Kautsky's wish to "take over" the state.

  1. Brutus
    Brutus
    In Road to Power, kautsky writes something like this: the SPD gets elected to power, institutes the minimum programme and creates a workers state (apologies for the gross over simplification). However, in 1904 he writes:
    “The proletariat, as well as the petty bourgeoisie, will never be able to rule the state through these means of rule. This is not only because the officer corps, the top of the bureaucracy and the church have always been recruited from the upper classes and tied to them with the most intimate links, but also because the very nature of these bodies as means of rule includes a striving to raise themselves above the mass of the people in order to rule them, instead of serving them. They will always be for the most part anti-democratic and aristocratic …

    The conquest of state power by the proletariat, therefore, does not simply mean the conquest of [the existing] ministries, which then, without further ado, use these previous means of rule — an established state church, the bureaucracy and the officer corps — in a socialist sense. Rather, it means the dissolution [Auflösung] of these means of rule.”
    Would this be the result of the censorship of RtP by the SPD, or that Kautsky simply changed his mind?
  2. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    I'm not sure. Lenin had quite a high opinion of the 1909 work, obviously.

    Since you're quoting from the WW article referenced in the IBT polemic, I would agree that the slogan "smash the state" isn't a good one. Democratization and "art of revolution" call for something else.

    I'd like to bring to comrades' attention my position on the military question, in which I'm very much against the slogan "abolition of the standing army":

    http://www.revleft.com/vb/political-...827/index.html (Simple example problem: How can we handle the nukes?)

    Kautsky the Marxist should have said "ultimate dissolution, starting with neutralization" instead of just "dissolution," IMO.
  3. Brutus
    Brutus
    Surely we need to abolish the bourgeois standing army? I'm not against creating a proletarian army (or at least structures like the Red Guards, which were nucleus of the early RA, no?) but today's structure of the army means you can get incompetent people in a position of power, leading to major clusterfucks. Hierarchy is needed, but it can't be the same model as the current army.
  4. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    This question of "smashing the state" is haunting me.

    Regarding the quotations by Lenin from one of Marx's letters, much seems to rest on the lessons of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, his fall and the subsequent Revolution in Paris. Indeed, according to Lenin Marx had once written:

    If you look up the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I declare that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people’s revolution on the Continent.
    So, what does Marx actually write in the Brumaire?

    The centralization of the state that modern society requires arises only on the ruins of the military-bureaucratic government machinery which was forged in opposition to feudalism.
    Why?
    But if the overthrow of the [bourgeois] parliamentary republic [by the proletariat] contains within itself the germ of the triumph of the proletarian revolution, its immediate and obvious result was Bonaparte’s victory over parliament, of the executive power over the legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases. In parliament the nation made its general will the law; that is, it made the law of the ruling class its general will. It renounces all will of its own before the executive power and submits itself to the superior command of an alien, of authority. The executive power, in contrast to the legislative one, expresses the heteronomy of a nation in contrast to its autonomy. France therefore seems to have escaped the despotism of a class only to fall back under the despotism of an individual, and what is more, under the authority of an individual without authority. The struggle seems to be settled in such a way that all classes, equally powerless and equally mute, fall on their knees before the rifle butt.
    Then in 1871 Marx rephrased this to conclude that people's revolutions must smash this "military-bureaucratic machine". This conclusion is the one quoted by Lenin in State and Revolution.

    However, we should not argue over how Marx formulated this "smashing" of the state without an analysis of the means of production and its ownership. Consider the problems of the Russian Revolution, they were legion: the proletarian revolution in the cities was surrounded by a sea of petty private property. This formed the basis for recurrent economic and political protests, counter-revolutionary armies and makeshift "white" governments. "Either property will smash the republic or the republic will smash property." (Proudhon)

    By the way. Lenin's focus on smashing the state is partially due to Bukharin. He was probably the first prominent Bolshevik to conclude this, but apparantly this must have appalled Lenin at first. Only after the February Revolution did Lenin consede to Bukharin - on some way or another - that he was right. It resulted in the State and Revolution brochure. Note that equally his Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism and where not only a response to Kautsky, but also an attempt to approach Bukharin of who's conclusion he always had some reservations.

    Lenin wrote to a Bolshevik in February 1917:
    I am preparing ... an article on the question of Marxism's attitude towards the state. I have reached conclusions much sharper against Kautsky than against Bukharin ... Bukharin is much better than Kautsky.
    Note that Lenin's attempts to change the programme stemmed from a reaction to Bukharin. This is yet another example of Lenin's "proper" theoretical development - as was shown by Lih when he pointed to the influence of Kautsky - instead of the myth that Lenin admitted he was wrong and that Trotsky was right all along.
  5. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Surely we need to abolish the bourgeois standing army? I'm not against creating a proletarian army (or at least structures like the Red Guards, which were nucleus of the early RA, no?) but today's structure of the army means you can get incompetent people in a position of power, leading to major clusterfucks. Hierarchy is needed, but it can't be the same model as the current army.
    Then perhaps use more appropriate wording? Another example is referring explicitly to "wholesale turnover" in the state organs and perhaps more. How some eastern European countries profiled and stigmatized those who worked for the Soviet-friendly secret police organizations is a good example of what to do to *everyone* working for the CIA, CIA, FBI, MIA, Mossad, MVD, NSA, etc. but that doesn't mean we can't discard comprehensive security forces of our own.

