ON THE
DICTATORSHIP
OF THE
PROLETARIAT

Contents
[Part II]

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Foreword

 
 
 
What is the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'?

In the following study I should like to suggest the first elements of a reply to this question, a question whose topical nature has brought it to the attention of all Communists. I hope thus to contribute to opening and to advancing a now unavoidable theoretical discussion in the Party and around it.
    The decisions of the 22nd Congress of the French Communist Party on this point, in spite of their apparently abstract character, have produced what might be considered a paradoxical result -- in any case, a result which has surprised certain Communists.
    The theoretical question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not explicitly mentioned in the Preparatory Document. It arose in the course of the discussion, when the General Secretary of the Party, Georges Marchais, took up the suggestion of abandoning the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of removing it as soon as possible from the Party statutes. From that moment on, this question dominated the pre-Congress debate: its solution seemed to be the necessary consequence and the concentrated expression of the political line approved by the Congress. The Central Committee's report, presented by Georges Marchais, made the point at great length: in order to establish a foundation for the democratic road to socialism for which the Communists are fighting, a new way must be found of posing and assessing the theoretical question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Congress in fact unanimously decided to abandon the perspective of the dictatorship of the proletariat, considered out-of-date and in contradiction with what the Communists want for France.

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    But this decision settled nothing, at root. No-one can seriously claim that the question was subjected to a profound examination during the preparatory debates, and even less during the Congress itself.[1] So it is not surprising, under these circumstances, that Communists are asking questions about the exact meaning of this decision. They are asking how far it implies a rectification or a revision of the principles of Marxism. They are wondering how it helps us to analyze the past and present experience of the Communist Movement. They are wondering what light it sheds on the present situation of the International Communist Movement, faced with an imperialism which, in spite of the crisis, is as aggressive as ever. They are wondering what changes will have to take place in their daily activity and struggles.
    They are asking: what precisely is the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'? How is it to be defined? And, consequently, if the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is being rejected, then what exactly is it that is being rejected? This common-sense question is very simple, and it ought not to be difficult to resolve -- but it is clearly decisive. To anyone who thinks about the problem it will become quite clear that the expressions 'rejecting the dictatorship of the proletariat' and 'renouncing the dictatorship of the proletariat' can have no precise meaning as long as this question has not been answered. It is quite clear that there is a very close link between the abandonment of a political line or of a theoretical concept and the content and the objective meaning of the alternative which is adopted.
    But since not all Communists are agreed on the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the result is precisely that the discussion which apparently took place did not go to the roots of the matter. And since the concept or concepts of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as they figured in the discussion, do not correspond to its objective reality; since, in spite of appearances, the discussion was not really about the dictatorship of the proletariat but

about something else, it happened that the unanimity in the Congress only disguised what are, tendentially, divergent interpretations and practices. Not unity, but division. At the same time it happened that, although the dictatorship of the proletariat -- the word and the thing -- appeared to have been completely abandoned, the problems which had led to its being brought into question nevertheless remained, and were even aggravated. Such are the ironies and upsets of real history.
    If you want an example, just look at the reaction of the French bourgeoisie, which did not miss the opportunity of fishing in troubled waters and of exploiting our weakness, even at the theoretical level. Its most illustrious ideologists (Raymond Aron) and political chiefs (Giscard d'Estaing), newly qualified as Experts in Marxism, are making full use of their positions in order to trap the Communists in a dilemma: either give up the theory and practice of the class struggle, or return to the one-way street of the Stalin deviation, which of course had such a lasting effect in weakening the Party. Their tactic: to jump onto the Communist Party's own separation of the Leninist principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat from the politics of popular union -- and popular union really is a condition of victory over big capital -- in order to take the argument one (logical) stage further: by demanding that the Party should abandon class struggle too, since the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing but the consequent development of this class struggle.[2] In addition, they claim that the decision made by the 22nd Congress, thus by the Communists themselves, amounts to an admission that these same Communists have up to the present indeed been opposed to democracy, that they have been fighting against it, and against freedom, in fighting for socialist revolution.

I 
 
Paris (1976)- 
Moscow (1936) 

 
 
In order for a discussion to get to the bottom of a question, it needs clear starting-points. A correct, Marxist definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the first of these starting-points, in the theoretical field. It is not sufficient in itself: you cannot settle political questions by invoking definitions. But it is necessary. If you do not pay explicit attention to it, you run the risk of implicitly adopting not the Marxist definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat but a definition imposed by the constant pressure of the dominant bourgeois ideology. That is what happened at the 22nd Congress, whatever is said to the contrary. I am not going to quote or sum up the details of the debates: everyone remembers them, or can look them up. I shall be as brief as possible, in order to direct attention to what seems to me most important, namely the way in which the problem was posed; this more or less, leaving aside details, underlay the reasoning presented at the Congress. To many comrades it seems to be the only possible way of posing the problem, it seems 'obvious' to them today. We shall therefore begin by examining it.

'Dictatorship or democracy'
The question was first of all posed within the framework of a simple alternative: either 'dictatorship of the proletariat' or the 'democratic road to socialism'. The choice was between these two terms: no third solution, no other alternative. Given the definitions used, this choice is imposed more by 'logic' than by history. The historical arguments in fact are only introduced after the event, they only ornament and illustrate a logical schema so simple

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that it seems unavoidable. We are told that the choice is not between a revolutionary path and a reformist path, but between two revolutionary paths, both based on mass struggle, a choice between two kinds of means to make revolution. There are 'dictatorial' means of struggle and 'democratic' means: they are suited to different circumstances of place and time, and they produce different results. The Congress thus had to demonstrate what distinguishes the democratic from the dictatorial means, and did so by borrowing three common contrasts.
(a) First, the contrast between 'peaceful' political means and 'violent' means. A democratic road to socialism, it is said, excludes on principle armed insurrection against the State as a means of taking power. It excludes civil war between the classes and their organizations. It therefore excludes both white terror, exercised by the bourgeoisie, and 'red' counter-terror, exercised by the proletariat. It excludes police repression: for the workers' revolution does not tend to restrict liberties but to extend them. In order to maintain themselves in power democratically, the workers must not primarily use constraint, the police and 'administrative methods', but political struggle -- i.e., in the event, ideological propaganda, the struggle of ideas.
(b) Secondly, the contrast between 'legal' and 'illegal' means. A democratic road to socialism would allow the existing system of law to regulate its own transformation, without recourse to illegality. The transformation of the existing system of law -- for example, in the form of the nationalization of enterprises -- is only to be carried out according to the forms and norms contained in (bourgeois) law itself, according to the possibilities which it opens up. Such a revolution would therefore not contradict the law; on the contrary, it would simply realize in practice the principle of popular sovereignty to which it constantly refers. Conversely it is the legality -- therefore the legitimacy -- of this revolutionary process which is supposed to authorize and strictly to limit the use of violence. For every society and every State, so the argument goes, have the right (and the duty) forcibly to repress 'crimes', the illegal attempts of minorities to oppose by force and by subversion the abolition of their privileges. Thus, if the need for constraint arises, this will be considered no fault of the new régime itself. And this use of violence will not be a form of class violence, but a constraint on particular individuals, just as bourgeois law itself

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now provides.
(c) Finally, the contrast between union and division, which is linked to the contrast between majority and minority. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is said, political power is exercized by the working class alone, which itself is still only a minority. Such a minority is and remains isolated: its power is clearly fragile, it can only maintain itself by violence. The situation, so the argument goes, is exactly opposite when, in the new historical conditions, the socialist State represents the democratic power of a majority. The existence of the union of the majority of the people, the 'majority will', expressed by universal suffrage and by the legal government of the majoritarian political parties, is therefore supposed to guarantee the possibility of peaceful transition to socialism -- a revolutionary socialism, certainly, with respect to its social content, but gradual and progressive with respect to its means and forms.
    Once you accept and reason according to these contrasts (I have only mentioned the most important ones), contrasts which become more and more closely linked to and dependent on one another, then at each stage you are forced to choose one of the two poles: civil war or civil peace; legality or illegality; union of the majority or the isolation of the minority and the division of the people. At each step you have to work out which choice is 'possible' and which is not; which is the one that you 'want' and which is the one that you 'do not want'. A simple choice between two historical roads for the transition to socialism, a choice between two conceptions of socialism, two systematically opposed 'models'. On the basis of these choices, the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is implied, must be defined as the violent political power (in both senses of the term 'violent': repression and recourse to illegality) of a minoritarian working class, bringing about the transition to socialism by a non-peaceful road (civil war). To this, one last argument -- and it is not the least important -- may be added, since it is a natural consequence: that such a road would lead to the political domination of a single party and end by institutionalizing its monopoly. Many comrades demand of us: if you do not want to abandon the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, at least admit frankly that you are for a one-party system, against the plurality of parties. . . .
    But what are we to think of these pairs of alternatives?

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    Their first characteristic is that they do not make a real analysis possible, because they contain the answer to every question ready-made. Posed in these terms, the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat already implies its solution. It is an academic exercise. To define the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes a simple matter of listing its disadvantages, compared with the democratic road. To analyze the concrete conditions of the transition to socialism in France becomes a simple matter of self-congratulation on the fact that the evolution of history now (finally) allows us to take the good road, that of democracy, and not the bad road, that of dictatorship. You can be very optimistic about socialism when you know that history itself is looking after the job of creating the conditions which will impose precisely the choice preferred in the first place. It only requires one more step in order to draw the conclusion: when a capitalist country has a non-democratic State (as in the case of Tsarist Russia), it cannot make the transition to socialism except in a non-democratic manner, with all the risks attached. But when a capitalist country is also (as in the case of France) a country of an 'old democratic tradition', it can make the transition to socialism in a manner which is itself democratic. Better: the transition to socialism will slowly appear to the immense majority as the only means of preserving democracy, which is under attack by big capital. Better still: the socialism which can be established in this case will be right from the first a superior form, rid of the contradictions and dangers represented by dictatorship (of the proletariat).
    This line of argument is indeed seductive, but that does not explain how Communist militants, involved for years in the class struggle, have nevertheless allowed themselves to be taken in by it and to adopt its 'common sense' language. To understand why they have done so, we must look into the question of what -- in the history of the Communist movement itself and in the interpretation of Marxist theory which has prevailed in the movement for many years -- could have produced this kind of 'common sense'. In this connexion the arguments of the 22nd Congress are dominated by three ideas which are by no means new, and which are clearly present. First: the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat is, in its essential characteristics, identical to the road followed in the Soviet Union. Secondly, the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat represents a particular 'political régime', a set of

page 42

political institutions which guarantee -- or fail to guarantee -- the political power of the working class. Finally -- and this is the decisive point at the theoretical level -- the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a means or a 'path of transition' to socialism. It must now be shown why these three simple ideas, though they are the product of real historical causes, are nevertheless incorrect.

Three simple and false ideas
A few words on these three ideas.

It is enough to read the reports of the debates of the 22nd Congress, and earlier contributions,[3] in order to recognize that behind the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat there lies first of all the problem posed by the historical evolution of the Soviet Union. It is no accident if, at the very same time that the Party is claiming that socialism is on the agenda in France, its leaders are also publicly raising their voices to pose the question of its 'differences' with the policy of the Soviet Communists, in terms such that it is clear that a real contradiction is involved. Look at the facts, which the careful selection of words cannot hide: disagreements on 'socialist democracy' (therefore on the structures of the Party and State); disagreements on 'peaceful co-existence' (which our Party refuses to accept as implying the status quo for capitalist countries like France, as overshadowing the class struggle, or -- even worse -- as requiring the socialist countries to give political support to the power of the French big bourgeoisie); disagreements on 'proletarian internationalism' (which our Party refuses to interpret in terms of 'socialist internationalism', an interpretation dramatically illustrated by the military invasion of Czechoslovakia). Such contradictions demand a thoroughgoing explanation. This question clearly lay behind the deliberations of the Congress. And it is this question, and no other, which underlies the argument several times advanced by Georges Marchais: 'The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" today has an unacceptable connotation for the workers and for the masses.' This is the vital question, and not the example of the fascist dictatorships which have appeared since the

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extend this formulation to the symmetrical opposite, in everyday language, of democracy: i.e., dictatorship? The State, the level of political action and institutions, is quite distinct from the other levels, in particular from the economic level, is it not?
    I want to concentrate on this idea, even though I have had to present it schematically, because it plays a crucial role in the thinking of many Communists. And here again the question of the Soviet Union arises. It is this idea for example which might lead us to say: from the 'economic' point of view, essentially, socialism is the same everywhere, its 'laws' are universal; but from the 'political' point of view, it can and must be very different, since Marxism teaches the relativity of the superstructures, the relative independence of the political superstructures and of the State vis-à-vis the economic base. And it is this idea too which might lead us to say: the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union resulted in catastrophic consequences from the point of view of the political régime, it resulted in the establishment of a political régime which is not really socialist, which contradicts socialism, because, from the political point of view, socialism implies the widest possible liberty and democracy. But, it will be argued, this did not prevent the development of socialism as an 'economic system', or at least it only held it back a little, hindered it, made it more difficult, without affecting its 'nature', its essence. The proof: in the Soviet Union there is no exploiting bourgeoisie, monopolizing property in the means of production, no anarchy in production; there is social, collective appropriation of the means of production, and social planning of the economy. Thus the anti-democratic political régime has, it is argued, nothing to do with the 'nature' of socialism; it is only a historical 'accident'. To which it is added, with an apparently very materialist air, that there is nothing astonishing about the fact that the superstructure is 'lagging behind' the base -- such is the law of the history of human societies, which guarantees that, sooner or later, the political régime will come into line with the mode of production, will come to 'correspond' with the mode of production.
    But it has to be pointed out that we are dealing here with an extraordinarily mechanistic caricature of Marxism, linking a mechanistic separation between State and means of production with a mechanistic dependency of politics on the economic base

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(in the form of the talk about the 'nature' of socialism, about 'accidents', about things which are 'in advance' of others which are 'lagging behind'). In such a perspective it is already impossible to explain the history of the capitalist State. It is a fortiori impossible to pose the problem of what changes, in the relation of politics and of the State to the economic base, when a transition is made from capitalism to socialism and to the dictatorship of the proletariat.[5]
    Now this idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a simple 'political régime' directly determines the terms in which the problem of the political power of the working class, or of the working people, is posed. The dictatorship of the proletariat becomes a special form of the political power of the working people, and a narrow form at that (since not all working people are proletarians). In fact, this amounts to saying that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a form of government (in the legal, constitutional sense), that it represents a particular system of institutions. To choose between a number of paths of transition to socialism, for or against the dictatorship of the proletariat, is -- according to this idea -- to choose between a number of systems of institutions, notably between institutions of a parliamentary or so-called 'pluralist' type (containing several political parties) and institutions of a non-parliamentary type, in which the power of the working people is exercized through a single party. Socialist democracy differs from the dictatorship of the proletariat, in this view, as one political régime differs from another; it is conceived of as another form of the political power of the working people, in which other institutions organize in a different way the choice of the 'representatives' of the working people who run the government, and the 'participation' of individuals in the functioning of the State.
    According to this picture the transition to socialism could be conceived, in theory at least, either in terms of a dictatorial form of politics or in terms of a democratic form. It would depend on the circumstances. It would depend in particular on the degree of development, on the level of 'maturity' of capitalism: in a country where capitalism is particularly developed, where it has reached the stage of State Monopoly Capitalism, big capital would already be practically isolated, the development of economic relations

A Precedent: 1936
Let us stop there for a moment. Before undertaking the study of the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat for its own sake, we must briefly look at the historical antecedents of the situation which I have just described. Such a situation does not just drop out of the sky. It is not so much that the decision of the 22nd Congress was the logical consequence, or the recognition after the event, of a long political evolution which had led the Party towards an original revolutionary strategy; it is rather that the particular conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat to which it referred had already, in all essentials, been for a long time accepted and even dominant in the International Communist Movement. The decision of the 22nd Congress does have an historical precedent, without which it would remain in part incomprehensible.
    We ought at this point to recall a fact of which most young Communists are unaware, or whose importance with regard to the present debate is not clear to them. It was the Soviet Communists themselves, under Stalin's direction, who first historically 'abandoned' the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in a quite explicit and reasoned way. They did so in 1936, on the occasion of the introduction of the new Soviet Constitution. The 1936 Constitution solemnly proclaimed, less than twenty years after the October Revolution, the end of the class struggle in the USSR .[¥] According to Stalin, who inspired and laid the foundations of what is even today the official theory of the State in the USSR, distinct classes still existed in the Soviet Union: working class, peasantry of the State farms and collective farms, intellectuals,

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industrial managers and State administrators.[6] But these classes were no longer antagonistic, they were equal members of a union, of an alliance of classes, which constituted the foundation of the Soviet State. From that moment on, the Soviet State was no longer concerned with classes as such, but, beyond the differences which separate them, with the individuals, with all the citizens, with all the working people. It became the State of the whole people.
    Even then it was possible -- and it is still possible in retrospect -- to ask questions about the validity (and even about the good faith) of the statement: 'Class antagonisms have disappeared'. This statement came for example only a few years after the collectivization of agriculture, which witnessed an outbreak of class conflict as acute as the conflicts of the revolutionary period, in which the socialist State had to break the resistance of the capitalist peasantry (the kulaks) and also, no doubt, of whole masses of the poor and middle peasantry, by using every available means, both propaganda and force. Above all, the statement came at the very moment when there began to develop in the whole country, and among all classes, what we now know to have been a bloody mass repression, of which the great 'Moscow trials' were only the visible and spectacular façade. How are we to explain this repression (which was then only in its first phase!) in a materialist way, unless we relate it to the persistence and development of a class struggle which, though it was perhaps unforeseen and uncontrolled, was nevertheless quite real? How are we to interpret the proclamation of the 'end' of the class struggle, and the administrative decision to finish with the dictatorship of the proletariat, except as an amazing refusal to look the existing state of things in the face, that in turn, by the mystifying effects which it produced, then reinforced and crystallized a tragic theoretical and practical deviation? This example, if there was need of it, would already be sufficient to warn us that the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat is no historical guarantee against violence; in fact it might even suggest that, in this case, such violence only becomes more cruel and damaging to the people and to the revolution.
    Stalin did not of course retrospectively reject the past applic-

remained absolutely necessary as an instrument of class struggle directed to the exterior, as a means of protection for socialism against the threat and the attacks of imperialism. Neither Marx, nor Engels, nor Lenin himself (though on this point Stalin was more prudent) could, it was argued, have foreseen such a situation: and what better opportunity could there have been, in passing, to issue a wise reminder that Marxism is not a fixed dogma, but a science in the course of development and a guide to action?
    However, this first argument could not do the whole job. Even admitting its validity (that is, even leaving completely aside the question of what type of State is suitable for defending the country against external enemies -- and it is true that Stalin used the opportunity to condemn every opponent of his policies as a 'foreign agent'), it presupposes another argument: that of the complete victory of socialism in the USSR.
    Stalin claimed in his Report on the Draft Constitution of the USSR:
    'The total victory of the socialist system in all the spheres of the national economy is now an established fact. This means that the exploitation of man by man has been suppressed, abolished, and that the socialist property of the instruments and means of production has developed into the unassailable foundation of our Soviet society. [. . .] Is it still possible to call our working class a proletariat? Obviously not [. . .] The proletariat of the USSR has become an absolutely new class, the working class of the USSR, which has destroyed the capitalist economic system and reinforced socialist property in the instruments and means of production, and is steering Soviet society on the road to communism.'
    This second thesis is the most important aspect of the argument developed by Stalin, because it brings to light the theoretical deviation underlying the 1936 decision. It is a deviation of an evolutionist type, in which the different aspects of the revolutionary process are isolated from one another, and presented as moments which simply follow one another, distinct historical 'stages'. Revolution, as Stalin presents it, begins by overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie, by eliminating capitalist property, by replacing the old State apparatus by a new one: this is the first transitory stage, the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Once this period has been completed, a new stage is entered, that of socialism: socialism is based on a particular 'mode of production',

