Rev Left Radio - State and Revolution: Marx, Lenin, & the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Episode Date: October 11, 2018

Alyson Escalante joins Breht to discuss Lenin's major work of political theory, State and Revolution.  Here is a previous show we here at Rev Left did specifically on the Paris Commune entitled "The Paris Commune: A Brief Blossoming of Proletarian Power", for anyone interested in taking a deeper dive: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/the-paris-commune-a-brief-blossoming-of-proletarian-power Find, Follow, and Support Alyson here:  Articles: https://medium.com/@alysonescalante Twitter: https://twitter.com/Alysonesque?lang=en Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/alyesque?source=user_profile--------------------------- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv8-2h2iNjU Please send all new logo designs to [e-mail]!  ---------------- Outro: "Police State" by Dead Prez Find and support their work here: https://deadprezblog.wordpress.com Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

You have the emergence in human society of this thing that's called the state. What is the state? The state is this organized bureaucracy. It is the police department. It is the army, the Navy. It is the prison system, the courts, and what have you. This is the state. It is a repressive organization.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade Red O'Shea. And today we have on Allison Escalante from our previous gender abolition, Michelle Foucault and Marxism-Leninism episode to tackle state and revolution, the monumental work of political theory written by Lenin in 1917 right before the October Revolution. This is an incredibly important text and I think a good, interesting, formative conversation between Allison and I on the topic. We also take it and apply it to today and how this book is relevant for us today, et cetera. So I really think people will enjoy this conversation. I had a hell of a time researching it and actually recording it. Allison is a friend of mine, a really principled comrade,

and so it's always fun to have these discussions with her and sort of work through these ideas. So yeah, I hope you really enjoy it. Before we go into the episode, though, I do want to mention the fact that Rev Left Radio is looking for a new logo. I think it's kind of time to move on a little bit. The logo we had was sort of thrown together last minute in the early days of the show. And while it's served as well,

kind of interested to see what other logos we can run with. If anybody creates a logo for Rev Left, submits it to us, and we accept it, we put it up, we will pay you some money, we will link to anything you want us to link to, whether that's your art or your Twitter page or whatever, we'll link to it in all the show notes. So every episode we release, we'll have whatever link you prefer, embedded in the show notes and giving you credit for creating the logo, and then anything else you want to work out. maybe we can figure something else out as well to sweeten the pot a little bit. So yeah, if you have any submissions for a new RevLeft logo

and you want to kind of win this little contest and get some money and some sort of recognition and credit in the show notes, go ahead and submit your logos to The Revolutionary Left at gmail.com. That's The Revolutionary Left at Gmail.com. Dave and I will reach out to you and let you know if you won. And as usual, if you like this episode, if you like what we're doing here at Revolutionary Left Radio, You can always support the show by becoming a Patreon member at patreon.com forward slash revel-left radio.

We have a bunch of goodies. We give out to our patrons every month, including bonus episodes, a book club, a private Facebook group, and much more. So if you're interested in sort of engaging in that community and getting more Reve-Left episodes and actually engaging with me directly, whether on Facebook or in the book club, sign up and we can start talking. So yeah, with all of that said, let's go ahead and get into this wonderful episode with Allison Escalante on State and Revolution. All right, welcome back, Allison, for people that maybe missed your first appearance on the show or don't know who you are. Would you like to give a little background about who you are, introduce yourself a little bit, et cetera? Sure, so I was previously on talking about Foucault and gender and Londonism and all sorts of stuff.

I am a, I mostly do writing from a Marxist perspective trying to do Marxist theory. I'm also involved in organizing in the Pacific Northwest and, you know, doing attempts to do sort of base building work up there. My background is in academic philosophy. I dropped out of grad school after spending a while there and got really into Marxism in that context. And then now I've spent a lot of time online sort of writing about and trying to synthesize it in a more sort of practical and less academic context.

so that it's useful and that people can put it to work today in sort of their socialist struggles. Yeah, and I think on our last episode, I think we, like, you know, vibed really well and we had, like, a good back and forth and a good rapport. And so I think even in that episode at the end of it, I, like, asked you to come back on to do this, to do this episode. And it's like three months later, and we're making it happen. Yeah, I'm super excited. It's such an awesome text, honestly. Definitely, yeah. And, you know, it was so fun to read it.

I mean, I've read it before, but, like, really going through what you know you're doing in a, basically a presentation on the book. You read it in a more like fine-toothed way and you really like get into the guts of it and you kind of think about, you know, what does this imply? What are the assumptions underneath it? And so reading it with that sort of orientation really, I think, brings out the depth of this work. And I think it's an important text for like even non-Marxist on the left. I think you can get a lot out of it.

And, you know, there are some parts where, you know, he goes in on the anarchist. But I think the, I think an anarchist, you know, who hasn't read state and revolution and kind of has a sort of caricaturized idea of what Lenin stood for. What might be pleasantly surprised with some of the stuff that Lenin and angles, you know, talk about when they talk about the state, when they talk about bureaucracy, etc. Definitely. And I mean, I think for me, that was sort of my experience when I first read it and a lot of other people I've talked to is realizing that the text isn't primarily a polemic against the anarchists, right? He sort of is less concerned with them

than sort of where the social Democrats have gone in a certain direction and sort of how the debate has become between anarchists and social democrats and there's not really a Marxist voice on it. Right. And yeah, in the sort of course of, you know, attacking the social Democrats, there are moments when, you know, he basically defends the anarchist position or clarifies it in the face of misunderstandings by social Democrats. And I think it becomes clear that Lenin sees anarchists, despite all the differences we may have with, you know, as Marxists with anarchists, sees them almost as closer to where he is than he sees social Democrats. Definitely.

So I guess we can just jump into it. And I do have some intro questions before we get into the text itself. And we might have touched on it a little bit right there. But really, let's go into this. What is the overall importance of this work for Marxists in particular? Why should we value it so highly? Yeah. So, I mean, I think my main thought on that is that it's a really, really concise and readable exploration of the state that is useful, you know, not just in the historical context.

it was written in. Like Lenin definitely is writing in a context, but he's also sort of doing this broader, more abstract work about what states are in almost any class society that I think is really cool. And it makes it sort of something that Marxists can use in a lot of different contexts to try to understand what the state they're living under looks like, what sort of antagonisms it's operating with and trying to be able to do an analysis of how to relate to it. So I think that's what's really, really cool about it. And it's also just one of those texts that like, you know, it's, a polemic, but it also is very theoretically complex. I mean, reading back through it, you know, annotating very closely, I was really in awe of how complex and really fantastic the argument that Lenin makes is. And I think, you know, even if you don't necessarily think Lenin is the most relevant theorist for the work that you're doing, there's something you just appreciate even about how well-crafted this argument is. Right. And we were talking about, I think, before we started recording, you know, really how relevant it is, both the pieces from angles and Marx, but also the way Lenin talks, the way he writes, the way he talks about opportunists,

etc. It means just as relevant today as it was back then. I think one of the big, you know, values of this work is that Lenin goes and really kind of elucidates the Marxist and kind of carries forward to new heights, the Marxist theory of the state, and really like defends marks and angles from those who at the time, and still to this day, sort of opportunistically distort and warp the original Marx and Engels works. I think we might get into this when we talk about context, but I think Lenin was initially sort of confused about the state and had debates with like Bucharin about what the Marxist view of the state was and kind of prompted him to go back and actually read Marx and angles on the state and then he comes out and, you know,

his position has been changed and then he does a good job of defending it. And you can read Marx and Lenin through or Marx and angles through Lenin. I think, you know, if you haven't really been able to get into a lot of deep, heavier Marxist works or whatever from the past, and this is kind of an accessible way to sort of understand Marx through the lens of Lenin, who I think does a really appropriate and good job of sort of representing Marx and Engels in a really honest way. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's the thing is the text that he's dealing with are all over the place across Marx and Engels writing, down to even like personal letters they were sending, right? So you actually get this incredible sort of overview of a lot of their work and even the historical

development starting in the Communist Manifesto and later being refined by them in their later works. that is, you know, a really cool benefit of this text. I could just imagine if Marks was still alive and seeing the developments. I think Marks would be like applauding Lennon as Lennon kind of tears through Marx's naysayers and distortors. I would love to hear a conversation between Marx and Lennon. That'd be fascinating. Right. The last thing before we move on about the importance of the work, I think is that, you know,

kind of zooming out a little bit, Lennon really defends in a really robust way the need for revolution. And he doesn't have any utopian, sentimental, or idealistic. notions of what revolution means. It means violence. It means overthrowing a class of oppressors. And it's the only possible way to transcend capitalism. In the process of defending the need for revolution, you know, he goes through and sort of tears the liberal and social democratic idealism concerning gradualism and reformism and this idea, which we still hear today, that you can have a peaceful transition towards socialism. He just dunks on all of that in a really relevant

way. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's one thing that I really appreciate about the text overall is I think that Lenin is, like, very attuned to utopianism as a problem. And even to, like, sort of how discussions of communism, even on the revolutionary end, could be potentially utopian if we're not careful about them. And the whole, like, fifth chapter of this text, which is just sort of the nitty-gritty of the economic changes that's going to take to build communism is so just rounded in what a scientific view of socialism would look like. That's not just building and wishing in a utopia, but is, like, working and theorizing and

struggling to create new economic conditions. Definitely. And you know, naysayers from not only the left, but I mean like the center and the right who talk about socialist as, you know, this utopian, idealist, you know, conception of a world that doesn't exist and can never exist. I mean, if you really read Lenin and you read Marxist, this like hard-nosed, scientific, materialist analysis of reality is far less idealist and utopian than anything that even most liberals and conservatives believe in. So also I do want to touch a little bit on context. What was going on in Russia and the world at the time? Why did Lenin feel it necessary to write and focus on this topic, etc? Is there any historical context you can give for people

before we get into it? Sure. Yeah. So the context of this text is fascinating because it's written in the middle of just this intense revolutionary period. So this text is written after the February revolution has already overthrown the czar. And there is sort of a new system in Russia with the provisional government at this point already being led by Kerensky, sort of taking official power and largely backing the capitalist interests and the capitalist parties. And at the same time, you have a system of Soviets, which are mostly composed of the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, the socialist revolutionaries, and a few smaller groups who are sort of kind of competing for power at the same time. And this is sort of, you know, in the historical sense, the classic dual power

situation where you almost had these two states that existed next to each other. So I think, you know, for Lenin, like why the state is a question that matters in that moment is very obvious because there are two states that exist in that situation. And one of them is explicitly capitalist. And the other is perhaps trying to pursue something else. So I think that's the really interesting historical moment. And I think the other concern for Lenin is that those other socialist parties outside the Bolsheviks are taking what he sees as an opportunity to stance towards the provisional government. So you see Mensheviks, you see socialist revolutionaries injuring into the provisional government and taking positions there within the capitalist state

and arguing that that's a way to further socialism. And I think that's a concern that is central for London is why that's a flawed strategy. Yeah. And like, you know, the idea that this is being written in basically, I believe, the summer of 1917, so right before the October revolution. And if I'm not mistaken, I think Lenin was still sort of working on this text as the October Revolution began to break out. And there's some historical line where he was like, it's fun or actually carrying out revolution than it is writing about it. So he had to kind of put the book to the side and actually do the thing.

