State and Revolution

State and Revolution

When Lenin stepped off the sealed train at Petrograd
on April 3,1917 he surprised all his Bolshevik
followers by announcing that the time was
now ripe to seize power and move forward to
socialism. He was in effect declaring his support
for Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.
Furthermore, like Trotsky, he assumed that a
Russian revolution would be certain of support
from the socialist revolutions it would ignite in
the advanced West. But there was no theory of
the transition to socialism. German Marxism had
studied the collapse of capitalism more intensively
than the transition to socialism. State and
Revolution ([I9171 1967, Volume Two, pp. 283-
376), written by Lenin two months before the
October Revolution, while he was in hiding, set
Marxism on an entirely new footing by making
the state central to the process of transition. We
should not be deceived by Lenin's ability to sound
as though he was merely parroting what Marx
and Engels had said. Working with the positive
heuristic they had established in their political
writings he constructed an entirely new belt of
theory. Indeed, it is difficult to appreciate the
state of Marxist theory before Lenin because inevitably
we read it, whether positively or negatively,
through the prism of Lenin's theories
(Polan 1984, Chapter one).
The question Lenin posed in State and Revolution
is: What must take place if there is to be a
transition from capitalism to communism? His
answer was a revolutionary transformation from
capitalism to a transitional stage called "socialism,"
which would then evolve into cornrnunism.
He assumed that the objective conditions
would be present (P3) and so reduced the problem
of transition to a question of state power
(P4). The capitalist state had to be destroyed, and
a new state -the dictatorship of the proletariat
-had to be set up in its place. This dictatorship
would wither away, leaving communism behind.
For all the references to events of his time, this
was an abstract model of "objective possibility."
It did not consider the concrete circumstances
which might thwart or foster any particular transition.