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and brings with it a stable State, the socialist State, which is no longer a class State, but a State of the whole people, a people made up of different classes of working people collaborating peacefully together. And it is within socialism, under the direction of the socialist State, that the 'foundations' of a future society, communism, are being laid, more or less quickly according to the rhythm of the development of the productive forces; under communism, the State will become superfluous, just as classes themselves will disappear. In all, therefore, three successive stages, each one of which can only begin when the preceding stage has run its course; and the links between them, according to Stalin's theory, can be explained by the great historical necessity of the development of the productive forces, to which Stalin's mechanical materialism attributes the role of the motor of history.
    As a consequence, two essential factors were eliminated, or at least pushed to one side: the dialectic of historical contradictions, and class struggle.
    The dialectic disappeared, because Stalin, in his theory of successive stages, purely and simply suppressed the tendential contradiction brought to light by Marx and Lenin: the proletarian revolution is both the 'constitution of the proletariat as a ruling class', the development of a State power which makes this a reality, and the revolution which undertakes, on the material foundations created by capitalism, the abolition of all forms of class domination, and therefore the suppression of every State. What Marx and Lenin had analyzed as a real contradiction, Stalin dissolved in a scholastic manner (in the strict sense of the term), by distinguishing mechanically between separate aspects and stages: first the abolition of antagonism, then the abolition of classes; first the construction of a 'new type' of State, a socialist State, then the disappearance of every State (Stalin did not answer the legitimate question: why should the State now disappear, since the 'socialist State' already represents the power and the interests of the whole people? Or, at least, he was content to point out that 'Marx had foreseen' its disappearance). One more example can be added to this list of mechanical distinctions: the idea that first comes dictatorship (dictatorship of the proletariat, transition to socialism), then comes democracy (socialism).
    The class struggle ceased, at the same time, to represent in Stalin's theory the motor of historical transformations, and in

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particular of revolutionary transformations. It represented no more than a particular aspect of certain stages. There is thus a necessary connexion between Stalin's general argument (cf. Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 1938), according to which the motor of history is the development of the productive forces, the class struggle being only an effect or a manifestation of this, and his theory of socialism: socialism is the transition to the classless society, which takes place not as an effect of the class struggle itself, but after the completion of the class struggle, as an effect of a different kind of necessity, a technical-economic necessity directed by the State. And there is a necessary connexion between this conception of socialism, the proclamation of the 'total victory of socialism' in the USSR, and the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which coincided with a strengthening of the bureaucratic and repressive State apparatus. In the same way there is a necessary connexion, in Marxist theory, between the opposite theses: the recognition of real contradictions in the historical relation of the proletariat to the State, and the demonstration that it is impossible to abolish class divisions except through the development of the class struggle itself, since classes are, historically, nothing but the effects of antagonistic class relations, effects which appear, are transformed and disappear together with these relations. The 1936 decision (and it was no accident that it took the Statist form of a constitutional decision, and thus bore the profound imprint of bourgeois ideology) therefore put the seal on the link, then the intimate fusion, between a particular practice and a particular theory. Anyone who is surprised that the 'freest', most democratic (restoring universal suffrage) constitution in the world should have been accompanied by the establishment of the most anti-democratic bureaucratic and police apparatus, and a fortiori anyone who reassures himself by interpreting all this as a proof that, 'at the level of principles at least', socialism maintained its links with democracy, thereby permanently blinds himself with regard to the real history of socialism, with its contradictions and retreats. You must take account of this paradox: that the tendential fusion of Marxist theory and the Labour Movement, which is the great revolutionary event of modern history, also extends to their deviations. The misunderstanding or underestimation of the class struggle in theory does not prevent it from unleashing itself in practice: for the precise reason, one which

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deserves to be recalled today for the benefit of all those who seem to doubt it, that the class struggle is not an idea but an unavoidable reality. Yet the theoretical misunderstanding of the class struggle is not simply a theoretical event: its result is that the proletariat can lose the practical initiative bought at a high price, it can become the pawn of social relations of exploitation and oppression instead of the force capable of transforming them.[7]

There can of course be no question here of making a direct comparison between the decision taken by Stalin and the Soviet Communists in 1936 and that just taken by the 22nd Congress of the French Communist Party. Neither the intentions (which however count for little in history), nor especially the historical conditions, and therefore the anticipated effects, are the same. However, the decision of the 22nd Congress can neither be understood nor seriously discussed independently of this precedent.
    The first reason is that it does in fact constitute one of the remote consequences of the decision of 1936. To restrict ourselves to the theoretical level, it is this decision, and more generally the whole of the ideological output which prepared for it and surrounded it, that imposed on the whole International Communist Movement a dominant mechanistic and evolutionist conception of Marxism, based on the primacy of the development of the productive forces, within which the dictatorship of the proletariat only functioned as a means, or even as a political 'technique' for the establishment of the socialist State (in spite of the fact that the Guardians of the Dogma insistently repeated and even hammered in the fact that it was a necessary means). For this decision provided -- at the cost of a gigantic effort of idealization and thus of misinterpretation of Soviet reality, for which millions of Communists in every land were enrolled, willingly or unwillingly -- the means

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for its own immediate 'verification'. The proof that Marxism, in its evolutionist and technicist Stalinian version, was 'true' and 'scientific' was precisely that the dictatorship of the proletariat had come to an end, that a 'definitive' victory had been won over capitalism, that a socialist society and State had been constructed which were now confronting other tasks -- fundamentally peaceful, technical, cultural and economic tasks. In other words, this proof on the omni-historical scale was in reality nothing more than an imaginary projection, onto the 'facts', of the very theory which it was supposed to verify.
    We are therefore obliged to state that the French Communist Party -- at the very moment when, in order to respond to the demands made by its own revolutionary struggle, it is trying to fight its way out of this mystification and at last to take a critical look at socialist history -- is nevertheless trapped more firmly than ever in the theory on whose basis the critique is being developed: it is posing, in the same general form, the same question of the 'transition to socialism', even if it has tried to provide a different answer. Unfortunately, it is the question itself which is wrong, and it is this question which has to be rejected.
    But the decision of the 22nd Congress is not therefore simply a remote consequence of its 1936 precedent: it also constitutes, in the changed conditions, its repetition. It is simply that what Stalin and the Soviet Communists applied to socialism in the period following the seizure of power by the workers, the 22nd Congress applied to the period before the seizure of power, to the very process of the 'transition to socialism'. But the procedure is the same: having argued that economic and social conditions have now 'matured' in this respect, the Party declares that the moment has come to renounce the use of dictatorship, which was always irregular, and adopt democratic means, espousing legality and popular sovereignty. The same rectification (or revision) of the Marxist conception of the State is therefore necessary: the State, it is said, is not only and not always an instrument of class struggle; it also has 'another' aspect, one which is repressed under capitalism, but which allows it to become an instrument for the management of public affairs in the common interest of all citizens. The same restriction of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat to its repressive aspect is involved, together with its immediate identification with the institutional peculiarities of the Russian

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Revolution (the single party, the limits on universal suffrage and on individual liberties for representatives of the bourgeoisie). The same restriction is placed on the role of the class struggle and of the antagonism between capital and the proletariat in the historical process of the disappearance of classes. It is therefore impossible to avoid asking the question: can you really hope, when you repeat the precedent of 1936 in this way, to rectify the deviation which it represents? Is it not more likely that this deviation will be retrospectively reinforced, within the framework of a nowadays untenable compromise? And above all: are you not exposing yourself once more to the nasty surprises reserved by the class struggle for those who do not take full account of the contradictions which it involves and of the antagonisms which lie hidden within it during the historical period of the socialist revolutions?
    These questions must be asked, and will become more and more urgent. Only through practice will satisfying answers be found. But this will only happen if we succeed in 'settling accounts' with the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which has been passed on to us in its Stalinian form in a truncated and deformed image that is today being in all innocence reproduced. And because fifty years of the history of the Communist Parties and of revolutionary struggles, marked with victories and with defeats, have brought their own objective and contradictory sanction to Leninism, which the same Stalin was not wrong to define, formally, as 'Marxism in the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolution', it is also and necessarily a question of settling accounts with Leninism. Therefore, in order to begin, we must re-establish what it is and study it, so that we can discover the real questions which it raises.

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2 
 
Lenin's Three Theoretical 
Arguments about The 
Dictatorship of the 
Proletariat 

 
 
Everyone knows that Lenin never wrote a 'treatise' on the dictatorship of the proletariat (which has since been done), and neither did Marx and Engels. As far as Marx and Engels are concerned, the reason is obvious: apart from the brief and fragmentary experiences of the 1848 revolutions and of the Paris Commune, whose main tendency they were able to discover and to analyze, they were never able to study 'real examples' of the problems of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As far as Lenin is concerned, the reason is different: for the first time, Lenin was confronted with the real experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Now this experience was extraordinarily difficult and contradictory. It is the contradictions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it was beginning to develop in Russia, that form the object of Lenin's analysis and of his arguments. If you forget this fact, you can easily fall into dogmatism and formalism: Leninism can be represented as a finished theory, a closed system -- which it has been, for too long, by Communist parties. But if on the other hand you remain content with a superficial view of these contradictions and of their historical causes, if you remain content with the simplistic and false idea according to which you have to 'choose' between the standpoint of theory and that of history, real life and practice, if you interpret Lenin's arguments simply as a reflection of ever changing circumstances, less applicable the further away they are in history, then the real causes of these historical contradictions become unintelligible, and our own relation to them becomes invisible. You fall into the domain of subjective fantasy. In Lenin's concrete analyses, in his tactical slogans is expressed a

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permanent effort to grasp general historical tendencies and to formulate the corresponding theoretical concept. If you do not grasp this concept, you will not be able to study, in a critical and scientific manner, the historical experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
    In order to be as clear as possible, I shall first of all set out en bloc what seems to me to constitute the basis of the theory as you find it in Lenin.
    The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat can be summed up in outline in three arguments, or three groups of arguments, which are ceaselessly repeated and put to the test by Lenin. They can be found in identical form, explicitly or implicitly, in every page of the texts of Lenin covering the period of the Russian revolution, and in particular they appear every time that a critical situation, a dramatic turning-point in the revolution necessitates a rectification of tactics, on the basis of the principles of Marxism, in order to realize the unity of theory and practice. What are these three arguments?

The first of them deals with State power.
    You can sum it up by saying that, historically speaking, State power is always the political power of a single class, which holds it in its capacity as the ruling class in society. That is what Marx and Lenin mean when they say that all State power is 'class dictatorship'. Bourgeois democracy is a class dictatorship (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie); the proletarian democracy of the working masses is also a class dictatorship. Let us be more precise: this argument implies that, in modern society, which is based on the antagonism between capitalist bourgeoisie and proletariat, State power is held in an absolute way by the bourgeoisie, which does not share it with any other class, nor does it divide it up among its own fractions. And this is true whatever the particular historical forms in which the political domination of the bourgeoisie is realized, whatever the particular forms which the bourgeoisie has to make use of in the history of each capitalist social formation in order to preserve its State power, which is constantly menaced by the development of the class struggle.
    The first thesis has the following consequence: the only possible historical 'alternative' to the State power of the bourgeoisie is an equally absolute hold on State power by the proletariat, the class of wage-labourers exploited by capital. Just as the bourgeoisie

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cannot share State power, so the proletariat cannot share it with other classes. And this absolute hold on State power is the essence of all the forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat, whatever their transformations and historical variety. To talk about an alternative, however, is really imprecise: we ought rather to say that the class struggle leads inevitably to the State power of the proletariat. But it is impossible to predict in advance, in any certain way, either the moment at which the proletariat will be able to seize State power or the particular forms in which it will do so. Even less can we 'guarantee' the success of the proletarian revolution, as if it was 'automatic'. The development of the class struggle can neither be planned nor programmed.

The second argument deals with the State apparatus.
You can sum it up by saying that the State power of the ruling class cannot exist in history, nor can it be realized and maintained, without taking material form in the development and functioning of the State apparatus -- or, to use one of Marx's metaphors which Lenin is always borrowing, in the functioning of the 'State machine', whose core (the principal aspect: but not the only aspect -- Lenin never said that) is constituted by the State repressive apparatus or apparatuses. These are: on the one hand, the standing army, as well as the police and the legal apparatus; and on the other hand, the State administration or 'bureaucracy' (Lenin uses these two terms more or less synonymously). This thesis has the following consequence, with which it is absolutely bound up: the proletarian revolution, that is, the overthrow of the State power of the bourgeoisie, is impossible without the destruction of the existing State apparatus in which the State power of the bourgeoisie takes material form. Unless this apparatus is destroyed -- which is a complex and difficult task -- the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot develop and fulfil its historical task, the overthrow of relations of exploitation and the creation of a society without exploitation or classes. Unless this apparatus is destroyed, the proletarian revolution will inevitably be overcome, and exploitation will be maintained, whatever the historical forms in which this takes place.
    It is clear that Lenin's arguments have immediate bearing both on the State and on the dictatorship of the proletariat. The two problems are inseparable. In Marxism you do not have on one side a general theory of the State, and on the other side a (particu-

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lar) theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is one single theory only.
    The first two arguments, which I have just set out, are already contained explicitly in Marx and Engels. They were not discovered by Lenin, though Lenin did have to rescue them from the deformation and censorship to which they had been subjected in the version of Marxist theory officially taught by the Social-Democratic parties. Which does not mean that, on this point, Lenin's role and that of the Russian revolution were not decisive. But if we restrict our attention to that core of theory which I have been talking about, it is true that this role consisted above all of inserting the theory of Marx and Engels for the first time in an effective way into the field of practice. It allowed a fusion to take place between the revolutionary practice of the proletariat and masses on the one hand and the Marxist theory of the State and of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the other -- a fusion which had never, or never really taken place before. Which means that although important progress in organization took place in the Labour Movement after Marx's time, this was accompanied by a considerable reduction in its autonomy, in its theoretical and practical independence from the bourgeoisie, and thus in its real political force. It is the transformation of Marxism into Leninism which enabled it to overcome this historical regression by taking a new step forward.
    This brings us to the third argument which I mentioned.

This third argument deals with socialism and communism.
    It is not without its precedents, without preparatory elements in the work of Marx and Engels. It is obviously no accident that Marx and Engels always presented their position as a communist position, and only explicitly adopted the term 'socialist' (and even more so the term 'social-democrat') as a concession. We can in fact say that in the absence of this position (and of the thesis which it implies) the theory of Marx and Engels would be unintelligible. But they were not in a position to develop it at length. This task fell to Lenin, and in carrying it out he based his work on the development of the class struggles of the period of the Russian revolution, of which his work is therefore the product, in the strong sense of the term. This argument is now meeting the fate which the first two arguments suffered before the time of Lenin and the Russian revolution: it has been 'forgotten', deformed (with dramatic consequences) in the history of the Communist move-

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ment and of Leninism, just as the first two arguments were forgotten in the history of Marxism.
    A first, very abstract formulation is sketched out by Marx in the Communist Manifesto and in the Critique of the Gotha Programme : it is that only communism is a classless society, a society from which all forms of exploitation have disappeared. And since capitalist relations constitute the last possible historical form of exploitation, this means that only communist social relations, in production and in the whole of social life, are really in antagonistic contradiction with capitalist relations, only they are really incompatible, irreconcilable with capitalist relations. Which implies a series of immensely important consequences, both from the theoretical and especially from the practical point of view. It implies that socialism is nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not simply a form of 'transition to socialism', it is not a 'road of transition to socialism' -- it is identical with socialism itself. Which means that there are not two different objectives, to be attained separately, by 'putting the problems into an order': first of all socialism, and then -- once socialism has been constructed, completed, once it has been 'developed' (or 'developed to a high level'), i.e. perfected, once it has, as they say, created the 'foundations of communism' -- secondly a new objective, the transition to communism, the construction of communism. There is in fact only one objective, whose achievement stretches over a very long historical period (much longer and more contradictory, no doubt, than was imagined by the workers and their theoreticians). But this objective determines, right from the start, the struggle, strategy and tactics of the proletariat.
    The proletariat, the proletarian masses and the whole of the masses of the people whom the proletariat draws with it are not fighting for socialism as an independent aim. They are fighting for communism, to which socialism is only the means, of which it is an initial form. No other perspective can interest them, in the materialist sense of this term. They are fighting for socialism just because this is the way to arrive at communism. And they are fighting for socialism with the means already provided by communist ideas, by the communist organization (in fact by communist organisations, because the Party can never be more than one of them, even if its role is obviously decisive). In the last analysis, the masses are fighting to develop the tendency to com-

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munism which is objectively present in capitalist society, and which the development of capitalism reinforces and strengthens.
    A very important consequence follows, which I will state in abstract form: the theory of socialism is only possible when developed from the standpoint of communism, and the effective realization of socialism is only possible from the standpoint of communism, on the basis of a communist position in practice. If this position is lost, if it drops out of sight, if the extraordinary difficulties of achieving it lead us to ignore or to abandon it in practice, even if it still has a place in our theory, or rather is still talked about as a distant ideal, then socialism and the construction of socialism become impossible, at least in so far as socialism represents a revolutionary break with capitalism.
    It is now a question, not of working out all the implications of these arguments, but simply of preparing a more complete analysis, of explaining the way in which it is formulated, and of countering certain false interpretations and unfounded objections.

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3 
 
What is State Power?

 
 
The question of power is the first one which must be examined. It is the most general question: it is in the historical possession of power by such-and-such a class that you find in concentrated form the conditions either of the reproduction of the existing social relations (relations of production and exploitation) or of their revolutionary transformation. It is also the most immediate question, the one which the workers face in their daily struggle for liberation, one which can be very quickly settled in one way or the other as soon as a revolutionary situation leads them into an open confrontation with the ruling class on the political terrain.
    Lenin, following Marx, constantly pointed out that the basic question of revolution is that of power: who holds power? and on behalf of which class? It was the question posed in the weeks immediately preceding the October Revolution (the question of the 'two revolutions', bourgeois and proletarian): will the Bolsheviks seize power? That is to say: will the Bolsheviks be the instrument of the seizure of power by the masses of the working people, who have become conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism between their own interests and those of the bourgeoisie? Or will the bourgeoisie, rallying to itself the remnants of Tsarism, imposing by terror and by mystification its hegemony over the peasant masses and even over a fraction of the proletariat, and supported financially and militarily by its imperialist allies, succeed in crushing the revolution and re-establishing the bourgeois State, thanks to which, in spite of the change in political form, the essential factor (exploitation) can persist? All the revolutions and all the counter-revolutions which have taken place since, however diverse their conditions, their forms and their duration, only provide massive confirmation of this point. Which means

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that it is valid for the whole of modern history: and what is modern history but the history of revolutions and counter-revolutions, their head-on clash being felt even inside those countries which, temporarily, 'benefit' from an apparent tranquillity? That is why you will never find a revolutionary who does not recognize, at least in words, the decisive character of the question of power.
    But there is more. You only have to follow the course of any socialist revolution (especially the Russian Revolution) in order to convince yourself that this question, which has to be immediately decided, nevertheless cannot be settled once and for all. It remains -- or better, it reproduces itself-- throughout the whole revolutionary process, which provides it in the forms imposed by each new conjuncture with a determinate answer. Will State power be held or lost? That is the question with which the historical period of the dictatorship of the proletariat begins. But it is also a question which continually reappears, just as long as a reason for its appearance persists in the form of the existence of class relations in production and in the whole of society. As long as this basis exists, the dictatorship of the proletariat remains necessary in order to develop the revolutionary forces and to defeat the counter-revolutionary forces whose contradictory unity is not destroyed until long after the seizure of power.
    This shows that the problem of power can absolutely not be reduced to a tactical question. The forms in which this seizure of power is carried out in the first place (armed uprising, prolonged people's war, peaceful political victory, other perhaps unprecedented forms) depend strictly on the conjuncture and on national particularities. We know that, even in the Russian conditions of the period between April and October 1917, Lenin did for a short time believe that the conditions existed for a peaceful (but not 'parliamentary') victory of the revolution, when he launched for the first time the slogan: 'All power to the Soviets!' In fact, there exists no historical example of a revolution which can be reduced to a single one of these forms, which does not represent an original combination of several forms. But in any case this diversity does not affect the nature of the general problem of State power, or rather it represents only one aspect of this problem, which must not be taken for the whole. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat has nothing essentially to do with the conditions and forms of the 'seizure of power' . But it is ultimately linked with the

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question of holding power, which in practice determines the whole course of the revolution.
    If this is how things are, it is because, in the last analysis, State power is not the power of an individual, of a group of individuals, of a particular stratum of society (like the 'bureaucracy' or 'technocracy') or of a simple, more or less extensive fraction of a class. State power is always the power of a class. State power, which is produced in the class struggle, can only be the instrument of the ruling class: what Marx and Engels called the dictatorship of the ruling class.[1]
    Why the term 'dictatorship'? Lenin answered this question absolutely clearly in a ceaselessly repeated phrase, whose terms only have to be properly explained:
    'Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws.
    The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.
    This [is a] simple truth, a truth that is as plain as a pikestaff to every class-conscious worker [. . .] which is obvious to every representative of the exploited classes fighting for their emancipation [. . .] which is beyond dispute for every Marxist.' (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, C.W., XXVIII, 236 [p. 11].)
    Elsewhere, Lenin uses an equivalent and very illuminating expression (I am quoting from memory): Dictatorship is the absolute power, standing above all law, either of the bourgeoisie or of the proletariat. State power cannot be shared.

