:

It was not a revolution to transfer it [the State] from one fraction of the ruling classes to the other, but a revolution to break down this horrid machinery of class domination itself.

For Marx, the Commune could not take the form of the capital-labor relation, like the capitalist state was. It had to be its destruction. Marx further writes:

The Second Empire was the final form of this State usurpation. The Commune was its definite negation, and, therefore, the initiation of the Social Revolution of the 19th century.

If communists, like those who uphold the Divine Lenin, need to call the dictatorship of the proletariat a state, the only acceptable term including “state” would be anti-state. If the commune had to be called a state, it would be an anti-state. It was the negation of the state itself. Marx gives a plain definition of what the Commune was:

[The Paris Commune was] the reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it[.]

Here, Marx shows us what differentiates the Commune from all previous particular states: that the Commune was the reabsorption of state power by society. In the capitalist state, society was split between political state and civil society; it was characterized by the separation between the economic and the political. This is in contradistinction from the feudal state, in which there was no split, and instead civil society was directly political.6 What the Commune did was not only destroy this split, but to smash the political state itself, and reabsorb that state power into itself.

Critique of the Gotha Programme

Marx wrote in section IV of the Critique of the Gotha Programme:

The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word ‘people’ with the word ‘state’.

Now, some communists might read this section of the Critique, and gather from it that the state, although undergoing a transformation, will exist in communist society. After all, Marx says that there will be “state functions” in this society! But an in-depth textual analysis of this paragraph shows that this reading is farcical. Marx asks, “What transformation will the state undergo in communist society?” But he writes, “in other words,” that this question actually means to ascertain the analogous social functions in the new society. He writes that there will be social functions analogous to functions that the present state has, but not that the state will actually exist. In layman’s terms, communist society will do certain (albeit a minimal amount of) things that the present, capitalist state does. Marx continues:

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx says here that corresponding to the “revolutionary transformation” that happens from capitalism to communism, there is a political transition period that takes place at the same time where the state can be nothing but the dictatorship of the proletariat. The “state,” in this case, can only be the anti-state, the negation of the capitalist state power. Andrew Kliman analyzed this Marx quote in his 2013 lecture, “The Incoherence of ‘Transitional Society’ as a Marxian Concept”,7 saying that:

What’s this political transition? It’s the transition from the capitalist state, which enforces the rule of the minority over the majority, to a worker’s state (don’t laugh!) which enforces the rule of the majority over the minority, to a situation where there is no state. Once capitalist society has been transformed into socialist society, the initial phase of communism, there are no social classes, so there is no need for a state to enforce class rule.

Notwithstanding the use of the term “worker’s state,” Kliman is absolutely correct in his analysis. This revolutionary transformation between capitalism and socialism/communism is not a “transitional society.” There is a transitional political form that exists between the capitalist state and the absence of a state, but not a new society. This is because, as Kliman says, the political state is downstream, a product of the economic base of society. The capitalist mode of production differs from the socialist mode of production, but it would be wrong to say there is a “transitional” mode of production between the two. To beat a dead horse, there is a revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism, where a transitional political form, the anti-state, exists. This is not to say that the transformation is instantaneous, or that there is not a time-consuming process of transformation. But, nevertheless, this does not imply a new social basis different from the capitalist or socialist mode of production. Marx continues in the Critique:

Now the [Gotha] program does not deal with this nor with the future state of communist society.

Certain communists may read this sentence from Marx’s Critique and say “wait, the future state of communist society? Well there must be, then, a state in this future society!” This is not what Marx is saying at all, however. He is only critiquing the Gotha Program for not dealing with the question of the future state and its existence or non-existence in communist society. Friedrich Engels confirms in his March 18-28, 1875 Letter to August Bebel, “with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear.”

Marx writes in section I of the Critique:

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor.

In socialist society, there is no exchange of products. This is because, as Marx writes here, there is no value in them. The exchange of commodities presupposes that they have value, that the labor congealed within it appears as the value of it. But since, in this new society which is based on common ownership, individual labor is no longer private and indirect, but directly social, there can be no value.

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If labor is directly social, not mediated by exchange, then it cannot have value because the latter presupposes the existence of commodity exchange. Marx continues:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.

After the revolutionary transformation is complete, communism emerges from capitalist society's womb. Marx claims that this new communist society is stamped with the economic, moral, and intellectual birthmarks of capitalist society. It would be important to note that Marx does not include “political” birthmarks of capitalist society. The economic remnants, he explains, boil down to equal right:

Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor.