    In my army post above, I actually defended the post-Red Army, "Stalinist" Soviet Armed Forces model from 1946-1991, with political officers having a key but second-fiddle role. After all, someone's got to manage the nukes and other WMDs.
  6. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    I think the Soviet Army was too large and too permanent to be a model. We need a permanent officer-corps and a small army of engineers to maintain complicated weapon systems. All other military personel remains in the army only fo the purpose of short-term training (a few years) and re-training.

    The permanent character of the officer-corps and the engineers itself is a relative concept. The employment of "lower" ranks (with lieutenants and captains forming the upper limit) could be reduced to that of half a generation (about 15 years).
  7. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Good counterpoint, though I must reiterate that I proposed demarchic features and labour rights (unionization and all) for all soldiers within my framework.
  8. Tower of Bebel
    Tower of Bebel
    Concerning the quotes from Marx, since they are so crucial to the argument made by Lenin: Marx calls the smashing of the "military-bureaucratic government machinery which was forged in opposition to feudalism" the "precondition for every real people's revolution on the Continent".

    Thus, this state machine of the executive power, the government, was forged by the revolutionary (petty) bourgeoisie in reaction to feudalism. And it must be smashed as a precondition for a real people's revolution, i.e. the socialist revolution. A convincing argument.

    The bourgeois revolution in France went, according to Marx, this way: "The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the monarchy had begun, centralization, but at the same time the limits, the attributes, and the agents of the governmental power."

    "Napoleon completed this state machinery. The Legitimate Monarchy and the July Monarchy added nothing to it but a greater division of labor, increasing at the same rate as the division of labor inside the bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and therefore new material for the state administration."

    This "breaking all separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to create [a new unity on a new basis]" seems to me far removed from "destroying" the whole state and the whole bureaucracy. "Smashing" or "shattering", indeed, look more adept than "destroying". "Breaking [apart]" even more.

    Compare this to what Trotsky wrote about the formation of the Red Army - part of the "military-bureaucratic state machinery" of the Soviet Union:

    "We built the army out of the human and technical material ready to hand, seeking always and everywhere to ensure domination by the proletarian vanguard in the organisation of the army, that is, in the army’s personnel, in its administration, in its consciousness and in its feelings."

    "The institution of commissars is not some dogma of Marxism, nor is it a necessary part of a proletarian ‘military doctrine’: under certain conditions it was a necessary instrument of proletarian supervision, leadership and political education in the army, and for this reason it assumed enormous importance in the life of the armed forces of the Soviet republic."

    "We combined the old commanding personnel with the new, and only in this way did we achieve the needed result: the army proved capable of fighting in the service of the working class. In its aims, in the predominant class composition of its body of commanders and commissars, in its spirit and in its entire political morale, the Red Army differs radically from all the other armies in the world and stands in hostile opposition to them. As it continues to develop, the Red Army has become and is becoming more and more similar to them in formally organisational and technical respects."

    So, right after the powers were "smashed" on all levels by breaking up the capitalist shackles, new proletarian shackles were made to reconfigure as much of the technical, administrative and human material as possible and to make it serve the working class interestes through "the predominant class composition of its body".

    I would make the causious conclusion from this that - maybe - "destruction" is not what we want. Neither is "abolition". Nor do we simply want to capture our goal intact. That would be the other side of the medal and equally false. These texts suggest to break it, take it and shape it in order to conquer.
  9. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    That would suggest, comrade, both "wholesale turnover" and "wholesale reorganization." That second one was missing from my previous post.
  10. bropasaran
    bropasaran
    The Program of the French Workers' Party, written mainly by Marx and Guesde, has these points as a part of the minimal political program:
    -Removal of the budget of the religious orders and the return to the nation of the 'goods said to be mortmain, movable and immovable', including all the industrial and commercial annexes of these corporations;
    -Abolition of standing armies and the general arming of the people;
    -The Commune (/municipality) to be master of its administration and its police.

    This would in a large degree constrain the church, army, police and state bureacracy as agents of capitalists, and this is the smashing of the "military-bureaucratic government machinery" that Marx mentioned, and Engels when he said "It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariatmust first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes".
  11. Noa Rodman
    Noa Rodman
    Just a translation of Peter Schöttler's article 'Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky as Critics of "Legal Socialism"' (1986) 14 International Journal of the Sociology of Law: http://www.academia.edu/7847402/Frie...egal_Socialism (the text of Engels and Kautsky itself is behind a wall: http://pas.sagepub.com/content/7/2/203.extract)
  12. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Comrade Bropasaran, I think that Engels quote succinctly describes my position on the matter of "democratization," "art of revolution," "wholesale turnover," and "wholesale reorganization."

    BTW, which work did Engels state that in?
  13. Noa Rodman
    Noa Rodman
  14. Die Neue Zeit
    Die Neue Zeit
    Thanks, Noa!
  15. Noa Rodman
    Noa Rodman
    https://libcom.org/library/free-society-karl-kautsky

    This is the final article in the series.