Origin of the National Republic

[CU for Monday, 14 September 2009]

The Great French Revolution that started in 1789 did not immediately produce a lasting democratic republic in France. Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire, which had attacked feudal monarchs all over Europe, was followed during the next three decades by the restoration of weak versions of the French monarchy, culminating in the “July Monarchy” of Louis Philippe. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels anticipated a coming revolutionary upsurge and published the Communist University at the beginning of the revolutionary year of 1848.

The Manifesto’s first major section is called “Bourgeois and Proletarians” and it says among other things that: “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.”

Yet it was Marx in particular, in two great books and one short Address (see the links below), who soon described the much less simple, more complex, permutations of class conflict at the time. For example, in the following cut from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (click on the link below for a longer selection) it is clear that the proletariat suffered an almost immediate disaster, because it had no allies and was isolated and attacked by all the other classes together, and massacred in June of 1848 in Paris [Picture: photo of barricades in a Paris street in June, 1848].

This is the situation that the proletariat must always avoid, and it is one reason why the working class must always have allies. Here is the cut from Marx’s outline of events:

“a. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.

“b. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December 10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.”

In the “18th Brumaire”, not only do the contenders of the Great French Revolution reappear, namely the Aristocracy, the Peasantry (known as the Montagne), the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat; but also described are the clear contradictions within the bourgeois class; the classless, manipulative Bonaparte, who played the four main classes off against each other for more than two decades until he lost the plot; and the “lumpen proletariat” of idle adventurers who were Bonaparte’s willing, and paid (with “whisky and sausages”) accomplices.

In his March 1850 Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League Marx spoke in particular of Germany, which had also caught the revolutionary enthusiasm, but still in terms of a precise and dynamic comprehension of the patterns and permutations of class contradiction, and of who must ally with whom at any particular moment.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were deeply, personally and very effectively involved in these events as individuals and as organisers, and in Engels’ case as a military combatant. These events shaped the new form of democratic republic that arrived in France after the eventual fall of Louis Bonaparte in 1871. That newly-formed kind of “democratic bourgeois republic” still remains the standard form of nation-state in the world, and it is the same kind that our republic has become, here in South Africa.

This historic understanding, as well as the unsurpassed clarity, with which Marx in particular describes the nature of practical multi-class struggle, can serve to prepare us for a progressively more specific, historical examination of the theory and practice of National Democratic Revolution (NDR) through the 20th Century, in Africa, and in South Africa up to the present time.

The NDR is nothing if it is not about class alliance, and about democracy on the national scale.

As the second component of the CU Generic Course on the NDR, the extracts from the “18^th Brumaire” would be used as the discussion text, with the “March Address” and the “Class Struggles in France” offered as additional reading.

Click on these links:

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapters 1 & 7, Marx (10719 words)

March 1850 Address to the CC of the Communist League, Marx (4120 words)

Class Struggles in France, Part 1, The Defeat of June 1848, Marx (9373 words)

National Democratic Revolution

[CU for Friday, 11 September 2009]

A blog can adjust its function over time. The Communist University Blog, and its linked e-mail distribution, is currently functioning as a generator of new material for the Communist University’s re-edited and re-formatted versions of the CU Generic Courses, which were first published nearly four years ago on the amadlandawonye Wikispace web site.

By South African and Zimbabwean popular demand, we now move to our next course, on the National Democratic Revolution (NDR). The original CU Generic Courses did not include a set on the NDR as such. So this coming series will be to some extent original work. Therefore your feedback will be appreciated, comrades. Feedback can be in the form of a “Reply” to the e-mail that you receive, or in the form of a Comment at the Blog.

To make a Comment on our blog, click where it says “0 comments” (or any number) at the bottom; or click on the title, just below the date at the top of any particular blog. The blog will re-open with a Comments form for you, below that particular post.

With any course, one must decide where to begin. In the case of the NDR, what is immediately crucial is an understanding of class struggle and class alliances in history.

Such a study could begin as long ago as 367BC, with the Conflict of the Orders in the Roman Republic, and proceed through the class struggles involving, for example, the Gracchus brothers [pictured: Gaius Gracchus, Tribune of the People], Julius Caesar and others, that led in 27 BC to the stagnant class truce called the Roman Empire, that soon declined and fell into a Dark Age. Class struggle is the engine of history, comrades. Without it, there is little life, and little light.

We could alternatively begin in 1512 with Machiavelli, and the class struggles of Renaissance (born again) Italy, where multiple city-states with populations of 100,000 or more were embroiled in internal and external class conflicts.

We could go to Thomas Hobbes, who published his Leviathan in 1651, describing the politics of the bigger national states of Northern Europe (Like Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands) which had by his time superseded the politics of Italy as the main theatre of recorded historical process.

