Revolution- According to the SPGB and Anarchists

I've come to believe that regarding the 'Transition' nothing is straightforward for Anarchists or Marxists in that in the chaos of a prosecution of the class war the extent of the need for a workers transitory body of some sort depends on the advanced state of the class and it's standing.As an Anarchist I hope it's requirement is little or zero but I think what matters is keeping the situation fluid so no be beaurocracy can usurp workers power.

With much of the SPGB's positions there always exists important caveats. We see a difference between a transitional society and a transitional (transformative) period.

The first caveat is that the SPGB intends to capture the state machine to dismantle the coercive elements ...once any threat of what Marx called a slave-owners rebellion evaporates. The SPGB itself does not envisage that a recalcitrant ruling class will be a threat and so the speedy disappearance of the army and police etc. is to be expected. Obviously, capture of the State is something most anarchists would not agree with but perhaps some left communists might.

Every state possesses ministries (and world organisations like WHO and Unicef) that are required to make capitalism function smoothly and many of those will be modified and adapted...health, agriculture, science, statistics...we'll discover which departments of the state will be absorbed and merged with other newly empowered democratic processes such as workers councils, industrial unions, community assemblies into administering a socialist society. Again how long will it take for those international, national and local government structures to become unrecognisable to the present ones, who knows. Those anarchists who do work in such jobs i am sure are aware that they can be made into revolutionary organs.

This extract may help explain part of the SPGB thinking

Since 1900, the working class has still, it is true, needed to organise itself to capture political power in all the various states of the world, and, in this sense, a "political transition period" during which the working class uses state power to establish the common ownership of the means of production, is still necessary. However, since this period would be so short as to be negligible, the concept of a transition period has become outdated.
Similarly, though in the first few years of socialism, as the mess left by capitalism is cleared up, some restrictions on full free consumption may still be necessary, world socialist society could now move rapidly (i.e. in well under a decade at the most) to implementing free access to consumer goods and services according to individual need as the principle of distribution. To sum up, the concept of a "transition period", lasting some years, between capitalism and socialism is today an obsolete 19th century concept, while the ideal of a "transitional society" between capitalism and socialism, as proposed by Mandel, was never to be found in Marx in the first place.

http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2010/02/myth-of-transitional-society.html

In the situation of the transformation of society into a class-free, price-free, wages-free, money-free non-market, non-exchange society, the SPGB, as expressed in this article, is perhaps more anarchist than Marxist, refusing to suggest Labour Time Vouchers as a half-way compromise and agreeing with Kropotkin.

http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2015/07/what-marx-should-have-said-to-kropotkin.html

We do have a certain amount of internal debate whether in the early days of socialism everything will be freely accessible on demand. Obviously, some things might not be, and even when socialism is well developed, a bad harvest or even a miscalculation in production may result in a temporary shortage. If it is "life-threatening" then the principle of according to need determines the priority of distribution, if it is merely "life-style" -threatening, a simple lottery or even first-come-first-served can serve as a crude rationing system until the situation is corrected.

Anyways that is what i consider my opening statement of the SPGB. I am sure it will develop deeper with further contributions and criticisms

Some discussion of a Left Communist take on these issues in their pamphlet here:
http://libcom.org/library/communism-introduction-politics-internationalist-communist-tendency

Socialist Studies address this point here
http://www.socialiststudies.org.uk/polemic%20buick%20wrong.shtml

Bakunin argued that the abolition of the State was a pre-condition of Socialism, while Marx and Engels held that socialism would result in the state "dissolving" or "withering away" as a consequence of the social revolution.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain developed its position in the D. of P. in 1904, and in the 1978 statement, on the basis of Marx's position.