my local ML party insists on using the state as a means to archive revolution instead of going to communities and helping people. who really need it. in India there are Maoists(Naxalites) that go around helping and improving the lives of people according to the Indian government i just don’t understand why this is. why wait for revolution when there are people who need help now.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.ml
    14·
    4 years ago

    Going to communities and helping people is an important step towards building a revolution. A revolution can’t happen without people being organized and being able to support each other. However, this alone is also not sufficient for a revolution to happen.

    I highly recommend reading Lenin’s The State and Revolution for a longer discussion of the topic. The short of it is that the state exists as a way to manage conflict between the classes and represents the interests of the class that controls the state. A capitalist state represents the interests of capitalists and represses the working class. The current state apparatus is actively used to crush any worker resistance and organization. Good examples of this was how occupy protests were crushed in 2009 or recent George Floyd protests.

    Leninists say that this state must be torn down, however class conflict will not simply disappear when that happens. Therefore we need to create a socialist state that represents the interests of the working class. This is what the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to. This state can then wither away as society becomes more egalitarian. As Lenin puts it in [chatper 5]:

    Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then “the state… ceases to exist”, and “it becomes possible to speak of freedom”. Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.