Hello!
Apologies if this has been asked before, I did try searching but wasn’t really sure how to phrase it and didn’t find anything.
I’m reading Lenin’s “The State & Revolution”, but something confuses me when he talks about the proletarian state withering away. He says it would begin practically immediately, after all the state exists to suppress the opposite class, and after the revolution there would be no opposite class to suppress, and so the state would have no other option but to wither.
However, that’s only true within one country. Now more than ever all countries are inter-connected, and as we’ve seen in practically every socialist revolution, the likes of the US government will ensure it is not an easy transition. That means that even after revolution, a country is going to require a state in order to defend against outside attacks, is it not? Or am I misunderstanding what is meant by state?
Does that mean the withering away of the state cannot begin until all the world is communist? Is this already a theory? It sounds like something I’ve seen people discuss, but I don’t know the word for it.
Thank you!
Using the relatively limited amount of history and theory which I have ingested, I would say the establishment of the USSR spiked a HUGE reactionary fight which actually is not that hard to imagine if you count the successes and vastly superior situation in the USSR after a relatively short time.
If one were trying to imagine another such project starting today, we would anticipate the nuclear response that the reactionary forces would take and I’m pretty sure that is one reason why china wasn’t so open about their progress at first.
The fact that they were unable to anticipate the vileness and the effort that the imperial west would put into killing off socialism is saddening but ultimately it is a historical fact.
One can only hope that the actually existing and even improving socialist states of the world will be able to weather the storm of the writhing empire.
This brings me to the point that orange man must be every accellerationsts wet dream. It would be interesting to see if anyone has put this mechanic into theory yet. (Moderate fascists, really bad because slow decline of imperial core. Raging fascists better because contradictions explode immediately)
But dont worry, at this point the fascists in germany will also take power in 3 years at the latest and shit will hit the fan tremendously. I just hope we can organize well until then to withstand them. Cells are forming but we need exchange between them which is cruelly slow atm.