Chapter Five
There exist additional writings on the theories of the State put forward at Pontedecimo. At the close of 1950 Cervetto himself acknowledged the inadequacy of the version placed before the conference, and noted that it had been an error to accept the anarchist theory of the ‘simultaneous elimination’ of the State, rather than the position of Marx, Engels and Lenin on the ‘dictatorship of the proletaria’. The 1951 deliberations would reach their conclusion in the theory of ‘imperialist democracy’ thirty years later.
The issue was a complex one, involving as it did evaluation on at least five different levels. Firstly, Lenin’s theory of the State, and its relationship with that of Bukharin and with anarchist theory. Secondly, Bordiga’s development of Lenin’s theory, associating it with a part of Bukharin’s totalitarianism
. Thirdly, the 1951 theories on elimination of the State
and the differing positions of Cervetto and Masini. Fourthly, Cervetto’s 1976 review, which evaluated the Pontedecimo theories in relation to those of Lenin, Bukharin, Bordiga and the anarchists, with his own and Masini’s incomplete 1951 ideas, and with subsequent study of the issue. Fifthly, the completed formulation on the State published by Cervetto, which orders and develops most of these themes within the theory of imperialist democracy
while dropping or shelving consideration of other positions.
The aim of the present work is to set the scene for those first steps taken in 1951, partly based on the lines of Cervetto’s 1976 reconstruction. We cannot here hope to go over the whole history of theories of the State and of imperialism, which engaged certain currents of the revolutionary movement over a period of decades up to the endgame of the harsh and tragic counter-revolution of the 1930s. The reader is directed to The Political Shell and The Difficult Question of Times where both these issues are treated more widely.
«Imperialist democracy» in «The Political Shell»
To begin with the conclusion: The Political Shell brings together lead articles published between 1977 and 1989. In five of these Cervetto deals with Bukharin’s theories, all of which touch upon the issue of the Imperialist State
.
Alongside the evolution of imperialism, wrote Cervetto in 1977, ideologies evolve to justify the actions of the State, and which, in an infinity of variations, become a shared concept for those who manage the State. Bukharin was tackling the issue during the stormy period of the First World War, and overestimated the tendency of the economy to become concentrated into a single capitalist-State trust: an error that was to have consequences for his theory of the State:
Bukharin peaks of the transition from liberal ideology to imperialist ideology as corresponding to the transition from the liberal State to the imperialist State, which in its turn is an expression of the transition from ‘laissez-faire’ economy to monopoly economy. All well and good, but there’s more to it than that.
On Bukharin’s absolutisation, Lenin points out that while capitalism does concentrate itself in trusts, it also spreads itself throughout small-scale production. It follows therefore that the superstructure will not correspond to the capitalist-State trust Bukharin envisaged: the imperialist State is actually less homogeneous and organic than it would be if capital concentration were absolute. It is rather the product of uneven economic and political development and the clashes between the various fractions of the bourgeoisie for a share of surplus value. Even ideology is influenced by this objective situation.76
Instead, the State of the imperialist phase corresponds to a distribution model with parasitic features. According to Cervetto, Lenin rejects Bukharin’s overestimation of the «Imperialist State» and maintains his own analysis of specific political forms: Lenin sees parasitism as, if anything, a feature common to all States that follow the same lines:
Bukharin gives the name ‘rentier economy’ to this phase of the mode of production and distribution: Lenin acknowledges the spread of capitalism, but also stresses the ‘rentier’ nature of ‘those who live by clipping coupons’. Bukharin defines the political form as ‘imperialist State’: Lenin rejects this absolutisation, sees differences of form and policy in the imperialist State, and identifies the parasitical traits typical of the bourgeoisies of various States, from Japan to Germany to the United States.77
Cervetto bases his critique of Bukharin’s Imperialist State
on the science contained in Capital. It has been suggested that with State and Revolution Lenin set himself to write that chapter of Capital – ‘The State’ – that Marx had planned but had not had the opportunity to complete. In the third volume of Capital it is certainly possible to trace Marx’s theoretical statement that democracy in all its variations follows consistent political rules. In this sense, Marx’s dialectical science as found in Capital disproves the absolutisation present in the New Leviathan
and totalitarianism theories:
Bukharin theorised a capitalist-State trust arising from a fusion of economics and politics, but we say that State intervention in the economy does not determine the particular form of State. What remains valid is the theory Marx expressed in Volume 3 of Capital, which sees in democracy a ‘specific form’ of the capitalist State, with other political forms as ‘variations and gradations of this specific form’. The tendency towards State capitalism confirms Marx’s theory on the ‘specific form’, which Lenin sums up as the ‘best shell’ for capitalism. Failure to understand this has led to many errors.78
The final step of Cervetto’s 1951 considerations took off from Lenin’s critique of Bukharin’s theory of the New Leviathan
– the imperialist State.
«Bukharin saw economic concentration and a corresponding political centralism merging in a single capitalist-State trust – an imperialist State that combined the maximum of economic and political power to hurl against similar competitor imperialist States. But in reality this wasn’t the case. Centralisation of capital and concentration of means of production give rise to a multiplicity of big competing enterprises, and at the super-structure level such competition brings about political pluralism. This political pluralism isn’t the direct democracy of small-scale production, but the imperialist democracy of the big producers, of a few hundred highly-concentrated big businesses.
