READING: From Lenin: "State & Revolution"
How ill-prepared the Bolsheviks were to administer anything, anything at all...
The remarkable thing is that as of 1917 Lenin seems to really have believed all this:
Vladimir Lenin (1917): The State & Revolution: ‘We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration…. At once… replace… state officials by… simple… functions… within the ability of the average town dweller… performed for “workmen’s wages”…. Iron discipline backed up by the state power of the armed workers…. Officials… simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid “foremen and accountants”…. Control and accounting, becoming more and more simple… performed by each in turn, will… die out as the special functions of a special section…. We shall have a splendidly equipped mechanism…which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will hire technicians, foremen and accountants, and pay them all, as indeed all “state” officials in general, workmen’s wages….
Disgusting bourgeois parliamentarism… mere talking shops… fooling the credulous rustics with phrase mongering and resolutions…. Revolutionary democratic phrases to gull the rural Simple Simons, and bureaucracy and red tape to “gladden the hearts” of the capitalists…. Substitute… for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion does not degenerate into deception, for the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have themselves to test the results achieved in reality, and to account directly to their constituents.… We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism….
We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny… excesses or the need to stop such… as simply and as readily as any crowd… put[s] a stop to a scuffle or… prevent[s] a woman from being assaulted….
The higher phase of the development of communism… presupposes not the present ordinary run of people, who, like the seminary students in Pomyalovsky’s stories, are capable of damaging the stocks of public wealth “just for fun”, and of demanding the impossible….
Until the “higher” phase… the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labor and the measure of consumption… exercised… by a state of armed workers… the conversion of all citizens into workers… [for] one huge “syndicate”… and the complete subordination of… this syndicate to a genuinely democratic state….
Engels here approached the interesting boundary line at which consistent democracy… is transformed into socialism and… demands socialism…. It must be made impossible for “honorable” though profitless posts in the Civil Service to be used as a springboard to highly lucrative posts in banks or joint stock companies, as constantly happens in all the freest capitalist countries…. Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism. Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes.… Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized…. People will [then] gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse… without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state. The expression “the state withers away” is very well chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process…. 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….
During the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary…. A “state” is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state… for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage laborers, and it will cost mankind far less. And it is compatible with the extension of democracy to such an overwhelming majority of the population…. The people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple “machine”… by the simple organization of the armed people (such as the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, we would remark, running ahead)….
The great majority of the functions of the old “state power”… can be reduced to… exceedingly simple… registration, filing, and checking… can be easily performed by every literate person…for ordinary “workmen’s wages”, and… stripped of every shadow of privilege, of every semblance of “official grandeur”….
The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is such a high state of development of communism…. Expropriation of the capitalists… will make it possible for the productive forces to develop to a tremendous extent… transforming labor into “life’s prime want”…. The question of the time required for… the withering away [is] quite open, because there is no material for answering these questions. The state will be able to wither away completely when society adopts the rule: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”….
LINK: <https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf>
Robert Service: Lenin: A Biography: ’So why has Lenin been charged with monumental insincerity in relation to the book [State and Revolution]? The main reason lies in the contrast between the predictions made in The State and Revolution_ and the reality of Bolshevism in power. The State and Revolution described an imminent future when the working class would become the ruling class and ordinary workers themselves take the crucial decisions of state and society. Things turned out very differently after October 1917, when the Soviet state quickly became a one-party dictatorship that used force against industrial strikes and political protests by workers. A long shadow of doubt was cast over his intentions when he wrote The State and Revolution…
Nadezhda Krupskaya: :Reminiscences of Lenin: Zurich 1916: ‘There were differences with Rosa Luxemburg, Radek, the Dutch, Bukharin, Pyatakov, and to some extent with Kollontai. The sharpest differences were with Pyatakov…. Ilyich sat down at once to write him a reply…. The role of democracy in the struggle for socialism could not be ignored. “Socialism is impossible without democracy in two respects,” Vladimir Ilyich wrote… “1. The proletariat cannot carry out a socialist revolution unless it has prepared for it by a struggle for democracy; 2. Victorious socialism cannot maintain its victory and bring humanity to the time when the state will wither away, unless democracy is fully achieved.”… As far back as October 1915 Ilyich had written a reply to an article by Radek (Parabellum)…. "The proletariat can win only through democracy, i.e., through putting into effect full democracy and linking up every step of its progress with democratic demands in their most emphatic wording. It is absurd to offset the socialist revolution and the revolutionary struggle against capitalism by one of the questions of democracy…. We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary programme and tactics in respect of all democratic demands, including a republic, a militia, election of government officials by the people, equal rights for women, self-determination of nations, etc. So long as capitalism exists all these demands are capable of realization only as an exception, and in incomplete, distorted form…. We demand the overthrow of capitalism and expropriation of the bourgeoisie as an essential basis both for abolishing the poverty of the masses and for fully and thoroughly implementing all democratic transformations. Some… will be started before the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, others in the course… and still others after it. The social revolution is… an epoch of… of battles on all and every problem of economic and democratic transformations…. It is quite conceivable that the workers of a given country may overthrow the bourgeoisie before any single cardinal democratic transformation has been fully implemented. But it is quite inconceivable that the proletariat, as an historical class, will be able to defeat the bourgeoisie unless it has been prepared for it by being educated in a spirit of the most consistent and determined revolutionary democratism…
LINK: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/krupskaya/works/rol/rol20.htm>