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

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jglobfaul.4.2.0095
• Pages: 95-109
• Published date: 01 February 2018
• Date: 01 February 2018
• Author: Nick Rogers

Journal of Global Faultlines, 2018

Vol. 4, No. 2, 95–109.

95

Lenin’s Misreading of Marx’s Critique

of the Gotha Programme1

Nick Rogers*

Abstract

Lenin’s The State and Revolution, written in 1917 on the eve of the October Revolution, intro-

duced 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 “with-

ering 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 inno-

vation on Marx’s discussion in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of two “phases” of “com-

munist 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.

Introduction

Lenin spent much of the summer of 1917 in hiding, moving from safe house to safe house,

then relocating to an isolated lakeside peasant hut not far from Petrograd and finally escap-

ing to Finland. After the semi-insurrectionary demonstrations of early July had ebbed, an

orchestrated campaign accusing the Bolshevik leader of being a German spy allowed Russia’s

provisional government to take steps to suppress the Bolsheviks and imprison its leaders.

Lenin took the precaution of preserving his freedom and possibly his life at the cost of remov-

ing himself from the center of political events.

In Finland Lenin spent much of his time writing up a substantial manuscript based

on extensive notes he had taken the previous year. The topic was the attitude of Marx and

Engels to the state and their view of what would become of this institution (or set of institu-

tions) following a successful workers’ revolution. The resulting pamphlet was not published

until 1918. By then Lenin was head of government of the new revolutionary Soviet regime.

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 Revolution2 was to be one of these – and arguably among the

most influential.

It popularized concepts such as Engels’s discussion of the post-revolutionary “with-

ering away of the state” that until then had received scant attention within the mainstream

politics of the socialist Second International. A “commune state” of the type pioneered for a

few short weeks in 1871 by the Parisian revolutionaries was identified as the political form

through which a workers’ regime would rule.

* The author is a socialist activist and writer.