Before we take up this issue, we first need to define State apparatus:The State apparatus is the organization of the ruling class.Without the State apparatus -- the armed forces, the civil service, the legal apparatus imposing respect for the law, and all the ideological State apparatuses -- the ruling class (today the bourgeoisie) could never succeed in unifying its class interests, in conciliating or overcoming its internal contradictions and in pursuing a unified policy with regard to the other classes in society.
This rather schematic remark allows us now to proceed to a very important fact, which Lenin constantly emphasized: the fact that each great historical epoch, based on a determinate material mode of production, comprises tendentially one type of State, i.e. one general determinate form of State. A ruling class cannot make use of any type of State apparatus; it is obliged to organize itself in historically imperative forms, which relate to the new forms of class struggle in which it is held fast. The feudal-ecclesiastical type of organization is completely ineffective as a means of organizing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. The same general point is true of course with respect to the dictatorship of the proletariat. If the class struggle fought out by the proletariat is of a quite different kind from that of the bourgeoisie,it follows that, even if it does need some kind of State apparatus, it cannot purely and simply make use -- as if they were instruments which could be manipulated at will -- of the standing army, the law courts and their judges, the secret and special police forces, the parliamentary system, the administrative bureaucracy, immune from practically any form of control by the people. To picture this in simple terms, let us say that, if State power is an instrument in the service of the class interest of the bourgeoisie, the State apparatus in which it takes material form is not itself a simple instrument: it is a 'machine' in which the ruling class is held fast, to which it is in a certain sense subjected, at least with regard to its general historical forms. And this 'machine' determines the possibilities of political action open to the ruling class, just as the need for profit, for accumulation, and the compelling force of capitalist competition determine its possibilities of economic action. There is no question of escaping from either constraint: the 'will' of the capitalists, like that of the people play no role here.
It was on the basis of these above observations that Lenin constantly repeated and demonstrated that the essential point about opportunism was its position on the question of the State apparatus, i.e. it’s on position on the question of the revolutionary destruction of the existing State apparatus, and not on the simple abstract question of the exercise of the power. What Lenin demonstrates is that opportunism is not characterized by a refusal to talk about the conquest of the State power, nor about the need for workers to take political power. On the contrary, opportunism is characterized by the fact that it imagines that the bourgeois and the proletariat can exercise power by means of a similar kind of State apparatus, a State apparatus of the same historical type. Lenin emphasized the importance of a historical break, transformations in the nature of the State and its institutions. Opportunism therefore consists in the belief and the argument that the State apparatus is an instrument that can be bent according to the will, the intentions and the decisions of a given class. The Marxist analysis completely rejects this belief: the State power is not the product of a decision or a subjective will: it is the organization, the objective practical activity of the State apparatus, a set of social relations independent of the will of the men who play a material role in the structure of the State apparatus. It is based upon this understanding of the meaning of opportunism that the Communist revolutionaries must make a thorough analysis of those historical experiences in the course of which the revolutionary vanguard did not succeed in casting off the illusion that it is possible to make use of the bourgeois State apparatus to establish a revolutionary proletarian regime.
The vanguard can never underestimate the immense costs that the International Communist had had to pay in the past for the inability of the proletarian revolutions to install a State apparatus different from that of the bourgeois state apparatus- an apparatus tending not to reinforce and to perpetuate itself, but progressively to wither away in accordance of its own nature. The inability to conceive the need to understand this can only lead to the distortion, the retreat and the degeneration of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It leads in fact to the transformation of the dictatorship of the proletariat into its opposite, into what could be called the dictatorship of a bourgeois State apparatus over the proletariat.
So what are the main aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat?This main aspect -- as Lenin indicates in the clearest possible fashion, and as the experience of all revolutions has confirmed -- does not consist in the establishment of a certain type of institutions, in the legal sense of the term,which might be considered to possess a universal validity, and above all which might live on unchanged, and continue to fulfill their revolutionary role throughout the whole period of transition to the classless society. Though some institutions are necessary to the dictatorship of the proletariat, since this is still a State, and they provide it with a determinate 'political form',which depends on the historical conditions under which it is established and on the stages of its development. But the necessary political foundation and the principal aspect of all these forms is what we can call mass proletarian democracy. Now this kind of democracy cannot be decreed, it can not be 'guaranteed', in short, it does not depend mainly on institutions, however much freedom may characterize them; but it can be won, at the cost of a hard struggle, if the masses intervene in person on the political scene.When Lenin says that proletarian democracy is infinitely more real than any bourgeois democracy, however progressive or advantageous the latter may be, compared with the open,brutal forms of bourgeois class dictatorship he means that the difference between them is not simply one of degree, the difference between a narrow and limited democracy and a broad or extended democracy, but a difference of nature: the difference separating on the one hand the legal democratic forms realizing the power of a minority class, and thus excluding the possibility that the popular masses themselves have any hold, however precarious, on State power, and on the other hand a democracy which realizes the power of the majority class, and therefore demands the permanent intervention,the leading role of the masses of the people in the State. Lenin was constantly searching for the means of abolishing the State's monopoly -- even that of the State of a new type -- in the administration, management and political control of public affairs, in order to transfer these tasks in part to organizations of the masses of the people, which of course must not be confused with the Communist Party, which are distinct from the Party and much wider. The dictatorship of the proletariat, in so far as it bears on the State apparatus, cannot be defined simply in terms of the replacement of one State apparatus by another, but must be defined in a complex manner both as the constitution of a new State apparatus, and as immediately setting in motion the long process of the disappearance or extinction of every State apparatus.
A State (a State apparatus) which is not from the very first moment in course of 'withering away', i.e., of handing over political leadership -- by various means which can only be learned from experience -- to the masses themselves, has no chance of ever being a new kind of State apparatus it can only result in the resurgence or the extension of the old one.
Communism means the end of the State, and not the 'State of the whole people', an
expression which is nonsense for a Marxist. Between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie there is both a relation of symmetry (both need the State), and a relation of dissymmetry (the proletariat aims at the destruction of every State, it practises class struggle with a view to the abolition of classes). What defines the dictatorship of the proletariat is the historical tendency of the State which it establishes: the tendency to its own disappearance, and not towards its reinforcement.
Lenin explains that the dictatorship of the proletariat must push democracy 'to its limits' --which means: it must push it forward to the point where there is no longer any State, not even a democratic State. Lenin never claims that proletarian democracy is a 'pure' democracy, an absolute democracy; he never falls into the least legal, liberal illusion in this connexion: he always insists, following Marx and Engels, that every democracy, including proletarian democracy, is a form of the State, deriving from the fact that class relations still exist, and that in consequence this democracy is not freedom. Freedom can only be equated with the disappearance of every State, in other words, only with communism.
From this point of view it is possible to explain why the dictatorship of the proletariat is feared or rejected. The reason does not lie in a principled attachment to democracy, in a determination to preserve democracy while bringing about socialism by democratic means.On the contrary, it lies in the fear of democracy, the fear of the mass forms of democracy which overshoot and explode the extraordinarily narrow limits within which every bourgeois State confines democracy. Or perhaps in despair that history will ever make it possible for these forms to develop.Let us not forget that what defines opportunism is not too great an attachment to democracy but, behind the abuse of the term democracy (understood in accordance with the legal conception of democracy), its revulsion in the face of the extension of democracy represented by the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the last analysis, opportunism means the defence of bourgeois democracy, which is a form of Statism, and conceives the intervention and organization of the State as a means of overcoming social antagonisms.At least, that is undeniably the way in which Lenin presented the question. So let no-one say, after that, that the Communists ever 'underestimated' the value of democracy!
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