On the one hand, imperialist democracy is the centralism of a few big economic groups, and on the other hand it is the pluralism of their diverse political wills, conditioned by their interests. Imperialist democracy is most accurately defined as the pluralist political centralism of big capital. It is the best shell for the long and varied struggle for concentration».79
Bukharin’s «New Leviathan» theory
In the autumn of 1915 Bukharin finished his study of Imperialism and World Economy and immediately began work on an essay, ‘Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State’. It was in the nature of a continuation of the first work, the aim being to find in Marx and Engels the premises to critique the crushing and all-pervasive power of the State in a new era.
In his text on imperialism, Bukharin had already theorised the evolution of the State as an entirety new socio-political formation caused by the growth of finance capital
with an economic dynamic driving an aggressive foreign policy and the «militarisation of all social life [...] Being a very large shareholder in the State capitalist trust, the modern State is the highest and most all-embracing organisational culmination of the latter. Hence its colossal, almost monstrous, power».80
The essay on the Imperialist State
both summarises and develops these theories, and examines the mobilisation of a war economy, with references to passages from Marx and Engels. In the new era, writes Bukharin, differences between groups and fractions disappear, private monopoly enterprises merge into one entity within the framework of the State capitalist trust: and the contradictions between different sub-groups of the ruling class will also largely disappear
. The individual capitalist no longer clashes with other capitalists within a national context: all collaborate with each other because the centre of gravity in the competitive struggle is carried over into the world market, whereas within the county competition dies out
. A co-operative capitalism
arises, in which the State is transformed into a single, centralised, exploiting organisation
and within it a hierarchically-structured bureaucracy fulfils the organising functions in complete accord with the military authorities
, whose significance and power steadily grow.
As the distinction between State and society dissolves: All of the formerly differentiated political organizations of the ruling classes gradually lose their differential specifications, being transformed into a single imperialist party
. From absolute capitalist-imperialist economic concentration to the absolute Imperialist State
.
Thus emerges the finished type of the contemporary imperialist robber State, that iron organisation, which with its tenacious, raking claws embraces the living body of society. This is the New Leviathan, beside which the fantasy of Thomas Hobbes looks like a child’s toy.81
As Cervetto pointed out in 1976, at the time Bukharin was writing, the war economy, and especially Germany’s wartime planning, were the influences behind the idea of a militarised and all-pervasive «Imperialist State», anticipating also many features of later totalitarianism and Fascistisasion theories. Bukharin had been motivated primarily by the desire to oppose the German social democrats who had supported the war: his reference to the New Leviathan’s monstrous power
was in effect a denunciation of their subservience. The same applies to his references to the Marx-Engels theories of the State, when he writes of how the State will become extinct in a future higher form of society.
In pile of many statements to the contrary, the difference between Marxists and anarchists isn’t that Marxists are for the State and anarchists are against the State. The real difference as regards the way things will be structured in the future is that socialists see a social economy as the result of trends towards concentration and centralisation – an inevitable consequence of the development of the productive forces – while conversely the economic Utopia of a decentralised anarchism would take us back to a pre-capitalist economy. Socialists expect the economy to become centralised and technologically advanced: anarchists would make any economic progress impossible, State power would be continued only during the transitional period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a form of class rule in which the class in power would be the proletariat. As the dictatorship of the proletariat disappeared, the final State form would likewise vanish.82
Lenin’s initial disagreement
Between the summer of 1916 and the first months of 1917, the theoretical disagreement between Lenin and Bukharin focused on these paragraphs. Bukharin had sent ‘Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State’ to the party’s annual journal, the Social Democrat Review83. Lenin refused to publish it. The part dealing with imperialism could be extracted and published, but that on the State was limited: no more than touching on issues of fundamental principle in inadequately thought-out terms. The differences between Marxists and anarchists on the issue of the State had been defined in a completely erroneous way. The conclusion that social democracy had to firmly stress its hostility to the principle of State power was inaccurate, mistaken and contradicted the theory that the proletariat would create its own temporary form of State power. The advice was to leave the issue for further mature consideration.84
In the next few tense months, Bukharin broke ranks and published extracts of his article in Dutch, Danish and Norwegian journals, and finally, under the pseudonym ‘NB’ in the Jugend-Internationale, the publication of the social democrats’ youth organisation. Lenin’s reply – clearly couched as that of an educator «set against flattering youth» while having patience for their errors
confirmed his reservations about Bukharin’s rejection of the principle
of State power. It wasn’t possible to overlook the essential differences between the socialist and the anarchist attitude towards the State.