Marxism and bourgeois legal ideology
'As plain as a pikestaff to every class-conscious worker', says Lenin. He is right, because this argument is only the logical

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development of the recognition of the class struggle, and this recognition is part of the daily experience of the exploited workers, in their struggle against exploitation. Which does not mean that this logical development does not have to overcome any obstacles. On the contrary, it never stops coming up against the power (i.e. the operation) of bourgeois legal State ideology, which the bourgeoisie has a vital interest in maintaining. Bourgeois legal ideology inevitably influences the workers themselves. They are not 'vaccinated' against it: indeed, it is inculcated in them by all the practices of the bourgeois ideological State apparatuses, from their childhood in the primary school to their adult participation as citizens in the political institutions of the country. To develop the analysis of the State from the proletarian standpoint of the class struggle is therefore at the same time to criticize its constantly resurgent bourgeois legal representation.
    The whole question of 'democracy' versus 'dictatorship' is profoundly rooted in legal ideology, which then reappears within the labour movement itself in the form of opportunism: it is striking to note the degree to which the terms in which this opportunism is formulated remain constant from one period to another. It is impossible to understand the reason unless you go back to its cause, the reproduction of legal ideology by the bourgeois State apparatuses.
    Legal ideology is related to the law; but although it is indispensable to the functioning of the law, it is not the same thing. The law is only a system of rules, i.e. of material constraints, to which individuals are subjected. Legal ideology interprets and legitimates this constraint, presenting it as a natural necessity inscribed in human nature and in the needs of society in general. The law, in practice, does not 'recognize' classes, which is to say that it guarantees the perpetuation of class relations by codifying and enforcing rules addressed only to 'free' and 'equal' individuals. Legal ideology on the other hand 'proves' that the social order is not based on the existence of classes but precisely on that of the individuals to which the law addresses itself. Its highest point is the legal representation of the State.

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    Bourgeois legal ideology tries (successfully) to make believe that the State itself is above classes, that it only has to do with individuals. That these individuals are 'unequal' in no way embarrasses it, since, seeing that they are 'equal' in the sight of the law, any State worthy of the name will naturally set about dealing with these inequalities . . . So it would follow that State power cannot be described as the exclusive domination of a single class, because this expression, from a legal point of view, actually does not make sense. Instead of the idea of the domination of a class you find in legal ideology, to be precise, the notion of the State as the sphere and the organization of public interests and of public power, as against the private interests of individuals or groups of individuals and their private power. It is essential to grasp this fundamental aspect of bourgeois legal ideology if you do not want to find yourself, voluntarily or otherwise, trapped within its implacable 'logic'.
    I said that the law is not the same thing as legal ideology, though the latter sticks to it like a limpet; and here is the direct proof: the distinction between the 'public' and the 'private' spheres is a very real legal relation, constitutive of all law, whose material effects are unavoidable as long as law exists. But the idea that the State (and State power) must be defined in terms of this distinction, as the 'public' sector or sphere, as the organ of 'public' service, of 'public' security and order, of 'public' administration, of 'public' office, etc., represents a gigantic ideological mystification. The legal distinction 'public'/'private' is the means by which the State is able to subordinate every individual to the interests of the class which it represents, while leaving him -- in the bourgeois epoch -- the full 'private' liberty to trade and to undertake 'business' . . . or to sell his labour power on the market. This distinction is however not the historical cause of the existence of the State. Otherwise one would have to admit that, like the omnipotent God of our priests and philosophers, the State is its own cause and its own end.
    The same circle is in operation in the manner in which bourgeois legal ideology presents the opposition between 'dictatorship' and 'democracy': as a general and absolute opposition between two kinds of institutions or of forms of State organization, in particular of two types of government. A democratic State cannot, from its own point of view, be a dictatorship, because it is a 'constitutional State' in which the source of power is popular

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sovereignty, in which the government expresses the will of the majority of the people, etc. Bourgeois legal ideology thus performs a clever conjuring trick: it ceaselessly explains, convincing itself and especially convincing the masses (it is only the experience of their own struggles which teaches them the contrary) that the law is its own source, or, what comes to the same thing, that the opposition between democracy (in general) and dictatorship (in general) is an absolute opposition. This really is the case, it says, because democracy is the affirmation of the law and of its legitimacy (and 'democracy taken to the limit' is the affirmation of and respect for the law taken to the limit), while dictatorship is the negation of this same legality. For bourgeois ideology, in short, where does law come from? -- from democracy. And where does democracy come from? -- from the law. To the notion of the State as the 'public' sphere, as 'public' service, is now added, to complete the circle, the idea of the 'popular will' (and of 'popular sovereignty'): the idea that 'the people' is a unified whole (collectivity, nation), unified beneath its divisions, linking together the 'will' of all the individuals and transforming it into a single will represented in the legitimate majority government.
    You must therefore make a choice: either the system of notions of bourgeois legal ideology, which rules out any analysis of the State in terms of class struggle, but which precisely for this reason serves the class struggle of the bourgeoisie of which the existing State is the instrument; or the proletarian point of view, which denounces this mystification in order to struggle against the class domination of the bourgeoisie. Between these two positions there is no possible compromise: it is impossible to 'make room' for the standpoint of the class struggle inside the bourgeois legal conception of the State. As Lenin said, with reference to Kautsky:
    'Kautsky argues as follows: "The exploiters have always formed only a small minority of the population".
    This is indisputably true. Taking this as the starting point, what should be the argument? One may argue in a Marxist, a socialist way. In which case one would proceed from the relation between the exploited and the exploiters. Or one may argue in a liberal, a bourgeois-democratic way. And in that case one would proceed from the relation between the majority and the minority.
    If we argue in a Marxist way, we must say: the exploiters inevitably transform the State (and we are speaking of democracy,

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i.e., one of the forms of the State) into an instrument of the rule of their class, the exploiters, over the exploited. Hence, as long as there are exploiters who rule the majority, the exploited, the democratic State must inevitably be a democracy for the exploiters. A State of the exploited must fundamentally differ from such a State; it must be a democracy for the exploited, and a means of suppressing the exploiters ; and the suppression of a class means inequality for that class, its exclusion from "democracy".
    If we argue in a liberal way, we must say: the majority decides, the minority submits. Those who do not submit are punished. That is all.' (C.W., XXVIII, 250. [The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, pp. 30-31]
    For the Marxist theory of the State, which involves a class standpoint diametrically opposed to that of bourgeois legal ideology, every democracy is a class dictatorship. Bourgeois democracy is a class dictatorship, the dictatorship of the minority of exploiters; proletarian democracy is also a class dictatorship, the dictatorship of the immense majority of working and exploited people. By holding on to the direct relation between the State and the class struggle, we preserve the only key to its materialist analysis.

    Let us return to Lenin's phrase, which I quoted above: 'A power standing above the law'. Does this definition mean that a State power might exist without any law, without any organized legal system -- and here we must include the dictatorship of the proletariat, since the dictatorship of the proletariat is once again always a State power, as is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie? Absolutely not. It means on the contrary that every State imposes its power on society through the mediation of a system of law, and thus that the law cannot be the basis of this power. The real basis can only be a relation of forces between classes. It can only be a relation of historical forces, which extends to all the spheres of action and intervention of the State, i.e. to the whole of social life, since there is no sphere of social life (especially not the sphere of the 'private' interests defined by law) which escapes State intervention; for the sphere of action of the State is by definition universal.
    We might here deal with a current 'objection', which is of course in no way innocently meant, which creates confusion by surreptitiously reintroducing the point of view of legal ideology.

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According to this objection, Lenin's definition of the State is 'too narrow' , since it identifies State power with the repressive function, with the brutal violation by the ruling class of its own law. Apart from the fact that this objection is not at all new -- contrary to what one might think, given that, though it is in fact a theoretical revision of Leninism, it is presented as an example of theoretical progress and as 'transcending' Lenin's position -- it is particularly absurd from a Marxist or even quite simply from a materialist point of view.
    In Lenin's definition the essential factor is not repression or repressive violence, as exercized by the State apparatus about which we were just speaking, and by its specialized organs -- police, army, law courts, etc. He does not claim that the State operates only by violence, but that the State rests on a relation of forces between classes, and not on the public interest and the general will. This relation is itself indeed violent in the sense that it is in effect unlimited by any law, since it is only on the basis of the relation of social forces, and in the course of its evolution, that laws and a system of legislation can come to exist -- a form of legality which, far from calling this violent relation into question, only legitimates it.
    I said that this current objection is particularly absurd, because if there is anything true about repression, for example police repression, it is precisely the fact that it does not stand 'above the law'. On the contrary, in the vast majority of cases it is provided for and organized by the law itself (a law which can, in case of need, be specially constructed to this end by the ruling class with the aid of its legislative and judicial State apparatus). It is worth recalling in this connexion that the closure of factories put into 'judicial liquidation' or their simple 'transfer' elsewhere, the sacking of workers, the seizure by the bailiffs of debtors' property, the attacks on 'illegal' popular demonstrations are all perfectly legal practices, at least in most cases, while the use of strike pickets attempting to prevent non-striking workers or blacklegs from entering a factory, the occupation of factories, organized opposition to evictions from workers' homes, and political demonstrations dangerous to the government constitute, in the official language, 'interference with the right to work', 'attacks on the property right', or 'threats to public order', and are quite illegal. You only have to think a little about the significance of these everyday

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examples in order to understand Lenin's formula: 'Class dictatorship is a power above the law'. It is therefore not a question of forgetting about the law, of reducing State power to its repressive functions, but of recognizing the true material relation between State power, law and repression.
    You will see at the same time how absurd it is to present the bourgeoisie, and in particular the imperialist bourgeoisie of the present day, as a class driven by history, by the crisis of its own system, to 'violate its own legality'! It may of course happen, in fact it certainly does sometimes happen, that the working people, defending themselves step by step against exploitation and making use in this struggle of all the means at their disposal, including legal means, succeed in exploiting, in the fight against a particular employer or a given administrative decision, the 'gaps' in the existing system of legislation and the contradictions which even the unceasing activity of the jurists has been unable to eliminate, and even certain favourable legal provisions which they have been able to force through by their struggles. No trade union or Communist militant is however unaware of the extraordinary difficulties of such an enterprise and of its necessary limits, and especially of the fact that it can in any case never succeed except on the basis of a certain relation of forces, and with the support of mass pressure. But, above all, what this ceaselessly repeated struggle teaches the working people is precisely the fact that the ruling class, because it holds State power, remains in control of the game: from the standpoint of the ruling class -- as long as you do not confuse this standpoint with the moral conscience of its jurists and its petty-bourgeois ideologists -- law is not an intangible absolute. In applying the law, or in getting it applied, it may be necessary to find a way round it; it certainly always has to be transformed and adapted to the needs of the struggles of the capitalist class and of the accumulation of capital. And if this process of adaptation cannot be carried out without calling into question the constitutional form (the public institutions -- parliamentary, legal and administrative) in which the power of the ruling class is exercized -- then, in that case, the bourgeoisie is not averse to making a political 'revolution': the history of France, from 1830 to 1958, provides enough examples of the fact.
    No relation of forces between the classes can be maintained without institutionalized repression. But no relation of forces can

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be maintained by or rest on or be identified with repression alone. That would be a completely idealist notion. An historical relation of forces between the classes can only be founded on the whole of the forms of the class struggle, and it is perpetuated or transformed in function of the evolution of all the forms of the class struggle. In particular, it rests on the relation of economic forces, in which the bourgeoisie possesses the advantage of the monopoly of the means of production, and therefore of permanent control and pressure on the conditions of life and work of the masses. And it rests on the relation of ideological forces, in which the bourgeoisie possesses the advantage of legal ideology (including what Lenin called 'constitutional illusions' and the 'superstitious religion of the State', which are supported by bourgeois law), the advantage of the whole of bourgeois ideology materialized in the daily operation of the ideological State apparatuses, in which the exploited workers themselves are held.
    Lenin's definition cannot therefore be 'too narrow', in the sense that it might be supposed to take account of only one aspect of State power (the repressive aspect). On the contrary, it aims precisely to show that all the aspects of State power (repressive and non-repressive, which actually cannot be separated) are determined by the relation of class domination and contribute to the reproduction of its political conditions. In this sense, all the functions of the State are through and through political: including of course, the 'economic' and 'ideological' functions. But Lenin's definition is just 'narrow' enough to exclude the possibility that, in a class society, any aspect whatever of the State might escape the field of class antagonism.
    In reality the distinction between a 'narrow' and a 'broad' definition of the State is an old theme, which can be traced a long way back in the history of the labour movement. It was already invoked by the theoreticians of Social-Democracy against the Marxist theses on the' State and the dictatorship of the proletariat: 'Marx and Engels regard the State not as the State in the broad sense, not as an organ of guidance, as the representative of the general interests of society. It is the State as the power, the State as the organ of authority, the State as the instrument of the rule of one class over another', wrote the Belgian Socialist Vandervelde in 1918, quoted by Lenin. (C.W., XXVIII, 322. [The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky , pp. 134]) The need, stressed by Marx, to overthrow the State power of the bourgeoisie by

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destroying the bourgeois State apparatus would in this perspective obviously only concern 'the State in the narrow sense' . . . As far as 'the State in the broad sense' is concerned, the organ of guidance and public service, it would have to be not destroyed but developed: the point would be to make 'the transition from the State in the narrow sense to the State in the broad sense', to organize 'the separation of the State as an organ of authority from the State as an organ of guidance, or, to use Saint-Simon's expression, of the government of men from the administration of things' (Vandervelde; in op. cit., pp. 323-24 [p. 136]). The reference to Saint-Simon's humanist technocratism is illuminating.
    Those of our comrades who, after the event, are hurriedly seeking 'theoretical' foundations for the abandonment of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat are being driven into exactly the same position. Here is a typical example. François Hincker, immediately after the 22nd Congress of the French Party, published a series of three articles in which he wrote:
    'Throughout the whole history of the Marxist-Leninist labour movement, two appreciations [sic ] of the concept of the State have circulated and intersected. [. . .] A "narrow" appreciation: the State is a repressive apparatus which has been produced by the governing class [sic ], which is separated from the social base (relations of production), and intervenes on it from the outside [. . .] A "broad" appreciation: [. . .] the essence of the State is the organization of the functioning of class society in the direction of the reproduction of the existing relations of production, in the direction of the reproduction of the domination of the ruling class. [. . .] Everything suggests that, precisely, to "do politics", for the political personnel of the ruling class, is to surpass the immediate and competing interests of the individual members of the bourgeoisie. This domination, this hegemony, is exercised by means of repression, by means of ideology, but also by means of organization, to the point that, and just because, it renders services which, taken separately, have a universal use-value. This last aspect has not been sufficiently attended to by the old and new classics of Marxism.[2] [. . .] The ruling class has to represent its interests in universal terms, [. . .] to construct roads, schools, hospitals, to assure the

function of arbitration in the form of a system of justice, which in general works in favour of the ruling class [sic ], but which also, willy nilly, guarantees a certain security, a certain order, a certain state of peace, etc.'[3]
    Thus he finally comes up with this pearl of Statist ideology: 'To smash the State is to develop the democratic State with the aim of causing it to take on its full social function'.[4]
    In fact, if the State 'in the broad sense' could not be reduced to class domination, if this domination only affected its operation after the event, pulling it and deforming it 'in the direction' of the reproduction of such domination, and sooner or later coming into contradiction with the 'needs of society', then the revolutionary struggle would not be a struggle against the existing State, but more fundamentally a struggle for that State, for the development of its universal functions, a struggle to rescue it from the abusive 'stranglehold' maintained on it by the ruling class . . . It is not surprising, then, that this definition of the State quite simply adopts the traditional image provided for it by bourgeois legal ideology. The Marxist thesis says: it is because the social relations of production are relations of exploitation and antagonism that a special organ, the State, is necessary for their reproduction; that is why the maintenance of the working population, which capitalism needs and the conditions of the development of the productive forces, which capitalism needs -- including the construction of roads, schools, hospitals -- must inevitably take the form of the State. But what we are now being offered, on the contrary, is the bourgeois thesis (whose value has, it seems, not been 'sufficiently attended to' by the classics of Marxism) that the State is something other than the class struggle; that it is partly (for the essential part) detached from that struggle, and that it limits the field of the class struggle (by subjecting it to the demands of the 'whole' of society). In turn it is at most limited (shackled and perverted) by that struggle.[5] Thus, if these limits are overcome, it will be all the more 'free' to fulfil its universal (democratic) functions . . . But all this

is simply based on the following fake argument: seeing that society cannot do without the State on the basis of the existing relations of production, it can never do without it, even when these relations disappear! Bourgeois ideology starts from the presupposition that the State, its State, is eternal, and -- not surprisingly -- that is also its conclusion.
    Remember Marx's words in the Communist Manifesto : 'Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.' In the same way the disappearance of the State is to him identical with the disappearance of society itself!
    In other words, it is impossible really to separate the recognition of the class struggle from the recognition of the class nature of the State as such -- from which follows the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As soon as you admit that the State, with respect to such-and-such of its functions, may stand outside of the field of class determination, as soon as you admit that it might constitute a simple 'public service' and represent the interests of the whole of society before representing those of the ruling class, otherwise than as the historical interests of the ruling class, then you are inevitably led to admit that the exploiters and the exploited 'also' have certain historical interests in common (those of the 'nation', for example), that their struggle does not determine the whole field of social relations, that it is restricted to a certain sphere of social life or that it may disappear under the weight of certain higher demands. And to crown it all, this limitation (therefore in fact abandonment) of the class point of view is invoked precisely with respect to the present-day development of the State, which represents historically the expression, reinforcement and concentration of the power of the ruling class, in step with the development of imperialism and the aggravation of its contradictions.
    I have just been speaking about the class interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. In fact, the bourgeoisie as a class has only one fundamental interest in common. Except for this interest, everything divides it. The interest in question is the maintenance and extension of the exploitation of wage labour. It should therefore be easy to see what Marx and Engels intended by their argument about State power: State power can belong only to a single class just because its roots lie precisely in the antagonism between

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the classes, in the irreconcilable character of this antagonism. Or better: in the reproduction of the whole of the conditions of this antagonism. There is no 'third way' between the extension of this exploitation, for which the bourgeoisie is fighting, because its very existence depends on it, and the struggle for its abolition, led by the proletariat. There is no possibility of reconciling these two corresponding historical tendencies. Marx and Lenin were always trying to demonstrate this point: the basis of the petty-bourgeois ideology of the State -- and this is true even when it penetrates socialism and the organizations of the working class -- is the idea that the State represents at its own special level a site of conciliation in the class struggle between the exploiters and exploited. And the no. 1 key point of the proletarian conception of the State, an idea which is absolutely unacceptable to bourgeois and especially petty-bourgeois ideology is the idea that the State results from the irreconcilable, antagonistic character of the class struggle, and is a tool of the ruling class in this struggle. The historical existence of the State is immediately linked to that of the class struggle, even when, indeed especially when it tries to fulfil 'general social functions', whether economic or cultural: for these general functions are necessarily subordinated to the interest of the ruling class and become means of its domination. The more important and diverse these functions become, the more this characteristic of the State as a tool of class rule comes to the fore.

