A socialist state is a

communist state A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state in which the totality of the power belongs to a party adhering to some form of Marxism–Leninism, a branch of the communist ideology. Marxism–Leninism was ...

formation that is the product of a purported base and superstructural relation that is called the

socialist mode of production The socialist mode of production, also known as socialism or communism, is a specific historical phase of economic development and its corresponding set of social relations that emerge from capitalism in the schema of historical materialism wit ...

, or simply socialism. Socialism acts as the base of the socialist state, while the superstructure is made up of two parts: the class character of the state and the organisational form of state power. The class character of the state, which is the dictatorship of the proletariat (or a variant thereof) in which the proletariat acts as the

ruling class In sociology, the ruling class of a society is the social class who set and decide the political and economic agenda of society. In Marxist philosophy, the ruling class are the class who own the means of production in a given society and apply ...

, in which purportedly the most advanced elements of this class form a vanguard party ( communist party) to lead the state. The exception to this rule was the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

. From 1961 onwards, the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...

(CPSU) argued it had created a developed socialist society where the proletarian dictatorship had been replaced by a socialist state of the whole people since all the exploitative classes had been defeated. The

Chinese Communist Party The Communist Party of China (CPC), also translated into English as Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Founded in 1921, the CCP emerged victorious in the ...

vehemently opposed this theory and argued that every state formation had to have a ruling class. The organisational form of state power, literally the

form of government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a m ...

in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary, is centered on the

unified power Unified power is the political power principle of communist states, whereby political power, instead of being separated into different branches as Montesquieu called for, is unified, in the state's case, in the highest organ of state power. This ...

of the supreme state organ of power that works under the party's leadership. The majority of communist states have been unable to establish a socialist state. These states had, according to Marxist–Leninist teachings, reached a lower form of development and designated themselves, or were designated, for example, as national democratic states, states of socialist orientation or as people's democratic states.

Concept

The Marxist theory of the state deems it to be an oppressive tool of the

. In the ''

The Communist Manifesto ''The Communist Manifesto'' (), originally the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (), is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The ...

'',

Karl Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...

and

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.Anti-Duhring'', Engels argued that the aim of the proletariat was to abolish the state: "it puts an end also to the state ... the state ... withers away." The Russian Bolshevik leader

Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...

supported Engels' notion of the withering away of the state in his book, '' The State and Revolution''. Lenin defines the state as "a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms", that is, the state is a product of the class struggle within a given society. He further notes that the state is "a power which arose from society but places itself above and alienates itself more and more from it", and that in the hands of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (literally a state in which the bourgeoisie acts as the ruling class) the state is an "organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another". The oppressed classes, headed by the proletariat, Lenin argued, needed not only to overcome bourgeoisie class rule but to abolish the state power created by them. The old state, Lenin contends, "must be replaced by a 'special coercive force' for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat (the dictatorship of the proletariat)". Only when there was no more class enemies to oppress would the state wither away, Lenin argued. Lenin further clarified his thoughts on the state in his '' Letters on Tactics''. In it, he argued that a state would exist in the transitory period between the capitalist mode of production and communist mode of production: the transitory phase was later referred to as the

(socialism for short). This state, under the dictatorship of the proletariat (literally a state in which the proletariat acts as the ruling class), would differ from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in the sense that it would be "without a standing army, without a police opposed to the people, without an officialdom placed above the people." That is, Lenin argued that the state would only start withering away when the state in question had completed the socialisation of the

means of production In political philosophy, the means of production refers to the generally necessary assets and resources that enable a society to engage in production. While the exact resources encompassed in the term may vary, it is widely agreed to include the ...

(the economy). After the Bolsheviks seized power in the

October Revolution The October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Historiography in the Soviet Union, Soviet historiography), October coup, Bolshevik coup, or Bolshevik revolution, was the second of Russian Revolution, two r ...

, Lenin began referring to a proletarian state. He contended in his article, "The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power" (published in 1918), that the new state was the "organisational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat." He argued that this dictatorship was to be headed by the most advanced elements from the proletariat through the communist party, which was tasked with raising the consciousness of society to actively partake in state administration. This organisational form, Lenin argued, "can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy—democracy for the rich—and establish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants." In the same article, Lenin contended that Soviet Russia was not a socialist state, "The socialist state can arise only as a network of producers’ and consumers’ communes, which conscientiously keep account of their production and consumption, economise on labour, and steadily raise the productivity of labour, thus making it possible to reduce the working day to seven, six and even fewer hours." He later clarified that "socialism is nothing but the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in the words, socialism is nothing but state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly." Soviet Russia could not construct socialism without the advanced technology of the capitalist countries, and in his pamphlet, '' A Tax in Kind'', Lenin argued in favour of implementing

state capitalism State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, ...

