“Lenin’s theoretical restoration of the revolutionary doctrine re-established the definition of the state as a machine which one social class uses to oppress other classes. This definition above all is fully valid for the modern bourgeois, democratic, and parliamentary state. But as a crowning point of the historical polemic, it must be made clear that the proletarian class force cannot take over this machine and use it for its own purposes; instead of conquering it, it must smash it and break it to pieces.
The proletarian struggle is not a struggle that takes place within the state and its organs but a struggle outside the state, against it, and against all its manifestations and forms.
The proletarian struggle is not a struggle that takes place within the state and its organs but a struggle outside the state, against it, and against all its manifestations and forms.
The proletarian struggle does not aim at seizing or conquering the state as if it were a fortress which the victorious army seeks to occupy. Its aim instead is to destroy it and to raze its defeated defences and fortifications to the ground.
Yet after the destruction of the bourgeois state a form of political state becomes necessary, i.e. the new organised class power of the proletariat. This is due to the necessity of directing the use of an organised class violence by means of which the privileges of capital are rooted out and the organisation of the freed productive forces in the new, non-private, non-commodity communist forms is made possible.
Consequently it is correct to speak of the conquest of power, meaning a non-legal, non-peaceful, but violent, armed, revolutionary conquest. It is correct to speak of the passage of power from the hands of the bourgeoisie to those of the proletariat precisely because our doctrine considers power not only authority and law based on the weight of the tradition of the past but also the dynamics of force and violence thrust into the future, sweeping away the barriers and obstacles of institutions. It would not be exact to speak of the conquest of the state or the passage of the state from the administration of one class to that of another precisely because the state of a ruling class must perish and be shattered as a condition for the victory of the formerly subjected class. To violate this essential point of Marxism, or to make the slightest concession to it (for instance allowing the possibility that the passage of power can take place within the scope of a parliamentary action, even one accompanied by street fighting and battles, and by acts of war between states) leads to the utmost conservatism. This is because such a concession is tantamount to conceding that the state structure is a form which is opened to totally different and opposed contents and therefore stands above the opposing classes and their historical conflict. This can only lead to the reverential respect of legality and the vulgar apology for the existing order.”
– Force, Violence, and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle by Amadeo Bordiga, serialized in Prometeo over 1946-1948.
Image: cover of Prometeo #2, August 1946.
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