Has the proletariat disappeared?
Let us put the point in another way: the only 'limits' on the class struggle are set by the class struggle itself, by the material means which it provides to the exploited masses to organize and mobilize their forces. One thing ought indeed to be clear: to the extent that class struggle is ever attenuated, it is not because antagonistic class interests have been reconciled or because the conflict between them has been transcended. On the contrary, it is because a certain relation of forces has been imposed in struggle by the proletariat. To take only one example, which has sometimes provoked debates inside the labour movement and has necessitated the vigilance or intervention of the Communists: the fact that representatives of the working people are elected to public bodies (Parliament, municipal councils) is an index of their strength and a help to them

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in their struggle, one means among others of taking this struggle further forward; but it certainly does not entail that the workers thereby hold the least scrap of State power, as if State power could be divided up into a number of different local or individual powers, shared out between the classes in proportion to their political strength, and thus cease to be absolutely in the hands of the ruling class. It is the experience of struggle itself, provided that this experience is consistently developed, which inevitably leads to the recognition of State power as the instrument of the ruling class, to what Marx called its class dictatorship.[6]
    If State power really is the dictatorship of a single class, in the sense which I have just indicated, it must be either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or that of the proletariat, which constitute tendentially the two classes of modern society, the two classes produced and reproduced by the development of capitalism. The class State, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat are three concepts representing the moments of a single antagonistic process. This is illustrated once again by the discussion now taking place, for, as we have seen, the rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat leads immediately, by the logic of the ideological reasoning which it sets in motion, to avoiding, watering down and finally revising the idea of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and therefore of the State as a class instrument. Thus you can begin to see why the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat is inseparable from the Marxist theory of the State and of the class struggle: let it go, and the rest crumbles!
    The proletarian revolution is the reversal of the existing relation of social forces, the establishment in the course of the struggle of a new relation of forces, the opposite of that which previously existed. To imagine that this reversal could take any other form than the dictatorship of the proletariat is to imply that there exists in history, over against the bourgeoisie, an antagonistic force other than the proletariat, a 'third force' independent of the proletariat, capable of uniting the working people against capital. This always more improbable miracle, this 'third force' is the saviour which petty-bourgeois ideology has long been awaiting in order to escape from the class antagonism within which it feels itself to be squeezed; this force it 'discovers' successively in the peasantry, the

absolute character of the antagonism between classes (which is the root of the whole question) with the idea of the immutability of social classes, an idea which can then be triumphantly 'disproved by the facts': this confusion actually amounts to a denial of the antagonism between the classes, to its progressive attenuation, and consequently to the conjuring away of the need for a revolutionary break with capitalism. Just as, in other circumstances, the transformation of the knowledge produced by the natural sciences allowed idealist philosophy to proclaim that 'matter has disappeared', we are here faced with a situation in which it is being ever more openly explained that classes are disappearing: no more 'bourgeoisie', in the strict sense, no more 'proletariat', in the strict sense. Power lies, so we are told, not with the bourgeoisie as a class, but in the hands of a few families, or rather of twenty-five or thirty individuals, the Company Presidents of the great groups of monopolies; that is, it lies nowhere, or rather in a simple, abstract politico-economic system which owes the persistence of its influence over men, over the people, only to the backwardness of their political consciousness! The antithesis to the capitalist system is no longer the proletariat, but everyone, or almost everyone: for almost everyone, in one sense or another, is part of the working people! The proletariat is now interpreted simply as one category of working people among others.[7]
    The facts (since they have been mentioned) are quite different. They show that, with the development of capitalism, and especially of present-day imperialism, the antagonism is actually getting deeper and progressively extending itself to all regions of the world, leaving an ever narrower margin of manoeuvre to the social classes left over from the past in their attempts to provide themselves with an independent economic and political position. The centralization of the State power of the bourgeoisie and its dependence in relation to the proletariat on the process of accumulation of capital are increasing. The transformation of more and more working people into proletarians, even if it sometimes runs up against historical obstacles which slow it down, is inexorably running its course.
    Of course, the history of capitalism does demonstrate a ceaseless

4 
 
The Destruction of the
State Apparatus

 
 
'We are for [. . .] utilising revolutionary forms of the State in a revolutionary way.'

Lenin, Letters from Afar , XXIII, 325.

'The dictatorship of the proletariat means a persistent struggle -- bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative -- against the forces and traditions of the old society. The force of habit in millions and tens of millions is a most formidable force.'

Lenin, 'Left-Wing' Communism-an Infantile Disorder , XXXI, 44 [p. 32].

The State rests on a relation of forces between classes, which it develops and reproduces. It could not otherwise continue to exist. But it is not purely and simply the same thing as this relation of forces. It needs a 'special organ', created and perfected for the purpose. This is the second argument of Marx and Lenin: there can be no State power without a State apparatus. The State power held by a class takes material form in the development and action of the State apparatus.

The opportunist deviation
We can explain right away, in a few words, the manner in which the opportunist deviation on the question of the State manifests itself within the labour movement and Marxism itself. We have seen that, seduced by the constant pressure of bourgeois legal ideology, it ends by taking over the terms of this ideology. Lenin constantly repeated and demonstrated that the essential point about opportunism was its position on the question of the State

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apparatus. That is, its position on the question of the revolutionary destruction of the existing State apparatus, and not on the simple, abstract question of the exercise of power, nor on that of the use of the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat' -- Social-Democratic opportunism, from Kautsky and Plekhanov to Léon Blum, always formally referred to the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', while at the same time emptying it of its practical content, the destruction of the State apparatus. Lenin wrote:
    'A gulf separates Marx and Kautsky over their attitudes towards the proletarian party's task of training the working class for revolution.'
    Kautsky had written a pamphlet dealing with the socialist revolution, on which Lenin comments:
    'Throughout the pamphlet the author speaks of the winning of State power -- and no more; that is, he has chosen a formula which makes a concession to the opportunists, in as much as it admits the possibility of seizing power without destroying the State machine. The very thing which Marx in 1872 declared to be 'obsolete' in the programme of the Communist Manifesto , is revived by Kautsky in 1902.[1]
And Lenin continues:
    'Kautsky abandons Marxism for the opportunist camp, for this destruction of the State machine, which is utterly unacceptable to the opportunists, completely disappears from his argument, and he leaves a loophole for them in that "conquest" may be interpreted as the simple acquisition of a majority.' (XXV, 484, 489-90. [The State and Revolution  pp. 128-29, 136])
    Let us leave aside the purely historical aspect of this criticism, even though it does not lack interest, for opportunism has always, right up to the present day, ignored the rectification of the Communist Manifesto, and explained that the concept of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' in Marx's writings in fact means 'nothing else' than the 'victory of democracy' referred to in very general terms in the Manifesto. More important is the theoretical aspect. What Lenin shows is that opportunism is not characterized by a refusal to talk about the conquest of State power, or about the need for the workers to take political power. On the contrary,

The organization of class rule
What then is the State apparatus? Essentially it is that material organization, the product of a particular 'division of labour', without which no State power can exist: at one and the same time both the organization of the ruling class and the organization of the whole of society under the domination of a single class. Before making a more detailed analysis we must first understand this double organizational function, which lies at the root of the historical efficacy of the State apparatus, but also of most of the resulting illusions concerning the nature of the State.
    To say that the State apparatus is the organization of the ruling class is to imply that, without this State apparatus -- the armed forces, the civil service, the legal apparatus imposing respect for the law, and all the ideological State apparatuses -- the ruling class (today the bourgeoisie) could never succeed in unifying its class interests, in conciliating or overcoming its internal contradictions and in pursuing a unified policy with regard to the other classes in society. Of course, this process of unification, which takes the form of the centralization of State power in the system of political institutions, is not the result of a contract to which the different fractions of the ruling class freely agree, or of a peaceful discussion between them. Or rather, such discussions do take place -- for example, when representatives of different parties work out a Constitution together -- but these contractual discussions only ratify an already established material relation of forces.
    But we must also pay attention to the second aspect: the organization of the whole of society within the State apparatus, in accordance with the needs of the reproduction of exploitation. If the State apparatus was only a closed-circuit organization of the ruling class, it would in fact produce considerable obstacles to the maintenance of the power of this ruling class, for it would immediately result in the isolation of the ruling class in the face of the mass of society. The point we made a moment ago concerning the law is the key to an understanding of how things work in this connexion, because the law is already, thanks to the operation of the legal apparatus (legal code, law courts, lawyers, jurisprudence . . .), an essential aspect of the State apparatus in capitalist society. This point could be illustrated in detail with reference to the history of the State. In feudal society, the State apparatus comprises both forms of organization proper to the ruling class

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(like feudal lineage relations and bondage), which constitute it as a relatively self-enclosed 'cast', and much more general forms of organization, which correct or compensate for this isolation by organizing the whole of the non-ruling classes, down to the humblest of wretches, in association with the ruling class, in a single order binding upon everyone. This is the religious order, which assigns to the Church a determinant role in the functioning of the feudal State apparatus.
    What, in this connexion, characterizes the State apparatus of the bourgeois epoch? What explains the fact that, in Marx's words, it represents a continuous 'perfectioning' of the State apparatus inherited from the old ruling classes? It is precisely -- apart from the enormous extension of the State apparatus, the increase in the number of its organs and the growth of its capacity for intervening in social life, together with the increase in the number of its specialized employees -- the fact that it carries out much better and more completely than previous forms the function of fusion or integration of the two functions which I mentioned: the organization of the ruling class and the organization of the whole of society. The bourgeoisie, as a result of course of its direct, internal role in the production and circulation of commodities, has absolutely no need to organize itself as a closed social 'caste'. On the contrary, it needs to organize itself as a class open to individual mobility, a class which individuals may enter and leave in the course of historical development. It is true that there are indeed forms of organization specific to the bourgeoisie, 'corporative' forms, for example the employers' organizations (like the CNPF in France or the CBI in Britain), professional associations and bourgeois political parties. But this last type of organization functions more as a means of subjecting entire masses of the petty-bourgeoisie and working people to the political and ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie than as a means of combining the fractions of the bourgeoisie in a co-operative relation and the bourgeois political parties themselves only constitute one aspect of the operation of the bourgeois political apparatus, with its parliamentary and municipal institutions, etc.
    It is important to realize that it is this double, simultaneous function of the State apparatus, brought to perfection by capitalism, which allows us to understand why the class struggle takes place not only between the State apparatus on the one hand and the

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exploited classes on the other, but also, in part, within the State apparatus itself. The State apparatus is held fast in the class struggle of which it is a product.
    These schematic remarks allow us above all to grasp a very important fact, which Lenin constantly emphasized: the fact that each great historical epoch, based on a determinate material mode of production, comprises tendentially one type of State, i.e. one general determinate form of State. A ruling class cannot make use of any type of State apparatus; it is obliged to organize itself in historically imperative forms, which relate to the new forms of class struggle in which it is held fast. The feudal-ecclesiastical type of organization is completely ineffective as a means of organizing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. The same general point is true of course with respect to the dictatorship of the proletariat. If the class struggle fought out by the proletariat is of a quite different kind from that of the bourgeoisie, it follows that, even if it does need some kind of State apparatus, it cannot purely and simply make use -- as if they were instruments which could be manipulated at will -- of the standing army, the law courts and their judges, the secret and special police forces, the parliamentary system, the administrative bureaucracy, immune from practically any form of control by the people, or the school system, which segregates the children and is cut off from the sphere of production, etc. To picture this in simple terms, let us say that, if State power is an instrument in the service of the class interest of the bourgeoisie, the State apparatus in which it takes material form is not itself a simple instrument: it is a 'machine' in which the ruling class is held fast, to which it is in a certain sense subjected, at least with regard to its general historical forms. And this 'machine' determines the possibilities of political action open to the ruling class, just as the need for profit, for accumulation, and the compelling force of capitalist competition determine its possibilities of economic action. There is no question of escaping from either constraint: the 'will' of the capitalists, like that of the people, plays no role here.
    In order to illustrate this point, let us take a small but significant example of present-day interest. A political question has recently arisen, in West Germany and in France, concerning the rights and duties of civil servants. The West German government and administration, in the tradition of the Prussian Empire and of

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Nazism, are identifying service to the State with service to the government in power and to its policies, and are sacking anyone opposed to these policies on the grounds that they are 'extremists' and 'enemies of the Constitution'. In France, in spite of the desires of men like Poniatowski to imitate this enticing example, the continuity of democratic struggles is still guaranteeing the distinction between 'service to the State' and service to this or that government, whose task is to carry out the policy of the dominant big bourgeoisie. This makes a big difference, which must not be underestimated, because it provides individuals living on one side of the Rhine with rights and guarantees of which those living on the other side are deprived. But this only means that these individuals, in their capacity as private citizens, are allowed to think what they like about the class policy which they have to carry out -- and not that they are allowed to oppose it; for, in France as in West Germany, they would in that case find themselves out of a job, not because of a Berufsverbot, but on the grounds of 'professional misconduct', and the result is the same. But that is not all: for what can 'service to the State' mean, historically, when it is distinguished from service to this or that particular government? A non-political form of service, above or beyond class politics? Not at all: it means service to any government whose policy is compatible with the maintenance of the existing order, that of bourgeois property relations and of bourgeois law. By keeping itself relatively independent of changes of government, the body of civil servants of the bourgeois State, whatever the ideas which any of its members might have in his head, guarantees precisely the primacy of the State apparatus over the government itself. Thus the bourgeoisie's hold as a class over State power, instead of being exposed to the hazards of an election, or of a motion of non-confidence, or to the whims or errors of appreciation of a President of the Republic, can lean for support on the firm foundation of the 'sense of duty' and of the 'professional ethics' of thousands of civil servants (and of course also, more prosaically, on their total financial dependence on the State).
    But let us take another example which relates to this point. In replying to the provocative remarks of a Minister of Public Order, who had accused high civil servants sympathetic to the Socialist Party of having used 'for partisan purposes' information which they had acquired in the exercise of their function, i.e. of pub-

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lishing official secrets, a leader of that party retaliated with the accusation that the examination results of the students of the National Administration School had been manipulated in accordance with their political opinions. The resulting argument is extremely revealing: for behind this 'left-wing' criticism you find precisely the same ideology of the civil service as a body independent of class politics and class antagonisms. You find it in this special modified form: since non-political civil servants do not exist in reality, it is only right that the different political tendencies should be fairly represented in the administration, corresponding to their national importance! But since this ideology is precisely the one professed by top civil servants, precisely the one fed into them at the National Administration School, the accusation -- whether true or false -- turned out to be a blunder: it was met by a general outcry of indignation, even among the Socialist students themselves! The next part of the story is even more interesting: L'Humanité (May 31st, 1976) decided to explain what was really at stake in this debate; it concluded that 'one thing is certain: the social origin of the students does not reflect the class composition of the nation. The number (practically zero) of students of working class origin is ironic proof of the extent to which the vast majority of the producers of wealth is excluded from the management of the affairs of State.' Two days later, a Socialist Professor of Law put forward the same line of argument in Le Monde (June 2nd, 1976):
    'The creators of the National Administration School (ENA) claimed that they wanted to make it an instrument for democratizing recruitment into the top levels of the civil service. This policy is a total failure. The ENA is recruiting its students from a very narrow fringe of French society, from the economically and culturally most privileged groups; and since these students will later be entrusted with the reality of economic and political power both inside and outside of the State sphere, the School appears to be one of the instruments for the preservation of the power of what we must call the ruling class. This is not a matter of opinion, but an observable fact. [. . .] This makes it easier to understand who the top civil servants educated at the ENA really are, and to guess what use they will make of their power. [. . .] This system has provided the State with civil servants of high quality, [. . .] but such a narrowly based recruitment policy necessarily leads to a profound gulf between the top levels of the administration and the

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great mass of citizens.'
    I have quoted these texts at length because they illustrate the point so well: you see the development first of the utopian idea of an administration which would be independent of the government thanks to the counterweight exerted by the presence of civil servants holding a different opinion, and then of the utopian idea of an administration standing at the service of the people thanks to the democratization of its recruitment policy, reformed so as to reflect the 'class composition of the nation'. And in consequence you are, if I may say so, forced to admit the absence of a revolutionary position on the question of the civil service and of the State apparatus: for any sons of workers or former workers who became civil servants would thereby cease, by definition, to be workers. The 'class origin' which they carried with them would change absolutely nothing with regard to the basic characteristic of the State apparatus: the 'division of labour' between the civil service, the administration of public affairs, the government of men, and material production; the separation between the State apparatus and productive labour. When someone argues that, since the 19th century, the number of civil servants has increased, so that these civil servants have ceased to constitute a 'privileged' stratum -- supposing that most of them ever did -- and today make up a mass of employees more or less badly paid by the State, and concludes that it is now possible that the State apparatus might therefore as such swing over one day to the side of the revolution, he quite simply 'forgets' that this increase in numbers represents an enormous extension of the 'division of labour' in the State. This division of labour is a material social relation, made up of institutions, of practices and of ideological 'habits' (as Lenin put it): it must be 'broken' by a long, difficult and persistent class struggle if a political and social revolution of the working people is ever to become a reality. The problem of the proletarian revolution does not lie in the recruitment of the members of the government and top civil servants from among the working people or from former workers; it is rather, tendentially, the problem of how the working people can 'govern' and 'administer' themselves.
    Lenin drew the necessary conclusion when he asked: what type of State does the proletarian revolution need in order to seize and to hold power? Not the bourgeois type of State, of which the parliamentary republic represents the highest, most developed

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historical form, whatever the extent of the 'reforms' which might be envisaged within this type of State. But a new type of state 'of the Commune type, the Soviet type, or perhaps of some third type' (XXVIII, 237, 246, 255-57, 321, etc. [The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky , pp. 13, 24, 37-39, 133]). Lenin constantly stressed (in particular in connexion with the famous question -- whose role in Stalin's writings I have already mentioned -- of the Soviet Constitution, and of the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the right to vote) that the particular institutions developed by the Soviet Revolution do not themselves constitute a 'model' State. They are only an effect of the general tendency of proletarian revolutions to produce this new type of State. Their importance -- the importance of the Soviets -- is that they proved the reality of this tendency. All subsequent revolutions, even if they were defeated by a more powerful enemy, even if they were only 'dress rehearsals', have provided in their own way illustrations of this tendency: from the Italian 'factory councils' and the Chilean 'workers' cordons' to the Chinese 'People's Communes'.

