Vladimir Lenin was the great leader of the Bolshevik Revolution that overthrew tsarism and capitalism in Russia and built a new socialist society, for the first time in history. His book The State and Revolution is one of his greatest contributions to Marxist theory and is a cornerstone of Leninism.

The State and Revolution was written in 1917, during a period of heightened repression against the Bolsheviks by the Provisional Government led by the Mensheviks and the rightist Social-Revolutionaries. It was written when many of the party leaders were underground or in jail. Lenin himself had first been hidden from the police by Stalin and then escaped the country in disguise. This period, known as the “July days” is summed up well in the 1943 book, Vladimir I. Lenin: A Political Biography, prepared by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. “When he went into hiding in Finland he gave the manuscript of his book The State and Revolution to the comrade who was escorting him with instruction to pass it on to Stalin in the event of his being arrested.” Furthermore, Lenin “wrote to party leaders that in the event of his being killed by the agents of the Provisional Government they were to take all measures to publish his notebooks on Marxism and the State.” Following this turn, the Bolshevik’s sixth congress, led by Stalin while Lenin was in exile, decided that the way forward for the socialist revolution was through armed insurrection.

Clearly Lenin considered the work to be of great importance to the revolution. This is because the book outlines the views of Marx and Engels on the state and further develops them. He explains the importance of proletarian dictatorship, how it must come about, and what its primary tasks are.

The main goal of The State and Revolution is to inoculate the revolutionary movement against opportunist currents (namely the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries) who would distort Marxism to their own ends and lead the revolution astray. Lenin had to explain why the revolution not only couldn’t stop short with the bourgeois February Revolution that overthrew the tsar, but must advance to its second, socialist stage, to break up the bourgeois state and establish a new, proletarian state. In other words, Lenin understood that the question of how to advance depends on a correct theoretical understanding of the state and its role.

Marxism and the state

Lenin sums up the Marxist understanding of the state like this, “The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”

Drawing from Engels’s book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Lenin explains that the state is an instrument of class power. “What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.” Indeed, because class antagonism exists, the state becomes an instrument by which the dominant class preserves its interests by use of force, or the threat of force, and as long as class antagonism exists, the state will exist as a result of that antagonism. Capitalism is built upon maintaining these class antagonisms, which are inherent in the relations of production at the core of the capitalist system. Without such class antagonism, the capitalist class cannot continue to reap its obscene profits at the expense and impoverishment of the working class. Thus the state represents the way in which these antagonisms are held at bay, so that society can function in the way that benefits the ruling class.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If the working class takes power, because it has no material interest in exploitation and oppression, it can and must eliminate class antagonism. This causes the state to lose its purpose, resulting in its “withering away.”

Thus, society is able to progress from capitalism (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) through socialism (the dictatorship of the proletariat), to communism (a society without class antagonism and therefore without a state). Lenin sums this up, saying, “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of ‘withering away’.”

Revolution

Marx and Engels gave particular attention to the summing up the revolutionary upheavals of their time, and Lenin draws upon their analysis of the 1848 revolutions in Europe and the 1871 Paris Commune. In fact, it is in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonapart, Lenin notes, that “Marxism takes a tremendous step forward compared with The Communist Manifesto.” Lenin explains that in the Manifesto, Marxism treats the question of the state abstractly, but following the experience of 1848, the summation presented by Marx becomes concrete, “and the conclusion is extremely precise, definite, practical and palpable: all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.”

Lenin emphasizes that this is “the chief and fundamental point in the Marxist theory of the state.”

What does this mean? Lenin explains that “the centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions most characteristic of this state machine are the bureaucracy and the standing army. In their works, Marx and Engels repeatedly show that the bourgeoisie are connected with these institutions by thousands of threads.”