Socialists want to use the modern State and its institutions in the struggle for the emancipation of the working class, and in addition stress that the State must be used in the form it takes at the point of the transition from capitalism to socialism. This transitional form – the dictatorship of the proletariat – is also a form of State. The anarchists want to ‘abolish’ the State, to ‘blow it up’ (‘sprengen’ in the expression employed at one point by Comrade NB, who mistakenly attributes this concept to socialists. Socialists – and unfortunately here the author quotes Engels on the subject very selectively – acknowledge the ‘extinction’, the gradual ‘withering away’ of the State, after the bourgeoisie has been expropriated.85
Notes on Marxism and the State
Between the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, Lenin systematically gathered and wrote a commentary on everything Marx and Engels had said on this issue. This was to become ‘The Blue Notebook: Marxism on the State’ which would form the basis of ‘State and Revolution’, of which the foundations were to be laid in the summer of 1917. As a result of these reflections, the accusation of anarchism
against Bukharin was initially reduced and then more or less withdrawn, although part of ‘The Blue Notebook’ repeats the assessment that Bukharin’s theories were inadequate. We can understand Lenin’s insistence on not allowing the thesis of State power to be rejected by principle, given that the revolutionary political struggle did not exclude using the State, and given that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a form of State: the Commune-State
in fact.
«We differ from the anarchists in (α) our use of the State now and (β) during the proletarian revolution (‘dictatorship of the proletaria’) – very important points for our immediate practice. (This is what Bukharin has forgotten!)
What distinguishes us from the opportunists are deeper, ‘more eternal’ truths, which regard (αα) the temporary nature of the State (ββ) and the damage done by current inaccuracies on this issue at the present time (γγ), the not completely stateist nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat (δδ), the contradiction between State and liberty (εε), the more accurate idea or concept of the ‘Commune’ in place of the State (ζζ), and the ‘smashing’ (zerbrechen) of the bureaucratic machine».86
Lenin added that it was important not to forget the opportunism of the Bernsteins, who in Germany denied the dictatorship of the proletariat, while the official party programme distanced it indirectly
, neglecting to mention it and tolerating currents that openly rejected the revolutionary way. Then there was the issue of Bukharin’s article:
In August 1916 Bukharin was told to ‘subject his ideas on the State to mature consideration’. Without doing this he has leapt into print as N.B. and has done so in such a way that instead of unmasking the Kautskyists his errors have helped them! While all the time Bukharin is on balance closer to the truth than Kautsky.
This comment is important in terms of evaluating the parameters of Lenin’s critique and his revised judgement. As Lenin saw it, Bukharin thought he was fighting opportunism by emphasising opposition to the principle of the State, but in the process he was falling into inaccuracy as regards the dictatorship of the proletariat — the real area of difference with the Kautskyists.
In a February 1917 letter to Alexandra Kollontai, Lenin writes of having nearly finished gathering the material
on the State and confirms the assessment he made in the ‘Blue Notebook’:
I’ve reached much harsher conclusions about Kautsky than about Bukharin – have you seen his N.B. in No. 6 of the Jugend-Internationale? And in No. 2 of Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrata? [the issue that contained Lenin’s reply: editors note]. The issue is of over-arching importance: Bukharin is worth a lot more than Kautsky, but Bukharin’s errors could ruin our ‘just cause’ in the struggle against Kautskyism.87
Two days later, in a letter to Ines Armand, he uses the same expression as in the ‘Blue Notebook’:
[...] I’ve gathered lots of material and I think I’ve come to some interesting and important conclusions, a good deal more against Kautsky than against N. Iv. Bukharin (who is nevertheless still wrong albeit closer to the truth than Kautsky).88
Lenin intended to publish Bukharin’s article, which he had rejected a few months previously, together with his own analysis of Bukharin’s minor errors and Kautksy’s massive falsification and degradation of Marxism
. The project was never carried to completion. What remains is a preliminary draft of the planned article, to which we shall return in due course.
‘State and Revolution’: Marxism and anarchism
From these notes it’s clear that the essence of the issue was the dictatorship of the proletariat «the provisional State», as it was referred to in the - GAAP debates.
On the question of smashing the bourgeoisie’s State machinery, State and Revolution abandons the criticism levelled at Bukharin a few months previously. We believe that this was the sense of Cervetto’s 1976 note that in State and Revolution Bukharin’s critique of the State was accepted by Lenin
.
Lenin’s text is unequivocal, and his ordered exposition makes it crystal-clear that the issue is to smash
the bureaucratic-administrative machinery
of the bourgeois State, while it was the power of the proletariat, the Commune-State
that would eventually wither away. In fact, within that at last discovered political form
two movements combined: the abolition of bourgeois State power and the revolutionary constituting of the semi-State
the dictatorship of the proletariat that was destined to wither away. Here we cite only the most important passages:
[...] Engels says that in seizing power the proletariat thereby abolishes ‘the State as State’ [...] As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here of the proletariat revolution ‘abolishing the bourgeois State, while the words about the State withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian State after the socialist revolution. According to Engels, the bourgeois State does not ‘wither away’ but is ‘abolished by the proletariat in the course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian State or semi-State.89
The words ‘to smash the bureaucratic-military machine’ briefly express the principal lesson of Marxism regarding the tasks of the proletariat during the revolution in relation to the State. And this is the lesson that has not only been completely ignored but positively distorted by the prevailing Kautskyist ‘interpretations’ of Marxism!90
On the relationship between Marxism and anarchism, Lenin also moved closer to Bukharin, thus withdrawing the accusation that Bukharin had supported semi-anarchist
theories. Marxism and anarchism were in agreement on the smashing
of the bourgeois State machine, wrote Lenin:
Neither the opportunists nor the Kautskyists wish to see the similarity of views on this point between Marxism and anarchism (both Proudhon and Bakunin) because this is where they have departed from Marxism.91
It would not be surprising if the opportunists classed Engels, too, as an ‘anarchist’, for it is becoming increasingly common with the social-chauvinists to accuse the internationalists of anarchism. Marxism has always taught that with the abolition of classes the State will also be abolished. The well-known passage on the ‘withering away’ of the State in Anti-Dühring accuses the anarchists not simply of favouring the abolition of the State, but of preaching that the State can be abolished overnight.92
The distinction between Marxists and the anarchists is this: (1) The former, while aiming at the complete abolition of the State, recognise that this aim can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution, as the result of the establishment of socialism, which leads to the withering away of the State. The latter want to abolish the State completely overnight, not understanding the conditions under which the State can be abolished. (2) The former recognise that after the proletariat has won political power it must completely destroy the old State machine and replace it by a new one consisting of an organisation of the armed workers, after the type of the Commune. The latter, while insisting on the destruction of the State machine, have a very vague idea of what the proletariat will put in its place and how it will use its revolutionary power.
The anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat should use the State power, they reject its revolutionary dictatorship. (3) The former demand that the proletariat be trained for revolution by utilising the present State. The anarchists reject this».93
One can understand Cervetto’s reservations in December 1950 about drafting his theories for the Pontedecimo meeting, since Lenin’s subject-matter went to the conceptual heart of the Arshinov platform, Pier Carlo Masini’s point of reference, and nailed the theoretical weakness of revolutionary attack and abolition
of any form of State as a simultaneous process
.
‘Absterben’, ‘Abschaffung’, ‘Sprengung’
Lenin’s alternative criticism of Bukharin – that with the notion of blowing up
(German = sprengen) the State he was giving in to the anarchists – has an irresolute ring to it.
The study on the Imperialist State
would be published in 1925. In a footnote, Bukharin recalls all the vicissitudes, from Lenin’s refusal to publish, his own choice to break with the party by publishing extracts in radical-Left journals
up to Lenin’s riposte in the Jugend-Internationale:
My readers will speedily understand that I did not make the errors that have been attributed to me, since I clearly saw the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, as can be seen from Lenin’s note, at that point he did not have a correct position on the issue of blowing up the State (the bourgeois State, that is) and confused this with the withering away of the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the time, I should perhaps have developed the proletarian dictatorship theme more fully. But in my own defence I can say that at the time the social democrats built up the bourgeois State to be so strong that it was natural to concentrate all my attention on the issue of abolishing this machine.94
Bukharin ends by recalling a diplomatic visit paid him by Lenin’s wife when she came back to Russia in May 1917:
[...] her first words were: “Vladimir Ilyich has asked me to tell you that he no longer disagrees with you on the issue of the State”. Once he had reviewed the issue, Lenin reached the same conclusion as to ‘blowing up’ the State, but he developed this theme, and the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat that derived from it, so thoroughly that he laid down a marker for our era in terms of theoretical development in this area.
The reconstruction seems genuine enough, but so does Bukharin’s incomprehension. In his defence he invokes the need to press the Kautskyists on the way they magnified the State
, but ultimately this was at the root of Lenin’s objection: in order to unmask opportunism one had to get right to the core of the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this sense – and Bukharin acknowledges as much – State and Revolution gives the whole answer on an issue he had only touched on in his study of the Imperialist State
.
Some maintain that all the evidence shows that in the autumn of 1916 Lenin had not fully considered the issue of blowing up
the State machinery, but this does not seem convincing. Lenin continued to criticise Bukharin even after he had scrutinised Marx and Engels on the Commune. In the ‘Blue Notebook’ Lenin noted down Marx’s words in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon on the need to smash
the machinery of the bourgeois State, but goes on to restate his criticism of Bukharin for not having adequately considered the dictatorship of the proletariat issue. Lenin’s criticism of Bukharin’s inadequately worked-out theory therefore goes beyond the sprengen
– blowing up
the State – controversy, in which, conversely, Lenin had not been precise. In his draft of the article that was to accompany Bukharin’s, Lenin returns to his objection: Absterben
– (abolition) of the State. «Why not Abschaffung (destruction) or Sprengung95 (blow up)?» This insistence confirms that Lenin was concentrating on the issue of the provisional State, and was criticising Bukharin’s terminology.
Above all, however, it hardly seems likely that by the autumn of 1916 Lenin had never considered the issue of «smashing» the State machinery, and in fact he had not failed to do so. Lenin had edited the Russian edition of Marx’s correspondence with Kugelmann. In a 1907 controversy with Plekhanov, Lenin cites exactly what Marx’s position was on the Commune (letter dated 12-4-1871):
This, he says, was an attempt not simply to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it. And he praises our heroic Party comrades in Paris, led by the Proudhonians and Blanquists.96
So in 1907 Lenin had already made the observations that open the ‘Notebook’ on the State, that lie at the heart of State and Revolution and provide the chapter heading What made the Communards’ attempt heroic?