For Marx, this is what equal right in communist society is. The same amount of labor the producer gives to society in “one form,” he receives back “in another.” This is the extent of Marx’s meaning of equal right. He continues:

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

Marx is not saying here that commodity exchange prevails, but instead that the regulating principle prevails, the exchange of equivalents. In Marx’s principle of equal right, producers give an amount of labor and receive back an equal amount. This is analogous to commodity exchange insofar as two commodities have equal amounts of labor embodied in them, but that is the extent to which these two concepts converge. Marx continues:

Hence, equal right here is still in principle – bourgeois right, although principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads, while the exchange of equivalents in commodity exchange exists only on the average and not in the individual case.

So, at last, it is revealed that bourgeois right is just another name for Marx’s equal right. In capitalism, this equal exchange of commodities existed on the average. This is the same as socially necessary labor time as the determinate factor of a commodity's magnitude of value.8 In communist society, however, this measure of labor time happens in the individual case. Instead of calculating the amount of labor time by an individual producer based on the average time it takes for the totality of society’s labor-powers to produce something, the producer receives back exactly what they give. Marx is not saying here that commodity exchange exists in communist society.

The term in German for bourgeois right used in the Critique is “bürgerliche Recht.” In the German language, the term Recht does not imply the existence of a state. If Marx had wanted to imply a state, he would use a word like Gesetz.

Finally, Marx writes:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Marx is claiming that when communism has developed, erasing the capitalist birthmarks and snipping its umbilical cord, allowing for “all the springs of co-operative wealth [to] flow more abundantly,” this could be termed the “higher phase of communist society.” It is at this point that bourgeois right is discarded into “the dustbin of history,” and society can operate under the maxim from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Nowhere in this paragraph, however, is there a mention of the state withering away or dissolving. This is because the state had already ceased to exist by the time the revolutionary transformation from capitalism to socialism/communism was complete.

Lenin’s State and Revolution

Now that a brief introductory explanation of Marx and Engels’s view of the revolutionary transformation to communism is complete, the same should be done for Lenin.

Lenin believed that, in the course of the revolution, the proletariat cannot lay hold of the “ready-made state machinery.” Instead, he believed, it must be broken up and smashed. He understood that Marx and Engels had felt the need to revise the Manifesto in order to include that most important lesson of the Paris Commune. For him, though, “abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out of the question.”9 This is because the proletariat would have “to construct a new one [bureaucracy].” For Lenin, the Commune was not “withering away,” but instead it took part in “building up the state.”10 He claimed that Marx was against the idea “that the state would disappear when classes disappeared,” and that Marx thought that the state would not “be abolished when classes were abolished.”11 The state couldn’t wither away or be abolished until “the functions of the civil service” are converted into “the simple operations of control and accounting” that the population was capable of doing. The “banks” and “joint-stock companies” implicitly still exist in this classless, though not stateless, society.12

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Lenin understood Marx’s split between the “lower” and “higher” phases of communism as “socialism” and “communism” respectively. An example of the socialist economic system, for Lenin, was the postal service.13 He claims that in capitalist society, it is organized on the lines of state-capitalist monopoly, but when “the united workers themselves … hire technicians, foreman and accounts, and pay them all … workmen’s wages,” then it would be organized under the workers. He writes that in this “first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism.” This is why “bourgeois law” persists throughout the course of the lower phase of communism (for Lenin, socialism).

Lenin reads Marx’s “bürgerliche Recht” as bourgeois law. While Recht can be translated as “law,”14 it is not what Marx meant by the term. He writes:

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.

He continues:

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

It seems that in the lower phase of communist society, the associated producers construct a bourgeois state to enforce their bourgeois law. He subsequently contends that this claim “may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum,” but that only people who have not studied it would say this.

Lenin also claims that, within this lower phase of communist society, “all citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state”15 and will enjoy an “equality of labor and wages.”16 As “employees and workers of a single countrywide state ‘syndicate’,” they are required to “work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay.” However, Lenin still believes that there will be an exercise of “control over the capitalists (now converted into employees),”17 implying that there will still be capitalists in the lower phase of communism. But eventually “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay.” Only at that point, “the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state.”

A horrifying image, isn’t it?

Tearing Lenin’s Nose

Chattopadhyay writes about The State and Revolution in his 1994 The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience:

Socialism, even as a concept, appearing in Lenin’s State and Revolution, contains elements, such as “state” and “hired employees” earning “wages,” that are alien to Marx’s socialism conceived as a free Association.