But, you know, really, I think about it also as like, this is the first time where Marxism is being attempted to be put into actual practice on a large grand scale. And these questions are coming to the fore as the revolutionary sort of momentum develops. And Lenin is in the middle of that momentum. So simultaneously leading it, helping lead it, and synthesizing theory to guide it. And I think that is, you know, an interesting and important way to kind of think of this text as well. It is a text that is really blossoming out of a revolutionary moment.

And that makes it all the more beautiful and all the more relevant as revolutionaries, I think. Absolutely. And I mean, I think the other thing, too, is that when Lenin's writing this text, it's when he's in exile. So the provisional government sort of framed a lot of the Bolshevik leaders and even some of the Mensheviks. as having been German spies because this is during World War I. So Lenin actually had to flee the state at this point and I believe he was in Finland when he was writing this text

because of state repression. So in this text he's thinking about the state as this repressive apparatus that's whole job is to crush sort of the struggle for socialism. You know, he's personally experiencing that effect of the state as he's writing it. We'll keep going back and forth whenever anybody brings up a point. But I think it's important to know

that like Marx and Angles back in their day, they were, you know, very much hounded by, arrested, hassled by the various European states and they were exiled at different times. Lenin, the same sort of thing. So it's kind of funny also when you have like these quote unquote anti-state libertarians

or right-wangers, talking about how much they hate the government when in reality and we'll get into what the state means and why it does this. But it's like these leftist radicals have always been the ones, even up to this day that take the brunt of the system. It's not these right-wing weirdos that have to face off with these right-wing states. It's leftists. And Marx and Lenin, you know, were oppressed by

their, by various governments far more than these, you know, libertarians today like to think they are. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think the theory of the state that gets forwarded here, you know, it also explains why that's the case so perfectly. Right. Exactly. So let's go ahead and get into it. And I think that's the perfect sort of segue to the text and the first fundamental question when I hear anybody writing or talking about this text, sort of the first thing. And as people that have been trained in philosophy. We do this as well, but let's get the definitions on the table. Lenin drawing on and defending the view of state put forward by Marx and Engels calls the state the product of class antagonisms in Chapter 1 and, quote, a special organization of force in chapter

two. Marks calls it an organ of class domination. So building off these one-liners, what is the capitalist state according to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and what are its primary functions? Sure. So, yeah, I mean, all of those sort of capture what Lenin's really interesting. in, which is the idea that you can't answer that question without thinking about class society already. So, you know, from a Marxist perspective, class society constantly has class struggle occurring within it, right? And this can happen in all sorts of spaces. But even liberal union efforts and things that aren't explicitly revolutionary express a struggle between the classes, which are occurring in all times within capitalism. And so for Lenin, I think what he's really getting at with

those one-liners and what Marx is getting at, too, is that the state isn't. this thing that exists outside the context of class struggle, but the state exists to intervene in class struggle and actually make sure that it results in the victory of the dominant class. In this text, you'll get examples of Lennon talking about how the capitalist minority needs the state function in order to oppress the working majority. And so the state exists not as something outside a class struggle or above it or trying to solve it, but actually as an instrument of class oppression that continues to act on behalf of a certain class to suppress another. Right. And it mediates, you know, it sort of holds in place the exploitation and all of that,

but it also mediates conflict between segments of the ruling class itself. We're seeing sort of right now, even in the U.S., this sort of these huge splits between the ruling class as far as which way to go forward. The whole Trump presidency really brought a lot of those contradictions to the four. The state is there to sort of maintain power, even in this situation, where the ruling class sort of goes at each other. And, you know, contrary to these ideas of the Illuminati or these conspiracy ideas about how the world works, Marx made this point, you know, back in the day, the ruling class is not one monolith. It doesn't have one, you know, certain set of goals and ambitions.

There are, you know, splits and whatnot. And when the ruling class splits, when there are these really fevered moments of interruling class disputes, that does tend to create a space for insurgency from below. So the state, as well as sort of maintaining the exploitation of the capitalist system, also has an incentive to make sure that the beefs between the ruling class itself don't get too out of control precisely because that will create space for sort of proletarian movements, anti-class society movements, anti-capitalist movements, et cetera. Absolutely.

And I think also this is where Lenin consistently refers to Engels formulation also of like special bodies of armed men and sort of the existence of the standing army. and a police force who can maintain order, even when those crises occur among the ruling class themselves, right? Well, you can look at how the function of, I think, even fascism or military coups to come in and resolve those crises that can happen when you have fracturing there shows that the state can continue to sort of have that weird stabilizing function almost to make sure that revolt doesn't occur there.

Definitely, and first I'll talk about this. I was reading something about, you know, the state and revolution just like doing research on it. And I came across this one article, and it kind of had a cool metaphor. It's pretty simplistic, but at the same time, it kind of helps highlight maybe what the idea of the state is, though I'm sure most listeners are sort of intuitively picking it up. But it's this metaphor of the house, right? And in the front room, in the showroom, when you walk into the house of the capitalist state, it is fundamentally, you know, the parliamentarian system, the illusions of democracy,

the illusions that you have to say, oh, look, there's battles between these two parties. They must have real differences about how those societies should be. be structured, et cetera. It's basically a show that the system puts on for itself. And in the cellar, the metaphor goes on, are the armed guards of the state, right? The police and the military, the things that are, when push comes to shove, dispatch to either put down workers' movements or feminist movements or, you know, Black Lives Matter movements, standing rock. You know, when push comes to shove, the system which pretends to be all about democracy and freedom and liberty comes down extremely hard with extreme violence on anything that threatens

the status quo. And the final sort of room in this house is like the backroom, right? What I think Lenin refers to it as the executive, which doesn't really cohere well with our idea of the executive branch. It's basically the real rulers, right? The people that the people that have a disproportionate amount of power that have these backroom discussions, you know, the fact, for example, why you never get to a vote on imperialism. You know, that's not up for a vote. Capitalism's not up for a vote. And there's a reason that those things don't make their way to the showroom, things that we're supposed to be able to vote on decide on, even though they're hugely consequential. I mean, just look at the defense budget.

Look at the cost it takes to maintain imperialism. What if that money was put instead towards health care, infrastructure, education, et cetera? So I think with this house metaphor, you sort of get this idea about how the system shows you one face and it has these other hidden faces that will come out at a moment's notice. And as far as fascist movements and reactionary movements, I think you and I were talking about this a little bit on Twitter the other day. It's going down calls fascist movements auxiliaries of state force, right? It's like when the hierarchies of capitalism, of class and race that capitalism is sort of premised on, when those are under pressure from left-wing movements, when the capitalist class as a whole is facing

off with revolutionary left-wing proletarian movements, fascism, even though it often presents itself as being anti-government or anti-state, comes into the fore to sort of beat back and assist the state in beating back left-wing challenges. to its hegemony. So I think thinking about fascism that way is incredibly important. Yeah, and I think historically, you know, it's very easy to see, even though, you know, Hitler would later on gut the brown shirts,

the early on function of the brown shirts in Nazi Germany as almost a paramilitary force that's, you know, operating with sort of the state consent, but not completely to engage in terror against the working class movements and against Jewish populations. It's like really emblematic of how fascism is sort of the state adapting to that. You know, it's the classic, the Nazi, denounced a lot of the violence that the brown shirts were doing while functionally creating

the context for them to do it and basically giving them the ability to do it in the first place. Exactly right. And we kind of see, you know, some analogs to that today, like the unmasking Antifa Act or whatever is like you can see how in sort of an indirect way these movements are supporting each other and maybe not even indirect. I mean, there has been multiple situations where it's been shown that fascist and police forces have been explicitly working together, texting each other, trying to target people. I mean, the three percenters were helped putting down Antifa protesters at a rally with the police next to him. So, I mean, at times, even that facade comes down and it's like, oh, it's very fucking clear who's on whose side here. Right. And I think

that's what's so, like, important about Lenin's view is that every part of the state, whether or not it's, you know, the explicit armed forces of it, whether or not it's the parliament or even the sort of more boring bureaucratic managerial side, all is working together towards class domination. Definitely. Now, before we move on, And I think one way to sort of like spike the ball on a lot of these back and force with these questions is to sort of quote from the text itself. And Lennon himself quotes extensively from Engels and Marx, as I mentioned earlier. So I'm just going to read a little bit from the book. I'm going to start with an Engels quote and then sort of Lennon reacting to it.

Awesome. Engel says, the state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from the outside. Just as little is it the reality of the moral idea or the image and reality of reason as Hegel asserted. Rather, it is a product of society. society at a certain stage of development. It is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms, which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, may not consume themselves in society in sterile struggle,

a power apparently standing above society becomes necessary, whose purpose is to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of quote-unquote order. And this power arising out of society, but placing itself above it and increasingly separating itself from it is the state. Now, that's angles. And then here's what Lenin says in response. Lenin goes, here we have expressed in all its clearness the basic idea of Marxism on the question of the historical role and meaning of the state. The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where, and to the extent that the class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class

antagonisms are irreconcilable. It is precisely on this most important fundamental point that distortions of Marxism arise, and he goes on to talk about distortions of this idea. But this is really a materialist, an historical materialist analysis of the state. The state is not some concept is not some, you know, just idea that the Enlightenment thinkers came up with or whatever. The state is a development of certain stages of historical development. It comes, it rises and the implication being in the future, if we live long enough to see it, if those economic conditions change enough

that the state itself no longer plays that historical role and will leave the historical stage. So this is a very historical materialist approach to the state, and I think the analysis of the state is all the better for it, I mean, obviously. What's really interesting there, right, is that this is really, I think, a powerful critique of sort of the liberal social contract theory, right, that talks about the state as sort of the rational coming together of people

to avoid chaos and sort of this, consensual agreement that we're all just going to let the state mediate things when lennon is saying no the state doesn't serve a general interest actually the state is a partisan function and then justifies itself later on through that sort of mythology exactly let's see here should i read one more quick quote from angles on the state yeah go for you okay i can't help myself uh angles goes a little later page 15 of state and revolution angles says the state therefore has not existed from all eternity There have been societies which managed without it, which had no conception of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this cleavage.

