Smashing the State Machine

On 12 April 1871, in the middle of the Commune, Marx wrote to Kugelmann: if you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it (zerbrechen), and that this is essential for every real people's revolution on the Continent; and this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting.

The third section of The Civil War in France opens with the sentence: "But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." Marx traced the centralised state power, with its organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature, from the absolute monarchy to its completion under the First Empire, and argued that as modern industry deepened the antagonism of capital and labour it took on more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, an engine of class despotism. The Commune replaced the standing army with the armed people, turned the police, the judges and every public servant into responsible agents revocable at any time, and had public service done at workmen's wages. He saw the Commune as a new historical creation that broke the modern state power.

In their preface of 24 June 1872 to the German edition of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that its programme had in some details become antiquated and that one thing especially was proved by the Commune: "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." In his 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France Engels wrote that from the outset the Commune had to recognise that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; the state, he added, is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and this shattering of the former state power and its replacement by a new and really democratic state is described in detail in the third section of The Civil War.

In chapter 3 of The State and Revolution Lenin argued that the opportunists had distorted this lesson. The vulgar reading had Marx stressing slow development as against the seizure of power, but the exact opposite was the case: the working class must break up, smash the ready-made state machinery, and not confine itself to laying hold of it. Marx had restricted his conclusion to the Continent because Britain in 1871 had neither a militarist clique nor, to any great degree, a bureaucracy; by 1917, Lenin held, Britain and America too had sunk into the morass of bureaucratic-military institutions, so the restriction no longer held. To abolish the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, was a utopia, but to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and begin immediately to build a new one that would make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy was not; the Commune was the first attempt of a proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state machine and the political form "at last discovered" to replace it. He granted that Marx agreed with Proudhon and Bakunin on the smashing of the modern state machine, but called the confusion of Marx's destruction of state power with Proudhon's federalism monstrous.