Chattopadhyay is completely correct in his analysis. Marx himself said that “hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor.”18 He writes in his 2012 article, Lenin Reads Marx on Socialism:

Lenin tries to smuggle “state” into Marx’s text of the Gothacritique by brazenly revising it. This he does by connecting two independent ideas in two analytically separate places of Marx’s text: Marx’s discussion of the continuation of “bourgeois right” in the first phase of communism and Marx’s speculation about the future of the “present day functions of the state”. Lenin emphasises the need for the existence of the “bourgeois state” to enforce “bourgeois right” in the first phase of the new society. … Whatever bourgeois right remains in the area of distribution does not require a particular political apparatus to enforce it. It is now society itself which is in charge. One could read this textually in the Gothacritique.

Again, a critique of Lenin that has already torn off his nose. Lenin does not understand that bourgeois right is equal right. Chattopadhyay uses Marx19 to show that Lenin’s understanding of socialism is actually state capitalism, because of the assertion that the economy would act as “one ‘single factory’.”

Lenin wrote in Chapter IV of The State and Revolution:

In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.

Nick Rogers, in his 2018 publication, Lenin’s Misreading of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, analyzed the quote, writing that “it is being suggested that organized violence by a set of institutions that may still be called a state will be necessary in a form of society called socialism and will only disappear at a later stage.” Rogers is correct. Lenin believes that before communism - which includes socialism, the lower phase of communism for him - there will be a state! Not only this, but in the lower phase of communism, “the subordination of one man to another” would persist! Lenin is the true kleptomaniac here, not just Kautsky. When quoting Lenin on the bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie, Rogers sarcastically writes:

This is certainly a bold application of dialectical logic but we have moved a long way from a post-revolutionary semi-state that “withers away” with the dissolution of class society. Lenin has replaced that conception with a two-phase transition to communism. The period of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to be followed by a “socialist” society in which, although there are no longer conflicting classes, there remains the need for a state until people have learnt “to work for society without any rules of law.”

This is exactly what Lenin does, and Andrew Kliman makes the same critique of a socialist society distinguished from communist society.

Chris Wright’s 2001 Contra State and Revolution remarks that “Lenin still sees the first phase of communism as one of subordination because he can only conceive of it in terms of capturing state power and statification of private property.” He continues in the text:

The idea that “socialism” merely equals the conversion of bourgeois private property into common property completely misunderstands Marx. For Marx, private property means capitalist property as a whole, as in the total property of the capitalist class, not simply juridically recognized individual property. State capitalism turned individual property into common property, without ever violating private property, i.e. capitalist property.

Whether property is in the hands of the individual capitalist or in the hands of the capitalist state, the content is the same. Socialism abolishes property relations, and the free association of producers holds humanity’s productive forces as a society. The state is antithetical to this concept. Wright concludes:

We must go even further and say that Lenin completely misunderstands Marx’s discussion of bourgeois right under the first phase of communism, believing that Marx means the continued existence of wage-labor. The first phase of communism already assumes the end of money and the wage relation. It assumes the end of the state and of capitalist relations of production. Both phases of communism depend on what Marx called “the free association of producers”, in which the freedom of each is the precondition for the freedom of all.

Werner Bonefeld, in his essay, State, Revolution, and Self-Determination, poses an important question in relation to Lenin’s conception of socialism:

Does the proletariat need what Lenin extolled: factory discipline? Would this really be what the community of freely associated Man would decide for themselves in freedom from coercion?

Elsewhere in his essay, he explains that:

The Leninist espousal of the state as the vehicle of social revolution confuses social autonomy with the autonomy of the state and, by doing so, it affirms the essence of the state, that is, the emancipation of the political from society the content of which is the subsumption of human purposeful activity to relations of abstract equality, an equality that denies human dignity: it treats everybody, regardless of need, as abstract individuals endowed with formally equal rights.

Lenin’s misunderstanding of Marx, while not malicious, has been one of the most devastating blows to the world’s conception of socialism in the 20th - still yet, the 21st - century. His conception of a new “bureaucracy” being constructed is absolutely alien to Marx’s writings. Neither did Marx speak of the Paris Commune’s “building up” of “the state,” which is an extreme vulgarization.