«The New Leviathan» and the national question
However, if we limit ourselves to simply examining the language employed, we are only going round in circles. Lenin may have written that to blow up
the State was not a Marxist expression, but Marx’s view of the Commune – which had in fact attempted to smash
the State machinery instead of taking it over – had not only been a part of his theoretical background for years, but was a political weapon that he had already employed against centrists and Mensheviks and would soon do so again in the April Theses.
Almost certainly, one of Cervetto’s sources in 1976 was Stephen Cohen, Bukharin’s biographer, who provides a useful overview of events, but lacks the political background to arrive at a complete understanding of his material. The prevailing sentiment of the first chapter of his work97 is his empathy with Bukharin and Western-style Marxism
: he compares Bukharin – youthful, libertarian and ‘Westernised’ – with an older ‘Russian’ Lenin who is suspicious of all dissent.
Cohen appears to be unaware of the dynamics of a centralised party, to the point of not understanding Lenin’s insistence that all publications must be authorised by the party. Still less does he seem to comprehend the difficulty of the struggle to consolidate a political group around a defined strategic vision. He writes of Lenin’s battle on the national question
and on the right to self-determination, but does not appear to realise its importance, and even labels as «hard to understand»98 Lenin’s harsh attitude to Bukharin when the latter was veering towards supporting the theories of Jurij Pjatakov, Radek, Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch ‘Left’.
Cohen does provide some interesting psychological commentary. In Vienna Bukharin had taken courses with the liberal economists of the ‘Austrian school’, the better to confute them; he had studied Rudolf Hilferding’s theories on financial capital and had met the principal exponents of Austro-Marxism. His book on The Political Economy of the Rentier, which opposed Austrian marginalism, was to become one of the few Russo-Marxist texts positively received by European social democrats, and one could speculate that Bukharin might have gained adulation as the young intellectual who had been able to break free of Russia – this from a viewpoint of Lenin as restricted by Russian backwardness. Cohen writes that the rupture caused by the war, and the catastrophe of the Second International had added significance for Bolsheviks like Bukharin who had seen themselves as European social democrats adhering to the advanced Marxism of Germany and Austria
.
Cohen fails to display the same level of intuition when he writes of Lenin’s debating style. He appears to be taken aback by Lenin’s intransigence, which in fact is a stubborn focus on the point at issue – his attempt to retrieve Bukharin and prevent external intrusions: in any case, this is the habitual tone in which Lenin communicates. You argue very strangely, really, or rather, you don’t argue at all
at all begins his October 1916 letter to Bukharin, refuting Bukharin’s complaints about the rejection of his article. Later he writes to Zinoviev that he has given Bukharin «a bland response»99. Or this November letter to Ines Armand: «I apologise for this long letter and for the abundance of sharp words: I can’t write otherwise when I am speaking frankly. Well, after all, this is all entre nous, and perhaps the unnecessary bad language will pass».100
Cohen tends to treat the national question
and ‘self-determination of peoples’ as separate from the issue of the ‘State’, yet this very battle could help, if not to resolve the conundrum, at least to set it in a political framework. Between 1915 and 1916 Bukharin was swinging towards the theories of Jurij Pjatakov, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg, according to which claims for nationhood had no reason to exist in the age of imperialism. It’s clear that for Lenin the two issues – self-determination and attitude towards the State in the age of imperialism – were part of the same theoretical problem, formed a single knot of strategic analysis and were part of the political battle between those who made up the «Zimmerwald Left». The New Leviathan
theory, understood as principled hostility towards the State, converged with abandoning struggles for national independence.
It’s not possible here to summarise the flood of articles and letters that from 1915 to the opening months of 1917 document this nexus. It was a period during which Lenin was defining his strategy, and as such would merit a separate study in itself. We quote only a letter (January 1917) which uncovers this nexus between theory of the State, national question and strategy centred on the contradictions of the system of States
.
Defending Friedrich Engels from superficial criticism of his 1891 position on supporting a «defensive» war against Russia and France, Lenin rejects any parallels with the 1914 war:
«Wars are a supremely varied, diverse, complex thing. One cannot approach them with a general pattern.
- 1) Three main types: the relation of an oppressed nation to the oppressor (every war is the continuation of politics; politics is the relationship between nations, classes, etc.). As a general rule, war is legitimate on the part of the oppressed (irrespective of whether it is defensive or offensive in the military sense).
- 2) The relation between two oppressor nations. The struggle for colonies, for markets, etc. (Rome and Carthage; Britain and Germany -). As a general rule, a war of that kind is robbery on both sides; and the attitude of democracy (and socialism) to it comes under the rule: “Two thieves are fighting may they both perish” [...]
- 3) The third type. A system of nations with equal rights. This question is much more complex/!!! Especially if side by side with civilised, comparatively democratic nations there stands tsarism. That’s how it was (approximately) in Europe from 1815 to 1905.
In 1891, writes Lenin, French and German colonial policy was insignificant, while Italy, Japan and the United States had no colonies at all. But then:
«In Western Europe a system had come into being (N.B. this!! Think over this!! Don’t forget this!! We live not only in separate States, but also in a certain system of States; it is permissible for the anarchists to ignore this; we are not anarchists), a system of States, on the whole constitutional and national. Side by side with them was powerful, unshaken, pre-revolutionary tsarism, which had plundered and oppressed everyone for hundreds of years, which crushed the revolutions of 1849 and 1863.
