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!

  • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
    0·
    7 days ago

    Even if classes (and the need for armed organizations to suppress capital and uphold proletarian rule) have dissappeared in a single country, that doesn’t mean they have dissappeared everywhere, or that the capitalist-imperialists are going to leave us alone. The history of the 20th century (with all the mass killings that US imperialism inflicted on the world) is a testament to the absolute necessity of socialist states to not disarm.

    Any talk of disarming, or ridding ourselves of proletarian police, armies, and intelligence services, is anarchist childishness.

    Lenin also doesn’t say this will happen immediately: he says it will take an entire epoch of socialist construction, with advances and retreats, for class antagonisms to resolve (ie the elimination of capital).

    • honeyontoast@lemmygrad.mlOP
      0·
      7 days ago

      When I mentioned Lenin saying it begins to wither immediately, I was referring to this part of The State & Revolution:

      “The proletariat needs the state — this is repeated by all the opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who assure us that this is what Marx taught. But they “forget” to add that, in the first place, according to Marx, the proletariat needs only a state which is withering away, i.e., a state so constituted that it begins to wither away immediately, and cannot but wither away.”

      Which comes from here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch02.htm

      Within one country, the state couldn’t begin to wither away immediately because of the international threat that remains. But I suppose, if we are talking about the proletariat worldwide, then I understand how it would begin immediately.

      • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        7 days ago

        Passage is phrased really weird, but regardless, Lenin explicitly stated on many occasions that this is not immediate:

        “It will be necessary under the dictatorship of the proletariat to re-educate millions of peasants and small proprietors, hundreds of thousands of office employees, officials and bourgeois intellectuals, to subordinate them all to the proletarian state and to proletarian leadership, to overcome their bourgeois habits and traditions,” 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 abandon their petty-bourgeois prejudices at one stroke, by a miracle, at the bidding of the Virgin Mary, at the bidding of a slogan, resolution or decree, but only in the course of a long and difficult mass struggle against the mass petty-bourgeois influences” (see Vol. XXV, pp. 248 and 247).

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
        0·
        7 days ago

        The process of withering, ie the basis of a state that cannot help but wither, is there from the start. A socialist state intent on collectivizing all of production and distribution, and eradicate all class, is already eroding the basis of the state.