To understand this question of the “thousand threads” it is essential to understand how the state arises. Every mode of production has a superstructure that arises from the economic base, reproducing and reinforcing it. The state is part of the superstructure. As such, it isn’t just dreamed into existence, but arises as the result of definite material processes. So, in the course of development of bourgeois society, the state arose in service to the ruling class, in order to protect and promote its class interest. Throughout that process, all of the various mechanisms of the state were deeply entwined with the needs and interests of the capitalist class, to the extent that one could say that capitalism is the fabric of the bourgeois state. Put another way, capitalism is embedded in the bourgeois state’s DNA.

After the February Revolution in Russia, when the Provisional Government took power, Lenin says, “The official posts which formerly were given by preference to the Black Hundreds have now become the spoils of the Cadets, Mensheviks, and Social-Revolutionaries.” Rather than smash the state, they simply took over its bureaucracy, its police, and its military. In this way, they too entwined themselves in the “thousand threads” of the existing state machinery.

The Provisional Government sought a lengthy period of capitalist development in Russia, which could only intensify class antagonisms between the bourgeois and petty bourgeois ruling parties on the one hand, and the working masses on the other. This, concretely, led the Provisional Government “to intensify repressive measures against the revolutionary proletariat, to strengthen the apparatus of coercion, i.e., the state machine.” Lenin therefore concludes, “This course of events compels the revolution ‘to concentrate all its forces of destruction’ against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.”

The socialist transition period

Importantly, Lenin asks what should replace the smashed machinery of the bourgeois state. The bourgeois state is a democracy for the ruling class, for the rich minority, and a dictatorship over the toiling and oppressed majority. But the proletarian state that replaces it must be something altogether different. The task is to abolish class antagonism, but until that task is complete, class antagonism and class struggle remain. “In reality, this period inevitably is a period of an unprecedently violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms,” Lenin writes, “and, consequently, during this period the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletariat and the propertyless in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the bourgeoisie).”

Summing up the Paris Commune of 1871, which Marx called the first instance of proletarian dictatorship, Lenin writes, “It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune; and one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not do this with sufficient determination.”

Lenin emphasizes that Marxism is scientific. It takes things as they are, rather than dreaming up a new society of thin air.

“We are not utopians, we do not ‘dream’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and ‘foremen and accountants.”

Against all such fantasies, Lenin asserts that we cannot be rid of the state all at once, the day after the revolution. Instead, he says, we must “smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and … begin immediately to construct a new one that will make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy.”

The main theoretical source Lenin draws upon here is Marx’s important text, The Critique of the Gotha Program, especially as it concerns the transition period between capitalism and classless society, which Marx calls the “higher-stage” of socialism, or communism.

In order to overcome class antagonism, socialism must, in a systematic way, overcome all of the problems carried over from capitalism which serve to recreate and reproduce capitalist class relations. This means getting rid of what Marx calls “bourgeois right,” meaning the legal rights of property ownership and the social and political power that the capitalist derives from owning capital. Lenin sums up Marx’s view in Critique of the Gotha Program as follows:

“In the first phase of communist society (usually called Socialism) ‘bourgeois right’ is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained, i.e., only in respect of the means of production. ‘Bourgeois right’ recognizes them as the private property of individuals. Socialism converts them into common property. To that extent—and to that extent alone— ‘bourgeois right’ disappears.

“However, it continues to exist as far as its other part is concerned; it continues to exist in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of products and the allotment of labor among the members of society. The socialist principle: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat,’ is already realized; the other socialist principle: ‘An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor,’ is also already realized. But this is not yet Communism, and it does not yet abolish ‘bourgeois right,’ which gives to unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.

“This is a ‘defect,’ says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of Communism [Socialism]; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any standard of right; and indeed the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic premises for such a change.

“And there is no other standard than that of ‘bourgeois right.’ To this extent, therefore, there still remains the need for a state, which, while safeguarding the public ownership of the means of production, would safeguard equality in labor and equality in the distribution of products.”