Lenin’s conception of banks and joint-stock companies persisting in socialist society is even more absurd. Banks, in their dealings with money, could not possibly survive in a society that has progressed past the money-form. Ascribing the postal service as socialist was also incorrect, because socialism as a mode of production cannot be applied simply to an institution such as this. The postal service does not have a free association of producers, but hired laborers who work for it. This is all too acceptable for Lenin, though, who believed that socialist society would act as a single office, forcing people to take their “equal” wages.

Lenin’s application of the maxim, “he who does not work shall not eat” and “all that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay,” is not unlike Proudhon’s conception that “the general equality shall never be violated, … only the idler shall be punished for his idleness.”20 Really, when Lenin calls for the exercised "control over the idlers [тунеядцев], ... [and that] the escape from this popular accounting and control ... [will] be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment,"21 he is mirroring Proudhon exactly. Further, Lenin’s “equality of wages” is very similar to what Marx portrayed Proudhon’s economics as: “M. Proudhon takes constituted value as his starting point to construct a new social world with the aid of this value. … All men are wage workers getting equal pay for an equal time of work. Perfect equality rules the exchanges.”22

The assumption that in the lower phase of communism, any political power would exist is in absolute contradiction with Marx’s conception of there being “no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.”23

Concluding Remarks

Lenin’s State and Revolution is an important work in the history of Marxism and Communism. It is one of the most read books in the Marxist corpus and even today radicalizes readers throughout the world. Notwithstanding this, its many faults (a product of its time, of course) leave it as a subpar theoretical summarization of Marx and Engels. Following Marx’s maxim, “it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists,” it would be important to apply this not only to Lenin but also to all of the theorists of the 20th (and now 21st!) century. To reclothe Marxism, restore to it its revolutionary form, help create a new society built around production for humanity and not through it, this ruthless critique will be necessary.

As Marx wrote in a letter to Arnold Ruge:

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.

Marxist-Leninist Historian

Are "The Withering Away of the State" a Distortion by Engels and Lenin?

Left-communists are among the most annoying people. Being largely ignoramuses made up of armchair, metaphysicians who have never achieved anything noteworthy in their lives, they have nothing better to do than accuse actual revolutionary theorists of being “revisionists” and whatnot…

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a month ago · Comrade Scriptrix

In ’s article detailing the transition between capitalist and communist society, she writes that when “the workers first take over and usurp the capitalists, there will be a workers’ state.” Marx only uses the term “workers’ state” one time throughout his works, and it is only to mock the term and Bakunin’s use of it^[1]. In fact, when writing about the Paris Commune, there is not a single place where Marx calls the Commune a state. More radically, he claims that the Commune could not even create a class government^[2], and was instead the reabsorption of the state power by society^[3] that organized its own force of political supremacy.

Marx and Engels nowhere make the distinction between socialism and communism. For M&E, socialism, communism, the free association of producers, union of free individuals, and associated mode of production are all equivalent. The conception that socialism is congruent with Marx’s “lower phase” of communism can be traced back to Lenin in The State and Revolution.^[4] However, this conception is not one found in Marx's or Engels’ work.

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’s claim that “Left-coms, being illiterate, contend (as the instagram philosopher does) that under the ‘lower phase communism’ that there is no state.” Being endowed with reasoning capabilities, however, I contend that in the lower phase of communism, there really is “no state.” This is from a thorough reading of Marx’s work. Marx says that between capitalist and communist society, there is a revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. This revolutionary transformation does not have a name, just the revolutionary transformation between capitalism and communism. However, corresponding to this transformation between epochs/modes of production, there is a political transition period where the state can be nothing but the dictatorship of the proletariat.^[5] He says that this dictatorship of the proletariat only exists during the transition “to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”^[6] When quotes Marx in the Gothakritik, however, she comes to the conclusion that “the first stage between full communism and capitalism … involves the worker’s state.” Nowhere did Marx say that this dictatorship of the proletariat exists in the “first stage” of communism, and specifically argues that it takes place “between capitalist and communist society,” not during communist society.
This conflation of lower phase communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat finds its origin in a misreading of the Gothakritik. For Marx, “communist society,” even “as it emerges from capitalist society,” is still a “co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production.”^[7] This co-operative society, whose foundation is common ownership of the means of production, conceptually must be classless. Although there are “defects”^[8] in this first phase, nowhere can there be common ownership in a society split up into classes, which is why her claim that the “first phase [of communist society], socialism, is characterized by class[,]” would be incorrect. Her claim that the existence of “bourgeois right” requires a state, but, again, there is no textual basis in M&E for this. If the state presupposes that society is split up into classes, and it is understood by M&E that there are no classes in the co-operative society founded on the common ownership of the means of production, then the state does not exist during the existence of bourgeois right. Not to mention that Marx uses the term bürgerliches Recht for “bourgeois right.” In German, Recht does not imply the existence of a state. If he had used the term Gesetz, then a state would have been implied, but he did not use that term. To further hammer in the point, we can refer to the previous concept from Marx that the dictatorship of the proletariat, which exists specifically between capitalist and communist society^[9], only persists until the abolition of all classes.^[10] It is Lenin’s misunderstanding of the Gothakritik that this conception of bourgeois right implying a state originates.^[11]

