Lenin's Misreading of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme

Nick Rogers Nick Rogers

doi:10.13169/jglobfaul.4.2.0095

Abstract

Lenin's The State and Revolution, written in 1917 on the eve of the October Revolution, introduced into Marxist theory the concept of socialism and communism as two different forms of post-capitalist society defined by the distinct ways in which they distribute consumer goods. Socialism would distribute consumer goods on the basis of the amount of work citizens undertook and retain a state. Only communism would see the completion of the state's “withering away” and distribution “according to need.” This is a conceptual framework that, in the twentieth century, was abused to justify Stalinist practice. Lenin based his theoretical innovation on Marx's discussion in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of two “phases” of “communist society.” In fact there is no basis for Lenin's schema in the writings of Marx. A careful reading of Capital, in particular, demonstrates that Marx wrote no blueprints for how the future society should be organized. He only predicted that it would evolve. For Marx, the state is a political institution that begins to dissolve as soon as the workers seize political power and will not outlast class society.

Highlights

Lenin’s The State and Revolution, written in 1917 on the eve of the October Revolution, introduced into Marxist theory the concept of socialism and communism as two different forms of post-capitalist society defined by the distinct ways in which they distribute consumer goods
Lenin spent much of the summer of 1917 in hiding, moving from safe house to safe house, relocating to an isolated lakeside peasant hut not far from Petrograd and escaping to Finland
Marx makes virtually all the substantive points about the organization of communist society that he later repeats in the passages dealing with that society’s “first phase” in the Critique: the need to allocate resources for social requirements before producing for consumption; distributing consumer goods according to the quantity of work producers have undertaken; how the role of labor-time in such a distribution leaves social relations “transparent”

Summary

Introduction

Lenin spent much of the summer of 1917 in hiding, moving from safe house to safe house, relocating to an isolated lakeside peasant hut not far from Petrograd and escaping to Finland. Lenin’s prestige as leader of the first national government, established with the explicit aim of building a new post-capitalist order, was to make classics of many of his writings for the millions who in succeeding decades were won to revolutionary socialist politics The long pamphlet he drafted in August and September 1917 and published under the title of The State and Revolution was to be one of these – and arguably among the most influential. More fatefully for the future development of socialist politics in the Marxist tradition, Lenin’s work introduced an interpretation of the discussion in Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme that this article contends misrepresented Marx’s thinking This is the idea that even after capitalism has been superseded the cooperative, egalitarian and democratic society for which socialists were striving must pass through two distinct phases or stages based on starkly contrasting distributive principles. They should engage with a gap in Lenin’s research project during those months in 1916 and 1917, Marx’s Capital, which has much light to shed on the mode of production Marx thought would replace capitalism

The State and Revolution

Socialism and Communism