Beyond the State. The Future Polity in Classical and Soviet
Marxism
 In the transition from socialism to communism
foreseen in the present program of the CPSU, the Soviet state
will be transformed into a system of "communist societal
self-government." Public administration will no longer be
monopolized by a particular profession but will be turned over
to the whole people. Political coercion will cease to be necessary
and political institutions will survive only as organs of society.
Every citizen will engage in public affairs. "Communist
society will be a highly-organized community of working men.
Universally recognized rules of the communist way of life will
become an organic need and habit with everyone."1)
This is a vision of a future stateless society with deep roots in European
and Russian thought. Primarily and most conspicuously, it derives from
the classics of Marxism: from Marx who theorized that the proletarian
revolution would lead to the Aufhebung of the state, from Engels who
coined the famous expression that the state would be withering away,
and from Lenin who elaborated on this theme in his pamphlet State and
Revolution (1917) and designed a comprehensive system of direct popular
rule. But through these sources it is also connected with a broader vein.
The intellectual milieu of Marx and Engels knew many theories about the
transience of political authority and the coming decline of the state,
and Lenin's formative years coincided with a vivid discussion of self-government
and civic participation. Captured and preserved in the modern Soviet
conception of full communism are many fragments of the political ideals
of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.
On the face of it, the idea of the stateless society has remained a very
stable component of Marxist ideology: modern Soviet writers often define
it in the terms of the classical texts. To some extent, however, this
continuity is more formal than substantial. Engels, Lenin, and Khrushchev
all spoke of the withering away of the state, but their images of the
moribund leviathan, the transitional process, and the final self-governmental
system were not identical. Though the formula remained intact, its content
kept shifting with the cognitive and political environment: each cultural
setting gave it a new meaning, each strategic situation a new function.
The origins, development and substance of this theory are the subject
of the present dissertation. The first part of the study is
historical. In following the "political utopia" of Soviet Marxism
from its preMarxian sources to its renaissance in the period of Khrushchev,
my endeavour is to shed light on the variable intellectual premises and
political aspirations attached to it by different generations. Needless
to say, such an interpretation must be both subjective and selective.
The genetic study of political ideas stumbles on a wide range of aetiological
problems, and no single inquiry can ever distinguish more than a few
strands in the intricate causal fabric underlying political thought.
Thus, if this work provides only a bare minimum of relevant social, economic,
political, and biographic background data, this implies no underestimation
of the dialectical interdependence between thought and the real world
or of the role of personal experience and temperament in intellectual
history but a deliberate limitation of the analysis, in view of the complexity
of the problem and the abundant literature on the theory and practice
of Marxism. By presenting the Marxist views on the stateless polity in
the context of comparable earlier or contemporaneous ideas about the
good political system and of certain strategic situations in which the
conception evolved, I wish to propose some factors that were in a position
to affect the course of Marxist thought. Through the varying approaches
to the subject in the four chapters of this part, I also make some suggestions
about the relative importance of these factors at different times. I
submit that to understand the genesis and changing shape of the theory,
we should consider its emergence and early development primarily in terms
of intellectual influences and its later evolution increasingly in terms
of political motives. This shift from a cognitive-causal perspective
to a political-teleological one is related to the gradual ideologization
of the theory, i. e. its adaptation to partisan ends.
The first chapter is an interpretative essay on
the political tradition in which the theory arose. In examining
preMarxian thought about the place of the state in the
pursuit of social progress, I discern four schools which,
partly due to terminological differences, take divergent
views of this issue. One group of philosophers, including
the mature Hegel, identifies the state with the perfect
social system; another treats government as a real or potential
lever of progress. With an important third school, the
state is basically an obstacle to human advancement which
should be contained in favour of the free creative forces,
and a fourth group, including Kant, Fichte, and the young
Hegel, predicts the complete liberation of mankind from
the shackles of political government. While the latter
school, influential particularly in the decade after the
French Revolution, may be regarded as the immediate precursor
of Marx as a "political utopian," all of these
persuasions appear to have affected his conception of the
state.