These European machinations could be our workbook and our political sandpit, for the main reason that there is a record. There is very little virtue, but there is a literature.

But we might as well rather begin, as Frederick Engels does in the first part of his “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” (see the link below), with the Great French Revolution that started in 1789. From this point on we can meet, in their developed form, the class protagonists who allied and clashed from that time until now, in all possible permutations: alliances holy and unholy, strategic and tactical, marriages of convenience and marriages made in heaven; and we can have, for the most part, the benefit of Marx and Engels as eyewitnesses or near-eyewitnesses. These classes were the feudal aristocrats; the peasants; the bourgeoisie; and the proletariat.

Using this work of Engels’ as a starting point has the additional benefit of introducing the rudiments of political philosophy, and leading our thoughts towards the “democratic bourgeois republic”, which is at one and the same time the highest form of political life before socialism, and the prerequisite of concerted proletarian action, and also a form of the State, that has to be transcended. In other words, our study of the NDR will bring us, as history has already brought us, to the kind of crisis that Lenin outlined so sharply in “The State and Revolution” as we have already seen, when majority rule is no longer an adequate substitute for freedom.

The next following text will be some extracts from Karl Marx’s “18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, an account of the period in France of which Marx made a particular study, when Bonaparte, for his two decades as Emperor, juggled the contending classes until the apocalyptic year of the Paris Commune: 1871.

Click on this link:

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, Part 1, Engels (5105 words)

The State and Revolution Generic Course

[CU for Thursday, 10 September 2009]

One week after the launch of No Woman, No Revolution, the Communist University is proud to announce the completion of yet another Generic Course in the shape of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”.

It is a work that happens to be ideal in form for the Freirean method of pedagogy through study circles.

This is not surprising since Lenin, like Marx, began his political activities by organising study circles. [Pictured: Lenin’s study circle in 1896]

"The State and Revolution" is an uncompromising description of The State and of how it can be revolutionised, written as a rehearsal and a critique of Marx and Engels on the one hand, and of various reformist, opportunist and anarchist characters on the other hand.

The urgency of the work, undertaken after the bourgeois-democratic revolution of February 2005 in Russia, and the working-class-and-peasant, Bolshevik, October Revolution of the same year, comes through. Lenin was working at top speed and under pressure on problems of revolution - problems which remain directly relevant to us today in South Africa.

In the process a sharp, clear picture emerges of The State and of all the implications of The State for revolutionary strategy and tactics. Lenin shows the immediate and practical significance of crucial theoretical concepts, including the “withering away of the state”. This turns out, as science usually does, to have constant relevance in the present moment. The withering away of the state is by no means something that once known about, can be disposed of or parked to one side. The withering has to start at once, and consciously so.

Please click on the link below to go to the relevant page on the YCL Discussion Forum web site, where this course is housed for the time being. As with the previous Generic Courses, it mainly consists of downloadable MS-Word files of the texts, plus pages that are the equivalent of the voluntary “openings to discussion” that comrades usually give in Party political education study groups.

The four newly-edited courses are as follows (click to go to a course):

• Capital, Volume 1
• Basic Communism
• No Woman, No Revolution
• The State and Revolution

Click here to access the original Communist University Generic Courses

The original Generic Courses were compiled nearly four years ago.

The new Generic Courses already comprise of 50 possible classes, which is more than one year’s worth of material at a rate of one per week, with holiday breaks.

Click on this link:

The State and Revolution, Console (one-page hyperlinked table)

Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists

[CU for Wednesday, 9 September 2009]

Lenin at this stage of his writing life (1917) is using the term “Opportunist” to describe the Social Democrats, reformists or gradualists who had nearly all voted to take part in the Imperialist world war. He used the term “Anarchist” to refer to the ultra-leftist pseudo-revolutionaries, descendents of Proudhon and Bakunin, but also noted that the Opportunists and the Anarchists were petty-bourgeois “twin brothers”.

In this chapter, Lenin is writing of “the most prominent theoreticians of Marxism”. Kautsky, a German, had been known as the “Pope of Marxism”, whereas Plekhanov was known as the “Father of Russian Marxism.” By 1917 both were proven “renegades” – i.e. they were people who had “reneged”, or gone back on their word. They were supporting their respective national bourgeoisies in the inter-Imperialist Great War (First World War).

[Image: - Cover of "The State and Revolution," Penguin edition, depictiong Lenin]

Kautsky

Kautsky… displays the same old "superstitious reverence" for the state, and "superstitious belief" in bureaucracy.