Germany (in 1891) was the county of advanced socialism. And this county was menaced by tsarism in alliance with Boulangism!
The situation was quite, quite diffèrent from what it is in -, when tsarism has been undermined by 1905, while Germany is waging a war to dominate the world. A different pair of shoes!!
To identify, even to compare the international situations of 1891 and 1914, is the height of unhistoricalness.
Stupid Radek wrote recently in the Polish manifesto (Befreiung Polens) that ‘Staatenbau’ is not the aim of the Social-Democratic struggle. This is arch-stupidity! It is half-anarchism, half-idiocy! No, no, we are not at all indifferent to the Staaten bau, to the system of States, to their mutual relations».101
Making the State was, in this case, Polish national independence: system of States
and mutual relations
were the forces in play within the balance of power, a balance at that point shaken by imperialist war. The simplification of the New Leviathan
theory only echoed the limitations of imperialist economicism
if hostility to the principle of the State was to be extended to utilising bourgeois democracy and to the struggles for national self-determination. The strategy for 1917 would make use of the legal gaps in the State that followed on from the democratic and bourgeois February Revolution: taking the Commune as its model it would claim all power to the Soviets
for the proletarian October Revolution: would take up ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in the face of the contradictions of a system of States
order that was breaking up in the front line of the trenches: and would make use of the national question
and self-determination in order to blow up that prison of the peoples
the Tsarist empire.
Using the democratic State: the Commune-State as dictatorship of the proletariat: the theory of system-State balance: national struggles for the independence of new States: these were four theoretical questions on the State and on imperialism on which Lenin fought a relentless battle between 1915 and 1916, and which by 1917 had become practical issues in the revolution. Only by joining up all the pieces of the mosaic can we understand the terms in which the draft of State and Revolution in the summer of 1917 organically developed and laid out the theory of the State, certainly taking into account the clash with Bukharin, and focusing on all the inexactitudes within that confrontation.
‘State totalitarianism’ and the move towards Fascism
From the - documents the reader will recall that at the end of April 1949 Pier Carlo Masini sent Arrigo Cervetto some Bordighist material which again according to Masini went beyond Marx, beyond Lenin
. We may guess that Masini was focused on the State: in fact, he writes on the one hand of sharp theoretical elements borrowed from anarchism that can be reintegrated into the anarchism of the vanguard
and on the other of «eliminating all Bordiga’s authoritarian, Jacobin, and basically abstract inconsistencies».102
It will be also be recalled that in Cervetto’s 1976 theoretical review, he refers to Masini’s belief that Bordiga’s critique of the State – which took up the anarchist critique went beyond Lenin
, whereas in fact it took up Bukharin’s critique, which was accepted by Lenin
. As we have seen, all this wasn’t just splitting hairs: anarchism certainly agreed with the stress on «abolishing» the State and on the need to smash
the machinery of the bourgeois State, but fundamentally the basis of these points lay in Marx’s theory. At one and the same time the Commune united Marxists and anarchists in the need to smash the bourgeois State, and divided them over the idea of the Commune-State
as the at last discovered political form
of the ‘provisional State’ of the proletariat.
In accepting
Bukharin’s critique of the State, Lenin was not accepting the whole anarchist critique, but the part of it that stressed the need to blow up
the bureaucratic-military machine – Marx’s theory, which anarchism shared. Lenin had two separate objections to Bukharin’s writings. Firstly, although Lenin’s theory of the State included Bukharin’s critique, this theory was part of a totality of vision – in State and Revolution – that Bukharin’s work lacked. Secondly, Bukharin was too dogmatic about the tendency to concentrate in a ‘national trust’ State capitalism, resulting in the equally dogmatic theory of a totalitarian New Leviathan
.
Two implications arise out of Cervetto noting that Bordiga took his critique of the State from Bukharin and not from anarchism (as Masini had claimed). First, by doing so Cervetto was asserting continuity with Marxism and with Lenin. True, there’s plenty of Bordiga in those 1951 debates, whether his theories were being criticised or accepted, but this was because at the time Bordiga was ‘the’ revolutionary Marxism in Italy, and ‘He’ represented Marxist criticism of the social nature of the USSR. Secondly, Cervetto was also highlighting the dialectical deficiencies of Bukharin’s «New Leviathan» theory, which came down to the «Bukharin-Vercesi-Bordiga» stresses on totalitarianism > Fascistisation
.
Correspondence from the editorial staff of Prometeo at the end of May 1949 indicates that after Masini had mailed him the original material, Cervetto had been catching up with missing issues of the publication. For around two thousand lire*, Cervetto received «issues 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12»103 of Prometeo, a subscription to the next six new issues and The ABC of Communist by Bukharin and Preobrazenskij, the official programme of the Internationalist Communist Party**. This tells us that some work on the theory of the State by Bukharin and by Ottorino Perrone (alias Vercesi) had come to the attention of Cervetto and Masini by the spring of 1949, and were part of their thinking on the theories that would be put forward at Pontedecimo.