We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but is becoming a positive hindrance to production. They will disappear as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. along with them the state will inevitably disappear the society that organizes production anew on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machine where it will then belong in the museum of antiquities side by side with the spinning wheel and the bronze axe so that is angles looking forward and being like you know the earlier quote i read is like if the state is a historical development based on certain conditions that give rise to the state obviously the cleavage of society into classes, et cetera.

If that's what it came from, then projecting into the future, we can kind of see this idea where the state itself will no longer become necessary once we've transcended class society entirely. Exactly. And I mean, I think what I love about that is it's what you see Lenin really work on in the final chapter of this text is that, you know, capitalism and the social relations it imposes are a hindrance to productive forces at a certain point. And, you know, this is one thing that Marx emphasizes a lot,

which is, you know, capitalism has organized the way. workers to an extent and universalized sort of productive abilities in such a way that bosses are redundant. They're literally holding back the system from being more efficient. Absolutely. And I mean, the whole idea of like bullshit jobs or the whole idea of like, you know, unleashing the creative power of people right now wrapped up in meaningless wage labor toil just for the, you know, reproduction of commodities and consumer goods for no real reason. I mean, just like the the unleashing of productive forces on every line could be different if it wasn't so narrowly constrained by this absurd. capitalist system.

Honestly. Yeah. But moving on, we talked about, and this is a big part of this text as well, which is Lenin, by way of clarifying Marxism and Marxist and Angles views of the state, he's also attacking opportunists and people who distort it. I think the term opportunists would be people that sort of shroud themselves in Marxist rhetoric, but who are fundamentally other social Democrats, liberals, et cetera, who present a Marxist face or pretend to be speaking in the name of Marxism, but do so in a way that

radically distorts Marxist's view of things and just kind of strips it of its revolutionary zeal, et cetera. So what are some of the main distortions of the Marxist view of the state by the opportunist of the time? And how do those distortions sort of continue to live on in our own? Yeah. So I mean, I think this is really one of the central questions. It's also my favorite sort of quote from this where Lenin says, all the social chauvinists are now Marxists. In parentheses, don't laugh. which I think really gets at how angry he is and what are happening there. And yeah,

I think that the opportunism that he's talking about is this sense in which a lot of people have taken up calling themselves Marxists and then basically forwarding and I think he's not shy about this capitalist politics and just really trying to rehabilitate Boutchwal politics under the banner of Marxism. And one thing that I want to say

more rhetorically is that I like how mad when it is about this. That really makes him angry. and I think it should, and it's something that I think we need to be angry about today because we see this happening all over the place. But sort of like there's several distortions that he's interested in. I think one of the more interesting ones is he's really mad about this idea that the state can reconcile class interests. So that instead of the state being a way of sort of, you know, oppressing one class in the name of the other,

the state can be a place for the classes, can come together and can work towards the mutual interest of society. And for Lenin, that's just absolutely impossible. The state wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the need for class struggle to function at all. So there wouldn't be the possibility of that reconciliation. And then the other one has to do with this concept of the state withering away, which you sort of started to get to in that Ingalls quote that you looked at, where London thinks there's a lot of distortions about what the withering away of the state means, that essentially moves away from a revolutionary theory of that towards a more gradualist approach.

Right. Yeah, and I think there's also what Lenin perceives to be some anarchist distortions of the idea of just like sort of taking, like that angles quote. I mean, an anarchist could read that quote sort of decontextualized that I just read a little bit ago and sort of not an agreement completely. But then when we're going to get into later what the withering of the way of the state actually means and how it's connected up with the dictatorship of the proletariat. But suffice it to say for now that the withering away of the state can't happen by force of will or, you know, just like smash the state the first chance you get. what angles and Lennon and Marx are getting at with the withering way of the state is that when conditions are right, the state will

organically become superfluous. It's not something you can force. It's something that the conditions themselves have to organically give rise to. And so we'll go into that a little bit later, but sticking kind of back to the opportunists, you know, one of the other ideas that he attacks is this false idea that, like you mentioned, the state is above classes and that it's

neutral, right? Like this is the sort of liberal delusion that the state is a neutral arbiter of interests that, you know, yeah, we have some money in politics and some crony capitalism. But for the most part, you know, if we just had a state free from the influence of like super PACs or something, that the state would be neutral. And that's, of course, an absolute delusion. And it's never the case. And I think anybody listening to us sort of has an intuitive understanding of the absurdity of that. But also, I think, bring it into our own time,

you know, maybe the term Marxist, right? The opportunist of his time would call themselves Marxist, but really not be. The opportunists of our time, because we live in the wake of the Cold War, Marxism is still sort of a scary term. But they sort of try to rehabilitate socialism, and we get the same exact thing. Instead of Marxism, these politicians, these people come to the fore saying that, yes, I'm a socialist, and, you know, sort of engage in entreeism, engage in like bringing the Democratic Party to the left, the same exact mistakes that Lenin is saying don't work and literally can't work because you have a fundamentally flawed understanding of the state and how it operates and like this whole idea that you can just enter the state and make it

good from the inside is absolute nonsense and i think um you know jacobin gets a lot of shit from the left and perhaps jacobin ds a burney maybe they're all like bridges for liberals to slowly come over to the left and certainly lots of people who are energized by that sort of political formation have since become more and more radicalized so it's hard for me to say that it's a wholly useless or bad thing i don't think it is i think ultimately you know shift people a little bit to the left and then put them into me and Allison's hands and we'll take him further. But certainly, like, Jacobin, as a publication, would be called opportunists by Lenin. It would be called Kotzky.

They have quotes of Lenin and Marx on the back of their magazines and stuff, and then they go in on like the Soviet, whatever. I don't want to get into it, but like we very much have opportunists and people shrouding themselves in the rhetoric of socialism, but ultimately pushing this sort of electoral, liberal line that we have to deal with in our own time. And when Lenin's talking about it, it's as relevant as if he was writing yesterday. Right. And I think what's important is they're making the exact same error that Lenin is criticizing, right?

Because for like especially Democratic Socialists and I guess Social Democrats in the United States, what they want the state to do is to play that mediating function. They're not trying to like abolish the capitalist social relations. They're not trying to get rid of the capitalist class. They've kind of just accepted that capitalism is going to exist. but there needs to be some third party that makes sure that the working class isn't suffering too badly. And so what they really want is exactly that view of the state that Lenin's saying is impossible, which is a state that comes in and makes the working class and the capitalist class work together more smoothly

and more coherently and sort of brushes over class struggles. And what's so important is that Lenin saying that that is just a fundamentally idealist understanding of what the state is. If we want to start with materialism and the way that Ingalls does, the only thing the state can do is be a organ of class oppression, basically, and class domination. And it's never going to be that neutral third party that gives us a social welfare sort of safety net so that workers don't fall too low. And then we're all happy even under capitalism. Right. Yeah, it literally never can be. And even in those moments where there's enough space for sort of social democratic movements to maybe get some big reforms or some big electoral wins, you know, the moment that's the moment that's, you know, the moment that's, you know,

those wins become inconvenient for the ruling class, they will be rolled back. I mean, you can, that's why I've said this before, but that's how you can go from the New Deal to Reganomics in a couple of decades. I mean, it's a systematic rolling back of even the most robust liberal reforms. And as the empire crumbles, as climate change intensifies, as these contradictions intensify, there's going to be virtually no room for even the most milk-toast liberal reforms that can stand any chance of lasting because as things get more intense, the ruling class sort of batten downs the hatches. The fascist movements come out to the fore with their teeth out ready to fight. And in that context, you're not going to be able to get these big victories

for the working class. So maybe in nicer economic times and historical conditions, social democracy can get some meaningful reforms for people. And certainly, you know, something like universal health care, even in the confines of this hellhole of a system, is something I'm deeply, you know, concerned about and will fight my ass off for because it makes material differences in people's lives, but with this idealist conception of the state, you're going to be fucking bulldozed the first chance that they get to bulldoze you. And I think Lenin's like, you should be concerned about this and you should be aware of this. Yeah, I think the other important realization there, and Lenin gets to imperialism a little bit, but this isn't the text where he's most concerned

with it, but you could build all of that social democratic safety net and still completely leave the imperialist base of the United States in place, right? So you could be taking care workers in that way, but still internationally have this exploitation of the global south and the contradiction developed between the imperial core and the periphery completely in place, still exploiting and killing on a massive scale. Exactly. And, you know, Lenin is concerned with imperialism. And in this work, he mentions a few times the notion of the oppressed classes, right? Like, he does say that the proletarian because of their position in the capitalist sort of system as industrial workers is the mechanism

by which a revolution can be led, but he talks about the proletariat leading all oppressed classes. So this is an incredibly, like in 1917, a pretty goddamn advanced understanding of how imperialism works and how, like, there's a lot more nuance than just the working class versus the global bourgeoisie. There are strata in those different, you know, classes broadly, but there's also people that, you know, are victims of imperialism or et cetera.

And I'm not sure if he, I think I remember correctly, and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't he at least mention the, concept of national liberation struggles in this work? Do you remember that? Yeah, he does get to national liberation a little bit. He kind of glosses over it, unfortunately, but he brings it up. And I mean, I think, you know, it's really interesting when he talks about the proletariat liberating the other classes, you know, he straight up says the proletariat can liberate portions of the petty bourgeois, right? So it's so broad even, an amount of other classes that can

be brought out of capitalist conditions by the proletariat for him. But I think it's easy to make the jump to thinking about national liberation in sort of the classic Leninist context. Definitely. I mean, he did sort of gloss over it because it kind of escaped the purview of what he was trying to do with this work. But he did hint at it and it's very clear that obviously Marxist, Leninist, leftists of all sorts have taken that on and taken it further, developed it. You know, lots of thinkers coming out of colonial, you know, occupations like Phenon, for example, you know, took this analysis and went further with it. But it's just interesting to see these little hints of these things in here. So let's move on because in the book, I think chapters two and

where they really talk about the Paris Commune. You know, the Paris Commune and Marxists, and even I think on just broad left version of history, the Paris Commune is really the first proletarian revolution. You know, I mean, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, those were bourgeois revolutions. Those were not proletarian revolutions. The Paris Commune stood out as like the first proletarian revolution

and Marx and Engels immediately went into understanding it, synthesizing it, using it as data points by which they can, you know, advance their own theory. So why was the Paris Commune so important to Marx and Engels? and what Marxist concepts came out of Marx and Engels' analysis of the commune? Sure. So, yeah, so the commune, real quick, just as a basic historical point, was a period in 1871, where for two months, Paris was more or less ruled by radical socialists, and like a very true sense of the word.

