Statism and Anarchy 2006

Bakunin (in reference to Marx and Lassalle):
"We have already stated out deep opposition to the…foundation of a People’s State, which, as M and L have expressed it, will be none other than the proletariat organised as a ruling class. Question…if the proletariat becomes the ruling class; over whom will it rule?”

Marx:
(…so long as the other classes, esp. capitalists, still exist, so long as the proletariat struggles with it , it must employ forcible means, hence governmental means. It is itself still a class..) Yeah, blah blah blah.

Legal Smeagol:
What is the Working Class? Do those who work for the “People’s State” constitute the Proletariat simply because the Government does?
What about the remainder of the Peasantry, especially in developing countries where Peasant life is the life of the majority? With Bourgeois civil servants still running the State, and even assuming a government of unreconstructed (i.e. somehow remaining untainted by power and moving in ever more Bourgeois circles) Proletarians, a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” means only a dictatorship over the Peasantry, for as long as there is a State, and as long as there is a Bourgeoisie, the State will never counter its interests.
The State is a “class of its own”, and must be considered as such.

“e.g. the Peasant Mob, which as we all know does not enjoy the goodwill of the Marxists, and which, being as it is at the lowest level of culture, will apparently be governed by the urban factory proletariat.” In the interests of the social revolution, as the Marxists would say.

Or, in a modern sense, undeveloped counties, where most of the workforce is non-proletarianised, must be, to follow historical materialism, subservient to, and dependent of, the more developed nations of the Global North.

(A fine idea, that the rule of labour involves the subjugation of land labour! But here Mr B’s innermost thoughts emerge. He understands nothing about the social revolution, only its political phrases. Its economic conditions do not exist for him. As all hitherto existing economic forms, developed or undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker, he believes that a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike. Still more! He wants the European social revolution, premised on the economic basis of capitalist production, to take place at the level of the Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral peoples, not to surpass this level. The will, not the economic conditions, is the foundation of his social revolution.)

Historically, has not the exploitation of surplus labour always been a matter of political will? Is a social revolution only possible with proletarians at the vanguard? Do the names Spartacus, Watt Tyler or Emiliano Zapata mean nothing? Every successful revolution since Marx’s day has occurred in a country outside the traditionally proletarianised region, and never in the specific nations (despite a history of working class militancy) of England, Germany and the U.S., although most, if not all, could still be described as being basically bourgeois in character.

It was Bakunin who successfully recognised the organisational character of the traditional peasantry, which was later to assert itself in “the” Ukraine “under” Nestor Makhno.

“If there is a State, then there is unavoidably domination and, consequently, slavery. Domination without slavery, open or veiled, is unthinkable-that is why we are enemies of the State.

What does it mean: the proletariat organised as a ruling class?”

(It means that the proletariat, instead of struggling sectionally with the ruling class, has gained a sufficient strength and organisation to employ general means of coercion in this struggle.

Presumably to accelerate the proletarianisation of the peasantry.
It can, however, only use such economic means as abolish its own character as salitariat, hence as class. With its complete victory, its own rule thus also ends, as its class character has disappeared.)

If the working classes already possess what are effectively the means of their own emancipation from wage slavery, what do they need the State for, except as a gun, to be perpetually pointed at their own heads? If the Apparatus of State is now both popular and apparently necessary, are the People unable to carry out their own Will?

“If their State will really be Popular, why not destroy it, and if its destruction is necessary for the real liberation of the people, why do they venture to call it ‘popular’?”