What is now happening to Marx's theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don't laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!

In these circumstances, in view of the unprecedently wide-spread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state. This will necessitate a number of long quotations from the works of Marx and Engels themselves. Of course, long quotations will render the text cumbersome and not help at all to make it popular reading, but we cannot possibly dispense with them. All, or at any rate all the most essential passages in the works of Marx and Engels on the subject of the state must by all means be quoted as fully as possible so that the reader may form an independent opinion of the totality of the views of the founders of scientific socialism, and of the evolution of those views, and so that their distortion by the “Kautskyism” now prevailing may be documentarily proved and clearly demonstrated.

My emphasis.

This could have been written today. Just a quick glance at twitter or even on this site (recently) will show this tendency toward "de-revolutionizing" Marx and Engels. Lenin is right that this is not an "easy" read, but it is necessary. You have only to change a couple of names and a couple of geographic/national locations and this is a remarkably timely book.

In a democratic republic, Engels continues, “wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely", first, by means of the “direct corruption of officials” (America); secondly, by means of an “alliance of the government and the Stock Exchange" (France and America)<...>Another reason why the omnipotence of “wealth” is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell ... it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it. <> We must also note that Engels is most explicit in calling universal suffrage as well an instrument of bourgeois rule. Universal suffrage ... is
“the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state."


Here, we can only indicate this false notion, only point out that Engels' perfectly clear statement is distorted at every step in the propaganda and agitation of the “official” (i.e., opportunist) socialist parties. A detailed exposure of the utter falsity of this notion which Engels brushes aside here is given in our further account of the views of Marx and Engels on the “present-day” state.

Engels gives a general summary of his views in the most popular of his works in the following words:

“The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."

We do not often come across this passage in the propaganda and agitation literature of the present-day Social-Democrats. Even when we do come across it, it is mostly quoted in the same manner as one bows before an icon, i.e., it is done to show official respect for Engels, and no attempt is made to gauge the breadth and depth of the revolution that this relegating of “the whole machinery of state to a museum of antiquities” implies. In most cases we do not even find an understanding of what Engels calls the state machine.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s3

"Democracy" is the "political shell" of capitalism - it has no other current function. In socialism "democracy" goes without saying - it is not a "political shell", it is simply a condition of existence, a "fact on the ground".
And to all of our "anti-authority" folks out there, who think that the state disappears the moment the workers rise up, remember what Engels says about the "museum of antiquities". The spinning wheel and the bronze ax did not "disappear", they were replaced by better implements. You don't throw away the bronze ax before you develop the iron one; who don't discard the spinning-wheel before the advent of the machines.

One can wager that out of every 10,000 persons who have read or heard about the “withering away” of the state, 9,990 are completely unaware, or do not remember, that Engels directed his conclusions from that proposition not against anarchists alone. And of the remaining 10, probably nine do not know the meaning of a “free people's state” or why an attack on this slogan means an attack on opportunists. This is how history is written! This is how a great revolutionary teaching is imperceptibly falsified and adapted to prevailing philistinism. The conclusion directed against the anarchists has been repeated thousands of times; it has been vulgarized, and rammed into people's heads in the shallowest form, and has acquired the strength of a prejudice, whereas the conclusion directed against the opportunists has been obscured and “forgotten”!

The “free people's state” was a programme demand and a catchword current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies. this catchword is devoid of all political content except that it describes the concept of democracy in a pompous philistine fashion. Insofar as it hinted in a legally permissible manner at a democratic republic, Engels was prepared to “justify” its use “for a time” from an agitational point of view. But it was an opportunist catchword, for it amounted to nothing more than prettifying bourgeois democracy, and was also a failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in general. We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a “special force” for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not “free” and not a “people's state". Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.

Only 1 in 10,000 "know the meaning of a “free people's state” or why an attack on this slogan means an attack on opportunists." And this was said a hundred years ago when Engels' writings were much more recent! This is also why our anarchists and CPUSA folks do not "get" that calling for a "free people's state" (or any modern variations) is anathema to the left. They just don't get it. They are not approaching the struggle against capitalism from a class or materialist position, they are still operating under bourgeois understandings of reality.

Fifthly, the same work of Engels', whose arguments about the withering away of the state everyone remembers, also contains an argument of the significance of violent revolution. Engels' historical analysis of its role becomes a veritable panegyric on violent revolution. This, “no one remembers". It is not done in modern socialist parties to talk or even think about the significance of this idea, and it plays no part whatever in their daily propaganda and agitation among the people. And yet it is inseparably bound up with the 'withering away" of the state into one harmonious whole.