to construct socialism, arguing this retreat was both necessary given the backward nature of Russia's economy and that the proletarian state could limit the worst tendencies of capitalism. Lenin believed that socialism was not attainable in the short-run and made it synonymous with a classless society, stating, "as long as workers and peasants remain, socialism has not been achieved." He further noted that socialism was, by definition, an economic system organised from below, "We recognise only one road-changes from below; we wanted the workers themselves, from below, to draw up the new, basic economic principles." The proletarian state formation headed by the Bolsheviks, Lenin contended, was not a socialist, "there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie." Later, in 1921, Lenin in '' The Party in Crisis'' argued against the notion that Soviet Russia was a proletarian state, "A roletarianstate is an abstraction. What we actually have is a roletarianstate with this peculiarity: firstly, that it is not the working class but the peasant population that predominates in the country, and, secondly, that it is a roletarianstate with bureaucratic distortions." According to scholar Roland Boer, "Although osephStalin is usually ignored in analyses of the ocialiststate, he is the one who produced the first seeds for a theory of the socialist state. In order to do so, he had to overcome a number of hurdles bequeathed to him by Lenin, let alone Engels." Originally, he shared Lenin's conviction that the class character of the state was its most important feature, and he referred to the Soviet Union as a "new proletarian type of state". Stalin's earliest writings on the subject is rather vague, and he states that a socialist state is responsible for systematically improving workers wages, reducing price increases and provide the essential for good living. However, by the end of the 1920s, Stalin argued that the economic foundation was a basic feature of any socialist state. At the 2nd Joint Plenary Session of the Central Committee and the Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on 7–12 January 1933, Stalin claimed that a socialist economic system had been constructed in the Soviet Union. However, instead of arguing in favour of the withering away of the state, Stalin champions the theory of the aggravation of the class struggle under socialism, in which the proletariat has to struggle against the moribund classes that are trying to sabotage socialism. The aggravation of the class struggle, Stalin reason, would strengthen the state: The socialist state Stalin envisioned had, unlike Lenin's outline, a standing army, a police and officialdom. Its main goal was, in Stalin's words, to "smash" the bourgeoisie state and spread communism. He also envisioned that the growing strength of the Soviet socialist state would intensify "the resistance of the last remnants of the dying classes", both internally and externally. A strong socialist state went hand-in-hand with turning the socialist mode of production into a distinct historical stage of development instead of a transitory stage. The communist stage was postponed even further, with Stalin quoting Lenin by saying that communism was a "very, very" distant goal. When asked directly on the possibility of realising communism, Stalin stated, "Clearly, we are still a long way from such a society." To construct a communist society, Stalin argued, "communism—in economics, politics and culture—must become second nature to human beings and the planet." Unlike Lenin, Stalin came to believe that the proletarian state was not a remnant of the bourgeoisie state but instead a new type of state. On 25 November 1936, Stalin told an audience that "the complete victory of the Socialist system in all spheres of the national economy is now a fact." The

1936 Soviet Constitution The 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union, also known as the Stalin Constitution, was the constitution of the Soviet Union adopted on 5 December 1936. The 1936 Constitution was the second constitution of the Soviet Union and replaced the 1924 ...

proclaimed the Soviet Union to be a "socialist state of workers and peasants". In contrast to Lenin's vision, Stalin did not believe that the socialisation of the means of production initiated a process of state withering. At the 18th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1939, Stalin asked the assembled delegates a rhetorical question: "Why do we not help our Socialist state to die away?" He answered that as long as the Soviet Union was under capitalist encirclement, the state had to be strengthened to safeguard the socialist system. Later, in 1950, Stalin contended that the state would only wither away when capitalism had been defeated in the majority of countries. Stalin came to believe that a socialist state had, according to Roland Boer, six defining features. Two conditions must be met for the establishment of a socialist state: the eradication of any remaining capitalist elements and the establishment of a socialist economy. Thirdly, a cultural revolution should have been carried out to educate the masses and raise their class consciousness, similar to the one that occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Fourthly, after crushing the internal class enemies of socialism, the socialist state must redirect its military, punitive organs, and intelligence services to target external class enemies. Fifthly, a strong socialist state was therefore needed to defend and develop socialism in the context of capitalist encirclement. At last, the need to have a communist party which led the state and represented the most advanced elements of the working class.

Concept

Existing socialist states

See also

References

Books

Journal entries

Footnotes