So, we have to understand that the goal of socialism is communism, and the role of the socialist state is to usher in the transition to a classless society, whereby the state will wither away. If socialism means distribution based on work, and communism is distribution based on need, then to get there, people must first learn to work for society without the bourgeois right of equal pay for equal work, and the fundamental inequalities that reproduce bourgeois right must be uprooted. These are inequalities based on things like physical strength, endurance, and fitness, education, skill, family connections, inequalities of agricultural land, contradictions between town and country, between mental and manual labor, inequalities relating to the gendered division of labor, and persisting inequalities resulting from national oppression, among others. The class struggle continues under the dictatorship of the proletariat, particularly in the superstructure. Further, the material basis, in terms of advanced productive forces and division of labor, required for distribution based on need rather than work, must be in place.

The State and Revolution today

Lenin finishes his book with a look at the various opportunist trends in Marxism that were, in various ways, distorting the revolutionary understanding of the State.

Lenin writes,

“It is often said and written that the main point in Marx's theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie….Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The capitalists always hide their class interest behind an ideology that pretends to be universal. They speak of democracy and freedom in the abstract, as if they are something that exist for everyone. But Lenin always emphasizes that whenever the capitalist ideologues attempt to hide behind such abstractions, we must ask, “but for whom, for which class?” Marxism seeks to expose these class interests, and the question of democracy in the transition period is no different. Thus, Lenin writes of socialist democracy, defining it as “democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people.”

Today, we see the repressive side of bourgeois democracy laid bare. The Zionist genocide in Gaza is bankrolled by the U.S. monopoly capitalist class, led by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. As the resistance to these horrific crimes grows, in Palestine and here at home, everything is being exposed for what it really is. We are currently seeing a prairie fire of resistance sweeping the campuses of U.S. colleges and universities, where brave and heroic students are setting up encampments, occupying their schools, and demanding divestment from Israel and an end to the genocide. They are being met with tremendous state repression and mass arrests, and yet, in the face of all of this, the movement only continues to grow stronger, larger, and more militant.

In this context, it should be clear to anyone paying attention that the state's job, from the politicians to the courts, the police and the National Guard, is to protect the interests of the monopoly capitalists, who would use Israel as its proxy and as a foothold for its hegemony in the Middle East. The “thousand threads” connecting the universities themselves to imperialism are likewise laid bare for all to see.

All the same, there are many who don’t understand this main point. For example, the social democrats insist that socialism can be brought about through electoral means, and that a reformed capitalism, along the lines of the Nordic countries, is sufficient to build socialism. Even some who call themselves Marxist-Leninists advocate for a peaceful transition to socialism while arguing that the socialist state ought to be built upon the most foundational elements of the bourgeois state, such as the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Certainly, it is true that the masses have always waged a struggle for democratic demands, to increase democracy. But this has been a struggle against the machinery of the bourgeois democratic state, which is fundamentally designed to uphold and reproduce the power of the capitalists. This is a point driven home in the book We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few, by Robert Ovetz, which argues convincingly that the Constitution “was intentionally designed…to impede political democracy and prevent economic democracy.” It is an essential part of the “thousand threads” that connect the state to the class that it serves.

On the other hand, anarchists try to convince people that the state can be abolished all at once, and that the day after the revolution we can simply put all of the baggage left over from capitalist society behind us and live in classless and stateless heaven on earth. But Lenin explains why that is a recipe for defeat, and that if we don’t replace the state power of the capitalists with the revolutionary state power of the working class, then the door is left open for the capitalist class to restore their power.

To avoid all these pitfalls, we need to understand clearly what the state is, what its class nature is, and how to overcome it. Revolutionaries today should study Lenin’s State and Revolution, and, as the great leader of the Chinese revolution, Mao Zedong, once said, “cast away illusions and prepare for struggle.”

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

Read more articles in the Red Reviews series

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One of the main pillars of Trotskyism is the denial of the possibility of building socialism in a single country. This is an outgrowth of Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory, which argued that the revolution in Russia depended on the immediate success of revolution in western Europe to avoid defeat. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union did indeed build socialism in one country, so we should look at the disagreements between Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism on this point and try to understand where they come from.

Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory was, from the beginning, opposed to the idea that socialism could be built in a backwards, peasant country like Russia.

As Stalin writes in The Foundations of Leninism, “Lenin fought the adherents of ‘permanent’ revolution, not over the question of uninterruptedness, for Lenin himself maintained the point of view of uninterrupted revolution, but because they under-estimated the role of the peasantry, which is an enormous reserve of the proletariat.”

Lenin, as we have seen, understood far better, and more concretely than Trotsky, how to bring the revolution from its bourgeois-democratic stage into its proletarian-socialist stage. For Lenin, the key was to build the alliance between the workers and the peasantry that would form the backbone of both stages of the revolution. For Trotsky, this was a doomed project; he believed because that relationship was fundamentally antagonistic, and that the success of the revolution relied upon its immediate spread to western Europe. Thus, Trotsky said, in 1906, “Without direct State support from the European proletariat, the working class of Russia cannot maintain itself in power and transform its temporary rule into a durable Socialist dictatorship. This we cannot doubt for an instant.”

Trotsky wanted socialism to sweep through Europe all at once, as though all of the countries in the capitalist world were equally ripe for revolution. Lenin’s view, on the other hand, was based on his understanding that capitalism developed unevenly. Indeed, it is essential to understand that Lenin’s analysis is based on the understanding that the present stage of capitalism is its monopoly capitalist stage – imperialism.

In an article in the Swiss Social-Democrat called “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe,” Lenin argued, “The times when the cause of democracy and socialism was associated only with Europe alone have gone forever.” Instead, Lenin argues, “A United States of the World (not of Europe alone) is the state form of the unification and freedom of nations which we associate with socialism – about the total disappearance of the state, including the democratic. As a separate slogan, however, the slogan of a United States of the World would hardly be a correct one … because it may be wrongly interpreted to mean that the victory of socialism in a single country is impossible, and it may also create misconceptions as to the relations of such a country to the others.” Lenin then explains that “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of Socialism is possible first in a few or even in one single capitalist country taken separately.”

Trotsky rejects the Leninist theory of uneven development. In his article, “The Program for Peace,” from 1917, arguing against Lenin in favor of the slogan for a “United States of Europe”, Trotsky says,

“The only more or less concrete historical consideration put forward against the slogan of the United States of Europe was formulated in the Swiss Social-Democrat in the sentence which follows: ‘Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism.’ From this the Social-Democrat drew the conclusion that the victory of Socialism was possible in a single country, and that, therefore, there was no point in making the creation of a United States of Europe the condition for the dictatorship of the proletariat in each separate country. That capitalist development in different countries is uneven is an absolutely incontrovertible fact. But this very unevenness is itself extremely uneven. The capitalist level of England, Austria, Germany or France is not identical. But in comparison with Africa or Asia all these countries represent capitalist ‘Europe’, which has grown ripe for the social revolution.”

Trotsky dismisses the Leninist theory of uneven development by saying that Europe is comparatively on the same plane of development if you compare it to the colonies. With this rhetorical flourish, Trotsky dismisses the contradictions between the imperialist states themselves, and the contradictions between those states in relation to their colonies. Again, Trotsky sees only workers and capitalists, incapable of concrete, materialist analysis of the complex contradictions at work in each country. And so, Trotsky says, all of Europe is ripe for revolution, presumably because all of Europe is capitalist, concrete conditions be damned!

Based on these idealist abstractions Trotsky continues his argument:

“That no single country should ‘wait’ for others in its own struggle is an elementary idea which it is useful and necessary to repeat, in order to avoid the substitution of the idea of expectant international inaction for the idea of simultaneous international action. Without waiting for others, we begin and continue our struggle on our national soil quite sure that our initiative will give an impetus to the struggle in other countries; but if that should not happen, then it would be hopeless, in the light of the experience of history and in the light of theoretical considerations, to think, for example, that a revolutionary Russia could hold its own in the face of conservative Europe or that a Socialist Germany could remain isolated in the capitalist world.”