After the "revolutionary period of 1789-1871" in Western Europe, [Kautsky says], a similar period began in the East in 1905. A world war is approaching with menacing rapidity. "It [the proletariat] can no longer talk of premature revolution." "We have entered a revolutionary period." The "revolutionary era is beginning".

These statements are perfectly clear. This pamphlet of Kautsky's should serve as a measure of comparison of what the German Social-Democrats promised to be before the imperialist war and the depth of degradation to which they, including Kautsky himself, sank when the war broke out. "The present situation," Kautsky wrote in the pamphlet under survey, "is fraught with the danger that we [i.e., the German Social-Democrats] may easily appear to be more 'moderate' than we really are." It turned out that in reality the German Social-Democratic Party was much more moderate and opportunist than it appeared to be!

Kautsky, the German Social-Democrats' spokesman, seems to have declared: I abide by revolutionary views (1899), I recognize, above all, the inevitability of the social revolution of the proletariat (1902), I recognize the advent of a new era of revolutions (1909). Still, I am going back on what Marx said as early as 1852, since the question of the tasks of the proletarian revolution in relation to the state is being raised (1912).

In response to Kautsky, Lenin writes:

We, however, shall break with these traitors to socialism, and we shall fight for the complete destruction of the old state machine, in order that the armed proletariat itself may become the government. These are two vastly different things.

We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight - not to "shift the balance of forces", but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

The experience of the Commune has been not only ignored but distorted. Far from inculcating in the workers' minds the idea that the time is nearing when they must act to smash the old state machine, replace it by a new one, and in this way make their political rule the foundation for the socialist reorganization of society, they have actually preached to the masses the very opposite and have depicted the "conquest of power" in a way that has left thousands of loopholes for opportunism.

So Lenin knew well the arguments about “shifts”, and knew that the armed proletariat itself must become the government.

Click on this link:

State & Revolution, Chapter 6, Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists, Lenin (6061 words)

Withering Away of the State

[CU for Tuesday 8 September 2009]

How to explain the freedom that is beyond democracy? How to explain the freedom that is envisaged by the phrase “the withering away of the state”? Perhaps one can build it from the first experience of freedom in childhood, which consists of the things one may do without permission.

As the state withers away, so the scope of freedom increases. A person may act directly in more and more ways. The bourgeois says: “Freedom without payment is wicked.” The bourgeois bureaucrat says: “Who gave you permission to do that?” The bourgeois policeman says: “That property cannot be yours, I am arresting you on suspicion of stealing it.”

Human beings will have grown up altogether when they are all free of such constraints. In Chapter 5 of “The State and Revolution”, which deals with the “withering away of the state" as an immediate concern, Lenin writes:

“… in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord.”

… under capitalism we have the state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and, what is more, of the majority by the minority. Naturally, to be successful, such an undertaking as the systematic suppression of the exploited majority by the exploiting minority calls for the utmost ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood, through which mankind is actually wading its way in slavery, serfdom and wage labour.

[Now we can] fully appreciate the correctness of Engels' remarks mercilessly ridiculing the absurdity of combining the words "freedom" and "state". So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.

What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the "first", or lower, phase of communist society. Insofar as the means of production becomes common property, the word "communism" is also applicable here, providing we do not forget that this is not complete communism. The great significance of Marx's explanations is that here, too, he consistently applies materialist dialectics, the theory of development, and regards communism as something which develops out of capitalism.

Democracy means equality. The great significance of the proletariat's struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes. But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labour and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing farther, from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".

By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know. But it is important to realize how infinitely mendacious is the ordinary bourgeois conception of socialism as something lifeless, rigid, fixed once and for all, whereas in reality socialism will only be the beginning of a rapid, genuine, truly mass forward movement, embracing first the majority and then the whole of the population, in all spheres of public and private life.

Democracy is of enormous importance to the working class in its struggle against the capitalists for its emancipation. But democracy is by no means a boundary not to be overstepped; it is only one of the stages on the road from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to communism.

Road to freedom

The following statements by Lenin from this chapter spell out the road from capitalism via socialism to communism:

Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. This, in turn, results in the fact that, at a certain stage in the development of democracy, it first welds together the class that wages a revolutionary struggle against capitalism - the proletariat, and enables it to crush, smash to atoms, wipe off the face of the earth the bourgeois, even the republican-bourgeois, state machine, the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy and to substitute for them a more democratic state machine, but a state machine nevertheless, in the shape of armed workers who proceed to form a militia involving the entire population.

Accounting and control - that is mainly what is needed for the "smooth working", for the proper functioning, of the first phase of communist society. All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of a single countrywide state "syndicate". All that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations - which any literate person can perform - of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.

