2 - ‘The first proletarian government’

Summary

A revolutionary movement which, like the Bolsheviks', aspired to the total transformation of society, might be expected to destroy and replace the whole institutional network of the existing state – not only its political nucleus, but also its central administrative machine and even its field units throughout the country. Such root-and branch changes were, on the face of it, part of Lenin's vision. In his pamphlet The State and Revolution, written only a few weeks before the seizure of power, while arguing that the victorious proletariat would require a state of its own in order to prepare the conditions under which state power could ultimately ‘wither away’, Lenin nevertheless asserted that his would be an entirely new non-bureaucratic form of state after the style of the Paris Commune, erected on the ashes of the old state institutions which would have to be utterly shattered and swept away.

Marx teaches us to act with supreme boldness in destroying the entire old state machine, and at the same time he teaches us to put the question correctly: the Commune was able in the space of a few weeks to start building a new, proletarian state machine by introducing such-and-such measures to secure wider democracy and to uproot bureaucracy. Let us learn revolutionary boldness from the Communards; let us see in their practical measures the outline of urgently practical and immediately possible measures, and then, pursuing this road, we shall achieve the complete destruction of the bureaucracy. […]