And interestingly, basically, the commune emerged out of the war that was occurring in France between Prussia and France in this brief period where Paris was not totally under control either of the Germans or the French and the French wanted to retake control of Paris but at that time a radical socialist government had already set itself up. So that's sort of the historical moment that they're all working around

and I mean for Lenin and Marx I think what's really important is that it's the first time that we see what Marx is going to call the dictatorship of the proletariat beginning to emerge and it's really the concrete expression of proletarian power put into work

Lenin talks a lot about what's distinct about the commune. But what's sort of important for him is that it is actually a worker state. And there's a couple of things that indicate this to him. Part of it is that the bureaucracy and the administration loses social prestige. To be part of the state under the commune, you make workers' wages, you functionally are a worker within the broader body of workers. So the state as this separate expression of class power for the capitalist goes away, and it begins to express worker power itself. And that's what I think they're really interested in with the commune as this historical break. Yeah. And they talk about these words like breaking up and annihilating the state. They argue that,

like, you know, Marx reacting to the Paris commune says, you know, the famous line, the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. So what is Marx and Engels talking about when they're saying that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery? Yeah. So it's kind of interesting because I think Lenin walks a very fine line on this question, especially in his later part of the work where he talks about even having the bourgeois state without the bourgeois, right? So there's

sort of these interesting things. But I think what's fundamental there is that the commune didn't just take, you know, the existing remains of the second French empire and then orient it towards the workers. There was a complete overhaul and revolutionary sort of approach to

the state that created whole new forms of governance that didn't previously exist. So the smashing of the state isn't just we smashed the French state and then now we live in a stateless situation. It's we smash the capitalist power of the state and then we build worker power

and this is sort of again where Lenin is going to kind of read critically against the anarchists and use the commune as an example where he says the commune smashed the state and then it built the beginnings of a dictatorship of the proletariat but in a sense it didn't build sort of the new

dictatorship strongly enough and that actually caused it to potentially lose power. But what's important in Lennon's and Marx's conception of the smashing of the state here is that it doesn't immediately abolish the conditions of having state power. It abolishes the conditions of capitalist state power, which is an important distinction. And one thing I always like to think about when we're talking, like, if you think of the Paris Commune as the first real proletarian revolution and all these various proletarian uprisings and revolutions that have happened since, it really is this process of experimentation. Yeah, in the same way that feudalism transformed into capitalism over centuries, with fits and starts, with different parts of the globe rising up in bourgeois revolutions being put down, coming back, etc.

The transition from capitalism to socialism or eventually communism, if we live long enough to fucking see it, is going to be similar, right? It's not going to be the first Paris commune or the first Soviet Union figures it all out. And part of being a revolutionary and a member of the conscious proletariat is to think of these things, not so much in like, how do they adhere to my exact ideas of how I think a revolution should go, but what can we learn from the successes and failures and how can I take this entire proletarian heritage with all of its successes and all of its failures and draw out its lessons, right? It's concrete, universalized lessons. And Marx's, you know,

synthesizing and understanding and explaining of the Paris commune's successes and its failures, you know, laid the foundation for a really more robust Marxism that was later picked up by Lenin and Mao and is being picked up by us to this day. Absolutely. I think thinking about it in terms of long-term experimentation is important. I think the other thing that's interesting, too, that Lenin gets at is that Marx thought that the Paris commune was established too soon, right? He had expressed his concerns about the French working class trying to take power that early, but then as soon as they did that, he set that aside and supported them adamantly, right? And so again, even though there is that disagreement strategically going into it, once the movement to seize power by the workers

was underway, Marx was on board and ready to figure out what this meant for the broader socialist strategy. Exactly. And I mean, that's amazing. And he defended it like in the wake of the failure of the Paris Commune or even as it was happening. He was, I think he was working at a newspaper and he had a pretty big platform at the time. And Marx was one of the only voices in Europe really arguing in favor of it. So even though Marx had this theoretical disagreements or disputes with the way that they were going about it, he wasn't such a basically a chauvinist. You know, an ideologue where he's like, my ideas about the world are more important than the actual movements themselves. And he immediately, as you say, went to support it. before we move on to the next question, this will be my longest quote from the book. Totally. I think it's important and, you know, it's about a page, about one full page, maybe a page and a quarter. So stick with me through this, but I think it's just sort of the breakdown of Lennon, talking about how Marx and Engels analyzed it and then with quotes from Marx and Engels,

etc. So Lenin writes, The experiment of the commune, meager as it was, was subjected by Marx to the most careful analysis in his The Civil War in France. They're developed in the 19th century, he says, originating from the days of absolute monarchy, quote, the centralized state power with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature, end quote. With the development of class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character

of the national power of capital over labor of a public force organized for social enslavement of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in Boulder and Boulder relief." The state power after the revolution of 1848 and 1849 became, quote, the national war engine of capital against labor. The second empire consolidated this. The direct antithesis of the empire was the commune, says Marx. It was the positive form of a republic that was not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. What was this positive form of the proletarian, the socialist republic? What was the state it was beginning to create? The first decree of the communism,

and Mark says, was the suppression of the standing army and the substitution for it of the armed people. It goes on, it goes on. But the quote ends, and I'm not going to read it all, even though I wanted to, but it's actually really long. The end of it just says, Lenin says, it is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance. This was particularly necessary for the commune, and one of the reasons of its defeat was that it did not do this with sufficient determination. But the organ of suppression is now the majority of the population and not the minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom, and wage labor. And once the majority of the people itself suppresses its oppressors, a special force for suppression is no longer necessary. In this sense,

the state then begins to wither away. So he's kind of preluding to the withering away, which we'll get to in a bit. But that's sort of just like the breakdown of, you know, I didn't read it all, of course, but this sort of analysis of the commune coming from Marx and Lenin. Absolutely. And I think again, like what's important there is the state function no longer is just the few ruling, right? Getting rid of the army and having the armed people instead is similar to the way in which the bureaucracy of the state no longer stands above as sort of the special elevated petty bourgeois, but are workers themselves now. And again, when we see this transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat, it really is because direct worker power is what's functioning to do the operations that were once done by sort of the few and the set aside in the capitalist state. Exactly. And when they're like forming the commune, it was like the representatives were revocable at any time. They're responsible to the people, and they were only paid, quote-unquote, working men's wages.

So this idea that, you know, in bourgeois parliamentarianism, there's this special privilege class of politicians that stand above the people themselves and they get paid exorbitant amounts, etc. that one of the first acts of the Paris Commune was not only to arm the people as opposed to having a separate, you know, standing army, but also this idea that the functions of the government, the functions of everyday life to keep society going were no longer put into the hands of a privileged class, but put into the hands of the proletariat itself. And unfortunately, like, obviously the Paris Commune was fucking slaughtered and ended in complete and horrible tragedy. I mean, men, women, and children just sort of indiscriminately slaughtered by pretty much a coalition of like reactionary states. forces in Europe at that time. And so one of the criticisms of it was like, how can you, how can you do this project and then be able to defend it? Because right away we see what happens is this fucking bloodletting of, you know, unprecedented

proportions that the ruling class will team up with other national bourgeoisies and come after you. So I think Lenin and Marx really were influenced by this idea of, you know, making a successful revolution is one thing, but defending it is fucking essential. Right. And I mean, especially, you know, for. Lenin after this period, after the October revolution occurs and eventually

World War I wraps up, all these armies that had just been fighting each other had their members joined the white army to go attack Russia. You know, and again, you see the national bourgeoisie who literally were engaged in global warfare at this huge level, unify really quickly

to crush this new socialist project. And then we've seen it in every subsequent attempt since then. Yeah, honestly. It seemed that there's a pattern there. The last thing I'll say, Just one little paragraph from Lenin before we move on to the next question. But Lenin says, and this is important because it talks about what it means to break apart the state and how dictatorship of the proletariat, which we're going to talk about next, is not the same thing as the bourgeois state.

So Lenin says, the communes ceased to be a state insofar as it had to repress, not the majority of the population, but a minority, the exploiters. It had broken the bourgeois state machinery. In the place of a special repressive force, the whole population itself came onto the scene. all of this is a departure from the state in its proper sense and had the commune asserted itself as a lasting power remnants of the state would of themselves have withered away within it it would not have been necessary to abolish its institutions they would have ceased to function in proportion as less and less was left for them to do

so yeah it's awesome it kind of ties in a criticism of what the commune did wrong and then this idea of like this historical materialist analysis of the state when it arises and when it organically starts to fall away But this idea that the commune ceased to be a state, and it was the dictatorship of the proletariat, I think is incredibly interesting and leads well into the next question, which is, what is the dictatorship of the proletariat? And how does it differ in form and content from the bourgeois state? Yeah. So the dictatorship of proletariat, I think this is like, you know, very crucial to this text. And, you know, Lenin will say in this text, like, if you don't support the project of the dictatorship of proletariat, you are not a Marxist. This is what Marx is giving us. That is so important. And I sort of the way that I want to thematize it here, because I think Lenin does this in the chapter on the Paris commune is differentiating it from the anarchist views of pushing back against the state, where Lenin sort of says, you know, the anarchists want to get rid of the capitalist state and then do a way. with all administration and all subordination. And Lenin, in response to that, sort of highlights the way that the proletarian dictatorship

is still going to function with some of these classic state apparatuses at first. He says, and this is in chapter three, quote, we're not utopians. We do not dream of dispensing at once with all administration or with all subordination. These anarchist dreams based upon incomprehension of the task of the proletarian dictatorship

are totally alien to Marxism. And as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination control and foreman and accountants, end quote. And I think that captures something interesting for Lenin, which is that the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it moves to universalize proletarian power, cannot immediately do away with state functions. You still need subordination. You still need control. You still have economies to run. But the difference, and this is what we get out of their analysis of the Paris