What has to be 'destroyed'
The dictatorship of the proletariat means the destruction of the bourgeois State apparatus, and the construction of a State apparatus of a new type; but not all the aspects of the bourgeois State apparatus can be destroyed in the same way, by the same methods, and at the same rhythm.
    We know that Lenin (following Marx) particularly insisted on the fact that the core of the State apparatus lies in the State repressive apparatus, and that in consequence the absolute priority for every socialist revolution is precisely to attack this repressive apparatus, using the objective possibilities offered in this connexion by every really revolutionary situation, in which the masses of working people are involved in the struggle for the conquest of power, against the background of a grave crisis of capitalism.
    Why did Lenin pay so much attention to the repressive State apparatus, therefore to its immediate destruction, which he considered both the condition and a first consequence of the revolution? For two reasons, which are really one and the same.
    First, because -- in moments of open and acute class struggle -- it is the repressive apparatus in which the relation of forces favouring the bourgeoisie, on which its (absolute) State and class power

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rests, takes material form and is guaranteed. And the same is true every time when, even on a limited scale -- strikes, demonstrations, for example -- the class struggle becomes open and acute. The law must have power in order that the ruling class, standing above the law, may retain its power.
    Secondly, because the repressive apparatus is tendentially the same in all the particular forms of the bourgeois State, in all the particular political régimes whose form it takes, whether we are talking about 'democratic' republican régimes, or 'authoritarian' régimes -- dictatorial, monarchical or, in the present day, fascist. Of course, it is not an 'invariant' aspect of the State apparatus, standing outside of the development of history: but it is, in any given epoch, an aspect whose development and reproduction is not dependent on the different kinds of political régime. It is the armies of democratic republics which take part in fascist coups d'état. And the principles of organization of the French and the German police do not differ from those applied in Franco's Spain: it is not the police itself which determines whether or not these principles can be put into operation in the same way, nor does it determine the extent of its own freedom of action.
    To say that the repressive apparatus is the core of the bourgeois State apparatus is not to imply that enormous differences do not exist between 'democratic' régimes and openly 'dictatorial' régimes, in the sense which bourgeois 'political science' itself gives to these terms, with regard to the forms of political and ideological domination, to the relative 'weight' of the role played by open repression on the one hand and ideological hegemony on the other, or finally to the possibilities open to the proletariat in its class struggle to develop this struggle 'freely' as a political struggle. But as far as the forms of organization of the repressive State apparatuses are concerned, the 'last resort' of the ruling class, the differences are insignificant.[2]
    As Lenin says: 'It is quite easy (as history proves) to revert from a parliamentary bourgeois republic to a monarchy, for all the

machinery of oppression -- the army, the police, and the bureaucracy -- is left intact. The Commune and the Soviets smash that machinery and do away with it.' (XXIV, 69. [The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution ]) History also shows, under our very eyes, from Greece to Chile, via Spain and Portugal, that to move back from a totalitarian and fascist régime to the 'normal' bourgeois parliamentary republic is extremely difficult. This is because, in the epoch of imperialism, there is an enormous development of the class struggle and of the threat posed to the power of the bourgeoisie, while the contradictions in the struggle for the political and economic division of the world become ever more acute, the result being that the process of militarization and more generally the development of the repressive aspect of the State apparatus receive a new impetus. Thus, as Lenin pointed out with far-sighted insistence: 'The more highly developed democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connexion with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie.' (XXVIII, 245. [The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, p. 23]) The reason does not lie in the 'strength' or 'weakness' of the democratic conditions of a country: for democratic traditions are always strong among the common people, and especially within the proletariat, and always weak within the ruling class. The reason lies precisely in that aspect of bourgeois democracy which makes it a reality (a reality with a price): in the fact that bourgeois democracy allows the 'free' development of the political class struggle, the 'open' formation of political organizations of the proletariat which may, provided that they maintain their ideological independence, carry out propaganda and mass action for the abolition of capitalist exploitation. This is the immense advantage of the democratic republic from the proletarian point of view, this is the reason why the fight to establish or to defend it is always an aim of the proletariat -- and not, as opportunism believes, the supposed fact that under this system the State apparatus takes on a form such that it can be made use of, as it stands, by the proletarian revolution. It is simply -- though this is of great importance, and may even be historically decisive -- that the struggle for political democracy, when it becomes a class

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struggle against the reactionary bourgeoisie, allows the proletariat to organize itself, to educate itself, and enrol the masses of the people in the struggle for a more advanced objective.
    The argument that the repressive apparatus is the core of the State apparatus implies neither that the State can be reduced to this single aspect, nor that the repressive apparatus can function alone. And it certainly does not mean that all the aspects of the State apparatus can be 'destroyed' in the same way, as implied by the vulgar and mechanical image of a series of hammer blows, an image which the bourgeoisie turns against Marxism by using it as a bogy to frighten the people. The historical destruction of the State apparatus is indeed an uncompromising struggle, which can finally leave no stone of the bourgeois State apparatus standing, for the existence of this apparatus is incompatible with the real liberation of the working people. But the destruction of a whole State apparatus, and its replacement by new political forms of organization of the material and cultural life of society, cannot be carried out immediately, it can only be immediately begun. It cannot be carried out by decree or by a single violent attack, but only by making use of all the political contradictions of capitalist society, and turning them to the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
    Lenin already pointed out in 1916, in opposition to the mechanistic conceptions of a section of 'left-wing' Social-Democracy:
    'Capitalism in general, and imperialism in particular, turn democracy into an illusion -- though at the same time capitalism engenders democratic aspirations in the masses, creates democratic institutions, aggravates the antagonism between imperialism's denial of democracy and the mass striving for democracy. Capitalism and imperialism can be overthrown only by economic revolutions. They cannot be overthrown by democratic transformations, even the most "ideal". But a proletariat not schooled in the struggle for democracy is incapable of performing an economic revolution. Capitalism cannot be vanquished without taking over the banks, without repealing private ownership of the means of production. These revolutionary measures, however, cannot be implemented without organizing the entire people for democratic administration of the means of production captured from the bourgeoisie, without enlisting the entire mass of the working people, the proletarians, semi-proletarians and small peasants, for

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the democratic organization of their ranks, their forces, their participation in State affairs. [. . .] The awakening and growth of socialist revolt against imperialism are indissolubly linked with the growth of democratic resistance and unrest. Socialism leads to the withering away of every State, consequently also of every democracy, but socialism can be implemented only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which combines violence against the bourgeoisie, i.e., the minority of the population, with full development of democracy, i.e., the genuinely equal and genuinely universal participation of the entire mass of the population in all State affairs and in all the complex problems of abolishing capitalism.
    It is in these "contradictions" that Kievsky, having forgotten the Marxist teaching on democracy, got himself confused. [. . .] The Marxist solution of the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilize all democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory. Such utilization is no easy task. [. . .] Marxism teaches us that to "fight opportunism" by renouncing utilization of the democratic institutions created and distorted by the bourgeoisie of the given, capitalist, society is to completely surrender to opportunism!' (XXIII, 24-26. ["Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Pyatakov)"])
    If you need confirmation of this point, this time written on the eve of the seizure of power itself, re-read the State and Revolution, that supposedly 'utopian' and 'anarchist' text:
    'The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into "working" bodies.' (XXV, 428 [p. 55].)
    And referring back to the example of the Paris Commune, he adds:
    'The Commune substitutes for the venal and rotten parliamentarism of bourgeois society institutions in which freedom of opinion and of 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. Representative institutions remain, but there is no parliamentarism here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies. We cannot

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imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism, if criticism of bourgeois society is not mere words for us . . .' (XXV, 429. [pp. 56-57])
    In the same way, with regard to the bureaucracy:
    'Abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out of the question. It is a utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy -- this is not a utopia, it is [. . .] the direct and immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat.' (XXV, 430 [p. 57].)
    Many ironic and cheap remarks have been made, from apparently very different sides, on Lenin's argument to the effect that the aim of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a situation in which even cooks would take part in running the State. There is something which smells bad in this irony, not only because it shamelessly exploits, to the benefit of counter-revolution, the millions of victims sacrificed by the Soviet proletariat and people in the course of their revolution, but also because it displays an obvious contempt for cooks. And since I have just quoted the passage from The State and Revolution on the destruction of bureaucratism, I will quote another passage, written a few months later (and which, at root, is still just as relevant):
    'We are not utopians. We know that an unskilled labourer or a cook cannot immediately get on with the job of State administration. [. . .] However [. . .] we demand an immediate break with the prejudiced view that only the rich, or officials chosen from rich families, are capable of administering the State, of performing the ordinary, everyday work of administration. We demand that training in the work of State administration be conducted by class-conscious workers and soldiers and that this training be begun at once, i.e., that a beginning be made at once in training all the working people, all the poor, for this work. [. . .] The chief thing now is to abandon the prejudiced bourgeois-intellectualist view that only special officials, who by their very social positions are entirely dependent upon capital, can administer the State.' (XXVI, 113-14. ["Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?"])
    Lenin returns to this question again in 1920, when he attempts to explain what it is, in the development of the Russian Revolution, that has a universal relevance, taking account of the differences in

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the political history of the different countries of Europe. What is particularly interesting here is the fact that Lenin, precisely because he never retreated an inch on the question of the need for the destruction of the bourgeois State apparatus, entirely rejects the idea that this process of destruction could take any other form than that of a lengthy class struggle, a class struggle which is already in its preparatory stages before the revolution, and which becomes fully acute afterwards, under the dictatorship of the proletariat of which it is the condition of existence. The 'ultra-left' idea of the immediate abolition of bourgeois institutions and of the appearance out of the blue of new, 'purely' proletarian institutions is not only a myth, useless in practice; it also leads to a mechanical inversion of the parliamentary cretinism governing opportunism: it is no exaggeration to talk in this connexion about an 'anti-parliamentary' cretinism, for which particular forms of organization (Soviets, 'workers' councils', workers' control, etc.) becomes panaceas, whose 'introduction' and immediate 'application' is supposed to allow a direct transition from capitalism to socialism, finally abolishing the need for the political class struggle. It is this complex struggle, whose detours are imposed by the radical nature of its own tendential development, which now takes first place in Lenin's analyses. Thus a remarkable dialectic is introduced between the discovery of the immense political tasks confronting the dictatorship of the proletariat, following the Russian Revolution, and the analysis of the conditions of the seizure of power in the European 'bourgeois democracies'.
    It is worth quoting these texts at length, for they clearly contradict the dogmatic and simplistic image of Leninism too often evoked.
    'The experience of many, if not all, revolutions [. . .] shows the great usefulness, during a revolution, of a combination of mass action outside a reactionary parliament with an opposition sympathetic to (or, better still, directly supporting) the revolution within it. [. . .] The "Lefts" in general, argue in this respect like doctrinaires of the revolution, who have never taken part in the real revolution, have never given thought to the history of revolutions, or have naïvely mistaken subjective "rejection" of a reactionary institution for its actual destruction by the combined operation of a number of objective factors. The surest way of discrediting and damaging a new political (and not only political) idea

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is to reduce it to absurdity on the plea of defending it.' (XXXI, 62. ["Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder , pp. 56-57])
    And it is at this point that Lenin introduces the argument according to which 'it was easy for Russia, in the specific and historically unique situation of 1917, to start the socialist revolution, but it will be more difficult for Russia than for the European countries to continue the revolution and to bring it to its consummation.' Not in the framework of an abstract comparison between 'backward', 'uncivilized' Russia and 'advanced' 'developed' Europe, which might today be triumphantly developed in order to discover proof of the congenitally barbarian and primitive character of Russian socialism (peasant socialism!), from which our democratic and civilized culture will, thank God, preserve us (as long as we can just get started . . .). But in order to demonstrate the concrete historical link between the tasks of the Russian proletariat, attempting to find the material form of its power and constructing an effective 'proletarian democracy', and those of the European proletariat, attempting to take State power in the framework of a 'bourgeois democracy'. Both faced the problem of the existence of this bourgeois State apparatus, which can never disappear as a consequence of the simple will to 'repudiate' it, to destroy it, but only through patient revolutionary activity.
    'If it wants to overcome the bourgeoisie, the proletariat must train its own proletarian "class politicians", of a kind in no way inferior to bourgeois politicians.
    The writer of the letter [Lenin is referring to a letter from "Comrade Gallacher, who writes in the name of the Scottish Workers' Council in Glasgow"] fully realizes that only workers' Soviets, not parliament, can be the instrument enabling the proletariat to achieve its aims; those who have failed to understand this are, of course, out-and-out reactionaries. [. . .] But the writer of the letter does not even ask -- it does not occur to him to ask -- whether it is possible to bring about the Soviets' victory over parliament without getting pro-Soviet politicians into parliament, without disintegrating parliamentarianism from within, without working within parliament for the success of the Soviets in their forthcoming task of dispersing parliament.' (XXXI, 80 [p. 57].)
    It is therefore necessary to be able to adopt in turn and to combine several forms of action, several tactics for educating the masses in the struggle, precisely because the State apparatus (and especially the ideological State apparatuses, including the political

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apparatus) is not a simple 'organization of the ruling class', but also an organization of class domination within which the exploited, oppressed classes are objectively caught, but within which the 'development of their class consciousness' and their struggle for socialism must in the first instance take place. Their task is historically to 'destroy' something which is however not purely external to themselves: it is the structure of the world in which they live. But it must be destroyed, to make place for a new one.
    Lenin is addressing the revolutionaries of other European countries at the moment when the new Communist Parties are being set up. But he is also addressing the Russian Communists, he is also talking about the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat, tasks which have turned out to be more difficult than anyone could have imagined. Between these two struggles there is no Great Wall of China, to use one of his favourite expressions. The struggle to take power includes a struggle against parliamentarism, involving the attempt to introduce a 'Soviet form of politics' into the heart of the parliamentary system, thus bringing its contradictions to a head (a form of politics which is not restricted to the parliamentary benches: it is even more important for Communists to 'go into the public houses [. . .] and speak to the people', and to work in the factories and in working class districts!), but this struggle is not such a simple one: for parliamentarism may re-appear in the Soviets themselves. Lenin continues:
    'You think, my dear boycottists and anti-parliamentarians that you are "terribly revolutionary", but in reality you are frightened by the comparatively minor difficulties of the struggle against bourgeois influences within the working class movement, whereas your victory -- i.e., the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the conquest of political power by the proletariat -- will create these very same difficulties on a still larger, and infinitely larger scale. [. . .]
    Under Soviet rule your proletarian party and ours will be invaded by a still larger number of bourgeois intellectuals. They will worm their way into the Soviets, the courts, and the administration, since communism cannot be built otherwise than with the aid of the human material created by capitalism, and the bourgeois intellectuals cannot be expelled and destroyed, but must be won over, remoulded, assimilated and re-educated, just as we must -- in a protracted struggle waged on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat -- re-educate the proletarians themselves, who do not

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abandon their petty-bourgeois prejudices at one stroke, by a miracle, at the behest of the Virgin Mary, at the behest of a slogan, resolution or decree, but only in the course of a long and difficult mass struggle against mass petty-bourgeois influences. Under Soviet rule, these same problems, which the anti-parliamentarians now so proudly, so haughtily, so lightly and so childishly brush aside with a wave of the hand -- these selfsame problems are arising anew within the Soviets, within the Soviet administration, among the Soviet "pleaders". [. . .] Among Soviet engineers, Soviet school-teachers and the privileged, i.e., the most highly skilled and best situated, workers at Soviet factories, we observe a constant revival of absolutely all the negative traits peculiar to bourgeois parliamentarianism, and we are conquering this evil -- gradually -- only by tireless, prolonged and persistent struggle based on proletarian organization and discipline.' (XXXI, 114-15.["Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder, pp. 122-23])
    There are several striking aspects in these remarkable formulations of Lenin, dating from 1920. They are of an essentially descriptive character: Lenin is discovering, for the first time, the concrete forms of a question which is decisive for the revolution, of which up to that time he had only developed an abstract notion; he had first of all to describe these forms, to grope his way towards an understanding of the tendency which they represent. With hindsight, we can say that the fact that these formulations have only a descriptive character -- beyond which Lenin did not have the time, the material possibility of advancing -- that this fact had a very grave result; it allowed Stalin, by relying on the letter of certain formulae, and deliberately ignoring the others, to introduce what are prudishly called 'administrative methods' of resolving the political problems of the dictatorship of the proletariat: purging the Party and the State administration as a method of ideological struggle, then combining police terror with privileges of office in order to guarantee the 'loyalty' of the intellectuals of every kind to the Soviet government. And of course, as Lenin foresaw, these methods did not resolve the historical problem at issue, they only made it worse, up to the day when, in pursuance of Stalin's policy, the reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat -- i.e., the recognition of the objective reality of the problem -- had in its turn to be abandoned in a new attempt to exorcize and camouflage this contradiction.
    Lenin's formulations are descriptive, but at the same time they

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are extremely illuminating, in so far as they show clearly that the problem of the resurgence of parliamentarism and of bureaucratism within the Soviet institutions themselves, in other words the problem of the resistance of the bourgeois State apparatus to its revolutionary destruction, is not a problem of individuals. It is useless to raise a hue and cry about the bourgeois intellectuals, to send them to concentration camps, to replace them by workers, immunized against contamination by the old society . . . The contradiction arises from within the 'system'. The problem does not concern individuals, but the masses, the practices in which the masses are held, which they must learn to understand and to master in order to be able to transform them. Consequently -- but this is perhaps precisely the concept which Lenin lacked in order to crystallize his analysis -- it concerns the social relations in which the masses are held, from the intellectuals and civil servants to the workers themselves, social relations which oppose them to one another and yet at the same time associate them by the ideological force of 'habit'. It is today clear that the different aspects of the division of manual and intellectual labour, constantly reproduced and deepened in every class society, and inherited by socialism together with the 'human raw material' about which Lenin speaks, is in fact the material basis of this system of social relations which provides the bourgeois State apparatus with its astonishing capacity for resistance. And it is therefore clear that the struggle ('violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative', as Lenin said) against the forms of this division of labour, within production and outside of production, is the key to the revolutionary transformation which will finally liberate the working people from centuries of oppression.
    But Lenin's thoughts on this question involve another consequence, one which brings us back to the present-day situation. In abandoning the reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat, you necessarily evade, whether you want to or not, the problems posed by the real exercise of political power by the workers, or at least you give the impression that these problems will resolve themselves, 'at the behest of the Virgin Mary', that all you need is a good 'democratization' of the State apparatus: of the army, of the civil service, of the legal system, of the education system, etc. Thus you create a mechanical gap between the revolutionary struggles of today and the problems of tomorrow: and consequently you

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obscure for the workers the question of the conditions and of the stakes of their future struggle. You encourage thousands, tens of thousands of Communist militants to believe that the obstacles which they come up against every day, in practice, in the fight to unite the working class, to unite all manual and intellectual workers in the struggle against the big bourgeoisie, are only problems of individual consciousness, and therefore to be solved by propaganda. The idea thus grows that if each Communist would only re-double his efforts to convince everyone around him of the superiority of socialism over capitalism, and of the unshakeable devotion of the Communists to the ideal of the happiness of humanity, then the masses would finally swing over to the good side and, by an application of their will, would sweep away the obstacles to the enjoyment by everyone of the benefits of civilization. Unfortunately, however, things never follow this ideal order, nor can the masses ever be won for the struggle against capitalism by a simple process of argument, on the basis of promises or of a beautiful dream of the future, but only on the basis of their experience of the antagonism between their own vital interests on the one hand and the existing economic and political relations on the other. But at the same time it is precisely in this struggle that they progressively discover, as the size of the tasks confronting them grows, the practical means to carry them out. After the seizure of State power, these tasks become even more difficult and decisive, but they are not of a completely different kind. By maintaining, in spite of all opposition, that a revolutionary party cannot content itself with recognizing the existence of the class struggle, but must 'extend this recognition to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat', Marx and Lenin provided each Communist with the means of evaluating the importance of his everyday work of organizing the mass struggle: for this work is not only the technical means of ensuring the seizure of power by the workers' party; it is also a first step in and a first experience of a new type of political practice, unprecedented in history, quite different from the operation of the bourgeois State apparatus, without which this apparatus could never be 'destroyed'. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not provide Communists with a ready-made answer, with a clearly marked road; it only provides them with the possibility of posing an unavoidable problem. But well-posed problems will always be more valuable than dozens of imaginary answers.

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The main aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat
In spite of the brevity of these remarks, they do draw our attention to what will turn out to be the main aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a new type of State, incompatible with the maintenance of the old State apparatus. This main aspect -- as Lenin indicates in the clearest possible fashion, and as the experience of all revolutions has confirmed -- does not consist in the establishment of a certain type of institutions , in the legal sense of the term, which might be considered to possess a universal validity, and above all which might live on unchanged, and continue to fulfil their revolutionary role throughout the whole period of transition to the classless society. Such institutions are necessary to the dictatorship of the proletariat, since this is still a State, and they provide it with a determinate 'political form', which depends on the historical conditions under which it is established and on the stages of its development. Such-and-such a type of institution (the Soviets, for example, once they have taken a general form and been officially recognized as organs of the new revolutionary State) can only partly reflect, and sometimes in a contradictory manner, the requirements of the dictatorship of the proletariat during a given phase of the revolution, and in given historical conditions. But the necessary political foundation and the principal aspect of all these forms is what we can call mass proletarian democracy. Now this kind of democracy cannot be decreed, it cannot be 'guaranteed', in short, it does not depend mainly on institutions, however much freedom may characterize them; but it can be won, at the cost of a hard struggle, if the masses intervene in person on the political scene.
    Since this point is really the heart of the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat (with respect to its repressive aspect, too, its struggle against counter-revolution: the 'people in arms'), I shall look at it more closely.
    First of all I want to remind those comrades who have 'forgotten' it, with the self-interested encouragement of the whole bourgeoisie, that no real socialist revolution has ever been a 'minority' revolution, a forcible takeover by the minority. Every socialist revolution in history, beginning with the Russian Revolution and continuing with the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions, which are epoch-making events in the history of the dictatorship of the proletariat, has necessarily been a majority revolution, a revolution made by the movement of the masses and by mass organi-

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zations, armed and unarmed, which generally arose in the course of the revolution itself and changed with it. If this had not been so, no socialist revolution would have been able nor would it ever be able to overcome the material force of the bourgeois State apparatus, its repressive and its ideological power (the ideological influence which it exercizes on the masses themselves). And it was precisely when, in the course of the Soviet Revolution, the mass movement began to weaken and fade out, above all under the pressure of an unprecedentedly violent attack by a coalition of all the internal and external forces of imperialism, and also as a consequence of the errors of the Russian Communists themselves, when it was diverted from its revolutionary objectives, when the mass organizations were emptied of their content and in their turn became bureaucratic instruments for the control of the masses, that counter-revolutionary tendencies were able to develop at the level of the State.
    The experience of the Russian Revolution did however enable Lenin to show concretely that proletarian democracy, revolutionary mass democracy, is infinitely more real, infinitely more democratic than any kind of bourgeois democracy.
    It is one of the most widespread follies and calumnies of the enemies of Leninism, already spread by the 'right-wing' and 'left-wing' theoreticians of the Social-Democratic movement of his own time, that Lenin always 'underestimated democracy', the value and the usefulness of democratic institutions. This foolishness, which is in fact a complete falsification, was even recently repeated, I am sorry to say, by our comrade Jean Elleinstein, who tried to use it as one explanation of the 'Stalin phenomenon', i.e. of the destruction of proletarian democracy in the Soviet Union. And the same folly is unfortunately not unconnected with the constantly re-appearing idea that it is impossible to talk about the dictatorship of the majority of the people, that the notion of dictatorship is synonymous with the dictatorship of a minority. We must be careful in our use of words. To say that the dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible is to imply, like it or not, that the State power of the majority is impossible, that 'the lowest mass, the real majority' (XXIII, 120 ["Imperialism and the Split in Socialism"]) cannot itself exercize State power. It is to imply that the power of the masses will always be limited, and therefore that the proletarian revolution is impossible.
    The question of the majority and the minority cannot be a

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formal question for a Marxist and a Communist. Which means that it cannot be answered independently of the question; who constitutes the majority of the population? What classes constitute the majority and how are they to be unified in a single mass movement? Every bourgeois democracy already relies on the fact that any of its governments represents a majority, is elected by a majority, necessarily including millions of working people. But that does not of course in any way mean that the majority classes in society, the classes making up the working people, and in particular the proletariat, in any sense hold or exercize State power: on the contrary, it means that they remain in subjection to the State. Because between the masses on the one hand and parliament or the government on the other there is all the distance and the opacity of the State apparatus and the ideological State apparatuses.
    When Lenin says that proletarian democracy is infinitely more real than any bourgeois democracy, however progressive or advantageous the latter may be, compared with the open, brutal forms of bourgeois class dictatorship (for example, in our own day, fascism) he means that the difference between them is not simply one of degree, the difference between a narrow and limited democracy and a broad or extended democracy, but a difference of nature: the difference separating on the one hand the legal democratic forms realizing the power of a minority class, and thus excluding the possibility that the popular masses themselves have any hold, however precarious, on State power, and on the other hand a democracy which realizes the power of the majority class, and therefore demands the permanent intervention, the leading role of the masses of the people in the State.
    In this connexion, the lessons of the Russian Revolution, as reflected in Lenin's analyses, constantly draw our attention to two great practical questions, always open and always being re-opened, never finally settled, on which the development of revolutionary mass democracy depends.