Trotsky here combines ultra-revolutionary phrase-mongering with pessimism. It is his usual refrain: revolution must sweep through all of Europe or we are doomed.

Later, in 1922, Trotsky still persists in his rejection of the possibility of building socialism in one country. He writes, “The assertion, repeated several times in ‘A Program of Peace,’ that the proletarian revolution cannot be carried through to a victorious conclusion within the boundaries of one country may appear to some readers to be refuted by almost five years’ experience of our Soviet Republic. But such a conclusion would be groundless.”

Here, even as late as 1922, Trotsky insisted, “genuine advance in the construction of Socialist economy in Russia will become possible only after the victory of the proletariat in the most important countries of Europe.” Trotsky simply rejects facts in order to avoid having been proved wrong. The only way out for Trotsky, if he is to remain right, is to say that what is being built in Russia isn’t really socialism.

In 1923, Lenin, in the article “On Cooperation,” argued that the victory of socialism in Russia was indeed possible. Lenin wrote,

“…state power over all large-scale means of production, state power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured leadership of the peasantry by the proletariat, etc. – is not this all that is necessary for building a complete socialist society from the co-operatives, from the co-operatives alone, which we formerly looked down upon as huckstering and which from a certain aspect we have the right to look down upon as such now, under NEP? Is this not all that is necessary for building a complete socialist society? This is not yet the building of socialist society, but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for this building.”

In other words, Lenin understood clearly that the material basis for building socialism existed in Russia, and that the most important thing was correctly resolving the internal contradictions of the revolution itself, especially the correct handling of the contradiction between the workers and peasants. And as history has shown, correctly handling these internal contradictions formed the basis for dealing with the external contradictions between the Soviet Union and the imperialist countries. It gave them the material foundation needed to resist imperialist intervention when the Soviet people turned back the German Nazi invasion.

The Trotskyite theory was proven false in practice by the Bolshevik party, as socialist construction and agricultural collectivization cemented the bond between the proletariat and the toiling masses of the peasantry. Despite all of Trotsky’s protests to the contrary, the Bolsheviks did indeed build socialism in their country, which shown as a beacon to the working and oppressed people of the entire world.

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The disagreement between Trotsky’s “absurdly Left” (according to Lenin) theory of “Permanent Revolution” and the Leninist theory of revolution in two stages boils down to the question of how to deal with the question of the peasantry.

Trotsky argued for a socialist revolution that would be antagonistic to the tsar, the imperialist bourgeoisie and the broad mass of the peasantry, and that therefore depended on support from socialist revolutions in Western Europe, without which it would be crushed by counter-revolution.

Lenin, on the other hand, advocated a revolution in two stages. The first stage would be a bourgeois-democratic revolution against tsarism and feudal autocracy. The second stage would be a proletarian-socialist revolution against the imperialist bourgeoisie. Both of these, according to Lenin, would be led by the working class in alliance with the peasantry.

Indeed, Lenin called for the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,” and warned against confusing the particularities of “the democratic revolution with the socialist revolution.”

It is worth looking at the Leninist theory of revolution in two stages, as it proved itself in practice in the course of the Russian revolution of 1917.

The first stage, the bourgeois-democratic revolution, lasted from 1903 to February 1917. At this stage, the aim was to overthrow the tsar and the landlords. The Bolsheviks led the proletariat, in a strategic alliance with the peasantry. Lenin and the Bolsheviks understood that the liberal bourgeoisie (the Cadets) would compromise with monarchism and tsarism, and they struggled to isolate them from the peasantry. This period revealed in practice that the Cadets had no interest in the demands of the peasantry for land and liberty, that the tsar supported the landlords, and the Cadets supported the tsar. Thus, the peasantry could rely on no one but the proletariat.