Here is Engels' argument:

“...That force, however, plays yet another role [other than that of a diabolical power] in history, a revolutionary role; that, in the words of Marx, it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms — of this there is not a word in Herr Duhring. It is only with sighs and groans that he admits the possibility that force will perhaps be necessary for the overthrow of an economy based on exploitation — unfortunately, because all use of force demoralizes, he says, the person who uses it. And this in Germany, where a violent collision — which may, after all, be forced on the people — would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has penetrated the nation's mentality following the humiliation of the Thirty Years' War.[4] And this person's mode of thought — dull, insipid, and impotent — presumes to impose itself on the most revolutionary party that history has ever known! (p.193, third German edition, Part II, end of Chap.IV)

How can this panegyric on violent revolution, which Engels insistently brought to the attention of the German Social-Democrats between 1878 and 1894, i.e., right up to the time of his death, be combined with the theory of the 'withering away" of the state to form a single theory?

Usually the two are combined by means of eclecticism, by an unprincipled or sophistic selection made arbitrarily (or to please the powers that be) of first one, then another argument, and in 99 cases out of 100, if not more, it is the idea of the “withering away” that is placed in the forefront. Dialectics are replaced by eclecticism — this is the most usual, the most wide-spread practice to be met with in present-day official Social-Democratic literature in relation to Marxism. This sort of substitution is, of course, nothing new; it was observed even in the history of classical Greek philosophy. In falsifying Marxism in opportunist fashion, the substitution of eclecticism for dialectics is the easiest way of deceiving the people. It gives an illusory satisfaction; it seems to take into account all sides of the process, all trends of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it provides no integral and revolutionary conception of the process of social development at all.

This is a hammer.

This controversy took place in 1873. Marx and Engels contributed articles against the Proudhonists, “autonomists” or "anti- authoritarians", to an Italian socialist annual, and it was not until 1913 that these articles appeared in German in Neue Zeit.[2]

"If the political struggle of the working class assumes revolutionary form," wrote Marx, ridiculing the anarchists for their repudiation of politics, "and if the workers set up their revolutionary dictatorship in place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, they commit the terrible crime of violating principles, for in order to satisfy their wretched, vulgar everyday needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie, they give the state a revolutionary and transient form, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state." (Neue Zeit Vol.XXXII, 1, 1913-14, p.40)

It was solely against this kind of “abolition” of the state that Marx fought in refuting the anarchists! He did not at all oppose the view that the state would disappear when classes disappeared, or that it would be abolished when classes were abolished. What he did oppose was the proposition that the workers should renounce the use of arms, organized violence, that is, the state, which is to serve to "crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie".

To prevent the true meaning of his struggle against anarchism from being distorted, Marx expressly emphasized the "revolutionary and transient form" of the state which the proletariat needs. The proletariat needs the state only temporarily. We do not after all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes. Marx chooses the sharpest and clearest way of stating his case against the anarchists: After overthrowing the yoke of the capitalists, should the workers "lay down their arms", or use them against the capitalists in order to crush their resistance? But what is the systematic use of arms by ne class against another if not a "transient form" of state?

Let every Social-Democrat ask himself: Is that how he has been posing the question of the state in controversy with the anarchists? Is that how it has been posed by the vast majority of the official socialist parties of the Second International?

Engels expounds the same ideas in much greater detail and still more popularly. First of all he ridicules the muddled ideas of the Proudhonists, who call themselves "anti-authoritarians", i.e., repudiated all authority, all subordination, all power. Take a factory, a railway, a ship on the high seas, said Engels: is it not clear that not one of these complex technical establishments, based on the use of machinery and the systematic co-operation of many people, could function without a certain amount of subordination and, consequently, without a certain amount of authority or power?

"... When I counter the most rabid anti-authoritarians with these arguments, they only answer they can give me is the following: Oh, that's true, except that here it is not a question of authority with which we vest our delegates, but of a commission! These people imagine they can change a thing by changing its name...."

Having thus shown that authority and autonomy are relative terms, that the sphere of their application varies with the various phases of social development, that it is absurd to take them as absolutes, and adding that the sphere of application of machinery and large-scale production is steadily expanding, Engels passes from the general discussion of authority to the question of the state.

"Had the autonomists," he wrote, "contented themselves with saying that the social organization of the future would allow authority only within the bounds which the conditions of production make inevitable, one could have come to terms with them. But they are blind to all facts that make authority necessary and they passionately fight the word.

"Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All socialists are agreed that the state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and become mere administrative functions of watching over social interests. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social relations that gave both to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority.

"Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means. And the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority? Therefore, one of two things: either that anti-authoritarians down't know what they are talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion. Or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the cause of the proletariat. In either case they serve only reaction." (p.39)

This argument touches upon questions which should be examined in connection with the relationship between politics and economics during the withering away of the state (the next chapter is devoted to this). These questions are: the transformation of public functions from political into simple functions of administration, and the "political state". This last term, one particularly liable to misunderstanding, indicates the process of the withering away of the state: at a certain stage of this process, the state which is withering away may be called a non-political state.