commune, is that now it's the workers who are in charge, the proletariat who are overseeing this and who are now not standing as a separate class from the masses, but working in the interest of all the masses of the peasant classes, even of some of the petty bourgeois, to administer society for a liberatory end. Definitely. And I kind of want to touch on the sort of linguistics here, because, you know, here in the West and the U.S., when you hear the term dictatorship, there's a sort of like, you know, recoiling away. The term is a bad term. And so you might ask yourself, why is Lenin and Marx and why are they talking about a dictatorship of the proletariat? But I think the important thing is to understand when you adopt this view of the state, when you see this view of the state as it is, there's no such thing as not a dictatorship, right? It is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It dresses itself up in notions of liberty and freedom and democracy and parliamentarian. but in the final analysis, it is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And the only way to overcome a dictatorship of a small ruling class is for the large exploited class to rise up and overthrow it. And that act of authority, that act of power, that act of violence, you know,

has to be defended. And that is where I think partially the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes incredibly important because not only are you starting to run society according to your own sort of ideas about what's good for the working class, but also there's this militant, desire and necessity to defend it. And I think it leads well into this quote, which honestly is this might be my favorite quote of the entire book because it's just so strongly worded and it like I can just tell like liberals getting uncomfortable when they read it, which is like, you know, fun for me. But Lenin says, but the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of crushing the oppressors

cannot merely be an extension of democracy. Together with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the rich folks. The dictatorship of the proletariat produces a series of restrictions of liberty in the case of the oppressors, the exploiters, and the capitalists. We must crush them in order to free humanity from wage slavery. Their resistance must be broken by force. It is clear that where there is suppression, there is also violence.

There is no liberty. There is no democracy. Angles expressed this splendidly in his letter to Bebel when he said, as the reader will remember that, quote, as long as the proletariat still needs the state, it needs it not in the interest of freedom, but for the purpose of crushing its antagonists. And as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom,

then the state as such ceases to exist. Democracy for the vast majority of the people and suppression by force, i.e. the exclusion from democracy of the exploiters and the oppressors of the people. This is the modification of democracy during the transition from capitalism to communism. it's just powerful yeah it's it's it's unapologetic it's this idea of freedom and liberty is just like

it's dispensed with like it never has existed it's never existed for the vast majority of people and when we get our turn we're not going to allow them the same shit that they would never allow us you know they will slit our throats they will kill our children when it comes to it as the commune attest to so why in the fuck should we be anything but brutal in our sort of suppression of them in the same way that because I mean if you don't what's what's the consequence right if you don't suppress the bourgeoisie if you try to take these more democratic or you know quote unquote acceptable paths to socialism as we've seen in Chile as we've seen in Venezuela when you leave the bourgeoisie intact what do they do every single time they come back they they engage in

sabotage and subterfuge or straight out slaughter and so you know this is something that as Lenin is working to build up a revolution and he doesn't know this yet but it's going to break out into a civil war. I mean, these things come to the fore and they're incredibly important. So that's sort of unapologetic approach to this, I find incredibly refreshing. And it's kind of rare to hear leftist talk so like honestly about that. Absolutely. I mean, it really reminds me of, you know, the famous mouth quote that I still think is fantastic about revolution's not a dinner party. It's an ugly thing, you know, it's something that has weight to it. But once you accept that every state is a dictatorship, which I think Lenin just makes such a compelling case

form by working with Marx and Ingalls here, then you realize that that sort of admittedly sobering view just is what a materialist analysis has to lead us to. And I think for me, the other thing that I like about this is that I think it clarifies Lenin's critique of anarchism in an interesting way. Because Lenin, like, again, you can see throughout the text, is sympathetic to sort of the anarchist impulse, at least more than he's sympathetic to the opportunist impulse. But the problem for London that I think is really important is that if we just smash the state and are done with it, we haven't created, we haven't eliminated the material base that makes the state exist in the first place. And therefore, we haven't really done anything to stop the state from coming back.

Because as long as those class antagonisms still exist and are underlying, then the state's just going to find a way to reemerge. And it comes back in a reactionary way. I mean, it doesn't come back in a liberatory way. I think it was Trotsky who said that if the Bolsheviks didn't when the revolution in the civil war, fascist would have been a Russian term. And I think what Trotsky was getting at is this very idea is like, if we didn't do this, like the reaction to this proletarian movement would have been incredibly brutal and incredibly reactionary. I mean, the Bolsheviks were protecting Jewish folks from pogroms, etc. That would have all came back with a vengeance. And so I think that's really important to remember. I mean, we don't want to work our asses off

to build up a revolution to have it immediately just taken down and destroyed and all of us slaughtered and a new more reactionary form of capitalism gets reinstated. So defending is important. But I do want to ask you a question. This is something that I was thinking of when I was reading this text. And I thought of it like this might be a good interesting road to go down as a like relevant to like today. So at the end of chapter two, Lenin says the forms of bourgeois states are exceedingly variegated. But their essence is the same. In one way or another, all these states are in the last analysis inevitably a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism will certainly bring a great

variety and abundance of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be only one, the dictatorship of the proletariat. So when he talks about a great variety and abundance of political forms, I'm just kind of wondering how far do you think he's willing to take that, right? So I kind of think of places like Rojava and Chiapas, places where the seizure of state power is either impossible or not even an ambition of the of the revolutionaries on the ground right certainly capitalism takes on many exotic forms so can the dictatorship of the proletariat also be sort of this rojavan or chiapas sort of approach to things where they're not taking over the syrian or mexican state they don't even want to but in their territories in so far as they can maintain control of them there is a sort of

maybe tiny or small version of the dictatorship of the proletariat there's there is no capital there's no bourgeois class dominating those little territories, autonomous territory. So kind of what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I don't know. I haven't really thought about that too much, honestly. I think that, so always what we need to come back to is that the manifestation that the dictatorship of the proletariat takes is going to be a reflection of the conditions in which it emerges, right? So yeah, if you don't have sort of the ability to overthrow a national state, but you exist sort of in these marginal spaces, sort of outside both geographically and politically the state, and your establishing power, is that still a dictatorship of the proletariat?

I think I would lean towards saying that if it's not, it's at least a pre-formulation of it in a way that could be agitated further as struggle goes on. And part of the problem, I think, is that when Lenin's writing this text, he's super optimistic about global revolution, especially leading into sort of the October Revolution, Lenin was talking about how he expected the rest of Europe to rise up once the Russians did and that you would see revolution sweep globally in response to the obvious evils of imperialism. And so that kind of didn't happen and is not where we're at today. So you do have these situations that I think are almost outside the purview of what Lenin would have imagined,

where you have these groups of leftists existing in the margins and in the borderlands of already existing states, contending for power in sort of this different way. So I don't know even if the analytic he provides here gives us the best tools to think about it. But I think I would say that at least what those projects are establishing could be a precursor to a proletarian dictatorship as it links up with a larger international movement. Yeah, actually incredibly well said. And that's sort of where my thoughts were kind of drifting as well into that direction. And you know, you mentioned that Lenin was sort of overly optimistic about, you know,

the development of the global revolution. And I think that sort of optimism was also in Marx and angles. Absolutely. I think that's one of the big critiques as we're sitting here defeated and second. in 2018, that we can kind of look back and be like, well, that, if we can say they got anything wrong, it was like the time scale. It was their optimism about how these things would develop. And I don't know how deep that, that getting that wrong cuts to the core of their analysis. I don't think it obviously touches the core of their analysis or undermines

their entire project. But I do think it's interesting because, right, we're against the clock in a way that they weren't, but they were more optimistic about how much time it would take to do it. So it's just kind of this, it's this interesting little interplay between those two realities. Definitely. And I mean, one other things I would say, though, is, like, in terms of very political forms, I think you can look at the difference between sort of the USSR and the People's Republic of China, for example, right? Like, obviously, the manifestations of proletarian dictatorship there looked very different. And Mao synthesized his own sort of adaptations of Marxism, Leninism, to the Chinese context that created different organizational strategies that

caused the party to operate differently, but both of which, you know, were definitely attempting to function as a proletarian dictatorship. Oh, definitely, yeah. And I think Mao took this idea of experimentation very seriously, and he, like, genuinely looked hard at the Soviet Union and was very honest about what he perceived to be its sort of failures or its mistakes or its excesses and tried to push the proletarian experiment further. And in the process of doing that, if you're an MLM, I mean, you think that there were some universal things that were created in that attempt in China that we can take forward.

If you're an ML, you think that Mao was basically just a good Marxist-Leninist applying it to China. But the point is neither here nor there because it is this long experimentation. And these leaders are trying to apply Marxism and then Marxism-Leninism in really distinct, different situations. But before we move on, though, I kind of want to circle back around to this idea. You were saying, like, Rojava and Chiapis might be like pre-formations of an eventual dictatorship of the proletariat. And you rightfully say that, you know, the proletarian struggle is international. global. We can't have this recoiling into small territories as the end-all-be-all of a proletarian project because it still leaves out the vast majority of exploited and oppressed human beings on

the planet and we want liberation for everybody. But if you're talking about a pre-formation, certainly in Rojava and Chiapas, there are, you know, dual powers is being built, right? They exist technically inside the boundaries of other states, but they operate pretty much autonomously. They have their own, you know, education, their own health care, their own fighting forces, et cetera, and kind of the Maoist idea of forming red bases, right? So all of this leads to this other question, which is, I'm thinking as a revolutionary in 2018 in the U.S., what does this mean for us? Because I had a conversation one of the early days of the podcast with it's going down. And they said something that always kind of stuck with me. And, you know,

they're coming from an anarchist perspective, but they're extremely principled and like really insightful. And they were saying, like, you know, in the U.S., this idea that we're going to be able to capture the state apparatus to any extent is, is so. sort of, it seems very, very unlikely and what seems more likely, and I almost kind of agree with them, sadly, on this front is like climate change and like an economic collapse and shit will just get really bad for the state either like partially collapses or, or recoils from certain territories. And so I'm trying to think like, and I doubt that we all have the answers to this, but just this idea that in the context where capturing the state and establishing a traditional

dictatorship of the proletariat like Lenin has in mind, where that's not an option, right? If that if that's like taken off the board of options based on the amount of time we have in the sort of situation that we're in, then does Rojav and Chiapis become all we have left? Like, is it just like the left in the U.S. should be thinking about taking over territory? I don't know. Like, do you know what I'm going with this? Yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, this is honestly the question that's been on my mind for like the last two months. And as I'm starting to think more about ecological collapse as an imminent reality that we have to face and get real with. And I think from my perspective, this is why a dual power strategy makes sense to me, because on the chance that