, with her dubious reading of Marx, writes that the “first phase” (implying the first phase of communism) requires a “socialist state.” The “socialist state” is an oxymoron, even for Roland Boer, the author she quotes later in the paper as a supposed authority on Engels.^[12] She continues that the first phase of communism requires a state because it is “still surviving from capitalism and still has class character.” As has already been shown^[13], the lower phase of communism, which is still considered communist society, is characterized by Marx as founded on common ownership of the means of production. This already signifies that there is no class character in this communist society. She quotes Marx in the Gothakritik, where he explains the differences between lower and higher phase communist society^[14], to try and show that because there are differences between the two, one must contain a state. However, there is no mention of the existence of a state in the quote she attempted to mine from Marx’s Gothakritik.

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To justify her interpretation of Marx, she invokes Engels’ Anti-Dühring. This seminal Engels text allegedly supports her interpretation that a state exists in communist society. She argues that many people consider Anti-Dühring to be a “great distortion of Marxist thought,” and implies that people believe the state does not exist in socialist society because of this. From this faulty misconception, she goes on to a 3-page tirade containing quotes about how Marx agreed with Engels in Anti-Dühring and that he was really endorsing the text. However, a problem arises when we find that, throughout the entire article, does not quote Anti-Dühring a single time! She does quote Engels in his letter to August Bebel, though. This quote has no comment or explanation, and was seemingly shoehorned into the article with no purpose but to make it seem longer and smarter than it actually is. Not only this, but the quote explicitly contradicts her argument, saying that “with the introduction of the socialist order of society,” the state actually “disappears.”^[15] We can go further and actually quote from Anti-Dühring! Engels writes that when the “proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property,” in doing so it “abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state. … It dies out.” He continues, saying that “the first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state.”^[16] So for Engels, once the state seizes the means of production, it withers away. Unless wants to claim that communism is not the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, she will have to concede just about every point she has made in this article.

1. “[W]orkers’ state, if he wants to call it that.” (Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy, Karl Marx 1874.)↩︎

2. “The Commune – the reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organized force of their suppression – the political form of their social emancipation, instead of the artificial force (appropriated by their oppressors) (their own force opposed to and organized against them) of society wielded for their oppression by their enemies.” (The Civil War in France First Draft, Karl Marx 1871.)↩︎

3. “The Commune could not found a new form of class government. In destroying the existing conditions of oppression by transferring all the means of labour to the productive labourer, and thereby compelling every able-bodied individual to work for a living, the only base for class rule and oppression would be removed.” (Speech on the Seventh Anniversary of The International, Karl Marx 1871.)↩︎

4. “[T]he first phase of communist society (usually called socialism)” (The State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin 1917.)↩︎

5. “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx 1875.)↩︎

6. “What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Production), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.” (Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, Karl Marx.)↩︎

7. “Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production[.] ... What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society” (Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx 1875.)↩︎

8. Ibid.↩︎

9. See footnote 5.↩︎

10. See footnote 6.↩︎

11. “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.” (The State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin 1917.)↩︎

12. “To begin with, for Engels the idea of a socialist state would be an oxymoron” (Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance: Synopsis, Roland Boer 2021.)↩︎

13. See footnote 7.↩︎

14. “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx 1875.)↩︎

15. “All the palaver about the state ought to be dropped, especially after the Commune, which had ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term. The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.” (Engels to August Bebel in Zwickau, March 18-28, 1875.)↩︎

16. “The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an organisation of the particular class, which was pro tempore the exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The state was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out.“ (Anti-Dühring Part III: Socialism II. Theoretical, Engels, 1877.) ↩︎