1. The first question, and it is a well-known question, concerns the alliance of the proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie of intellectuals, producers (small peasants and artisans) and employees. This alliance can only be created by a struggle, a battle to overcome the contradictions opposing the proletariat to the petty-bourgeoisie, a

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battle to detach the petty-bourgeoisie, in the course of the class struggle itself, from the hegemony exercized on it by the capitalist and imperialist bourgeoisie, in order to develop the hegemony of the proletariat and of its revolutionary vanguard over the petty-bourgeoisie. We must never forget that Lenin was, in the Marxist tradition of his time, the only theoretician -- I repeat: the only one, because on this point his position is distinguished both from Kautsky's right-wing opportunism and from ultra-leftism, and even from the position of genuine revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg -- he was the only theoretician who never held a 'ouvrierist' ('workerist') conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is in the last analysis an economistic and mechanistic conception of the State power of the working class. There can be no dictatorship of the proletariat if the working class does not carry with it, in the seizure and the maintenance of power, not only the poor peasantry, and the petty-bourgeois strata which are already being absorbed into the proletariat, but the masses of the petty-bourgeoisie, even though their historical interests are contradictory. There can be no dictatorship of the proletariat if the working class does not succeed in welding solid political, economic and ideological links with these masses.
    In other words, there can be no dictatorship of the proletariat if the proletarian revolution is not at the same time a people's revolution. On this point too, even before October, Lenin was repeating the true lesson learned from Marx and from the Paris Commune: 'Particular attention should be paid to Marx's extremely profound remark that the destruction of the bureaucratic military State machine is "the precondition for every real people's revolution". This idea of a "people's" revolution seems strange coming from Marx', continues Lenin; and he shows that this is because of the mechanical way in which most Marxists envisage the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of proletarian revolution, for they are simply waiting for that mythical moment when the proletariat, conceived of as a naturally homogeneous and revolutionary class, will itself constitute the great majority of society and find itself faced by no more than a handful of capitalists superfluous to production (XXV, 421 [The State and Revolution , pp. 45-46]). Elsewhere he points out: 'From the point of view of science and practical politics, one of the chief symptoms of every real revolution is the unusually rapid, sudden, and abrupt increase in the number of "ordinary citizens" who begin to

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participate actively, independently and effectively in political life and in the organization of the State .' (XXIV, 61. [The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution ])
    The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot mean the isolation of the proletariat: this idea is a contradiction in terms and in the facts -- the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot overcome the counter-revolution, it cannot succeed in disorganizing the mass base of the bourgeois State unless it extends the real hegemony of the proletariat to the masses of the people, unless it constructs a revolutionary alliance of the proletariat, peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie. The fact that this alliance is constantly threatened, that its break-up constitutes a mortal danger to the revolution, is a fact which explains, as we know, many tragic aspects of the present history, of socialism. But whoever has really read Lenin, and followed the trials and errors, the upsets of real history, whose tendency is manifested even in the contradictions of which it is made up, will understand what is going on. He will in any case understand much better than those Communists who, in order to resolve the problem of class alliances, a problem which, ever since 1917, especially in France, has proved a stumbling block to so many revolutionary struggles, think that the proletariat should be drowned in an undifferentiated mass of 'working people' having 'an interest in socialism'. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat certainly does not exclude the question of alliances and of the allies of the proletariat in the revolutionary process; on the contrary, it urgently poses this question. And it shows that it is a political question, in the strong sense of the term, a question of mass politics, which goes far beyond the simple framework of constitutional decisions and guarantees.
    Unity between the proletariat and its allies cannot emerge spontaneously from the economic interests which they have in common, and from an appeal to those interests. 'Propaganda and agitation alone are not enough. [. . .] The masses must have their own political experience.' (XXXI, 93. ["Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder, p. 97]) This question is central for Communist Parties today. If the emergence of the contradictions between the revolutionary struggle in the capitalist countries and the defence of the interests of the Soviet State apparatus is the negative cause of the tendency now appearing in France to 'abandon' without further ceremony the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it should not lead us to ignore another, just as obvious cause: the search for a positive solution to the problem

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of class alliances, of the union of the people against imperialist capital.
    It is because it was not possible, in spite of the efforts of the Popular Front and of the Resistance, to find an answer to this question in the period when the dictatorship of the proletariat (as it was then generally conceived) figured as a sacred principle, that the conclusion is drawn: the way forward is to abandon it. But this solution is illusory; and it can only result in self-deception if it leads the Communists to believe that the union of the people already exists, potentially, in the economic and sociological evolution of capitalism, and that it only needs to be brought out into the open, to be revealed by a patient effort of explanation or propaganda. The economic foundations of a revolutionary class alliance do exist in all the imperialist countries, including the most 'developed'. But as long as capitalism continues to develop (and imperialist, monopolist capitalism is developing more quickly than ever before), the foundations of the hegemony of big capital also continue to exist. The contradictory process leading to the isolation of big capital, to the class unity of the proletariat and its alliance with the whole of the working people, and even with certain fractions of the bourgeoisie, is not pre-determined, nor is it the simple political translation of a process of economic evolution. It is the stake of a practical struggle between the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces in which the revolutionary forces -- proletariat, peasantry and those manual or intellectual workers who are in course of being absorbed into the proletariat -- must exploit the contradictions of the class enemy. Lenin wrote in 1920:
    'To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between States, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilization of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one's enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating or conditional allies) -- is that not ridiculous in the extreme? Is it not like making a difficult ascent of an unexplored and hitherto inaccessible mountain and refusing in advance ever to move in zig-zags, ever to retrace one's steps, or ever to abandon a course once selected, and to try others? [....] The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and by the most

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thorough, careful, attentive, skilful and obligatory use of any, even the smallest, rift between the enemies, any conflict of interests among the bourgeoisie of the various countries and among the various groups or types of bourgeoisie within the various countries, and also by taking advantage of any, even the smallest, opportunity of winning a mass ally, even though this ally is temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable and conditional. Those who do not understand this reveal a failure to understand even the smallest grain of Marxism, of modern scientific socialism in general. Those who have not proved in practice, over a fairly considerable period of time and in fairly varied political situations, their ability to apply this truth in practice have not yet learned to help the revolutionary class in its struggle to emancipate all toiling humanity from the exploiters. And this applies equally to the period before and after the proletariat has won political power.' (XXXI, 70-71. ["Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder, pp. 66-68])
    I would put it like this: it is by carrying out this policy in the period which precedes and prepares for the seizure of power that the proletariat can learn to resolve the problem in the best possible way in the period which follows it. But it is by understanding why this is necessary even and especially after the seizure of power that we can also understand why it is necessary beforehand, if the idea of the 'seizure of power' does not simply imply for us a moment of adventure for which the future does not exist. That is why the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the historical conditions existing in each country, is not a concept in spite of which the vital question of class alliances can be posed: it is in fact the concept with the aid of which this question can be posed in real terms, so that the objective foundations of this alliance and the nature of the obstacles which it comes up against can be analyzed in a critical way.

2. But, within this notion of mass democracy, there lies a second question, a different question which however determines the answer to the first: it is the question of the mass organizations of the proletariat. What made possible the seizure of power in the Russian Revolution, what enabled the Bolshevik Party to give tactical leadership to the seizure of power, was the existence of an unprecedented mass movement of workers, peasants and soldiers, and the fact that this movement found in the Russian revolutionary

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tradition the forms of organization which it needed: the 'Soviets'. This therefore is the double, dialectical aspect of the Soviets; both, in contradictory fashion, the embryo of a new State, of a new type of State apparatus, and the direct organization of the masses, distinct from every State, transforming political activity, on the scale of the most general questions (first of all that of war and peace) from the affair of specialists or representatives quite distant from the masses into an affair of the masses themselves. That is why the October Revolution was able to set about destroying the bourgeois State apparatus, both 'from above' and 'from below'. And that is why the Soviets are historically revolutionary, coming after the Paris Commune, and before other forms most of which are still to be invented.
    As we know, this question was constantly posed throughout the Russian Revolution, as it is posed in every revolution. The nature of the problems changes, the 'front' of struggle moves, the organizations which have played this revolutionary role become incapable of carrying it through, partly because they tend, like the Soviets themselves, to be reduced to the role of simple State, administrative institutions. Now in practice you can see that something is at stake here, something whose importance, as experience shows, can never be overestimated by Communists: quite simply the 'leading role' of the Communist Party in the dictatorship of the proletariat. What can be done to ensure that this role of political leadership does not lead to the identification of Party and State, but to the constantly expanding control of the operation of the State by the masses themselves?
    What characterizes Lenin's position in this period, against both 'right-wing' and 'left-wing' deviations, is on the one hand that he never fell into the illusion of believing that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be able, except after a very long time, to do without a centralized State apparatus, in which the functions of organizing the economy would have to be in large part carried out by specialists, thus perpetuating the division of manual and intellectual labour.
    But at the same time, on the basis of the experience of the masses themselves, on the basis of an analysis of the obstacles which this experience ran up against, Lenin was constantly searching for the means of abolishing the State's monopoly -- even that of the State of a new type -- in the administration, management and political

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control of public affairs, in order to transfer these tasks in part to organizations of the masses of the people, which of course must not be confused with the Communist Party, which are distinct from the Party and much wider.
    The first aspect of Lenin's answer is often interpreted as an illustration of his relentless political 'realism': not the slightest concession must be made with regard to the need for the concentration of proletarian State power; and here the reference is not simply to the 'military' necessities of a civil war, for the latter are only one of the forms of an acute class struggle characterizing every revolution.
    The second aspect of his answer is often interpreted as an illustration of his 'utopianism' or even of his 'anarchism', whether in order to try to play down its importance, or on the contrary to isolate it in order to exploit it for certain specific purposes. But what must not be lost from view is that Lenin's realism lies in the unity of the two aspects: it is a dialectical, i.e. critical and revolutionary realism only because it constantly relates the two sides of this contradiction, in spite of the gigantic practical difficulties involved.
    And here you find a key with which to unravel the enigmas of the history of the Soviet revolution. I shall give just a single example: Lenin's changes of position on the question of the trade unions, which have been abundantly commented upon. In the space of a year, from the end of 1919 to the beginning of 1921, Lenin moved from the slogan 'Governmentalization of the Trade Unions', i.e. the transformation of the Trade Unions into organs for managing the economy (and in particular for organizing the distribution of labour power and for guaranteeing discipline in production), organs integrated into the State apparatus, to the slogan of the independence of the Trade Unions from the State, for the Trade Unions, under socialism, must always represent the interests of the workers in the face of the State, even against the proletarian State itself. It is of course true -- and I shall return to this point -- that this change of views can be explained by the relative failure of a particular policy, by the self-criticism which this made necessary, and by the transition to the 'New Economic Policy', in which a certain 'return to capitalism' also implied that the Trade Unions would return to the role of fighting for the workers' demands. But if you look closer, these sudden changes are themselves not simple

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'accidents' of socialism, and beneath Lenin's position you can discern a constant tendency, all the more persistent for the fact that it comes up against so many obstacles. To transform the Trade Unions into an element of the State apparatus and even of the civil service is to attempt to make use of their irreplaceable function in the direct organization of the masses -- a function developed in the course of decades of struggle under capitalism -- both in order to transmit and explain State policy to the masses, and genuinely to involve them in the exercise of power, in order little by little to create in their midst the 'leaders' of an historically new type of politics and economics. One single phrase sums up this outlook: 'the Trade Unions are schools of communism' (and are indeed, in part, the type of school which communism needs). A little later, Lenin explained, in opposition to Trotsky's militaristic attitude -- but also, it should be noted, in a struggle against the anarcho-syndicalist deviation of the so-called 'Workers' Opposition' -- that 'we, for our part, must use these workers' organizations to protect the workers from their State, and to get them to protect our State', and that we must 'be able to use measures of the State power to protect the material and the spiritual interests of the massively organized proletariat from that very same State power' (XXXII, 25 ["The Trade Unions. The Present Situation and Trotsky's Mistakes"). It is now a question of wielding against the 'bureaucratic deformation' the only weapon which can attack it at its root: the initiative, culture and organization of the masses, the real control over politics which they must establish in order for these politics to be their own. This was also Lenin's objective in his last efforts to reorganize the 'Workers' and Peasants' Inspection',[*] made up of direct representatives of the working people, and to transform it into an organ for the permanent control of the administrative apparatus. And above all, this was Lenin's objective in his attempts to counteract the tendency for the Party to transform itself into a new body of State and ideological functionaries. For the 'bureaucratic deformation' is not a simple accident, not a simple inheritance from ancient times, which disappears in advanced capitalism (on the contrary -- we have before our eyes proof of the enormous development of bureaucracy to which this leads!): it is, in different degrees and in different, evolving forms, inherent in every State, in the 'division of labour' which it involves. In fact, the contradiction is located within the proletarian State itself.

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    One last word on the question of democracy. Having understood the sense in which revolutionary mass democracy thus constitutes the main aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the condition of its existence, or rather of its development, we can finally take a look at two apparent contradictions.
    First of all, the fact that the objective of 'destroying the State apparatus' seems to be a purely negative aim, while in reality it implies an historically unprecedented effort of innovation and of organization, for its source lies, for the first time, in the broad masses themselves.
    Secondly, the fact that the dictatorship of the proletariat, in so far as it bears on the State apparatus, cannot be defined simply in terms of the replacement of one State apparatus by another, but must be defined in a complex manner both as the constitution of a new State apparatus, and as immediately setting in motion the long process of the disappearance or extinction of every State apparatus. This second aspect, as we shall see, determines the meaning of the first.
    Let us put the same point in another way. As long as it is presented only in abstract fashion, this idea of the 'destruction of the State apparatus' remains difficult, and open to any number of arbitrary interpretations (and of outbursts of sham indignation). It is precisely this idea which leads certain people to claim that the concept of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is 'contradictory', even dangerously mystifying, that it plays on two images at the same time, pushing forward the bad side under cover of the good: Statism behind the mask of democracy. But this is to ignore the real contradictions of which the dictatorship of the proletariat is the product, and which the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat allows us to analyze. In order to make such an analysis, however, we must provide the concept with a concrete definition, that is, we must avoid splitting up the two aspects. These two questions -- that of the 'destruction' of the bourgeois State apparatus, and that of the 'extinction' or 'withering away' of every State -- are recognized in the Marxist tradition. But as long as they remain artificially separated, they remain equally scholastic and insoluble. And Marx's definition, taken over by Lenin, according to which the State of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the State which allows the proletariat to 'constitute itself as the ruling class', is at the same time already a 'non-State', becomes a mystery or --

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what is even worse -- appears to be a trick. A State (a State apparatus) which is not from the very first moment in course of 'withering away', i.e., of handing over political leadership -- by various means which can only be learned from experience -- to the masses themselves, has no chance of ever being a new kind of State apparatus: it can only result in the resurgence or the extension of the old one. In this sense, the notion of the proletarian State itself designates, not an absurdity, but a contradictory reality, as contradictory as the situation of the proletariat in its role as the 'ruling class' of socialist society. The proletariat has to turn against the bourgeoisie a weapon forged by the bourgeoisie itself, a double-edged weapon. The experience of the socialist revolutions shows that this is possible. It also shows that it is terribly difficult, always more difficult than anyone believes, and that you can never rule out mistakes, or deviations, or reverses. It is a real contradiction, which develops in history and in practice, which grows deeper until it is finally solved; a contradiction which it is impossible, except in utopian ideology, to resolve except by developing it to its final point.
    The existence of every State apparatus is linked to the continued existence of classes, i.e. of class struggle, of antagonistic social relations. It is held fast within this antagonism. Every State apparatus is (always) bourgeois, even when the workers succeed in using it against the capitalists. Communism means the end of the State, and not the 'State of the whole people', an expression which is nonsense for a Marxist. Between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie there is both a relation of symmetry (both need the State), and a relation of dissymmetry (the proletariat aims at the destruction of every State, it practises class struggle with a view to the abolition of classes). What defines the dictatorship of the proletariat is the historical tendency of the State which it establishes: the tendency to its own disappearance, and not towards its reinforcement.
    Lenin explains that the dictatorship of the proletariat must push democracy 'to its limits' -- which means: it must push it forward to the point where there is no longer any State, not even a democratic State. Lenin never claims that proletarian democracy is a 'pure' democracy, an absolute democracy; he never falls into the least legal, liberal illusion in this connexion: he always insists, following Marx and Engels, that every democracy, including proletarian

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democracy, is a form of the State, deriving from the fact that class relations still exist, and that in consequence this democracy is not freedom. Freedom can only be equated with the disappearance of every State, in other words, only with communism, which has its own social foundations. But communism is already present, as an active tendency, within socialism: socialism cannot really be constructed except from the standpoint of communism. The proletarian revolution already entails, right from the beginning, the development of communist social forms, in particular in the shape of the political intervention and organization of the masses themselves, without which it would never have been possible to make the transition from the bourgeois State to proletarian democracy. In other words, proletarian democracy is not the realization of full liberty for the working people, but it is the struggle for liberation, it is the process and concrete experience of liberation as materialized in this very struggle.
    From this point of view it is possible to explain why the dictatorship of the proletariat is feared or rejected. The reason does not lie in a principled attachment to democracy, in a determination to preserve democracy while bringing about socialism by democratic means. On the contrary, it lies in the fear of democracy, the fear of the mass forms of democracy which overshoot and explode the extraordinarily narrow limits within which every bourgeois State confines democracy. Or perhaps in despair that history will ever make it possible for these forms to develop.
    Let us not forget that what defines opportunism is not too great an attachment to democracy but, behind the abuse of the term democracy (understood in accordance with the legal conception of democracy), its revulsion in the face of the extension of democracy represented by the dictatorship of the proletariat, even when this dictatorship has to defend itself in the face of imperialist counter-revolution by mass revolutionary violence. In the last analysis, opportunism means the defence of bourgeois democracy, which is a form of Statism, and conceives the intervention and organization of the State as a means of overcoming social antagonisms.
    At least, that is undeniably the way in which Lenin presented the question. So let no-one say, after that, that he ever 'underestimated' the value of democracy!

