Re: Comments on a Leo Panitch article in the latest MR

At 09:56 AM 6/4/2002 -0700, Luke Rondinaro wrote:
>Whether one agrees with it entirely or not, the following article by
>Joseph Sobran has a very good point.
>http://www.lewrockwell.com/sobran/sobran262.html   Your thoughts? Luke R.  

Sobran writes, "Even the most wary of us have to keep reminding ourselves
that the state is our enemy. Always. Not just when the Republicans – or the
Democrats – are in power. Always. Tyranny and freedom are equally
nonpartisan."

I tend to lean toward Lenin:

Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism and the political struggle
that the state was bound to disappear, and that the transitional form of
its disappearance (the transition from state to non-state) would be the
"proletariat organized as the ruling class". Marx, however, did not set out
to discover the political forms of this future stage. He limited himself to
carefully observing French history, to analyzing it, and to drawing the
conclusion to which the year 1851 had led, namely, that matters were moving
towards destruction of the bourgeois state machine. 

And when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst forth,
Marx, in spite of its failure, in spite of its short life and patent
weakness, began to study the forms it had discovered. 

The Commune is the form "at last discovered" by the proletarian revolution,
under which the economic emancipation of labor can take place. 

The Commune is the first attempt by a proletarian revolution to smash the
bourgeois state machine; and it is the political form "at last discovered",
by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced. 

We shall see further on that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in
different circumstances and under different conditions, continue the work
of the Commune and confirm Marx's brilliant historical analysis. 

http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/staterev/

Louis Proyect
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