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Anarchism and the state
there was a good discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat on a thread discussing Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control ...
Joseph K. wrote:
a dotp requires a class society for there to be other classes for the proletariat to dominate - classes are only maintained by state (or psuedo-state if the bourgeoisie hire mercenaries etc) violence protecting alienated property relations.thus the dictatorship of the proletariat is a paradox - for there to be dictatorship - not civil war but dominance - the power of the bourgeoisie must have been smashed and thus there is no obstacle to the self-negation of the proletariat. in practice this can only mean an attempt by the proletariat to use the state as a tool can only result in the proletariat becoming a tool of the state.
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The reason for this is that the continued existence of the Class antagonism will entail the necessity of the state - or an institution fulfilling the functions thereof - to organize and conduct the defense of the revolution.
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The absence of central leadership which would exist in the absence of the state may result in independent groups of armed proletarians carrying out what they perceive to be the best plan of action with no regard for the broader requirements of the revolutionary movement
I fail to see how a state/centralised power in the above instances would lead to better conditions. If collectivisation is a process that as happened by intiative from those directly involved, then subordinating that to state checks, quotas and redistribution is just cumbersome. I think this is a bit of a myth of Leninism, that centralism is the best defence, autonomy is. Centralism is a good tactic and its something we should encourage but it should be supported from below within a federalist structure.
And collectivised autonomous communities would always be supportive of others facing the same struggle, centralised states have proven time and time again to make sacrifices of one group in aid of their own advancement.
See Anarchist FAQ
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The state is essentially a set of institutions that exercise a monopoly on the use of force within a defined territorial area, and arises from, as established by Vladimir Lenin in State and Revolution, the irreconcilability of the class antagonism, such that the state is a constant feature of all class societies.
See, that's the problem with most Leninists, they have a shitty definition of the state. Marx says that the state is the organized force of society, and this force is the power, privilege, and wealth concentrated in the hands of the minority at the expense of the majority. The external ruling power is used to exert the influence of the minority over the majority, and anarchists tend to use the shorthand term "government" as a catchall for all vehicles of the state oppression.
The Dictatorship of the proletariat will not be maintained by the working class during the fight to communism. If you understand socialism, as Lenin used it in State and Revolution, as the lower order of communism, then you understand that the form of socialism is accidental to the direct fight to communism.
In order for Communism to be achieved the mode of capitalist production must be negated, and the revolution is the nodal point for the negation of the negation to occur and for the capitlist system to begin turning into its opposite -- a stateless society.
The stateless society will have to be torn down continually, and will not wither away. This tearing down of the bourgeois state, through the building of specific communist relations meant on a form of distribution of meeting people's needs, will negate the state, and not Lenin's opportunistic paen to nationalism that you're quoting.
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how the defence of the revolution would be organised in the absence of a institution which has a monopoly on the organisation and legitimate use of force.
this is pretty paradoxical if the raison d'etre of the revolution is the elimination of the monopoly on organization and the 'legitimate' use of force. the defense of such a rev would have to be some sort of tension that encourages individuals to freely reject movement towards that type of institution. its a bit hard to say really, since the lenin's reds uprooted, executed and deported the makhnovist experiment in the ukraine, but in the short time that those 'free-zones' operated, they saw no need for any repressive apparatus. the threat wasn't internal b/c people organized themselves on a communal level and with such face-to-face relations and mutual dependence, some sort of subversive reaction was not practicable and so why monopolize violence? regarding the external threats of the whites and the reactionaries, the mahknovists handled themselves pretty well by an all volunteer military. they eventually lost, but it would be difficult to argue that their failure lay in their social organization but rather was in an absurdly unequal game of military and technological force. i think this can be said of the anarchist zones during the spanish civil war as well and the similar areas in the italian anti-fascist resistance. the state apparatus clearly did not give way to a communist society in the marxist sense in russia and really only helped them create an imperialist force and severely repressive ruling political class. moreover, an argument could be made that the paris commune's fall may have been partially due to a statist logic. the specialization of force embodied by the paris national guard failed to catch the final assault of thiers' military by dint of poor centralized organization. if the the authority of violent action was spread out equally and generally as a responsibility of all paris citizens, as much of the propaganda and resolutions appeared to call for, then an armed and omnipresent populace committed to the defense of the revolution (not an army, mind you, not a police force) could have been ready for the reaction's final push.
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if the the authority of violent action was spread out equally and generally as a responsibility of all paris citizens, as much of the propaganda and resolutions appeared to call for, then an armed and omnipresent populace committed to the defense of the revolution (not an army, mind you, not a police force) could have been ready for the reaction's final push.
I agree to an extent, but within the first stages of the revolution, there will be a standing army or "column". I am just pointing out that there will be a "red Army" advancing the gains of the revolution, but the primary forces that defends the gains of the revolution will be worker's militias on local levels. The workers must never be disarmed again.
I think we are just beginning to get a good grasp on what happened and what went wrong in the revolutions of the 20th century.
bobkindles isn't using the Marxist theory of the state but Max Weber's definition. But social anarchists need to reject Weber's definition. Note that by defining the state as the institution with a monopoly of legitimate resort to force in a territory (Weber's definition), this says nothing about its class function, nor its relationship to the mass of the people. But as Engels pointed out, the modern state is an institution essentially separated from any real control by the mass of the people. This is necessary for the state to play its main social function, in the Marxist view, which is to maintain the conditions of domination and thus exploitation by the dominant class. A polity in which the population ran things thru direct popular assemblies and congresses of revocable delegates would be inconsistent with performing that function.