Marx's image of the future polity is presented in the second chapter.
This remained reasonably stable throughout his productive life-time,
but it was also responsive to new tendencies in his intellectual environment
and assumed four different "faces." In his early career as
a liberal critic of German politics, Marx contrasted the record of the
positive state to the vocation of a truly political state. This real
state, embodying the ideals of the French Revolution, became the first
version of his "political utopia," soon to be succeeded by
a new pattern, the democratic state. Then, in the mid-forties, Marx adopted
a new designation for his perfect polity which was very much in the air:
association. This term was retained for many years until it finally appeared
in Capital, where the shadow alternative evoked to the prevailing politico-economic
system was the association of the free producers. At last, in his posthumous
eulogy of the Paris uprising in 1871, Marx hailed the Commune as the
revealed form of the coming classless community.
The third chapter deals with the reception of this
conclusion by Lenin. Besides Marx and Engels, two sources
of Lenin's "utopian" thought are considered:
the ideas of the Zukunftsstaat in German social democracy
and the societarian and self-governmental projects in the "social
movement of Russia. In the analysis of Lenin it is claimed
that his most importanto contribution to the political
futurology of Marxism is to be found not in his scanty
comments on full communism but in his theory of the commune-state,
developed on the eve of the Revolution as a strategic project
for the conquest of power. Though not launched as a picture
of the ultimate goal but as a plan for immediate implementation,
this scheme is dually related to the "political utopia" of
Marxism: it both drew on previous ideas of the future polity
and bequeathed a great many elements which have now been
incorporated into the Soviet image of full communism.
The fourth chapter is concerned with the transformation
of the idea of the withering away of the state and the
Soviet uses of "political utopia" from the Revolution
to the period of Khrushchev. Four stages are distinguished
in this development. After an initial phase in which the
decline of the state was propagated as an official operative
goal, the theory was gradually taken over by various opposition
groups and converted into an instrument of criticism and
protest. This precipitated a freeze on the utopian perspective
which more or less removed the concept of the withering
away of the state from the ideological scene till after
Stalin's death. With Khrushchev, the formula was again
brought to life and employed to stimulate political reactivation
and participation. In this context it was adapted in several
respects to clear away remaining dysfunctional implications.
A final section of the chapter discusses the function of "utopia" as "ideology" and
the integration of anti-etatiste ideas into the official
ideology of a state-building regime.
The second part of the thesis is
a systematic analysis of the Soviet conceptions of the withering
away of the state (Chapter V) and the stateless polity of the
future (Chapter VI). In this investigation of a province of Soviet
political thought, I regard the various authors as exponents
of a common and reasonably coherent doctrine and examine their
stated beliefs without attention to individual or collective
motives. Examples are drawn from the whole period between 1917
and the mid-sixties, but most of the materials is supplied by
the extensive discussion of communist societal self-government
under Khrushchev.
The fifth chapter deals first with the causal explanation
of the withering away of the state. Three conditions, with
different ratings in different periods of Soviet thought,
are distinguished: the cessation of the class struggle,
the elimination of the threat of foreign aggression, and
the creation of a moral and material base for a communist
social system. A second section of the chapter is devoted
to the chronology of the passage to the stateless polity,
while a third one outlines, as "ideal types," six
competing or complementary models of the transition that
appear in the Soviet literature.
The sixth chapter inquires into the Soviet vision
of the new system at work. After a brief presentation of
its "social setting," the functions and institutional
structure of the future polity are examined. Two different
theories of the local organs of communist self-government
are discerned, one giving prominence to economic units
and another to territorial. The following section records
divergent views on the issue of professionalism and expertise
versus amateur government and popular rule. Finally, there
is an account for Soviet opinions about the control of
social behaviour in the new society.
1) Program
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: International
Pub lishers, 1963), pp. 112 f.
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