A multi-class alliance against colonialism can be historically progressive if it was destroying pre-capitalist social structures and replacing them with bourgeois ones in a bourgeois-democratic revolution, sure. In the case of Cabral, contrary to Marx and Lenin, he argued that "[t]he leaders of the liberation movement, drawn generally from the 'petite bourgeoisie'" or the urban working class. The word "or" here is doing some heavy lifting. Marx and Lenin (even Mao!!?) would specifically attack the idea that the petit bourgeoisie should lead a bourgeois-democratic revolution, that is if the goal is a communist revolution. Cabral does what Marxists call a "fetishization of the national question." He obviously does not have the communist understanding of the national question in mind during these speeches when he upholds the nation as a harmonization of the culture of all peoples. He says:

the liberation movement must [...] characterize the master line which defines progressively a national culture. [...] Confronted with such a necessity, the liberation struggle is, above all, a struggle both for the preservation and survival of the cultural values of the people and for the harmonization and development of these values within a national framework.

This is not Marxism, just bourgeois-democratic twaddle. While for Leninists a national liberation movement to establish a bourgeois state in Guinea-Bissau was progressive, it was definitely not communist and nor did it follow any communist tactics. For Marx and Lenin, though, an alliance with the bourgeoisie in these struggles for national independence is unnecessary. Marx says in 1850:

[If the proletariat entered into unity with the petit bourgeoisie, the] proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner. [...] In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past. It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come, as in all others, it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory.

Cabral's "tactical" alliance was simply to be anti-communist in his tactic of allying with the bourgeoisie in an attempt to create socialism.

[In] order to truly fulfill the role in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.

Cabral wants the petty-bourgeoisie to help lead the national liberation movement and even the socialist revolution that comes afterwards. He understands that the class will need to be liquidated after taking power, so his grand plan is to hope they dissolve themselves? If the petty-bourgeoisie are a revolutionary class predisposed to anti-revolutionary behavior, putting them in a leadership position seems more like suicide for the social revolution than anything else.

In fact, it was. The June Revolution of 1848 already showed that an alliance with these antagonistic classes only lasted "as long as there was a consanguinity of interests between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat." Once this alliance started to sideline the proletariat, the betrayal has already begun. The June Insurrection had on one hand the "aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population." On the other hand was the Paris proletariat alone. Did the petty-bourgeoisie here stand by the proletariat, help them take power, and somehow consciously "commit suicide," however that is supposed to take place? No, they sided with the bourgeoisie and feudal remnants to crush the proletariat. These lessons should have been embodied in every worker's mind since that point, but it obviously has not.

For Marx, an alliance between the proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie is "unnecessary." This is because their interests only align when they are both directly fighting a common enemy, and "an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past." A united front is pointless because the proletariat's interests only coincidentally coincide with the petty-bourgeoisie's during battle, and that formal alliance would only integrate the proletariat as an appendage of bourgeois democracy.

I will concede this point: Lenin is closer to Cabral here than me. Lenin believed in an alliance between the bourgeoisie and the working class in anti-colonial struggles in the hope that the classes could work together against their common enemy, pre-capitalist class formations. Lenin would still heavily oppose Cabral's plan. Lenin did advocate for an alliance, but stressed that, with regards to the petty-bourgeoisie, the proletariat "should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form." Cabral does not advocate for this in the slightest, and instead wants a national harmony of all the peoples.

The problem with this Lenin's proposal is that he makes the same failed prediction Marx did in 1848. Marx thought this temporary alliance may have been possible but with the defeat of the June revolution that possibility was rejected by history. In 1850, Marx now claimed that an alliance would be detrimental to the proletariat's position. Lenin and the Second Congress's theory of national revolution rested on the notion that the national liberation of the East would force Britain into submission. History has proved them, and all who thought like them, wrong.

The Marx quote is about a speech from the aftermath of 1848, and Guinea-Bissau was on the eve - similarly to 1848 Germany - of a bourgeois-democratic movement. Germany had more proletarians than Guinea-Bissau did, this is true. That may be part of why they had a bourgeois-democratic revolution instead of a revolution of the working class. Lenin thought that this "stage" could be skipped and go straight to a dictatorship of the proletariat if the Soviets were to lend support to the colonies. This did not happen in Guinea-Bissau, so they were left to build capitalism. This happened all throughout the colonies, none of them actually leading a communist revolution; instead, the colonies built more capitalist apparatuses, leading to where we are today. Cabral's petty-bourgeois and peasant led national revolution was a multi class alliance, this cannot be denied, but it was not in any way a revolution to look back on with any intention of repetition. If Cabral intended to lead a socialist revolution, he did not do a good job at it, as he disregarded all of the lessons of 1848.