I believe that the state also has one other essential characteristic: It must maintain social peace in order to govern, and to do this it must be able to maintain sufficient sense of its legitimacy in the eyes of the population. This means that a role of the state is to resolve or respond to social conflict, such as intense class conflicts that might tear the society apart. This leads to the state being the means through which concessions are granted to the mass of the people during periods of unrest that threaten the survival of the dominating classes' system. This results in things like the social wage, programs like unemployment benefit, retirement benefits, health care insurance, and so on.
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In the post-insurrectionary period the class antagonism still exists, in so far as that there will be certain economic and political groups who endeavor to re-establish a system of private property such that workers no longer exercise control over the means of production. From this it may appear evident that there must exist a state apparartus. The reason for this is that the continued existence of the Class antagonism will entail the necessity of the state - or an institution fulfilling the functions thereof - to organize and conduct the defense of the revolution. The absence of central leadership which would exist in the absence of the state may result in independent groups of armed proletarians carrying out what they perceive to be the best plan of action with no regard for the broader requirements of the revolutionary movement, or alternatively armed groups may be subject to orders from a range of different sources and institutions between which there exists no unity of purpose and cohesion.
This is a series of typical Leninist fallacies.
If the revolution is a perocess in which the working class is dismantling the economic basis of the power of the dominating classes, both ownership and management hierarchy, this means that the ownership and hierarchical management structures are being replaced by institutions of direct worker management over industry. It is not a revolution that could liberate the working class otherwise. Now, it is true that to be able to consolidate this process, the working class must also possess the dominant armed power in the revolutionary territory. It can't defend its taking over economic management and dissolving the class power of the owner and managerial classes otherwise. Thus the working class must build an institution through which it collectively has political dominance over the region in that it has the power to set the rules, and turn back any counter-revolutionary challenge to its power.
It doesn't follow this must be a state. In fact it couldn't be a state. If it were a state it would be an entity with hierarchical topdown power over society, not controllable by the mass of the people, in which case it would be a means to some class dominating the working class. This is in fact what happened in the Russian revolution. The local soviets were mostly set up with centralized, top-down leadership. The mass of workers didn't control them. Once the Bolsheviks had gained control of the soviets, and set up a new national government, they attempted to use it to implement a centralist program, both a program of central planning via Vesenkha (which became Gosplan in 1924) and new top-down hierarchical army. These were a set of measures that would inevitably lead to the consolidation of a new managerialist ruling class.
If you look at the state you'll see it embodies a class division within it. The state has a corporate-style hierarchy with professionals and managers at the top and workers are expected to do what they're told. This is a relationship of class domination. To want this to continue is to want the class system to continue.
It's true that a single institution through which a united working class can make united decisions is needed. It doesn't follow this must be a top-down hierarchical structure, run by some party leadership, and separated from control by the mass of the people. You could have a regional congress of delegates from the local assemblies, and an elected and revocable administrative committee accountable to such a mass democratic body, with a democratic people's militia whose efforts they are coordinating.
Something like this was what the Spanish anarchosyndicalists proposed in Sept 1936 to replace the Republican state. They proposed a people's militia with unified command controlled by committees elected by the unions, and answerable to a national workers congress. It was to have no econmic power (since the industries were to be managed by their workers and planned via some grassroots planning system) but limited in its authority to the social self-defense function (including courts). It would have been a governing structure for the country but not quite a state, depending on how effective the actual control was by the population via congresses and elected militia committees. Thus you have a unified way of fighting the counterrevolution but without putting the "vanguard party" in charge of a top-down state to run the whole society.
t.
Hey - I am new at this forum and, as a Leninist, I differ ideologically from most of the member of this board in that I support the existence of a state apparatus in the post-revolutionary period. Although the invalidity of this idea is doubtless accepted as a given by Anarchists, I would appreciate it if I could post some of my personal views on the state in order to get a better idea of how Anarchists analyse the concept of the state.
First, it might be a good idea to ensure that are discussing the same concept and so I will establish a definition of the state: The state is essentially a set of institutions that exercise a monopoly on the use of force within a defined territorial area, and arises from, as established by Vladimir Lenin in State and Revolution, the irreconcilability of the class antagonism, such that the state is a constant feature of all class societies. Any society that is characterized by class division will invariably also contain a degree of class conflict; given that the interests of different classes are in fundamental opposition. Class conflict varies in magnitude; at its highest point it evolves into active class confrontation. The state is fundamentally the mechanism by which the current ruling class (The Bourgeoisie) can maintain the existing economic system of private property. The primary way in which the state does this is through the command of what Lenin referred to as 'bodies of armed men', most notably the armed services and the police force, who can exert physical force on the proletariat, should the proletariat choose to undertake such actions that are seen as posing a direct, or even symbolic threat to the existing economic and political system.
In the post-insurrectionary period the class antagonism still exists, in so far as that there will be certain economic and political groups who endeavor to re-establish a system of private property such that workers no longer exercise control over the means of production. From this it may appear evident that there must exist a state apparartus. The reason for this is that the continued existence of the Class antagonism will entail the necessity of the state - or an institution fulfilling the functions thereof - to organize and conduct the defense of the revolution. The absence of central leadership which would exist in the absence of the state may result in independent groups of armed proletarians carrying out what they perceive to be the best plan of action with no regard for the broader requirements of the revolutionary movement, or alternatively armed groups may be subject to orders from a range of different sources and institutions between which there exists no unity of purpose and cohesion. This is based on an observation of the difficulties that workers have faced in the past, most notably in the case of the Paris Commune.
Your thoughts would be much appreciated. In particular, I would be interested to know how the defence of the revolution would be organised in the absence of a institution which has a monopoly on the organisation and legitimate use of force.