"A bourgeois state without the bourgeoise?"

[Jacob Cliff]

In Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky mentions Lenin saying something along the lines that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoise." What exactly is inferred by this? Is lenin talking about the bourgeois right, from "each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution?"
And also, in Lenin's State and Revolution, Lenin emphasizes many times that the bourgeois state is not captured, but smashed; a proletariat state is a whole new state. Are these statements not contradictions?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

In Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky mentions Lenin saying something along the lines that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoise." What exactly is inferred by this? Is lenin talking about the bourgeois right, from "each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution?"

"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.

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


This may sound like a paradox or simply a dialectical conundrum of which Marxism is often accused by people who have not taken the slightest trouble to study its extraordinarily profound content.


But in fact, remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society. And Marx did not arbitrarily insert a scrap of 'bourgeois' law into communism, but indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society emerging out of the womb of capitalism."


(The State and the Revolution)

So, yes, the idea is that as long as the productive forces have not developed to the extent that bourgeois right can be abandoned, there needs to exist some sort of apparatus to oversee rationing etc., which Lenin calls a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" by way of analogy.

And also, in Lenin's State and Revolution, Lenin emphasizes many times that the bourgeois state is not captured, but smashed; a proletariat state is a whole new state. Are these statements not contradictions?

They look contradictory, but this "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" is not a form of bourgeois class rule (and it is not a state either); it is an apparatus like the one possessed by the bourgeois state but it is not the same apparatus.

[Creative Destruction]

which is a crap misreading of Marx and Engels.

[Brutus]

The proletarian dictatorship is the transitional period between capitalism and communism: capitalism is being dismantled, communism is being birthed. The bourgeoisie have been destroyed during the Proletarian Dictatorship, and the production of things for use and not for value has been created. So on the one hand, the bourgeoisie have been defeated and production for use is now possible (nascent communism) but on the other hand, classes still exist and that the law of value is still in effect (dying capitalism). Capitalism is not gone, socialism is not established; Lenin clearly states that the dictatorship of the proletariat is “the struggle against petty commodity production and against the capitalism which still persists and against that which is newly arising on the basis of petty commodity production.” The proletariat will expropriate the businesses and land, putting them under the control of the proletariat state, which is built up from the local councils composed of workers, thus the means of production are controlled by the workers themselves, creating a system of worker-managed capital on a national scale, eliminating all competition within the proletarian dictatorship.

[MonsterMan]

In Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky mentions Lenin saying something along the lines that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoise."

it would be a 'change of mindset' IMO - ie: smashing of the need to dominate others and petty ego gratification, that kind of thing