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5 
 
Socialism and
Communism

 
 
Thus we arrive at the third aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat: what I called in the beginning Lenin's third argument. We shall examine it in its own right: the above discussion already shows how important it is. It is ultimately only on the basis of this third argument that we can understand the two preceding arguments. It shows why they are necessary, and it allows us to understand the historical role of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even set out in schematic form, as it must be here, given the space available to us, it has a more concrete and a more dialectical form than these first two arguments.
    I presented this thesis in a very allusive manner: I said that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the period of transition from capitalism to communism. It follows that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the period of 'transition to socialism', and even less is it a particular political 'road' taken by this transition to socialism: it is socialism itself, an historical period of uninterrupted revolution and of the deepening of the class struggle, the period of transition to communism. Thus, the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be correctly defined except by referring it right from the beginning to the theoretical and practical standpoint of communism; it cannot be defined by reference to the standpoint of socialism, considered as an independent objective.
    We have to show of course that we are not dealing here with a simple question of words, a question of definitions. What is of primary importance is not the use of such and such a word (even if the terms involved do have a connotation which, in the light of experience, is not at all accidental): it is their historical content which is crucial. It is not a question of calling by the name 'dictatorship of the proletariat' what others call socialism, for the pleasure

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of upsetting some people, but of demonstrating, at least in principle, why the problems of socialism cannot be posed in a revolutionary manner except in terms of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and of making use of this knowledge as a touchstone and as an instrument for the analysis of the real history of socialism.
    It is not irrelevant in this respect to pose the question, first of all, of why Lenin came to place such principled importance in this argument, not in an 'academic' manner -- to use a phrase which is supposed to frighten us -- but as a guide to practical action: recognition of this argument might become a question of life or death. This problem deserves a whole work of research to itself; it would tell us a lot about the historical conditions of Leninism. I shall mention only two facts, two episodes of the revolutionary process, which may serve as reference points, since they are decisive.
    The first is that in 1917 Lenin posed the problem of the Russian Revolution in these terms, to the great surprise of the Bolsheviks themselves. And this he did because he recognized that the revolution in course really was, in spite of a number of exceptional characteristics and of paradoxical conditions, a proletarian and therefore a communist revolution. It was not a 'purely' proletarian revolution: as I have already pointed out, according to Lenin there are no 'pure' revolutions in history. But it was a revolution whose main aspect was proletarian, and whose leading force was the proletariat, for its enemy was the imperialist system, the 'imperialist chain' in which Russia was a link. In the world of imperialism, there was no longer any place for another kind of revolution. Only the proletariat could therefore lead it, by itself taking power, in spite of the difficulties of this enterprise (Lenin was to say later: 'Under the influence of a number of unique historical conditions, backward Russia was the first to show the world [. . .] that the significance of the proletariat is infinitely greater than its proportion in the total population' C.W., XXXI, 90 ["Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder , p. 93]). That is why, in State and Revolution (a 'simply circumstantial' work!), Lenin directly poses the problems of the proletarian revolution, whose historical epoch has now opened: it is the problems of communism which must urgently be brought to light and taken in hand.
    Let us look at this first fact a little more closely. It will allow us to understand that there is nothing speculative about this question.

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The biographies of Lenin and the histories of the Russian Revolution have recounted a hundred times the anecdotal side of the events of April 1917, when Lenin returned to Russia, having crossed Germany in his famous 'sealed carriage' and arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd, where delegations of the Bolshevik Party and of the Provisional Government were awaiting him. The speech which he made was to amaze his comrades, those who had experienced on the spot the fall of the Tsar, the establishment of the Soviets and of the Provisional Republican Government, and the new conditions of political work. He was however to repeat it again and again in the course of the following days, before meetings of the leaders and members of the Party. He was to publish his theses, the famous April Theses,[*] in Pravda : but the editorial board, though it was made up of his best comrades in arms, added an introductory paragraph to the effect that Lenin was only expressing his personal opinion. During these discussions, Lenin was interrupted, and treated as a madman and as an anarchist: the very man who was later to be presented as the founder, the teacher, the only master theoretician of the Party, was in this period completely alone, isolated in his own Party, apparently in complete disagreement with his own previous line. It was to take him a month, in the heat of events, while the masses of peasants, workers and soldiers entered into acute struggle with the 'revolutionary' government of the bourgeoisie (of which the Socialists were members), in order to win the Party over to his analyses and his slogans and therefore in order to make possible, as far as its 'subjective conditions' are concerned, the October Revolution.
    What were these theses for which Lenin was arguing, whose unlikely and unexpected character I have just drawn attention to? Would Lenin himself, a few months beforehand, have been able to formulate them exactly in this way? They resulted from a particular analysis, according to which the revolution which had just begun in Russia, as a consequence of the imperialist war, was -- in spite of all its special characteristics -- the beginning of a world proletarian revolution. It thus became necessary to envisage the objective of the seizure of State power, which would open the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was the reason for the new slogan: 'All power to the Soviets'; for the Soviets represented, in the face of the bourgeois State, the embryo of a proletarian State. And it was also the reason for proposing, at the

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organizational level, that the Party should cease to be and to be called a Socialist, 'Social-Democratic' Party, in order to call itself and to become in reality a Communist Party, the first detachment of a new 'Communist' International. There is much more in these revolutionary theses which, for the first time since Marx, once again linked the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the concrete perspective of communism, than the simple intention to 'draw a line' in words between the Communists and the opportunist Socialist Parties whose imperialist war had illustrated their historical 'bankruptcy'. We are talking about theses concerning matters of principle, but which are nevertheless indispensable to and immediately applicable to practical problems.
    In order to understand this point, we must glance briefly backwards. Why, up to 1917, did Lenin talk so little about the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'? Why did he even construct, in order to grasp the political tasks of the revolution of 1905, a concept which can in many respects be described as 'hybrid' and quite monstrous: namely the concept of the 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', a concept borrowed in part from the example of the French Revolution, which is not exactly the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' (even if it anticipates certain aspects of this latter concept), and which still formed the basis in 1917 of the thought of most of the Bolshevik leaders? Contrary to what one might think (and to what, after the event, 'Leninist' orthodoxy has suggested), the reason was not that Social-Democracy in this epoch, in general, ignored or refused the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. On the contrary, it was in fact defending this term in its own way against Bernstein's revisionism. The reason was precisely that Lenin, during the whole pre-revolutionary period, shared certain theoretical premises with Social-Democracy, while at the same time drawing in practice diametrically opposed conclusions and coming into conflict with its principal Russian theoreticians. In other words, Lenin originally shared the conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a form of transition to socialism, just as he originally shared the idea that a 'backward' country like Russia was not 'ready' for socialist revolution, that it would have to pass through a more or less lengthy phase of 'bourgeois' revolution. To put it differently again, he had not yet been able to free himself explicitly and radically from the mechanistic and evolutionist conception accord-

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ing to which, for each particular country, it is the 'level of maturity' of the economic and social development of capitalism and this alone which can create the conditions for socialism in that country, which can render capitalist property in the means of production 'superfluous' and harmful, and which thus makes political and social revolution 'inevitable', a revolution which would transform the producers into the collective owners of their means of production. The conclusion was of course that the dictatorship of the proletariat had nothing to do with the particular historical 'situation' of Russia.
    But two things then happened: on the one hand, this economistic and evolutionist conception of socialism proved itself incapable either of analyzing imperialism or of genuinely opposing it; and on the other hand, the objective conditions of revolution, under the impact of imperialism itself, were suddenly present in a country where, 'in theory', such a revolution should never have been possible . . . From that moment on, Lenin had to revise his position: not to renounce the materialist idea according to which the objective conditions of a revolution and of a new society are engendered by capitalism itself; but to give up the idea -- the dominant idea of Social-Democracy -- that one must wait for the conditions of socialism to 'mature'. It had to be understood that capitalism does not create the conditions of a new society by a kind of pre-established harmony, in such a way that the capitalists can be removed simply by a vote or by a coup d'état, the new society then appearing in the full light of day, having already been prepared within capitalism itself. It had to be understood that if 'socialism is knocking at the door of every present-day capitalist State', this is only because the contradictions of capitalism have become insuperable; it is these contradictory elements which socialism has to correct, to develop, to complete and to assemble. From this moment on, it became possible to understand that the proletarian revolution, though it is linked to the general development of capitalism in the world, which has reached its imperialist stage, is not mechanically linked, in this or that of its phases, to the 'advanced' capitalist countries, to the leaders in the 'development' of capitalism. For these advanced countries are not necessarily, in a given conjuncture, those whose contradictions are most acute.
    By re-introducing and rectifying the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, by relating this concept directly to the perspec-

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tive of communism (and therefore to the insuperable contradictions of capitalism, which will not finally disappear until classes themselves disappear) -- rather than relating it only to the perspective of socialism, conceived as the result of the spontaneous development of the most advanced forms of capitalism -- Lenin was able to explain and to grasp the concrete and unique character of the historical conditions in which the proletarian revolution began.
    That is also why, once the real history of this problem in Marxist theory is understood, it is impossible not to be astonished by the argument now being put forward to the effect that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is an idea adapted by nature to the 'backward' conditions of the Russian Revolution (with its 'minority' proletariat, forced to make use of abnormal means of struggle because it did not represent a majority of the population, etc.): nothing is more contrary to the facts than this idea that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat is only a provisional response to, and a reflexion of, an historical situation which today no longer exists. The truth is that Lenin, arguing against the whole Marxist orthodoxy of his time, was able to rescue the concept of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' from the sphere of reformist socialism, and to discover the conditions of its unexpected 'application' to the conditions of the Russian Revolution: thus at the same time he was able to submit it to a provisional theoretical rectification, whose full importance still has to be appreciated today, by making it into the concentrated expression of the communist point of view -- and not simply of the socialist point of view -- on the development of class struggle in history. I shall return to this point in a moment.
    But I must right away, and just as briefly, say something about the second fact which I mentioned. For a Marxist, who wants to reason dialectically, this fact is even more important than the preceding one: it provides its confirmation. When Lenin in 1922 drew up the provisional balance-sheet of five years of uninterrupted revolution, he had to take into account its victories (in the face of armed counter-revolution), but also its defeats, including those which seemed to be the result of a mechanical application of Marxist theory. The simple fact that the Soviet power had triumphed over the whole coalition of its internal and external enemies, that it had maintained itself in spite of its isolation, of the devastating effects of the war and of the famine, was an immense

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historical victory: not the victory of a system of government technically and militarily more efficient than others, but the victory of a class, the proof that the epoch of proletarian revolutions had finally been opened. However, the period of 'war communism' also produced dramatic consequences which very nearly led to the destruction of the Soviet power: the 'disappearance of the proletariat' (because hundreds of thousands of proletarians had been killed at the front in the Civil War, and also because an important part of the proletariat had been forced to take over military and administrative tasks, tasks of controlling the management of enterprises, etc., and had left the sphere of production); the collapsing alliance between the proletariat and peasantry, in particular as a consequence of the policy of requisitioning the harvest and of the methods of constraint which had to be employed in order to carry this policy through; finally the 're-appearance of bureaucracy within the Soviet régime', the full dangers of which can be understood if it is related to the two preceding phenomena; thus the picture emerges of an isolated and decomposed revolutionary proletariat, impossibly trapped between, 'up above', the old State apparatus which was still in place, and 'down below', the hostility of the peasant masses, of the petty-bourgeoisie of producers. That is why Lenin then undertook and enrolled the Communists in a thorough self-criticism. At least, he desperately tried to do so. It is true that the situation can be explained by objective causes, which no-one had the power to eliminate: but objective causes only produce particular effects through the mediation of practice, by aggravating contradictions internal to that practice. Lenin showed how great was the error that he had committed in believing that it was possible to move directly from the existing capitalist system to communism, underestimating the inevitable 'delays', therefore ignoring the stages of transition, and confusing communism with different, more or less viable forms of State capitalism. 'We have to admit', said Lenin, 'that there has been a radical modification in our whole outlook on socialism.' (On Co-operation, 1923, C.W., XXXIII, 474.)[1]

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    We must look closely at the precise point on which Lenin made his self-criticism, and therefore in what direction this self-criticism led him, and leads us. Lenin's self-criticism was not at all -- contrary to what certain Bolsheviks believed -- directed against what we called the need to define the socialist revolution in terms of communism: for it is this need which in the last analysis accounts for the fact that the world socialist revolution began in that country where, at a precise moment, the most acute contradictions were concentrated.[2] In spite of all the pressures continuously exercized on him in this connexion, Lenin never accepted, and with good reason, the idea that he should return to the mechanistic schema according to which socialism arrives when its 'conditions have matured'; that the socialist revolution 'should have', if everything had gone 'properly', taken place elsewhere, in another way . . . than there where it became a reality, where it confronted the hard test of reality! That is why Lenin's self-criticism, which deals precisely with the need to give up all illusions, to recognize against all forms of voluntarism the nature of the obstacles thrown up on the road to communism, is not a kind of renunciation or of subjective repentance, but a great step forward in objectivity, as a result of which there emerged in this epoch a force capable, in spite of all its defects and all its errors, of transforming the world: the International Communist Movement.
    This becomes even clearer if you follow the development of Lenin's self-criticism, and if you study it in terms of the direction in which it moves. Originally, Lenin conceived of the New Economic Policy, involving commodity trade with the peasantry, 'concessions' to foreign capitalists and the development of co-operatives, as a 'step backwards' imposed by the temporarily

The historical tendency to the dictatorship of the proletariat
We have just made an apparent detour via the history of the conditions in which the Leninist concept of the dictatorship of the

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proletariat was constituted. We can now return to the question of what this thesis implies, as far as the relations of socialism and communism are concerned.
    What the concrete analyses carried out by Lenin show, with all their rectifications, is in fact the following: that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a 'slogan' summing up this or that particular tactic, even though it does determine the choice of correct slogans. It is not even a particular strategic line, whose meaning would be relative to certain transitory historical conditions, even though it does determine strategy and allow us to understand why a given strategy must be transformed.[3] It is neither a tactic nor a strategy to be applied after having first been invented; the dictatorship of the proletariat is above all a reality, just as objective as the class struggle itself, of which it is a consequence. It is a reality which Lenin tried to study scientifically, to the extent that it revealed itself in practice, in order to be able to find his bearings in the struggle.
    But what kind of reality? Not a reality like a table or a chair, which you can simply 'touch' and 'see'. It cannot be an unmoving, unchanging reality, any more than the class struggle itself can be. It is the reality of an historical tendency, a reality subject to ceaseless transformations which cannot be reduced to this or that form of government, this or that system of institutions, even of revolutionary institutions, established once and for all.[4] A tendency does not cease to exist because it meets with obstacles, because its direction has to be corrected under the impact of the existing historical conditions. On the contrary, this is precisely the manner in which it exists and develops.
    In order to understand this point, and to act accordingly, we must relate the dictatorship of the proletariat to the whole of its conditions, on the scale of the history of human societies: it is a tendency which begins to develop within capitalism itself, in struggle

What is socialism?
What I have just outlined in a very general manner can be explained in another way, by starting out from the simple but very topical question: what is 'socialism'?
    It is nowadays common to define socialism in terms of a combination of the 'collective property of the means of production' and the 'political power of the working people'. But this definition is insufficient. Or worse: it is false, because, by ignoring the question of the class struggle, of the place of socialism in the history of the class struggle and of the forms taken by the class struggle after the socialist revolution, it leaves room for enormous ambiguities. It does not allow us to distinguish clearly between proletarian socialism and bourgeois or petty-bourgeois 'socialism', which really does exist in the ideological and political field. The mistake becomes even more serious when socialism is defined in terms of planning, economic rationality, social justice, the 'logic of needs', etc.
    Let us first therefore say a word about what socialism cannot be, from the Marxist standpoint: socialism cannot be a classless society. And, since it is not a society without classes, it cannot be a society without exploitation, a society from which every form of exploitation has disappeared. Socialism can only be a society in which every form of exploitation is on the way to disappearing, to the extent that its material foundations are disappearing.
    Lenin explained this very clearly, in 1919, in a remarkable text, entitled Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (XXX, 107ff.), whose formulations can be usefully compared with those of the article 'Left-Wing' Communism -- an Infantile Disorder (1920) and with those, among others, of his Report on the NEP presented to the Eleventh Congress of the RCP (B) in 1922 (XXXIII, 259ff.). Lenin writes:
    'Theoretically, there can be no doubt that between capitalism and communism there lies a definite transition period which must combine the features and properties of both these forms of social economy. This transition period has to be a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism -- or, in other words, between capitalism which has been defeated but not destroyed and communism which has been born but is still very feeble.'
    Let us pause here for a moment, in order to look more closely at these remarkable formulations: this inevitable transition period,

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which takes a whole historical epoch (even if, in 1919, Lenin and the Bolsheviks underestimated its length), is socialism itself. This means that socialism is not an independent economic and social formation, and even less is it an independent historical mode of production. There is no socialist mode of production in the sense that there is a capitalist mode of production or a communist mode of production, contrary to what mechanistic Marxists like Kautsky or Plekhanov believed (they were always trying to work out the degree of its 'maturity'), and contrary to what a certain number of Communists believe today. To imagine that there can be an independent socialist mode of production, distinct both from the capitalist mode of production and from communism is either to imagine, in a utopian manner, that it is possible to move immediately from capitalism to the classless society, or to imagine that classes can exist without class struggle, that class relations can exist without being antagonistic. And the common root of these utopian ideas is generally the confusion between relations of production, in the Marxist sense of the term, which are relations of men to one another and of men to the material means of production in productive labour, with simple legal property relations, or again with relations of income distribution, of the distribution of the social product between individuals and classes, as regulated by the law.
    Let us make this point more precisely, for questions of terminology can play a decisive role here. The basic production relation of the capitalist mode of production is the 'immediate relation of the labourer to the means of production': it is the relation of exploitation, which rests on wage labour, the buying and selling of labour power, which is then 'consumed' in the production process. It is the social relation (concerning classes, not individuals; and the function of the legal forms which it takes is precisely to subject individuals to the basic relation itself) which transforms the means of production into just so many means of 'pumping' labour power and causing it to produce a certain amount of surplus labour. As Marx showed, this production relation is the last possible relation of exploitation in history: once having arrived there, you can neither return to former modes of exploitation -- in which the labourer enjoys a certain form of possession of his means of production and a certain individual control over their use -- nor go forward to a 'new' mode of exploita-

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tion. For capitalism is characterized precisely by the absolute separation of the labourer from the means of production, with which he only comes into contact through their owner, who controls them. Capitalism may last a very long time, it may undergo a long series of transformations with respect to the (legal) form of the (individual or collective) property of the means of production. And it may undergo a long series of transformations based on a number of technological revolutions, and of revolutions in the organization of the labour process, with all the necessary consequences on the system of qualifications, and therefore on the education of working people and on their relation to the labour market, etc. But all these transformations are always historical developments of the basic production relation: capitalist wage labour. Socialism is not a new mode of exploitation (whatever some may think). Nor is it a mode of production without exploitation and without classes: it can only be grasped as a period of transition.
    Is this an unprecedented idea within Marxism? By no means. On the contrary, it is part of Marxism. It is the key to the theoretical work of Marx, from the Communist Manifesto to Capital, in which its scientific foundations are laid down. Finally, it is made explicit in the text of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where Marx works out its first consequences, precisely in order to criticize the opportunist deviation of Social-Democracy: he shows that 'socialism' is only the first phase of communist society, therefore a period of transition to communism. Certain of Marx's formulations are very interesting in this connexion. For example, he explains that socialism is a communist society which has not yet 'developed on its own foundations', i.e., to borrow the rigorous terminology of Capital, on its own mode of production. He adds to this argument the fact that, under socialism, it is still 'bourgeois law' -- we could just as well simply say law, because all law, from the beginning of capitalism onwards, is bourgeois -- which inevitably regulates the relation of the workers to the means and to the product of their labour. Equally interesting is the fact that he lists the transformation of the social division of labour (and in particular of the division of manual and intellectual labour) as one of the conditions of the progressive transition from socialism to communism in the strict sense, i.e. to the higher phase of communist society, within which, once the transition has been accomplished,