Because the working class was able to lead the peasantry in the struggle against tsarism, the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia had the effect of weakening the bourgeoisie overall, paving the way for the proletarian socialist revolution, culminating in the Great October Revolution of 1917. The second stage of the revolution lasted through the eight short months between the February and October revolutions. In this period the proletariat consolidated its alliance with the peasantry. The new Provisional Government, dominated by the imperialist bourgeoisie together with the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, refused to pull out of the imperialist war or to confiscate and redistribute the landlords’ land. Under Bolshevik leadership, the proletariat again demonstrated in practice that it was the only reliable ally to the poor peasants. Thus, it was possible to advance, under the Bolsheviks’ slogan of “Land, Bread and Peace,” from the bourgeois democratic revolution to the proletarian socialist revolution.

Trotsky believed that the socialist revolution would inevitably put the proletariat into conflict with the masses of the peasantry as a whole. For Trotsky, the revolution was not a protracted struggle, proceeding carefully, step by step. It was a sweeping, global event. Lenin, however, built a plan for revolution in the countryside based on a concrete analysis of the real, material conditions that presented themselves to the proletarian dictatorship. Lenin argued that the majority of the peasantry could be drawn into the process of socialist construction through the development of agricultural co-operatives. By introducing collectivization in the countryside gradually, instead of through coercion and “tightening the screws” as Trotsky would have it, this antagonism between the working class and the broad peasant masses was avoided. As a result, the broad masses of poor peasants participated enthusiastically in the class struggle in the countryside and struggled sharply together with the working class against the resistance of the rich peasants (kulaks).

This gets us to the main problem at the root of Trotsky’s many errors: Trotskyism again and again demands a “pure proletarian revolution,” a “revolution without the peasantry.” This sort of narrow “workerism” leads the Trotskyites to wrong positions in relation to national liberation struggles and how to organize a united front. Instead of uniting with other classes in common cause against the monopoly capitalists, they treat the would-be allies of the proletariat as enemies.

Instead of uniting with democratic demands, they propose the nebulous concept of “transitional demands.” This Trotskyite organizational method is tied to their “all at once” concept of pure proletarian revolution. We should consider the Trotskyite notion of “transitional demands” in light of the Marxist-Leninist method of the Mass Line. Trotsky was an agitator and an orator, not an organizer, and this is reflected in how the Trotskyites approach the masses. Instead of uniting with the advanced masses around their felt needs, developing higher and higher levels of understanding, organization and struggle, shoulder to shoulder with the masses, the Trotskyites reduce the immediate demands of the masses to mere agitational slogans for socialism, shouted from the sidelines, with no concern for how to get from here to there.

We will see the Trotskyite opposition to revolution in two stages arise again when we look at the revolution in China. We’ll look more closely at this in a later article dealing with China in detail, but for now, let’s touch on it briefly. The main point here is that Trotsky and his followers failed to understand that the Chinese revolution’s first stage must involve an agrarian struggle against feudalism as an essential part of a national liberation struggle against imperialism. Thus, Trotsky opposed the formation of a national united front composed of the proletariat together with the peasants, petty-bourgeoisie, and the anti-imperialist national bourgeoisie. This was in direct opposition to the approach taken by Mao Zedong, which was proved correct in practice.

Again and again, the Trotskyites put forward a pure proletarian, all or nothing, approach to revolution. They shout their ultra-left slogans from the sidelines of the struggles of the workers and oppressed, and oppose the strategic allies of the working class. For the Trotskyites, it is always all or nothing, which, of course, amounts to nothing.

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To mark the 129th anniversary of the birth of Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong on December 26, Fight Back News Service is circulating his famous 1937 article “Combat Liberalism.” Combat Liberalism

By Mao Zedong

We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.

But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations.

Liberalism manifests itself in various ways.

To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.

To indulge in irresponsible criticism in private instead of actively putting forward one's suggestions to the organization. To say nothing to people to their faces but to gossip behind their backs, or to say nothing at a meeting but to gossip afterwards. To show no regard at all for the principles of collective life but to follow one's own inclination. This is a second type.

