The Bourgeois State: Machine of Repression

(Quote of the Week)

Anger at and mistrust of the cops must be infused with the understanding that the repressive bourgeois state apparatus cannot be made to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed. In the lecture excerpted below, delivered two years after the 1917 October Russian Revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained how the state is not an expression of the people’s will but a machine by which one class holds down another, notwithstanding the efforts of various mouthpieces of the bourgeoisie and capitalist politicians to obscure its true nature. That machine must be shattered in the course of the proletariat seizing power and a workers state established, as happened in 1917 in Russia.

Nowhere does capital rule so cynically and ruthlessly, and nowhere is it so clearly apparent, as in these countries [Switzerland and the U.S.], although they are democratic republics, no matter how prettily they are painted and notwithstanding all the talk about labour democracy and the equality of all citizens. The fact is that in Switzerland and the United States capital dominates, and every attempt of the workers to achieve the slightest real improvement in their condition is immediately met by civil war....

Whatever guise a republic may assume, however democratic it may be, if it is a bourgeois republic, if it retains private ownership of the land and factories, and if private capital keeps the whole of society in wage-slavery, that is, if the republic does not carry out what is proclaimed in the Programme of our Party and in the Soviet Constitution, then this state is a machine for the suppression of some people by others. And we shall place this machine in the hands of the class that is to overthrow the power of capital. We shall reject all the old prejudices about the state meaning universal equality—for that is a fraud: as long as there is exploitation there cannot be equality. The landowner cannot be the equal of the worker, or the hungry man the equal of the full man. This machine called the state, before which people bowed in superstitious awe, believing the old tales that it means popular rule, tales which the proletariat declares to be a bourgeois lie—this machine the proletariat will smash. So far we have deprived the capitalists of this machine and have taken it over. We shall use this machine, or bludgeon, to destroy all exploitation. And when the possibility of exploitation no longer exists anywhere in the world, when there are no longer owners of land and owners of factories, and when there is no longer a situation in which some gorge while others starve, only when the possibility of this no longer exists shall we consign this machine to the scrap-heap.

—V.I. Lenin, “The State” (July 1919)