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and to the extent that it is accomplished, it will find 'its own foundations'.
    In order to understand our present situation, it is particularly important to recall the historical fate of these formulations of Marx. On the one hand they were immediately criticized by the German Social-Democratic Party and by its 'Marxist' leaders, at the same time and for the same reasons that these leaders criticized the 'rectification' of the Communist Manifesto, whose importance with respect to the question of the State apparatus I mentioned earlier. All this was very logical. Then, having been taken up again and commented on at length by Lenin,[5] they became canonical formulae, constantly quoted but in fact used in a non-dialectical way, within the framework of the 'theory of stages'. I cited, at the beginning of this book (in chapter 1) a typical example of this theory in Stalin's work. There is no doubt, if you look first for theoretical reasons contained in the letter of the texts themselves, that this problem is related to the fact that Marx's formulations are still -- and for a good reason, given that Marx was no prophet, contrary to a popular legend -- of a very general and abstract nature. That is why they leave room for ambiguity. They leave room for a non-dialectical conception of the relation between socialism and communism, in which this relation can appear to be a matter of a simple, mechanical succession. It is true that in order to get this idea you have to read the texts very superficially, i.e. to concentrate above all on the 'general idea of transition', while more or less ignoring the content which Marx gives to each of these stages, and therefore the motor of the transition linking them. In this way a fetishism concerning the formal number of these stages is produced, and you are back in a utopian ideology.
    Of course, any present-day 'Marxist' is prepared to admit that after the 'end' of socialism there will be something else -- communism -- and that consequently socialism, in the long term, in the very long term, is not an end in itself, etc. The fact that Marx, in order to characterize the difference between socialism and communism, borrowed two old revolutionary slogans of utopian socialism which put the accent precisely on distribution and not on

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production ('To each according to his work'/'To each according to his needs'), this fact has paradoxically contributed to relegating the questions of communism to a kind of golden age, or to an indeterminate 'end of history'. It has been used to define so-called 'general laws' of the socialist mode of production and of the communist mode of production, and to construct on this basis a whole imaginary political economy of these modes of production. In this non-dialectical, mechanistic and evolutionist interpretation of Marx, 'socialism' and 'communism' become successive stages, the second of which only begins when the first is complete. And it is in this perspective that the dictatorship of the proletariat is re-defined as a 'path of transition to socialism', thus becoming little by little unintelligible. It is in the logic of such an evolutionist approach, which is incapable of thinking in terms of tendencies and of contradiction, to multiply the 'intermediate stages' in order to evade the resulting theoretical difficulties: to the transition period between capitalism and communism is added another, between imperialism and the transition to socialism, and another within the stage of socialism itself, etc. But why precisely these 'stages'? Why not more, or less? And how are they to be distinguished from one another, if they all represent forms of the 'classless society'? The circle is closed.
    Let us therefore return to Lenin's formulations:
    'The necessity for a whole historical era distinguished by these transitional features should be obvious not only to Marxists, but to any educated person who is in any degree acquainted with the theory of development . . .'
    What are these 'transitional features'? Lenin has just said: they concern the struggle between capitalism and communism. He then adds:
    'Yet all the talk on the subject of the transition to socialism which we hear from present-day petty-bourgeois democrats [. . .] is marked by complete disregard of this obvious truth. Petty-bourgeois democrats are distinguished by an aversion to class struggle, by their dreams of avoiding it [. . .]. Such democrats, therefore, either avoid recognizing any necessity for a whole historical period of transition from capitalism to communism or regard it as their duty to concoct schemes for reconciling the two contending forces instead of leading the struggle of one of these forces.' (XXX, 108. ["Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat"])

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    Since we want to abolish the class struggle, they argue, let us not encourage it ! Let us make up some plans. Up to now, history has always moved forward by its 'bad side', by struggle, or by violence: now it can move forward by its 'good side' . . .
    By defining the phase of transition as a phase of struggle, of contradiction between the surviving elements of the capitalist mode of production and the nascent elements of communist relations of production, Lenin, though he does not indicate what concrete forms this struggle must take, does make it quite clear (except to fools) that it must continuously change its form in the course of its development. He does not content himself with 'making up some plans'. He does not try to forecast how long it will last, or how easy or difficult it will be. But he does provide the key which allows a Marxist to escape from a paradox as crazy as the attempt to square the circle: the paradox of the existence of classes and of class relations without class struggle!
    On precisely this point Lenin continues:
    'Classes still remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat they will not disappear.
    Classes have remained, but in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat every class has undergone a change, and the relations between the classes have also changed. The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it merely assumes different forms.' (XXX, 115. ["Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat "])
    I note in passing that in reality this 'simply' indicates the enormous theoretical task which Marxists face, a task which is however vital for all Communists: the analysis of the new forms of the existence of classes and of the class struggle under socialism, bearing in mind of course that these new forms always have their roots in capitalist relations of production and of exploitation. We cannot say that much progress has been made on this task since Lenin's time. There is no doubt that this 'delay' is not unconnected, once again, with Stalin's position, which vacillated in the 1930s between two equally false theses: one arguing for the continuous sharpening of class struggle under socialism, the other claiming that the class struggle had come to an end in the USSR.
    If you re-read the analyses sketched out by Lenin in the course of the years of the revolution, you will soon come to the conclusion

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that this problem is precisely the one which he was trying to pose in a correct form in order to understand the nature of the obstacles met with in the course of the struggle, and in order to rectify the line of the Party. Lenin was slowly discovering the enormous complexity of this problem, which did not derive from the particular conditions existing in Russia (especially, from its economic and cultural 'backwardness'), but in the first place from the nature of the socialist revolution itself, of which no-one had any previous experience. He returns to this question when talking about the NEP:
    'When I spoke about communist competition, what I had in mind were not communist sympathies but the development of economic forms and social systems. This is not competition but, if not the last, then nearly the last, desperate, furious, life-and-death struggle between capitalism and communism.
    . . . It is one more form of the struggle between two irreconcilably hostile classes. It is another form of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.' (XXXIII, 287-89. [Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.).])
    But in this struggle 'we are not being subjected to armed attack', yet 'nevertheless, the fight against capitalist society has become a hundred times more fierce and perilous, because we are not always able to tell enemies from friends' (ibid.). New forms of classes and of class struggle, in which it is no longer possible simply to attack the 'political power' of the capitalists ('We have quite enough political power'!), nor their 'economic power' ('The economic power in the hands of the proletarian State of Russia is quite adequate to ensure a transition to communism'!); it is capitalist relations themselves, as materialized in commodity production, in the State apparatus, which have to be attacked. New forms of the class struggle, in which, as a provincial Communist wrote: 'It is not enough to defeat the bourgeoisie, to overpower them; they must be compelled to work for us.' (Cited by Lenin; XXXIII, 290.) Thus the mass line of the dictatorship of the proletariat, unity and struggle inseparably linked, becomes even more necessary, because it is essential 'to build communism with the hands of non-Communists'. Lenin points out: 'The idea of building communist society exclusively with the hands of the Communists is childish, absolutely childish. We Communists are but a drop in the ocean' (ibid.).
    And what happens when the Communists do not succeed in

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hammering out and then in applying this mass line? Then 'they are not directing [and cannot direct], they are being directed [and will continue to be directed].' Lenin is not so complacent as to ignore this fact; he even admits that there is some truth in the analysis made by some émigré bourgeois politicians intelligent enough to grasp the real tendency making up one of the sides of the contradiction, and who thus conclude: 'The Bolsheviks can say what they like; [. . .] they will arrive at the ordinary bourgeois State, and we must support them. History proceeds in devious ways.' Such is the 'plain class truth uttered by the class enemy'!
    Thus Lenin's words of 1920 take on their full meaning: 'Dictatorship is a big, harsh and bloody word, one which expresses a relentless life-and-death struggle between two classes, two worlds, two historical epochs.' And what is socialism, if not precisely two worlds within the same world, two epochs within one single historical epoch? Lenin adds: 'Such words must not be uttered frivolously.' (XXX, 355.)
    This expression has two senses: on the one hand it implies that you do not say such things on the spur of the moment; and on the other hand that you cannot, from one moment to the next, get rid of the reality which they express.

The real 'problems of Leninism'
When you re-read Lenin's texts today, or perhaps in fact really read them for the first time, you not only render to Leninism its revolutionary due, and rediscover its critical power, so long buried under the weight of dogmatism. You also begin to understand his real political position. There is no complete theory of socialism and of the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is no dogmatic system in Lenin. Nor do his writings consist of a set of simple empirical responses to the demands of a very particular historical situation. It is just because Lenin never leaves the sphere of the concrete analysis of the revolutionary process that he is able progressively to grasp the general meaning of the problems which it runs up against. Lenin's theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a system of dogmatic or empiricist responses (dogmatism and empiricism go together); it is a system of questions posed in the face of a contradictory reality, in response to the contradictions of this reality, an attempt to escape from utopianism and adventurism in all their

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forms. In this respect, it is now easy to see why what I called Lenin's 'third argument', in which the standpoint of communism comes to the fore, is absolutely indispensable: only this standpoint can guarantee the coherence and the development of revolutionary Marxism. Far from 'closing the circle' of a theory which falsely imagines itself to be complete, it is an element of progress, which opens new perspectives. It is a thesis whose function is precisely to open such perspectives, to develop and to rectify the analysis of the dictatorship of the proletariat -- an analysis which, though it has begun, is only in its first stages. It is therefore also possible to understand, at least in part, why the suppression of this third argument lies at the heart of the Stalinian deviation which had such profound effects on the whole of the International Communist Movement. That is why, in the present conjuncture, in today's world, a world combining new forms of imperialism with the first forms of socialism, a correct understanding and a creative application of the Marxist theory of the State and of the dictatorship of the proletariat depend -- this must be openly recognized and openly stated -- on the recognition and the development of Lenin's third argument: that socialism only makes sense from the standpoint of communism, as a phase in its concrete realization.
    Thus, to stand on the basis of the principles of Leninism is indeed, as we have been told so many times and for so many years, to develop Leninism. But this phrase has no real content unless it implies that we seriously take up the questions posed by Lenin, discuss the way in which they are formulated and, taking account of the conditions under which they arose and of the need of practical direction to which they corresponded, try to discover what problems they imply. To develop Leninism is not simply to make use of some vague 'method' or to justify the substitution of one concept for another by invoking 'concrete reality', which is supposed to throw up all the new concepts which we need, leaving us only the task of turning to marvel at their appearance.
    I should like, at my own risk and peril, to mention two of the problems which arise out of the above arguments.

2. But this first question leads us on to a second, more precise question, that of the relation between socialism and State capitalism.
    What is remarkable here is that, although Lenin right from the first considered State capitalism, the product of the insurmountable contradictions of imperialism, to be the 'threshold of socialism', he needed to go through the whole experience of revolution in order to discover the practical consequences of this direct relation. In the economic field, socialism first takes the form of State capitalism, itself in course of development. You will remember the famous formula from The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It :
    'Socialism is merely the next step forward from State-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely State-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.' (XXV, 362.)
    As becomes clear not only from the context of this quote, but also from the whole of Lenin's later thoughts on the matter,[6] to say that capitalist monopoly has ceased to be capitalist monopoly is to imply that it has ceased to be a class monopoly of the bourgeoisie; but that does not mean -- on the contrary -- that it immediately loses the whole of its capitalist character. Or, if you like, it means that it will only have lost the whole of its capitalist character at the moment when it will be genuinely possible to talk about the appropriation of the means of production by the whole people, because the whole people will be made up of productive workers, and because the antagonistic forms of the division of labour, inherited from capitalism, will have disappeared -- in other words,

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because, to the extent that the whole of society will have been absorbed into the proletariat, the proletariat as such will have finally disappeared.
    Normally, when this formula is cited from Lenin's writings, only one aspect is generally taken up: the idea that the objective foundations of socialism lie in capitalism itself, in the form of the (capitalist) socialization of the productive forces and of production. Thus the revolutionary point of the argument is often missed: namely that there is no other possible solution to the contradictions of monopoly and State-monopoly Capitalism except the proletarian revolution and socialism. But above all the dialectical consequence of his argument, as it bears on socialism itself, is generally ignored: there is no attempt to analyze the fact that the contradictions of this process of capitalist socialization -- contradictions which only represent the material form of the intensification of exploitation by capitalism -- are inevitably 'inherited' by and carried over into socialism. They cannot miraculously disappear as a simple result of the seizure of power.
    Of course, the forms taken by State Capitalism under socialism are necessarily profoundly contradictory and of an unprecedented kind. Lenin pointed this out in 1922:
    'We philosophize about how State capitalism is to be interpreted, and look into old books. But in those old books you will not find what we are discussing; they deal with the State capitalism that exists under capitalism. Not a single word about State capitalism under communism. It did not occur even to Marx to write a word on this subject . . .'
    And he added:
    'State capitalism is the most unexpected and absolutely unforeseen form of capitalism [....] We passed the decision that State capitalism would be permitted by the proletarian State, and we are the State. [....] We must learn, we must see to it, that in a proletarian country State capitalism cannot and does not go beyond the framework and conditions delineated for it by the proletariat, beyond conditions that benefit the proletariat.' (XXXIII, 278, 310-312. [Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) ])
    The complexity of contradictions: State capitalism is at one and the same time both the representation, in the face of commodity production, of the general struggle between socialism and capitalism, and also something to be controlled, limited and finally

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suppressed and eliminated by proletarian socialism. From what point of view does State capitalism, in opposition to the previous forms of capitalism, 'represent' socialism, to what extent is it a revolutionary tendency? From what point of view is it on the contrary the main enemy in which all the fundamental characteristics of capitalism tend to be 'concentrated', and against which the proletariat must struggle? And how are these two aspects combined, in a given country, in a given conjuncture?
    This is a typical example of the kind of question which it is impossible either to ask or to answer unless you start out from the theoretical standpoint of communism, of the struggle between capitalism and communism. Starting out from the concrete conditions existing in Russia ('Nobody could foresee that the proletariat would achieve power in one of the least developed countries, and would first try to organize large-scale production and distribution for the peasantry and then, finding that it could not cope with the task owing to the low standard of culture, would enlist the services of capitalism') Lenin came to stand, in fact, more and more consistently on this standpoint. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see why: socialism is in the first instance the collective property of the means of production; this form of property cannot be equated primarily with the appropriation of these means of production by the State, whatever the particular legal form which it may take. To restrict socialism to State appropriation would entail, from the point of view of the workers, that this appropriation remained formal, since it would not itself abolish the separation of the worker (of labour power) from the means of production.
    But at the same time State appropriation does produce a substantial transformation of the previous situation. It does first of all suppress the separation characteristic of capitalism between the political sphere and the economic sphere, or more exactly the sphere of labour (the term 'economic' is ambiguous here; bourgeois politics and bourgeois economics have never been separate!).
    On the one hand, it turns the problems of the organization of labour and of the transformation of labour relations into directly political problems.
    On the other hand, it enables all the forms of the mass movement, of revolutionary mass democracy, to become means of revolutionizing labour itself and the relations of production. And at the same time it ties the 'political' problem of the withering away

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of the State to the 'economic' problem of the abolition of exploitation. Because although these problems cannot be solved separately, they can be solved through one another, together.
    In this connexion, I shall re-introduce an expression which I have had occasion to use before, and say that socialism, the historical period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is necessarily characterized by the unprecedented extension of a new form or new practice of politics. And this of course also means that socialism can only exist and can only develop to the extent that this new (mass) political practice also exists and develops. It is in this context that, in my opinion, Lenin's famous formula defining socialism as 'electrification plus Soviet power' must be explained, not by ignoring but precisely by taking account of the conjuncture in which it was put forward. It does not mean that you have electrification (and more generally the planned development of the productive forces) on the one hand, and Soviet power on the other, one alongside the other, one in the economy, the other in the State: it implies that each is dialectically related to the other, so that electrification and planned development take place within the framework of the development of the power of the Soviets and of the mass organizations. And in consequence State capitalism is subjected to the development of communist social relations and communist forms of organization.

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A Few Words in
Conclusion

 
 
These are some of the questions concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat. Not the only ones, no doubt.
    Since the occasion of the 22nd Congress of the French Communist Party, our comrades -- and the revolutionary working people and intellectuals who stand close to us -- have had to pose the question (because they did not really get a chance to pose it before the Congress): when the perspective and the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat is 'abandoned', what changes actually take place in Marxist theory, in the theory which provides the labour movement with a scientific basis for analyzing reality and acting on it? The discussion on this question is now open.
    If the Leninist arguments are correct, and if it is not just a question of words that is at stake here -- which no-one really believes any more -- then the dictatorship of the proletariat is indeed a concept which constitutes an essential part of the Marxist theory of the class struggle, and cannot be separated from it without bringing this whole theory into question. The very idea that, in the history and the strategy of the Communist Parties, the dictatorship of the proletariat might be 'out of date' can have no meaning for a Marxist. For, as we have seen, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a particular method, a particular model or a particular 'path of transition' to socialism. It is the historical tendency which leads from capitalism to communism, through the transition period of socialism, in the conditions of imperialism.
    That is why it is both possible and necessary to rectify and to enrich our understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat by studying the real history of the socialist revolutions which have taken place up to the present day. But this investigation, indispensable to the Communists of every country, can only be carried out

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on the basis of the principles of analysis discovered by Marx and Lenin. Not by 'relativizing' the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, by trying to restrict it to a primitive, remote and defunct period -- that old epoch of imperialist wars, of violent revolutions and counter-revolutions -- but by developing the internal dialectic of its contradictions, by concrete analysis. The real history of socialism, which is, as I pointed out at the beginning of this book, the unspoken question haunting this whole discussion -- whether it is a question of 'socialist democracy', of 'peaceful co-existence' or of proletarian internationalism -- cannot be understood except in terms of this dialectic. Without the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, what today appear to us and tomorrow will appear to us as the errors and deviations of the socialist revolutions can only be seen as a sum of accidents, of strokes of bad luck, of inexplicable set-backs or as a new kind of infantile disorder from which our own maturity will, we hope, miraculously preserve us. Their victories, which have opened the way to our own, can only be looked on as lucky chances. But with the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we can analyze and rectify the errors of the past, and we can try to recognize and to correct in good time those of the future.
    Above all, it is possible and necessary progressively to work out, in the light of experience and the critical examination of that experience, the paths of revolutionary transformation in the conditions of our own capitalist country. The principles of Marxist theory, on which the arguments concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat are based, will no doubt undergo some unprecedented transformations as a result. That is precisely what makes them materialist principles, and not dogmas, 'fixed ideas' or commonplace 'catchwords'.
    Let us put it another way: it must today be obvious to anyone who has not closed his eyes on the world outside that we are experiencing a very grave historical crisis of Leninism, as a form of organization and as the principle of unity of the International Communist Movement, therefore as a form of the fusion of revolutionary theory and practice. This historical crisis has dramatically weakened the Labour Movement, at a moment when the imperialist system is itself entering a new period of general and acute crisis, thus opening revolutionary possibilities and demanding revolutionary solutions. But this historical crisis of Leninism

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also has its positive side: it means that, at the level of practice, the elements of a new form of revolutionary theory and practice are already emerging. This crisis is so acute that it can hardly be resolved by a simple 'return' to previous forms of organization, to the old methods of political and theoretical work. Everyone is aware that it is necessary to work out new forms. And the whole effort, the whole of the constant pressure of bourgeois ideology is tending precisely to exploit this crisis in order to present Leninism as a gigantic 'historical error' of the Labour Movement, in order to liquidate it (and Marxism with it): and above all to liquidate the Leninist theory of the State, therefore the dictatorship of the proletariat, by replacing it with the ideology of reformist and technocratic socialism, with a dash of its eternal by-product, anarchism, thrown in for good measure.
    It seems to me that the importance of this offensive, coupled with the importance of the present tasks of the proletariat, clearly entails that the Communists have an urgent duty: to study Leninism in a critical manner, and to develop it.
    I have proposed some weapons for our struggle, some themes for collective and public consideration. The question, as we have seen, is by no means of mere historical interest: it is of immediate importance. It is by no means speculative: it is a practical question, like every real question in Marxist theory. But let us not forget: this question is not one for an armchair discussion, for a fire-side chat about the reasons for our preferences and desires. It arises in the course of a confrontation in which each of our errors, each of our retreats is immediately exploited by the enemy. And this enemy, imperialism, has already, a long time ago, chosen for us the position which suits its own ends. Its own class dictatorship, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, has no interest -- on the contrary -- in being called by its real name and understood in terms of its real historical power. To suppress the dictatorship of the proletariat is at the same time to suppress the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie . . . in words. Nothing could serve it better, in practice.
    It is never too late to draw the conclusion.