State and Revolution

Accessing the texts on the internet 18th Brumaire https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w orks/1852/18th-brumaire/

Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, was published in 1884, the year after Marx’s death. However, Engels notes that Marx had read over and approved the text and that it reflected their joint studies through the late 1870s on the early development of human society from its communal stage prior the development of property relationships and the modern family. In doing so they had used what was then the latest anthropological research – again an example of their stress on the need for concrete analysis of human society in its development.

The Tutors Jonathan White Jonathan White teaches regularly at the Marx Memorial Library's Workers School and is a contributor to Theory and Struggle on aspects of Marxist thought. He is currently writing a book on historical materialism.

Critique of the Gotha Programme https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w orks/1875/gotha/

State and Revolution https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1917/staterev/

Emile Burns, Introduction to Marxism Chapters 2 and 4 https://www.marxists.org/archive/burnsemile/1939/what-is-marxism/ Ralph Miliband, Marx on the State https://www.marxists.org/archive/milib and/1965/xx/state.htm

Alex Gordon is an active trade unionist and Chair of Marx Memorial Library. He had written for Theory and Struggle on contemporary developments in global capitalism

Seumas Milne, The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War against the Miners 2014 ed.

Nisar Ahmed is an economist

Owen Jones, The Establishment and How they got away with It, Penguin 2015

Andrew Murray is Chief of Staff at Unite

A series of four classes to mark the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s State and Revolution 7 February

Marx 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and The Critique of the Gotha Programme Tutor Jonathan White

21 February

Engels The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Tutor Mary Davis

7 March

Lenin State and Revolution Tutor Alex Gordon

21 March

State Monopoly Capitalism Today Is Britain Still a Casino Economy ?

A round table discussion Nisar Ahmed, Nick Costello and Andrew Murray

Some background reading

Mary Davis FRSA is a Visiting Professor of Labour History at Royal Holloway University of London, She has written, broadcast and lectured widely on women’s history, labour history, imperialism and racism. She was an elected member of the TUC women’s committee and chairs the Charter for Women. She was awarded the TUC’s Gold Badge in 2010 for services to trade unionism.

Nick Costello was joint author of Beyond the Casino Economy with Seumas Milne

The State

Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1884/origin-family/

Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (1969) and Parliamentary Socialism (1961)

Ben Fine and Laurence Harris, Re-reading Capital (1979) chp. on state monopoly capitalism.

Classes start at 7 p.m. Although each builds upon the discussion in the previous class, each is free-standing and there is no obligation to have attended the previous one. The fee per class is £5. This folder provides a brief introduction and guide to the literature.

Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, EC1M 3RU http://www.marx-memorial-library.org/

The Texts

In honour of Lenin’s State and Revolution

Lenin wrote State and Revolution in the summer of 1917 a few weeks before the October Revolution. He did so at a time when the unelected Provisional Government in Russia, established after the February Revolution, was turning sharply to the Right and when there was a rising demand that the popularly elected Soviets, based in workplaces and army units, take back the power they secured in February.

Lenin’s objective was to distil the essence of writings by Marx and Engels which drew upon the experience of the two great revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century: 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. He did so in order to challenge those in those Marxists who had subsequently sought to argue that the working class movement should simply work within, and seek to transform, the existing institutions of representative government established under capitalism.

Lenin argued, as Marx and Engels did after the experience of 1848 and the Paris Commune, that, while such institutions could be used tactically, any revolutionary challenge would demand their replacement. Working people had to establish their own forms of direct democracy, to quickly and radically dismantle the old state structures and establish new ones that matched their objective of achieving the social ownership of the means of production. This required the mass involvement by working people in administering the new state.

In State and Revolution, Lenin summarised the arguments of Marx and Engels and reasserted their relevance for the twentieth century.

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He sought to place them, as Marx and Engels had, within an overall understanding of human development – from its long gestation within equal, communal social groupings to the emergence of the first class societies sustaining property relations of a patriarchal character. to slave and then feudal, serf-based societies. Each type of class society, Marx and Engels argued, had to create its own coercive institutions to enforce the new property relations. It had to destroy those designed to sustain the previous ‘mode of production’.

This was why there had to be a revolutionary transition to socialism which mobilised all working people to create a state of a new type, one based on mass popular participation and defending and developing the common ownership of the means of production.

In looking at the writings of Marx and Engels Lenin stressed how their analysis developed, historically, took in the experience of each stage in the development of the working class movement and its challenge to the existing order. He argued for the creative development of Marxism as the ‘summing up of the experience of the working class in its struggle for socialism’.

For Lenin himself this meant particularly taking into account the experience of the 1905 revolution in Russia. For us it must equally require the summing up of more recent experience. The closing discussion will seek to do so for the type of state we have today.

The first text, Marx’s 18 Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, was written in 1852 to analyse the outcome of the 1848 revolution in France. Marx sought to explain how a popular rising by workers, led by declared socialists, ended up with a coup that installed Louis Napoleon as ‘dictator’. In it Marx looks at how various fractions of the bourgeoisie eventually agreed to support an outside ‘strong man’ to provide the state power needed to defend their common interests against a potential challenge from the working class. This exemplified for Marx the coercive and ideological role of the capitalist State in ensuring the legal and institutional needs of capitalism as a mode of production.

The 18th Brumaire analysed on the basis of historical experience how this was attempted, how it failed and the lessons to be drawn. In a letter to its publisher Joseph Weydemeyer Marx wrote: ‘no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic economy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship [a reference to Napoleon’s new legal title] of the proletariat and (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society’.

Earlier in The German Ideology (1846) Marx and Engels had argued that human society developed through specific ‘modes of production’, matching particular stages in the development of the technological forces of production, and each requiring the enforcement of distinct and contradictory institutional and legal frameworks. In the Communist Manifesto (written just before the1848 revolutions) they argued that any progress from one to the other required a transformation of power and that the working class had to create a revolutionary alliance that could topple the existing state institutions: ‘The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’.

The second text The Critique of the Gotha Programme was written in 1875 and reflects the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 that did succeed briefly in creating the basis of a new mass revolutionary state of the working class.