When the majority of the people begin independently and everywhere to keep such accounts and exercise such control over the capitalists (now converted into employees) and over the intellectual gentry who preserve their capitalist habits, this control will really become universal, general, and popular; and there will be no getting away from it, there will be "nowhere to go".

The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and pay.

It will also have become a single, communist university!

Click on this link:

State & Revolution, Chapter 5, Economic Basis of Withering Away of the State, Lenin (6474 words)

Housing and Democracy

[CU for Monday 7 September 2009]

This fourth chapter of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution” (linked below) presents a Communist University-type study circle with a problem.

As short as it is, yet there is too much here to discuss in a 1½ hour session. But then one must remember that the Freirean requirement from any text is only that it provides a good occasion for dialogue. The dialogue is where the value lies, because it generates socialised learning. We are not trying to learn the text in its entirety, as individuals.

Therefore, since this chapter is a rehearsal of many critical contributions made by Frederick Engels, here are some of the topics that could be taken in a dialogue from this chapter.

Housing Question

"How is the housing question to be settled then? In present-day society, it is settled just as any other social question: by the gradual economic levelling of demand and supply, a settlement which reproduces the question itself again and again and therefore is no settlement.” [Engels]

Authority

"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries.” [Engels]

Monopoly capitalism (remarks on the Erfurt Programme)

The "proximity" of such capitalism to socialism should serve genuine representatives of the proletariat as an argument proving the proximity, facility, feasibility, and urgency of the socialist revolution, and not at all as an argument for tolerating the repudiation of such a revolution and the efforts to make capitalism look more attractive, something which all reformists are trying to do.

…the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat. [Lenin]

National Question

Engels, like Marx, never betrayed the slightest desire to brush aside the national question. [Lenin]

Religion

…the party struggle against the opium of religion which stupifies the people. [Lenin]

The State (in the Paris Commune)

"... in order not to lose again its only just-gained supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old machinery of oppression previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any time...."

“…in Germany particularly the superstitious belief in the state has passed from philosophy into the general consciousness of the bourgeoisie and even of many workers.” [Engels]

Communist and Social-Democrat

Engels wrote that in all his articles he used the word "Communist", and not "Social-Democrat". [Lenin]

Overcoming of democracy

…it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy.

At first sight this assertion seems exceedingly strange and incomprehensible; indeed, someone may even suspect us of expecting the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed - for democracy means the recognition of this very principle.

No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed.

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. [Lenin]

Click on this link:

State & Revolution, Chapter 4, Engels’ Supplementary Explanations, Lenin (9007 words)

No Woman, No Revolution: The Generic Course

[CU for Friday 4 September 2009]

The Communist University is proud to announce the completion of another Generic Course in the new style. It is called No Woman, No Revolution, and it is an update of the course first run in 2006 in the Women’s Jail, Constitution Hill, Johannesburg [pictured].

Please click here to go to the “console” of the course, or click below. Click here for the Introduction to the course.

If it should seem familiar, that is because the material was re-run through the Communist University last month, August, 2009, and the blog entries, which are also the e-mails that you receive, have been used as the basis for the pre-cooked “Openings” to discussion that are provided with this set of discussion documents.

Production line

What this means is that the Communist University is currently working as a production line for these Generic Courses, and will continue to do so.

The courses are being reviewed, re-edited and refined for publication in a more advanced form. The No Woman, No Revolution set is the third recent one, the other two being “Capital by a Freirean Method”, which is a full-scale read-through of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 in 24 easy parts; and “Basic Communism”, which was produced in response to demand from the Communist University e-mail recipients – yourselves – and has so far been well received.

The remaining three parts of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution” will be blogged next week from Monday. After that, “The State and Revolution” will be turned into a fourth Generic Course, downloadable like the ones above.

The Original Generic Courses

The original set of Communist University Generic Courses was laid down in December 2005. Click here to go to the page. The list is as follows:

• Basic Communism
• Cronin Series
• Development is Class Struggle
• For Peace, Against Imperialism
• Legal and Military Struggle
• No Woman, No Revolution
• Philosophy of Freedom
• Political Economy, not Economics
• Religion and Revolutionary Politics
• Revolutionary Classics
• Trade Unions
• Urbanism and Land

Some of these courses have been edited, but no new ones have been added in the (nearly) four years since the concept was put into effect on the “amadlandawonye” Wikispace web site. It is surely time to review these titles and to try to think of new ones.

Your input will be appreciated, comrades.