we are able to just take on the state someday, dual power gives us the ability to do that by already being organized, already having institutions to, you know, fight from. And this beauty of dual power is that in the end, it forces the state's hand against you so that the conflicts that actually exist in underlying capitalism become explicit. And if we're organized enough, then, then we can take that fight. But sort of the thought that I have as like a secondary reason that I think dual power is important. I tried to talk about this in like

the YouTube video that I did, is that if this climate collapse starts occurring faster, I do think we might just actually see the state abandoning territory. I think there's like a really big chance of that. In an article that I was reading in New York Times

called Survival of the Richest, they were talking about how the rich people are ready to just get out and leave the city. they have helicopters, they have motorcycles, they plan on just abandoning the cities at some point if climate collapse reaches a certain point. And so I think the other plus to dual power is that if we're building that and we have those institutions, when that happens, we can build power in those spaces that are abandoned. I don't know that I think that at this point, traditional revolution is out of the picture, but I do think the situation is such that

we need to think about the possibility that civil collapse is going to start occurring before that happens and we need a strategy that can go in both directions, essentially. And yeah, I think it might come down to the fact that sort of regional territorial control is what might end up playing out. And that requires a really intense reassessment and reevaluation of all of our strategies of socialists, I think. Incredibly well said. And honestly, I couldn't agree more. Like, you know, my conclusions kind of converge with yours on a lot of topics. And this is one where I think we're definitely on the same page with regards to like sort of the projections of what's going to happen. But beyond what we think is going to happen in the future, the necessity of doing mass work, of base building and getting towards dual power as fast as possible, which takes real organizing and real dedication and real effort, that should be on the mind of anybody on the left, because when this shit hits the fan, we're going to need those institutions already being built up to just turn to and for people to turn to because when capitalism fails, when the center falls out, when chaos ensues, people will be looking for alternatives.

before that had the luxury of being more or less apolitical, will all of a sudden be looking like, well, how the fuck am I going to get health care? And what about food distribution? And who's going to protect me from these roving gangs or these fucking fascists or whatever? And I think that's where the left has to be ready to step in and fill that gap. Because if we don't, we know who the fuck will. And it's not a good story for anybody. Yeah. And I mean, a thing there that I really want to emphasize is like, it's not just going to be MLs and MLMs who should be doing this work in the US. And I think like on the guillotine, you've done a fantastic job about talking about like, you know, the mutual aid efforts that are happening from anarchists as well in terms of disaster

relief. And that sort of infrastructure that can be built across the left in the US is what's going to be put to work when we start to hit these crisis moments. And for me, like, what I would encourage anarchists to do is even if you disagree with everything we're saying here, mass work is something you can start doing now. And it's something that you can do within the principles of anarchism, that when things really start to get bad is going to be incredibly useful. Yeah, exactly. And I have lots and lots of really principled anarchist comrades

who are thinking about that and doing that work. And that's why the guillotine, I think, is possible because although me and Bones come from radically different ideological perspectives on the left, I don't think on the left you can get much further apart with ideology, but somehow, some way, we have a strategic unity. And that's what the Marxist Center talks about, right? Like Bones and I kind of converge on,

okay, you might come from this direction, I'm coming from this direction, but we both definitely agree like what needs to fucking be done. And that's why that's why I think like, you know, Marxists and anarchists of various stripes can work together. And in fact, we'll fucking have to be working together if, if things go as it looks to be going, you know. Definitely. Okay, but let's go ahead and move on. And I think talking about democracy, which we touch on a little bit, the way Lenin treats democracy in this, in this work was probably one of the more surprising things that I came across, I don't remember really thinking about it a lot when I read it like a few years ago the first time, but going through with the fine-tooth comb, it really came out like, whoa, this is an

interesting take on democracy that I haven't heard. So what is democracy according to Lenin? And why does the destruction of the state entail, quote unquote, the destruction of democracy? Yeah. This is, yeah, it's really weird because for Lenin to come out and say, you know, we are going to get rid of democracy at a certain point. It's going to go away. It's not what you expect, given a lot of the rhetoric he uses leading up to it. But for Lenin, what's, central there is that democracy is an expression of the state, right? So if we are going to have the withering way

of the state, which is something that Lennon thinks will happen, but only through the proletariat of the dictatorship, then we're going to see the withering away of democracy, too. So for Lennon, he talks about how democracy is essentially the interests of the many being waged against the interests of the few.

And in the context of the proletariat dictatorship, we can finally actually see democracy, because truly you have a state that represents the interests of the workers and all the other oppressed classes, and that utilizes those interests for the explicit suppression and crushing of the capitalist minority that's left over. And so democracy is actually really incredibly embodied by the proletarian dictatorship in a way that a bourgeois dictatorship for all of its talk of liberty and freedom and

republicanism could never actually accomplish. But again, the point for Lenin is that even though the dictatorship of the proletariat is this disciplined, powerful, apparatus, it's going to go away at some point. And what we're going to see is that the universalization of state function among all the workers means that the state itself will become unnecessary and will become redundant. And when that happens, because class is gone, there is no more majority to wield power over the minority. Democracy itself is going to go away as well. Right. And I think that's the best way to understand it. And I think Lenin comes straight out

and says, he says, quote, democracy is a form. of the state, one of its varieties. Consequently, like every state, it consists in organized systematic application of force against human beings. So he's saying democracy is a form of the state and it will share the same fate as the state. And would you say that it's fair to say that under the dictatorship of the proletariat or like afterclass society has been sufficiently transcended, that the term democracy almost

becomes superfluous because it's so embedded in the way that just normal life it operates, that it doesn't need to be a concept above and outside of itself? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's what's important about the dictatorship of proletary is that it, in its core, is democratic in that sense, even though it is simultaneously a dictatorship. And Lenin does like a really interesting job of reconciling those two terms with each other. And yeah, it does become, I think, a little bit of a superfluous term. Just like in the sense, you know, the function of the dictatorship eventually becomes superfluous for Lenin.

because as self-management begins to happen, it becomes an unnecessary thing. And democracy plays a similar role. And I think that leads well into this next question. And, you know, this is sort of also a core feature of Marxism. In this book, it's put sort of as the lower and higher phases of communism. But I think more colloquially, Marxists understand this as the lower phase of communism is socialism and the higher phase is communism. Communism, the high phase being the sort of goal that both Marxist and anarchists share.

but the lower phase, right, the transition period is sort of where a lot of the disagreements between those two sex sort of come out. So what are the lower and higher phases of communism? And what does Lennon have to say about the no ability of the higher phases of communism? Yeah. So this is, I think, one of the really cool parts of this text that I'm really into. So Lennon, you know, sort of makes this differentiation between the lower phase, which is this transitional period out of capitalism that will be embodied by the dictatorship of the proletariat. And again, for Lenin, you know, he sort of explicitly says, right, we're not getting rid of subordination. We're not getting rid of control.

He says, we're not getting rid of foremen and accountants. But we're putting all of those in the hands of the worker. And so in the lower stage of communism, what you see actually is the apparatus is that capitalism is the capitalist state have put in place being used for worker control. If I can look to a quote real quick that I think summarizes this and gets to hint at the transition, Lenin says, quote, we the workers shall organize large-scale production on the basis of what capitalism has already created, relying on our own experience as workers, establishing strict iron discipline backed up by the state power of the armed workers. We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid foreman and accountants. This is our proletarian task, and this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution.

such a beginning on the basis of large-scale production will of itself lead to the gradual withering way of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order, an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery, an order under which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be performed by each in turn, and will

then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population. And I think that that sort of captures the relationship between the lower and the higher stage. And the lower stage, we're maintaining the infrastructure capitalism, but we are putting it under the dictatorship of the proletariat. And as things move on, that becomes unnecessary as a separate state outside of society more broadly, because it becomes habit, he says, because we just become to perform it all as members of the whole. And then we transition to something else where the state doesn't exist anymore.

Right. And, you know, this was kind of jarring because you got to appreciate the novelty of Lenin doing, you know, I think a little bit what Marx and Engels sort of principally refused to do, which is sort of think about what the society will look like. But obviously, Lenin is living in a different time and is taking this Marxism a little bit further. And so he actually does the risk of sort of like talking about what this transition will look like before it's even happened. And I think that's pretty new in the Marxist tradition. And I think people have rightfully sort of shied away from trying to predict what things will look like. Because, I mean, he also, like, leaves open, like, when I talk

about the noability of the higher phases of communism. He says we cannot know. We don't know and we cannot know. And he talks about, like, as I mentioned earlier, these variegated forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And he's sort of emphasizing this experimental sort of approach to this thing and the unknowability of it because he's a principled materialist. He's not going to get into predictions and idealism. And so he contains himself, as Marx did at a previous era, to sort of talking about what he can rightfully talk about. And as he's on the precipice of of applying Marxism in real conditions, he sort of has a little more wiggle room to start talking about this stuff. But I think maybe the way to like sum up with the first, the lower

phase of communism, i.e. socialism is. Would you agree that sort of the three main pillars of this idea are collectivizing slash socializing the means of production, creating a huge social safety net, right? They talk about health care and schools and hospitals. Housing. Housing, exactly. Engels has a really relevant and fascinating little excerpt in here about housing and how like so many houses sit unoccupied in bourgeois society and how homelessness could be addressed. And we're still dealing with that. Like I just came back from Seattle is like the third highest homelessness rate in the country. I was, you know, fucking kind of shocked and disgusted by it. And so like, wow, these things are ever relevant. But so socializing the means of production, creating a huge

social safety net for everybody. And then this part, which is to each according to their labor, right? We all know like, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs as the sort of banner of full communism, but this lower phase of communism, this socialist transition period, it's really to each according to their labor. So they want to be able to compensate people for how much they put into society, but also this huge social safety net will make sure that those who are, you know, obviously like unable to perform tasks, have disabilities of various sorts, or whatever the situation may be, that their basic needs are still being taken care of. But in this socialist transition, it's not going to be like everybody gets the same

amount of things from day one. And I think that's a really like, you know, sober analysis of what it actually means to transition. It's not this overnight thing. Yeah. And I mean, Lenin says, right, we won't have a quality yet. That is something we're going to get to, but it's not quite there. Right. It says, but what we will do is we'll get rid of the class differentiations that make it impossible. Right. And I think that's really important. The one thing that I would add that I think is like another central principle as Lenin theorizes it is like the subordination of the bureaucracy and the administration to the people. So recallable, accountable, and paid a worker's wage, I think is central to the dictatorship of the proletariat for him and the lower stage of communism.