Vercesi’s 1948 work ‘Parliamentary Democracy and Popular Democracy’ is dominated by references both direct and indirect to Nikolai Bukharin. For Vercesi, State totalitarianism
is the ultimate product of capitalist development, whether it is expressed in the parliamentary democracy of the West or in the USSR’s popular democracy
. The trend is towards Fascism and State intervention:
[...] today all countries ruled by democracy, whether popular or parliamentary, are going through a phase of increasing Fascism. Leaving aside differences of degree, State interventionism is everywhere triumphant; this is one of the fundamental goals of Fascism, which in its turn represents the only solution capitalism has to offer in the face of the development of the productive forces.104
As regards the tendency towards a State-trust
Vercesi quotes Bukharin, straight from ‘Imperialism and World Economy’:
State capitalist structure of society, besides worsening the economic conditions of the working class, makes the workers formally bonded to the imperialist State. In point of fact, employees of State enterprises even before the war were deprived of a number of most elemental rights, like the right to organise, to strike, etc. A railway or post office strike was considered almost an act of treason. The war has placed those categories of the proletariat under a still more oppressive bondage. With State capitalism making nearly every line of production important for the State, with nearly all branches of production directly serving the interests of war, prohibitive legislation is extended to the entire field of economic activities. The workers are deprived of the freedom to move, the right to strike, the right to belong to the so-called subversive parties, the right to choose an enterprise, etc. They are transformed into bondsmen attached, not to the land, but to the plant. Thy become white slaves of the predatory imperialist State, which has absorbed into its body all productive life.105
Vercesi commented that Bukharin at one and the same time author and victim of the decline of the Soviet State
had a presentiment of the sort of socialism you would get under the Boss-State
. That was in 1948. Regardless of the discovery that Bordiga’s stress on totalitarianism had its roots in Bukharin’s work, one essential point should not be forgotten: the denunciation of the USSR as a Boss-State
was at any rate a shaft of light in the dark night of Stalinism. Even that small flame, limited by Bordiga’s liquidationist stance and his strategic inadequacy, was enough, in 1951, to set off on the road again.
«New Leviathan» and «World Leviathan»
This was why Cervetto carefully followed the Bordiga debate. The file for his 1971 annual report on the ‘stages in the development of the Leninist party in Italy’ contains a note on Bordiga entitled ‘Theory of super imperialism / super-State / Mighty Dollar’. It’s significant that Cervetto is already using the term super-State
. This points to the line of thinking that is again to be found in his 1976 statement, which consists of a lengthy quotation from an article in a 1961 edition of the publication Battaglia Comunista (Communist Battle). Below we reproduce the quotation alongside Cervetto’s synthesis.
Reviewing the - back issues of Prometeo, we find several articles by Bordiga, such as ‘Tendencies and Socialism’ (January/February 1947) ‘America’ (May/June 1947) ‘More on America’ (November 1947) and ‘Europe under Attack’ (August 1949). In these the author, starting from the World War 2 military alliance between Russia and America and American armaments loans to Russia, cautiously touches on the hypothesis that the postwar period will see American imperialism – conceived as a world super-State – buy the Russian ruling class with the Mighty Dollar and economically absorb Russia’s enormous sphere of control.
This forecast is taken up and developed in the section ‘Timeline’* to which the reader is referred.
Bordiga’s theory may be compared with Kautsky’s ultra-imperialism theory.
‘Clearly, Bordiga believes that in this postwar period what Lenin defined ‘an empty abstraction’ will come to pass: that all inter-imperialist clashes – which result from world capitalism’s uneven development – will be eliminated.
Bordiga believes in US ultra-imperialism, and foresees that Western Europe, Africa, Asia, the whole world including Stalin’s Russia, is destined to fall under America’s financial hegemony’, i.e. to become passive pawns of the US global supertrust. ‘Hence, Bordiga believes in the peaceful ultra-imperialism for which Lenin never ceased to reproach Kautsky’.
For Lenin, the ultra-imperialism theory ‘only encouraged the apologists of imperialism in the notion that the rule of finance capital ‘would reduce’ the imbalances and contradictions of the world economy, whereas in reality it ‘exacerbates’ them’. Anticipating that the USSR – the only viable opponent of American imperialism – would instead become its financial serf, Bordiga believed that in the post-war period the imbalances of the world economy would be ‘reduced rather than ‘exacerbated».106
At the end Cervetto notes: «This was part of the basis for the 1975 theory». «Reduced imbalances» was as much a feature of Bordiga’s theories as a mythical deadline
for world crisis**.
We will consider super-imperialism in subsequent chapters on the theory of unitary imperialism. Here we will follow the super-State
line of thought. A passage in ‘More on America’ contains expressions typical of Bukharin.
The United States is the plutocratic monster State that keeps our American proletarian comrades, not the least in this tremendous crisis, under its classic iron heel
.107 A long six-part series (-) and signed A. Orso (Bordiga’s pseudonym) takes up the Marxist theory of the State, in a revealing formulation:
[...] the capitalist system has more than doubled its power, concentrated in the great monster States and in its construction of the new world Leviathans of class rule.108
World Leviathans
echoes Bukharin’s New Leviathans
. But Bukharin never suggested that State capitalism’s monster States
, even centralised in national trusts, could give birth to one single world power.
