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!

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    7 days ago

    So yes, if you read Lenin and don’t read Mao, you will see obvious contradictions between Lenin’s writings and the real course of history.

    Reading Mao is absolutely necessary, but i would just qualify your statement by saying that pre-October Revolution Lenin and post-October Revolution Lenin were quite different, and you can see this difference starkly in his writings.

    Where he was more naive and “utopian” before the revolution, he was wiser and more pragmatic after the revolution, when he was faced with the difficult realities of actually building the new system, defending it from reaction, and recognizing the compromises that would need to be made in order for the system to grow and survive.

    And i don’t mean utopian in the sense that he didn’t have a scientific outlook, but in the sense that he hoped the process would be easier and faster than it actually turned out to be. Compare something like “What Is To Be Done” or even “The State and Revolution” with later works such as “The Tax in Kind” or “The New Economic Policy” and you will see what i mean.

    • freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      Absolutely, but Lenin also died only a decade after the revolution. There was so much more to learn from the first national experiment in socialism that he did not have chance to observe let alone write about.

      My point to the OP was to acknowledge the limits on Lenin that were imposed on him by time itself and to read later writers to understand how Marxism-Leninism advanced beyond Lenin’s writings, and indeed where it has not yet advanced beyond his writings, as so much of what he wrote is still sound and applicable to the world today.