Not done with the childish anarchist, not by a longshot. I was going to highligh some parts, but I just couldn't find anything that was not "highlightable".

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch04.htm#s2

My emphasis.

This could have been written today. Just a quick glance at twitter or even on this site (recently) will show this tendency toward "de-revolutionizing" Marx and Engels. Lenin is right that this is not an "easy" read, but it is necessary. You have only to change a couple of names and a couple of geographic/national locations and this is a remarkably timely book.

Yep, here's some 'de-revolutionization' straight off the shitpile by the Menshevik A. Shaw:


REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS
worker | May 25, 2017 | 8:25 pm | Analysis, political struggle, V.I. Lenin
BY A. SHAW
Houston Communist Party

Most of Marxist theory on politics comes from Lenin and his best students.
Lenin towers above other theoreticians because he is perhaps the only one who offers us a sound and pragmatic definition of the term “revolution.”

Everybody on the Left talks about “revolution” but few say what revolution is.


Lenin says a revolution, in both its theoretical and practical meanings, is a “passing of state power from one class to another.” So, the passing of power from the working class to the capitalist class is a revolution, just as the passing of power from the capitalists to the workers is a revolution. Similarly, the passing of power from slaveholders to slaves is a revolution, just as the passing of power from slaves to slaveholders is a revolution. Again, the passing of power from the class of feudal landlords to the capitalist class is a revolution and vice versa.

Politics includes revolution, as Lenin defines revolution, as well as the passings and non-passings of state power to things other than classes. For example, politics includes the passing of power from one faction to another faction of the same class. Similarly, politics includes the passing of power from one individual to another individual of the same faction, so on and so forth.

Obviously, politics deals not only with various types of passings of state power, but also with the absence of passings of power.


Marx and Lenin called a passing of state power from the capitalists to the workers not only a revolution but also a proletarian revolution and the passing of power from the workers to the capitalists a bourgeois revolution, just as a passing from landlords to capitalists is also a bourgeois revolution.


Tragically, today and historically, many Marxists and Leninists never learn what is a revolution and how the types of revolutions are determined. They use the term revolution without any meaning at all or with a meaning that is transparently worthless.

Clearly, if one doesn’t know what a revolution is, then one is most unlikely to produce a revolution, under Lenin’s definition or even under some other definition.


The Leninist definition of revolution includes the term “state power.”


What’s state power?


State power is the dominance by one class or another of the military, police, intelligence agencies, bureaucracy and other instrumentalities of force.

Lenin says state power consists of special bodies of armed people [military, police, professional spies] and “adjuncts” of state power such as prisons, courts, and, to a degree, the bureaucracy.

In other words, state power consists of “institutions of coercion of all kinds.”

And there are many kinds of coercive institutions. They are terrible things.

The reactionary faction of the USAs increasingly prefer to employ mercenaries or independent contractors.

State power and the state are overlapping but they aren’t identical objects.

Both state power and the state include coercive institutions, but the state also includes facilities that are largely non-coercive while state power usually doesn’t bother itself with the non-coercive.

Non-coercive facilities of the state may include public schools, hospitals, playgrounds, accommodations for mass meetings, etc.

Again, the state and state power are close but they are not the same because state power is a terrible and terrorist thing.

The reactionary faction of the USAs is most terrible and terrorist force in the world.


The Leninist definition of revolution includes the term “passing.”

Some students of Lenin insist “passing” means sweeping or swiftly.

In other words, these misguided students of Marx and Lenin insist that state power must pass (1) in its entirety and (2) in a very short period of time.

Marx and Engels surely would call these misguided students a bunch of asses.

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote the proletariat uses its power “by degrees” to divest the bourgeoisie.

To be sure, the phrase “by degrees” may mean in some situations a sweeping and swiftly passing of state power. But “by degrees” may also mean, in other circumstances, a passing that is measured and slow.

When Lenin introduced his Letter on Tactics, April 1917, he merely said that a revolution is a passing of state power from one class to another.

Lenin didn’t try to accelerate or impede the pace of the passing of state power.

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/revolutionary-politics/


This guy got CPUSA written all over him. That last sentence is such a bald-faced lie, obvious to the most negligent student of history.

Yep, here's some 'de-revolutionization' straight off the shitpile by the Menshevik A. Shaw:



This guy got CPUSA written all over him. That last sentence is such a bald-faced lie, obvious to the most negligent student of history.

The guy is a moron and an "ass". His whole piece is made up of creating straw men to fight against. His whole drivel about "passing" power back and forth is embarrassingly juvenile (and for a dimwit juvenile, at that).

"By degrees", was Engel's way of saying be patient, you can't flip this thing all at once. There was no indication that you would take the revolution "slowly", but methodically, biting off hunks that could be chewed and digested and then take the next bite.

The guy's last sentence is beyond idiotic. Lenin didn't try to accelerate the revolution? What a pandejo!