Asian Leviathans and the theory of the State
We believe we have now adequately documented the development of the 1951 Thesis on the State, and the point of view from which Cervetto was commenting in 1971 and 1976. In The Political Shell Cervetto would further develop his 1976 observations, confronting both Bukharin’s theory and the accusations of anarchism
levelled against State and Revolution by Heinrich Cunow’s German revisionism and Hans Kelsen’s bourgeois liberalism. On the other hand, Cervetto does not analyse the issue of «smashing» the State machine by way of the Lenin-Bukharin clash, from the initial summer 1916 differences, with all their inadequacies and imprécisions, to Lenin’s withdrawal of his reservations, communicated to Bukharin in May 1917.
Was there some reason for Cervetto leaving this issue aside, or was he simply postponing it to future consideration? In the pages that follow our speculations will be informed by scientific caution, taking full responsibility for the interpretations here presented.
The focus on locating in a historical perspective the development of Lotta Comunista’s founding group should not lead us to forget the conditions existing at the time of its first steps. Cervetto’s error (which he later acknowledged) in accepting the simultaneous withering away
of the State, is exposed in the first two points of this statement:
«1. The social revolution, which will bring about a classless society, will be completed by the simultaneous abolition of the bourgeoisie as a class and of the State as the class machinery.
-
2. This simultaneous nature of the revolutionary act will be realised via an assault on the bourgeois regime by mass proletarian organisations (workplace councils, agricultural collectives, people’s committees) in conjunction with the political class (revolutionary minority) movement, which arises out of and leads it».109
In subsequent chapters we will consider just how rigid the initial theory of unitary imperialism was. Certainly, theories such as «the end of nation-State autonomy», «the cancelling out of differences between the metropolises and their colonies», «the end of the politics of power balances» have a distinct echo of the positions Lenin opposed in 1915 / 16. Perhaps because of the strong sense that war was just around the corner, the State took on features of Bukharin’s «New Leviathan». Here is Masini, writing in L’Impulso in March 1951:
Some aspects of the new situation that has been created in every country: the excessive enlargement of the State and the centralisation of dominant groups, from banks to industry, from agriculture to bureaucracy, from the Church to the Army, from the parasitic orders to political cliques, into a ruling class bloc bound together by a relentless will to hold onto power: the central planning of large sectors of the economy, the establishment of an oppressive propaganda machine capable of moulding public opinion in a totalitarian but underhand manner, sophisticated techniques of governing and policing and the unification of the driving forces of the nation’s life towards expansionism. Henceforth war will be total and permanent, conducted on the psychological and economic as well as military level, directly and indirectly: a complex and consummate process aimed at the final annihilation of the enemy.110
It’s as well not to exaggerate these echoes and analogies. The salient fact is that in 1951 there was a general expectation that war was imminent, and this caused the members of GAAP to think in terms of a «new Zimmerwald». It’s no surprise that these were the issues and the materials that they felt compelled to study.
Lenin’s battle to give direction to the «Zimmerwald Left» took place nearly a hundred years ago: it’s been sixty years since the youthful members of GAAP faced the prospect of a «new Zimmerwald»: the theory of an imperialist democracy
is thirty years old now. The reckoning between anarchism and Leninism, the distinction between the theory of totalitarianism and the Marxist theory of the State, the confrontation with Bordighist, with Trotskyist or conciliatory theories – surely these issues belong to past centuries, remnants of once-glorious ideals that are now definitively part of history?
Not so. Those political battles are not a mere subject for an academic seminar, they are our story, the story of our party. We must be able to set our daily political activity within the context of history, Cervetto wrote in 1976: this we cannot do unless we travel the crucial pathways taken by the strategy-party, for by doing so we will grasp the significance of those political and theoretical battles.
A less obvious reason is that the political and theoretical reckoning with those other internationalist currents – these, and not the political currents of the bourgeoisie, are our business – may plausibly be considered closed for this political cycle. But who can foresee the future of class struggle, in a new cycle?
What forms will class consciousness take among the hundreds of millions of proletarians who are right now entering their political apprenticeship? – because the objective process that is tearing them from the countryside and piling them into imperialist development’s new metropolises is taking place at this very moment.
What will happen in Asia, where the new Leviathans of the new strategic phase
are on the rise? Where China and India and many lesser powers, are putting together the instruments of State for their imperialist ascent?
How will some little group of young workers face their 1951, in Shanghai, Canton or Peking, in a Leviathan rearming on the economic, political and military level, but which still wears the ideological garb of China’s false socialism?
Who is to say that faced with their own particular Leviathan, fighting against a single State-party that still calls itself socialist and communist, they won’t take the road of libertarian communism? Or that they won’t choose to fight under some other internationalist banner? And when the breakdown of world order and an imperialist war at the gates brings together another internationalist «Zimmerwald Left», what will we say to them? How will we fight alongside them, how will we persist, with Bolshevik tenacity, to help them towards a clear strategy?
In this precise sense – the real strength of the world proletariat – the issue of european leninism’s relationship with other internationalist currents must be considered open. And in this sense the experiences, the theoretical issues resolved, the battles for clarity that every generation of Marxists has fought, are not only our yesterdays, but a scientific and political legacy for tomorrow.