All-People's State

History

The concept was already discussed in 1947 for the draft of the Third Programme of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and entered the Third Programme of the CPSU, adopted on 31 October 1961, as the 'state of the whole people'. The programme was an attempt to replace Stalin's harsh administrative 'pressure from above' with socialist self-government based on communist morality, projecting the building of communism over 1961–1980. Drafting began in mid-1958, chaired by Central Committee Secretary Boris Ponomarev, with roughly 100 leading scientists and specialists working for three years.

Theoretical preparation came earlier. After the June 1957 Plenum, Otto Kuusinen was elected a member of the Presidium and Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee; in September 1957 he prepared, and in October sent to the party leadership, a 'Note on the contemporary interpretation of the dictatorship of the proletariat', whose main idea was that the dictatorship of the proletariat had historically exhausted itself. 'Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism', which he edited, was one of the first documents to mention the thesis of the growing-over of the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat state into the all-people's state. Fyodor Burlatsky, sent in early 1960 as a consultant to the Central Committee department headed by Andropov and spending almost two years on the new party programme's draft, recalled that he obtained the opportunity to include the thesis of the transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to the all-people's state in that draft; Kuusinen also invited him to write the chapter on that transition for 'Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism'.

Article 1 of the Soviet Constitution adopted on 7 October 1977 defined the USSR as 'a socialist state of the whole people, expressing the will and interests of the workers, peasants, and intelligentsia, the working people of all the nations and nationalities of the country', and declared that having fulfilled the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Soviet state had become a state of the whole people. The constitution entered history as the 'constitution of developed socialism'; its preamble characterized Soviet society as 'a developed socialist society, as a law-consistent stage on the path to communism' and asserted that Soviet power had ended class antagonisms and national enmity.

Relations

The all-people's state succeeded the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat state after the latter fulfilled its historical tasks, and was theorized as a definite stage on the path toward the withering away of the state and the transition to communist social self-government. It would, however, persist until the full victory of communism.

The concept is characteristic of developed socialism. 'Developed socialism' was the Soviet official name for the period from 1964 (narrowly 1966–1967) to 1985, an intermediate phase between the full victory of socialism and communism that replaced the earlier 'period of full-scale building of communism' (1959–1964). Brezhnev announced the building of 'developed socialist society' in his report of 7 November 1967, and the 24th CPSU Congress (1971) fixed the norm.

The withering-away lineage traces to Engels's 'Anti-Dühring' (1878) and Lenin's 'State and Revolution' (1918). The 21st CPSU Congress (1959) announced the 'full and final victory' of socialism and the transition to 'full-scale building of communism', and the 22nd Congress (1961) adopted the programme.

The dictatorship of the proletariat was state leadership of society by the working class under conditions of antagonistic classes and class struggle. Because of the enormous changes brought by the complete and final victory of socialism, state leadership in the form of dictatorship was no longer necessitated.

Distinctions

The Soviet dictionary explicitly distinguished the all-people's state from the so-called 'free people's state' advanced by German Social Democrats in the 1870s: creating such a state under bourgeois conditions, on the basis of bourgeois democracy and without socialist revolution, was opportunist and illusory, whereas the all-people's state in the USSR was presented as a real fact.

The concept should likewise not be conflated with 'communist state' (workers' state) as used in English-language sources, or with 'people's democracy'. From the standpoint of Marxist theory, 'communist state' is an oxymoron because communism, once attained, presupposes a classless and stateless society; the all-people's state, by contrast, was theorized as existing only under socialism on the path to communism.

The distinction from the dictatorship of the proletariat also appears in constitutional texts. The 1936 Constitution named the VKP(b) the leading core of all organizations of working people, while the 1977 Constitution defined the USSR as an all-people's state and, in Article 6, fixed the CPSU's leading and guiding role as the core of the political system, which the dictionary read as the working class retaining its leading role within the all-people's state.

Examples and Criticism

In the USSR the concept entered the Third Programme of the CPSU in 1961 and was constitutionally embodied in Article 1 of the 1977 Constitution. Its lifespan as official doctrine ran from the 1961 formulation into the late 1980s. After the 27th CPSU Congress in 1986 the term 'developed socialism' was gradually abandoned, and Soviet sources increasingly spoke of 'developing socialism'.

The idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat had ceased to exist before the withering away of the state proved controversial because it broke with the Marxist conception of the state as existing only as a tool of class domination. Maoism and the Chinese Communist Party condemned it as revisionist, a position still held; Wang Weiguang states that since the state is a product of class struggle, it cannot be supra-historical, supra-class and all-people, but has to have a class basis. The Soviet dictionary stressed the opposite: the all-people's state is not above-class or classless. Because exploiter classes had disappeared, it expresses the fundamental interests of all working people; the restrictive functions remaining under it are not class suppression, since coercion is applied not to classes but to particular persons violating socialist norms of social life. Soviet society's socio-political and ideological unity is captured by the concept 'Soviet people', and the state became the instrument of the all-people's will precisely because the peasantry and intelligentsia became socialist and moved to the working class's positions.