Click on this link:

No Woman, No Revolution, Generic Course, Communist University

The Paris Commune, 1871

[CU for Thursday 3 September 2009]

This is the third part of Lenin’s “Generic Course” on The State and Revolution, and it is devoted to the Paris Commune [pictured in the photograph, left, and memorialised in the Soviet art-work, below] and the lessons that Karl Marx in particular drew from that experience.

Marx’s work “The Civil War in France” was written during, and immediately after, the events of early 1871 in Paris. Lenin’s summary of Marx, as usual, is brief but misses very little and cannot easily be beaten, but Lenin’s summary itself has its highlights and these are what we will note here.

The first is where Lenin notes that Marx would have made a correction to the Communist Manifesto on the basis of the experience of the Paris Commune. Marx wrote: “…the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes” - by which he meant that proletariat had to "to smash the bureaucratic-military machine" and to replace it with a state that is "the proletariat organized as the ruling class" and as an "armed people" that had disbanded the bourgeoisie's "special bodies of armed men". But:

“Marx did not indulge in utopias; he expected the experience of the mass movement to provide the reply to the question as to the specific forms this organisation of the proletariat as the ruling class would assume and as to the exact manner in which this organisation would be combined with the most complete, most consistent ‘winning of the battle of democracy.’"

The Commune was “a practical step that was more important than hundreds of programmes and arguments.”

Lenin proceeds in the second and third sections of this chapter to relate in brief how the practical steps were executed.

In the fourth part, Lenin addresses the question of centralism and clearly shows that centralism is not imposed but must be won politically, as a matter of free-willing action. All the time, Lenin is carrying on a secondary argument against the “opportunists” and the “anarchists, whom he says are “twin brothers.” Lenin writes:

“The anarchists dismissed the question of political forms altogether. The opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy accepted the bourgeois political forms of the parliamentary democratic state as the limit which should not be overstepped; they battered their foreheads praying before this 'model', and denounced as anarchism every desire to break these forms.”

“…now one has to engage in excavations, as it were, in order to bring undistorted Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the people,” says Lenin.

As it was in 1917, so it remains in 2009. One has to engage in excavations.

Click on this link:

State and Revolution, Chapter 3, The Paris Commune, Lenin (6609 words)

Eighteen-Forty-Eight

[CU for Wednesday 2 September 2009]

In his great “Generic Course” called “The State and Revolution”, Lenin spends the first five of the six existing chapters tracing the development of the thought of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The first Chapter takes from Engels’ “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, and is quite general.

This is followed in the subsequent chapters by a rehearsal, or a revision, including quotations, of a number of landmark texts of Marx and Engels, in more detail.

In Chapter 2, Lenin sweeps through the period of bourgeois revolutions in mid-nineteenth-century Europe that started in 1848.

[The first picture represents Paris in February, 1848, and the second represents Berlin in March of that year]

Engels and Marx had good timing. Not only had Engels witnessed Manchester in the early 1840s in the full bloom of its triumph as the first great industrial city of the world. He had also, together with Marx, engaged in literary disputes with the Young Hegelians, as well as with the anarchists of the time, and corresponded with the Chartists [The third image is an 1848 photo of a Chartist rally in Kennington, London in 1848].

Then they found themselves on the crest of the extraordinary revolutionary wave of1848, and were well-positioned to record it and to learn its lessons, as they were with later episodes, notably the Paris Commune of 1871.

In the first line of Chapter 2 Lenin describes “The Poverty of Philosophy” (together with the

Communist Manifesto) as “the first mature works of Marxism.” This book was written as a polemic against one of several anarchists (Pierre-Joseph Proudhin) that Marx had to contend with. These anarchists tested and tempered Marx’s resolve, in hard debate.

Lenin moves on to the Communist Manifesto, where he immediately derives the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” from the equally direct words of the Marx and Engels in the Manifesto, namely: “the state, i.e. the proletariat organised as the ruling class”.

“The state is a special organization of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class.”

The proletariat will use the state to suppress the bourgeois class.

Lenin then turns on the reformists. In Chapter 3 Lenin calls the anarchists and the petty-bourgeois opportunists “twin brothers”.

Here in Chapter 2 he writes:

“The petty-bourgeois democrats, those sham socialists who replaced the class struggle by dreams of class harmony, even pictured the socialist transformation in a dreamy fashion — not as the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class, but as the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority which has become aware of its aims. This petty-bourgeois utopia, which is inseparable from the idea of the state being above classes, led in practice to the betrayal of the interests of the working classes.”

The chapter proceeds to touch “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (but not Marx’s other notable work of the time, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850”). It returns to Marx on the dictatorship of the proletariat, this time in those very terms, in a letter written in 1852; and Lenin says: “Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Click on this link:

State and Revolution, Chapter 2, The Experience of 1848-1851, Lenin (4318 words)