To let things drift if they do not affect one personally; to say as little as possible while knowing perfectly well what is wrong, to be worldly wise and play safe and seek only to avoid blame. This is a third type.

Not to obey orders but to give pride of place to one's own opinions. To demand special consideration from the organization but to reject its discipline. This is a fourth type.

To indulge in personal attacks, pick quarrels, vent personal spite or seek revenge instead of entering into an argument and struggling against incorrect views for the sake of unity or progress or getting the work done properly. This is a fifth type.

To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type.

To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation or speak at meetings or conduct investigations and inquiries among them, and instead to be indifferent to them and show no concern for their well-being, forgetting that one is a Communist and behaving as if one were an ordinary non-Communist. This is a seventh type.

To see someone harming the interests of the masses and yet not feel indignant, or dissuade or stop him or reason with him, but to allow him to continue. This is an eighth type.

To work half-heartedly without a definite plan or direction; to work perfunctorily and muddle along—“So long as one remains a monk, one goes on tolling the bell.” This is a ninth type.

To regard oneself as having rendered great service to the revolution, to pride oneself on being a veteran, to disdain minor assignments while being quite unequal to major tasks, to be slipshod in work and slack in study. This is a tenth type.

To be aware of one's own mistakes and yet make no attempt to correct them, taking a liberal attitude towards oneself. This is an eleventh type.

We could name more. But these eleven are the principal types.

They are all manifestations of liberalism.

Liberalism is extremely harmful in a revolutionary collective. It is a corrosive which eats away unity, undermines cohesion, causes apathy and creates dissension. It robs the revolutionary ranks of compact organization and strict discipline, prevents policies from being carried through and alienates the Party organizations from the masses which the Party leads. It is an extremely bad tendency.

Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism.

People who are liberals look upon the principles of Marxism as abstract dogma. They approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practice it or to practice it in full; they are not prepared to replace their liberalism by Marxism. These people have their Marxism, but they have their liberalism as well—they talk Marxism but practice liberalism; they apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves. They keep both kinds of goods in stock and find a use for each. This is how the minds of certain people work.

Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism and conflicts fundamentally with Marxism. It is negative and objectively has the effect of helping the enemy; that is why the enemy welcomes its preservation in our midst. Such being its nature, there should be no place for it in the ranks of the revolution.

We must use Marxism, which is positive in spirit, to overcome liberalism, which is negative. A Communist should have largeness of mind and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any private person, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a communist.

All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.

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Up to now we have studied dialectical materialism and given a general overview of its application to history, historical materialism. Now let’s look more closely at some of the core concepts that make up Marxism’s materialist conception of history, starting with the forces of production.

Any social system, whether we are talking about capitalism, socialism, feudalism, or what have you, has a particular mode of production upon which it is based. What do we mean by a mode of production? Simply put, it is a way of producing. A mode of production is the historically constituted way in which production is carried out.

The mode of production is a complex structure made up of two contradictory aspects: the forces of production, and the relations of production. Here let's look closely at the forces of production, what they consist of and the role they play in this contradiction.

Fundamentally, the forces of production consist of the agents of production on the one hand, and the means of production on the other. The means of production consist of the instruments of production, that is, the tools, factories, and so on, along with the objects of production, that is, the raw material and natural resources that are transformed through the labor process into goods. The agents of production are the workers themselves, who work to transform the objects of production (raw materials, etc.) through their use of the instruments of production (tools, equipment, etc.). The main thing is the people. Without their labor the hammers don’t hammer, the machines don’t run, and the fruits and vegetables spoil in the fields.

Each mode of production has productive forces that are unique to that historical mode, and that have come to exist historically, as the result of what came before it. The productive forces don’t appear out of thin air but are built upon the productive forces that preceded them. This means that we can’t jump around, just as we couldn’t have simply decided to develop steel without first having learned to smelt iron.

Why is the development of the productive forces important? Basically, the productive forces coincide with the productive capacity of s