I'm just going to read a little bit. He's quoting Marx here. So Mark says, when he's talking about this, Mark says, what we are dealing with here is not a communist society, which has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, one which is just emerging from capitalist society, talking about the lower phase, and which therefore, in all respects, economic, moral and intellectual, still bears the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it sprung. And then Lenin says, it is this communist society, a society which has just come into the world out of the womb of capitalism and which, in all respects, bears the stamp of the old society that marks terms the first or lower phase of communist society. And I think that is an

important way to think about all of this, which is this development, right? This socialism emerging out of the shell of capitalism. It's bound up with it. And, you know, talking about like Mao, when he was applying it in China, you know, Mao really talked about this idea that we needed a revolution, not only in the base, but in the superstructure and the cultural revolution was an attempt to actually unleash the masses on the superstructure and sort of have a revolution there as well, like we needed to do that. And I think that that was sort of echoed in more maybe proto ways by Angles,

when Engels talks about a new generation reared under new and free social conditions. etc so how do you kind of think about the need for revolution in the superstructure and how this transition actually works in practice do you have any thoughts on that yeah i mean i think that it's central i don't know that i mean i'm just not an MLN so like the culture revolution might be slightly different but i do think that this is what lennin sets us up to think about right and again i think it's where he says like after the revolution bourgeois law even won't be immediately done away with some of the aspects of the bourgeois state will exist and again he says it's almost the bourgeois state, but now without the bourgeois Z.

And obviously, in the process of that transition, struggle still occurs. And while I don't really subscribe to Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, I do think to the constant reminder from MLMs that after a revolutionary period, class struggle intensifies is really important for thinking about that. Because in order to get to the point where the superstructure is being changed to, and we can truly move from those vestiges of bourgeois law to proletarian rule as a university, thing, we have to continue to struggle. And within the party, there's going to continue to be struggles and there's going to continue to be divides over these issues that have to be taken

seriously for creating the transition. I think, like, it would be easy to read Lenin's understanding of this transition is almost deterministic and guaranteed to play out. So I think it's important to read struggle into the process and the intentional guiding of a party of revolutionaries who are working these things out. Yeah, exactly. And I know, Mao clearly had the benefit of hindsight, which Lenin doesn't have, but perhaps a criticism of Lenin of this piece could be that he might be, like the optimism, right? He might be too optimistic about what happens after the revolution. And I think as, you know, this is in 1917. So as the things developed before his death, he was certainly grappling with these things and these things were

becoming apparent to him. But in this work, I think he might have had a little bit of too optimistic of view of what it means after the revolution. I mean, and what like the class struggle continuing in tales, et cetera, but you can't really blame him for that because he was in his own historical epoch. So yeah, so I think, you know, the lower and higher phases of communism is important, but something we've been working towards, right? We've been talking about the withering away of the state. And this is, this is a idea that you hear it a lot. It gets talked about. The discourse between Marxists and anarchists will often revolve around this idea. The critique from lots of anarchists will be like, well, you guys say that it'll a wither way, but it never has. And, you know, I don't want to

get into all of that, but basically it's covered in this work. And so what did Marx and Angles mean by the Withering Away of the State? How has it been misinterpreted? And under what conditions would it become even possible? Yeah. So this is the tricky part, right? Is, and this is where he's really mad at a lot of the opportunists, again, where Withering Away often gets understood as not a revolutionary process. So I think the first thing that's really important for Lenin is that the Withering away of the state can't happen until a revolution has established the dictatorship of the proletariat. That has to occur, because as long as the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't exist, the state continues to serve the interests of the few against the many and to reinforce the social antagonisms of class, which means it can never possibly weather away. The base which creates it is always going to be there.

So the first thing that has to happen is you have to have a revolution which instills the dictatorship of the proletariat. But then the second thing that has to happen is that dictatorship of the proletariat has to universalize proletariat control and crush the remaining capitalists such that the state's no longer necessary. You know, there's the sense in which Lenin talks about the state would become redundant. Once the capitalists are gone, they've been suppressed and crushed, once victory against them has been assured. And once the people and the workers and all the oppressed classes are administering their affairs and have been trained in doing that, he says, it becomes like habit. It becomes unnecessary for the state to coordinate those things anymore because the people themselves and the workers who the proletarian dictatorship has organized and has put towards this task can now just continue it on organically. And it's in that sense

that the state can finally wither away because the function of the state, the suppression of one class and the interest of another has no place in society anymore. Does it imply, I mean, I think it does imply that this revolution needs to be global before the withering of the way of the state. Because I mean, even if you're in one state and you've developed socialism to a really impressive degree, you're still surrounded by hostile capitalist nations. And so I can't imagine the state being able to be set down in the context of being surrounded by wolves, you know? Definitely. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's a very important aspect of it. And I think, you know, when we get into the why didn't things in the USSR play out according to what this would predict,

that's one of the primary things that we have to think about. And sort of the conditions that happened with being a socialist nation surrounded by capitalist makes a lot of this really difficult. And I think the other thing, you know, that Lenin doesn't reconcile with here is sort of the development of productive forces within a nation might not happen as organically as he thinks it might. And take a level of struggle that can make this process a lot longer than it really sounds like it's going to be when Lenin talks about it in this text. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I've talked about this a lot, and maybe we're going into like this talk about the Soviet Union just a little bit. You know, this idea that with their, when there are socialist struggles around the world, having a big socialist powerhouse like the Soviet Union for all of its flaws and excesses and failures, whatever, you know, it's incredibly important to sustain and help build up other movements.

Like look at Cuba before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, you know, look at these smaller socialist projects that by themselves stand no chance of lasting. Right. But with the backing of a big socialist powerhouse like the Soviet Union, you know, that they do have a chance. They have funding mechanisms. They have defense. They have deterrence with regards to bringing the Soviet Union into a war if they attack Cuba, et cetera. So just kind of like bouncing off that and talking what you alluded to about the Soviet Union. You know, how does the state and revolution sort of stack up when we have the benefit of hindsight and can look back on how the Soviet Union actually developed?

Do you have any thoughts about how it deviated from this? or maybe it was Lenin's fault for being sort of naive about certain aspects? Like, what are your thoughts on that? How is state and revolution tied into the actual practice of the Soviet Union? So, I mean, I think this is where I start to think that Lenin's optimism hurt him a little bit. So again, even in the propaganda that he was producing and that the Bolsheviks were producing outside the context of this text, there was this sense of the German working class, the English working class, all these other people are going to rise up with us.

And, you know, it's understandable where that's coming from. World War I was, like, incredibly unpopular with the workers who were conscripted and dying. And Lenin made a very clear case of, you know, revolutionary defeatism, where he said, what this should prove to us is that the capitalist class is using us to kill each other. And the only response to this kind of war is to rise up and kill them instead. So Lenin has this optimism, I think, that World War I and the just obvious horror of, imperialism is going to create a global uprising that again doesn't happen on the scale that he expects it to. And I think that's the first major reason that, you know, we don't see this establishment occur in the USSR after the October Revolution is that the USSR immediately is

involved with a civil war. And we see the development of war communism. That's sort of this very different picture than what Lenin paints here. But I mean, you know, I'm a Marxist Leninist. I'm going to defend it. It's what was necessary, I think, for the USSR to survive in that instance. And part of it is, yeah, I think Lenin expects the revolution to be more global in this text than it actually ended up being. And for me, at least, I don't think we can fault the USSR for adapting to the fact that that wasn't the case, unfortunately. Right. And then as history developed, you have not only, you have World War I, right? And then you have a fucking brutal civil war. And then you have World War II. Like the Nazi beast, you know, marching towards

Russia, marching in both directions, East and West. to deal with that. And then in the wake of the defeat of fascism, of Nazism, you have the rise of the Cold War. You have the rise of the U.S. with nukes, which, you know, dropping two nukes on Japan, let's be very clear, was not about winning the war and saving American lives. It was about flexing to the Soviet Union. Like, yeah, we teamed up to get rid of this fascist piece of shit, but you're next. So in those conditions, a lot of what could have happened or should have happened or what we would love to have seen happen. It's really just made it. impossible, right? You're surrounded by brutal enemies. You have these huge wars, the civil

war, and then the nuclear threat, you know, which just goes well into the 80s. I mean, it's just like, in those conditions, I think Lenin may have been even too naive about just how much attack, you know, the Soviet Union would have drawn just by being the Soviet Union, just by opening Pandora's box, like, hey, proletarian power is a thing now, and the fucking world reacted terribly to it, you know? Yeah, and I think in a sense, though, that sort of does vindicate, you know, some of Lenin's idea of how central the state is to capitalist control, though, because the moment that socialist threatened the capitalist state and are doing another project, just a level of global reaction that was very hard to expect just unleashes. And we're

still living in the wake of that today with another wave of global reaction across the world right now as capitalist crises begin to intensify. Yeah, no, definitely. And studying history, reading this stuff, understanding the context. I mean, it's incredibly illustrative for what we're dealing with today because these patterns reemerge. You know, capitalism is not an engine of progress. It's sort of this cyclical thing where it goes through phases and it develops in certain ways, but also a lot of the same deficiencies,

a lot of the same chaos and collapses, a lot of the same reactionary movements. Those things are cyclical. They come back. And so we can see how our comrades in the past dealt with them and we can learn from them because we have to face it again in 2018. It doesn't stop until capitalism stops. So I guess moving on, sort of, I want to get into this segment now of the relevance of this text and these ideas for today.

So I guess to preface this question, it looks like uniting, like let's say just Americans, because we're both in the U.S. at the moment, you know, uniting the American proletariat seems like an impossible task for lots of reasons, but also just because of like ideological ones. Like, you know, the average working class person either is totally ignorant of this, has no class consciousness, or because of the ideological. conditioning that they were bred in are just full-on fucking reactionary. And it makes it very difficult to think of a unified proletarian movement in the U.S. So I guess what are some major ways in your opinion that the ruling class and their various ideological apparatuses today sort of obscure the importance of class, help foster divisions between members of the proletariat and just broadly work to prevent class consciousness from developing in this country specifically? I think there's several ways where this occurs, right? On the one hand, it's what we've already thought in that. It's sort of

what I believe is, like, really the emergence of a militant fascism in the U.S. that I think the U.S. has always had a fascist history, but now it's taking on these more classical forms of fascism that we've seen in Europe, I think, where there's brawling in the streets between functionally paramilitaries who are pledging their allegiance to the capitalist state and to our current president and leftists. And part of what fascism in that sense does is it offers the working class what, you know, Lenin and Trotsky both refer to you as sort of this. like stunted or not fully developed class consciousness, right?

