Caracas / Politics – The socialist model that prevailed in the 20th century was based on the Marxist theory. In turn, the most successful and influential tendency is the interpretation made by Lenin, which lead to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Other versions of socialism have been left out of this article, because they are not as representative and influential. In this sense, our inquiry will revolve around the Marxist-Leninist approach, in order to make an analytic and critical overview of one of its main premises: the destruction of the bourgeois State as the condition to install superior socialism of communism.

 

THE MARXIST THESIS

 

Marxists sustain that the State is nothing but the administrative and armed apparatus of the interests of the dominating social classes. Therefore, they seek to conquer political power through the destruction of the bourgeois State and the construction of the people’s state, as a necessary step of transition from socialism to communism. That is, the transit towards a society where there the State will no longer be necessary because the contradictions and struggles between social classes will no longer exist.

 

Marx sustains that the working class cannot simply overtake the machinery of the bourgeois state and use it on behalf of its own interests. On the contrary, the proletariat must destroy the State created by the bourgeoisie and built a completely different revolutionary apparatus over the ruins of the former one. A kind of semi-State which will not function as the machinery of repression at the service of an exploiting minority, but as an instrument ruled by the oppressed majority, which has the purpose of eradicating social classes and eliminating any form of exploitation and alienation. In this sense, Lenin –following Marx and Engels- believed that the building of a revolutionary State must start with the destruction of the old bureaucratic apparatus, demolishing it to its very foundations with the implementation of certain measures such as: a) the revocation as the complement of the eligibility of public servants; b) public servants’ income cannot be higher than the income of the working class; c) the immediate establishment of a system by which everybody performs the role of control and inspection, so that everybody is a civil servant for some time, so that nobody can become a professional bureaucrat; d) the monopoly of violence in the hands of the people, organized in working class militias, different from a regular army that is alien to the people.

 

TWO PHASES OF THE SAME PROCESS

 

Two moments of phases of communism have been described: Lenin calls them “the first phase of communist society” (what is commonly called socialism), and the “superior phase of communist society (known plainly as communism). Let’s take a more detailed look at these two phases or moments:

 

1. Inferior or socialist phase of communism: the State (not the people but the Party) owns all the means of production, each worker contributes with his proportional amount of work and his retribution is the equivalent of his work in goods. This is a necessary phase because communist society doesn’t arise spontaneously, it arises from capitalism. Class contradictions in society exist precisely because the State exists.

 

2. The superior phase, or communism: social classes no longer exist, social division of labor has been abolished, production means and production itself belong completely to the people. There is no class that has to be repressed, making the State useless therefore it ceases to be. However, this extinction takes place gradually.

 

In sum: while the proletarian revolution and the installation of socialism destroys the bourgeois State, the socialist State is gradually extinguished together with any trace of private property and social differences between the members of society.

 

Give or take, this is the Marxist-Leninist approach in relation to the destruction of the bourgeois State. This being said, let’s confront theory with the historical experience and draw some conclusions.

 

HISTORICISM AS PRACTICE

 

None of the existing socialist revolutions has achieved the principles of possibility announced in the historicist structural theory. It could be said that at the moment of taking decisions, the thesis of the need of a structural maturity falls, since the political opportunities to carry out the revolution appeared in countries where capitalism was clearly incipient. Theory was replaced with political practice ruled by other real principles –meaning that the theory of the structural conditions of the revolution has been replaced by the historicism of the actual conditions. What happened in reality was that socialism and the supposed transition to communism was able to settle in because of contingent circumstances due to use of the correlation of favorable forces, and not to the supposed historical maturity of the conditions advocated by Marxists.

 

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NEW LEVIATHAN

 

A degeneration of the revolution derives from the immaturity of those conditions. This degeneration consists in that the process didn’t achieve its own objectives and promises. Instead of the hoped for de-statization, the result was the birth of a new Leviathan. The revolutionary strategy that prevailed in the 20^th century was the victim of a destructive duality between a libertarian doctrinarian discourse and the actual political practice which strengthen the power of the State. The declared objective was that the revolution would take over the old State in order to destroy it and build another one, whose political regime was a base democracy which grew gradually upwards. But of decentralizing, power concentrated in this State which absorbed and covered every field of human activity. Specifically, political power concentrated instead of becoming more socialized and public spaces were restricted. When these two operations, which are typical of a dictatorship, settled in, the State imposed itself over society, concentrating power in the hands of the combined bureaucracy of the party and the government. The democratizing potentials of the economic transformations were overturned, among them those of the nationalization of the means of production. Indeed, to be social, the expropriation of the means of production needed power to be democratic. When it isn’t, it becomes statization, the material basis of State socialism.

 

The historical development of socialist revolutions was a demonstration of that theoretical statement about the powerful internal tendency of States to become autonomous in relation to society and to impose the ideas and the interests of those that hold the power of the state as being universal truths. When the new State, which was supposed to be self-dissolving, got organized, State power was enhanced and its apparatus took over the complete control of society because there was no counterweight to power coming from the private property of the means of production. Historical experience has not only shown that there never was real socialization of the means of production, but also that socialist revolutions could never overcome their original mark and always relied on coercion.

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Jhozman Camacho, S.J. Member of the Editorial Board of SIC magazine, http://www.gumilla.org/?p=page&id=1217965813