Where there's this appeal to the workers and Trump, you know, has made this appeal to the white workers to those working in coal country, all these other conditions, and misdirected them from actually going towards working power into sort of the semblance of populism that actually is just a defense of capitalism in the first place. So I think we're seeing that very much in the direction that politics in the U.S. are going. And then I think also like opportunism in the United States today is a problem on the left. And I think, like, there are some great comrades in the DSA doing some awesome work in that organization to pull it to the left. I mean, refoundation and the Communist Caucus. I have a lot of respect for the work that they're doing. But also,

a lot of the function of the more liberal parts of the DSA is sort of, I think, to steer people away from class consciousness. I think that while the DSA might radicalize a lot of people, it can also pull a lot of people back into just working in the capitalist state and not understanding how that state can never possibly lead to actual revolution or liberation from capitalism.

Right. And as you say, it's not like a conscious scheme, just like this sort of ambient opportunism that just exists in people's minds and their approach to politics. But yeah, I completely agree. And it is like simultaneously sad and sort of like disheartening. But at the same point, you also realize

that as capitalism continues, to enter periods of crisis as you see the rise of the fascist right. I mean, more and more people are going to have to be forced to more or less choose a side. And so we have to be there. We have to be engaging in mass work. We have to be engaged in anti-fascist work to be prepared and ready for when the person turns their head to the left and says, what do you guys have to offer? Because these motherfuckers are offering me nothing. And if we're not there, yeah, if we're not there to embrace them, like as I said before, you know, the fascists will be. And they're sort of hyper-simplistic, tribalistic narrative of like immigrants are taking your job and all this

bullshit. It's so simple, but it's also really understandable to people. And so I think another challenge for us when it comes to raising class consciousness is how can we take these ideas from an important work like state and revolution or one of the other myriad works, you know, from the radical left? And how can we make it digestible and relate to people's actual material conditions in their day-to-day life? Because if the fascist can come in with this hyper-simplistic bullshit narrative, you know, and win people over that way, then we have to combat that with taking this knowledge and putting it into a way that people can easily understand and sort of be inspired to get active with. Absolutely. And I think that's for me what's important

in our strategy is with building dual power and with base building is showing that we have the ability to meet people's needs now so that they know that as a revolutionary struggle occurs, if we come onto the other side of that, the dictatorship of the proletariat we want to build that Lenin isolates here, it's something they can practically see as possible. And I think mass work shows how it's possible, even in the spaces within capitalist society

to begin to build workers' control. And what we're going to want is to universalize that. And I think that's where the state and revolution can come in those of us who are interested in doing mass work and interested in doing dual power organizing and sort of illuminate what that means for building dictatorship of the proletariat later on.

Right. Yeah, well said. And you know, it kind of leads into this next question, which we've touched on at various points through this conversation, but maybe have a more distilled approach. Why is this book written in 1917, a century ago, still relevant for radicals and revolutionaries organizing today? Yeah, I mean, so I think there's a number of reasons. One is, again, I think that the opportunistic mistakes that Lenin is responding to are still occurring today and, you know, touched on that a little bit. But I think that we still see that opportunistic misunderstanding of what the state is at like a really foundational level, which then leads to a whole

bunch of issues that, you know, later on develop into reformist or electoralist politics that aren't paired with a mass movement at all outside of state power. So that's a big part of it. But the other thing is, like, I think we are living in a period where revolutionary tensions are coming to the forefront. Crises, you know, economically are occurring globally at a really high level of frequency. And the world has never totally bounced back from the 2008 crisis in the first place. So the real practical question of what is revolution? What does it mean for us and why is it the path forward is really important for all of us who are doing organizing on the left right now? And Lenin's giving us an account that, you know, while it steals with the particularities of

these historical instances, also abstracts and universalizes a theory of the state that we can still use today. Yep. And I think, you know, I had three points written down that basically echo yours. Again, we converge on conclusions. But just to sort of restate it, what I had written down was exactly that, like a correct understanding of the state and its underlying economic basis is a sort of absolutely essential component of any solid materialist analysis. And it really helps you make sense of the social and political world and its events if you really do understand this stuff. Two, exactly understanding how liberals and social Democrats help obscure the reality of capitalism, of imperialism and of class struggle. And finally, it just like really offers, in my opinion,

a sober, concrete, non-utopian, and practical approach to revolution, one that's like a principally rooted in empirical investigation, actual revolutionary experience, and a proper materialist methodology. So on all those fronts, I think this book is completely still relevant today, and people should read it all over the left. And even if you're not on the left, if you're just interested in the left, it's a fun fucking read. Like you laugh out loud at times.

You can see, like, Lenin's personality coming through, and you kind of see, like, shit, If I existed at the same time as Lenin did, I would not want to be slipping on my analysis because Lenin will call you out. Yeah, I mean, he's something. There's this tweet that I saw the other day that was like, I think we all need to recognize that if Lenin were alive today, he'd have a really intense and annoying Twitter problem. It comes through. Yeah.

Honestly, he is not cutting people a break at all at any point. He would be a hell of a poster for sure. Right. Okay, final question, just to make sure. we didn't miss any loose ends. Do you have any points you want to make that we didn't get to and or any favorite quotes you want to mention before we wrap it up? Yeah, I mean, one thing that I want to say in the context of this book and contextualizing

it today, especially for a social struggle in the United States, is that I think, like, again, every socialist in the U.S. should be studying this book, should be reading it, and we'll gain something from it, honestly, regardless of what tendency you're from, you're going to get something out of it. But I also want to focus on the fact that, like, in the struggle for socialism in the United States, we're struggling in a settler colonial society. And the lessons that we get from the revolution in Russia aren't going to perfectly transplant here because there's this whole extra complication of the fact that, you know, settler colonialism is this ongoing genocidal process here

that we're going to have to overcome and push back against through literal decolonization as time goes on. And I think that that actually adds to Lenin's analysis here. It's not only that the state can't ever serve proletarian ends, but also that the state that exists here also can't serve decolonial ends because it serves the class for which sublular colonialism functioned in the first place. And I think a thing that is important for us a socialist in the U.S., doing the work of applying Lenin and applying these theories to the U.S. is to take that seriously and figure out how those two things can dialogue with each other. Beautifully said, that's why I had you on.

Amazing analysis, a really well digestible summaries of what's being discussed here. I really appreciate you coming on, Allison. I really appreciate the work that you put in to come on. I mean, not only just reading Lennon, but you even mentioned talking about going back to angles and reading some of that, just so your understanding of this text would be fully fleshed out. I appreciate it, and I know my listeners appreciate it. We will absolutely work again in the future. I just love talking with you.

I love working through these problems with you. So let's definitely do it again. Before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for having me on again. And this has really honestly been a blast. I had a ton of fun doing the research for this and really reading this text more slowly and carefully

than I ever had before. So my works are mostly on Medium. If you just Google Alison Escalante, medium, they'll pop up there. I also have a few pieces published at The Forge, which is an awesome socialist newspaper that I would recommend. Those are the two main places you can find me. I'm working on branching out into YouTube right now. I have one video up if you're interested in sort of our discussion

of climate collapse and what that means for. Socialist Strategy in the U.S., definitely check out my YouTube channel, but those would be the two big places that you can find me. And I am also on Twitter as Allison Esk, A-L-Y-S-O-N-E-S-Q-U-E. And yeah, those are sort of the places that you can find my work. Thank you so much for having me on. This has been a really good time. Definitely, yeah. And I became a member of your Patreon recently supporting your work. So if you want to collab on either your front or mine again in the future, let's absolutely do it. And I will hopefully see you in November at the Marxist Center Conference. Is that right? Definitely. Just got a ticket to be there.

So, super excited for that. Beautiful. All right, Allison, thanks again. Awesome. Thanks so much. Well, you know you've got to have the police because if there were no police, look at what, you'd be good to yourself.

You'd be killing each other if there were no police, but the reality is the police become necessary in human society, only at that junction in the society, where it is spread between those who have the dogs who ain't got. I throw a monitor cocktail at the precinct. You know how we think. Organize the hood under I Ching banners. Red, black and green instead of gang bandanas.

FBI spine on us through the radio antennas and them hitting cameras in the street light watching society. With no respect for the people's right to privacy. I take a slug for the cars like Huey Pete. While all you fake niggins try to copy master pee, I wanna be free to live. Able to have what I need to live. Bring the power back to the street where the people live.

We sick of working for crumbs and filling up the prisons. Dying over money and relying on religion for help. religion for health we do for self-like ants in a colony, organized the wealth into a socialist economy, a way of life based off the common needs, and all my comrades is ready, we're just spreading the seeds. To have a black male live a third of his life in a jail cell, because the world is controlled by the white male, and the people don't never get justice, and the women don't never get respected, and the problems don't never get solved, and the jobs don't never pay enough,

So the rent always be late. Can you relate? We're living in a police lane. No more bondage. No more political monsters. No more secrets. Space launches. Government departments started it in the projects.

Material objects. Thousands up in the closets. Could have been invested in the future for my comrades. Battle contacts. Primitive weapons out in combat. Many never come back. Pretty niggas be running with gas. Rather get shot in their back than fire back.

We're tired of that. Corporations hiring blacks. Denying the facts. all over the map. That's why I write the shit I write in my rap. It's documented. I meant it. Every day of the week, I live in it, breathe in it. It's more than just fucking believe in it. I'm holling in ones, rolling up my sleeves and shit. It's Elo for push-ups now. Many headed for one conclusion. Liggers ain't ready for revolution. The average blackmail, live a third of his life in a jail cell, because the world is controlled by the white male,

and the people don't never get justice, and the women don't never get respected, and the problems don't never get solved and the jobs don't never pay enough. So the rent always be late. Can you relate? You're living in a police state. You're going to say. I am a revolutionary and you're going to have to keep on saying that. You're going to say that I am a politarian.

I am the people. I'm not the big. Juliani you are full of shit and anybody that's down with you you could man make things bad bars and you cutting the well veil knowing damn well when you cut the welfare a person gonna do crime