Bebel wrote back to Engels, who was living with Marx in London at the time, and expressed his agreement with the ideas expressed by Engels. But he must have had a relapse because in 1886 he wrote "The state must be transformed from one based on class domination into a people's state." But a state is an instrument of class domination! A state of the whole people is a Marxist oxymoron. The state must be replaced by a socialist commune.
4. Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme.
The Erfurt Programme was the official policy of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which was adopted at a congress of the party in 1891. Its main thesis was that there could be a peaceful transition to socialism, that capitalism would ultimately fall due to its own contradictions, and that the party should concentrate on trying to better the conditions of the workers here and now and eschew revolutionary activity. August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, and Karl Kautsky were the three socialist leaders behind the program.
Lenin says that Engels makes three important statements about the nature of the state: "First, as regards a republic; second, as to the connection between the national question and the form of state; and third, as to local self government."
We must keep in mind that Engels was discussing conditions prevailing in the German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the 1890s and that we are living in very different circumstances in the early 21st Century. I will try, however, to see if any of Engels' or Lenin's views are a propos today.
The first point that Engels makes is that talk of a peaceful transition under the German constitution is ridiculous. Germany had no republican tradition and the Riechstag was only a cover for an undemocratic dictatorial regime headed by the Kaiser. Lenin sides with Engels and holds that the Erfurt Programme was fundamentally opportunistic and not a real socialist program. Lenin says Engels said "precisely because of the absence of a republic and freedom in Germany, the dreams of a 'peaceful' path were perfectly absurd."
This argument would not apply to contemporary conditions even in Germany which, like the U.S. is a democratic republic. It is even more democratic than the U.S., since it is a parliamentary democracy with a ceremonial head of state and an executive directly responsible to the parliament, as opposed to our presidential system which combines the powers of head of state with those of an executive power only indirectly responsible to the parliament (Congress), which has impeachment power.
Today citizens have a sense of personal freedom and the ability to participate in the government by means of elections and freedom of speech (however illusory this may be). I therefore conclude that this first reason for rejecting the Erfurt Programme would not be applicable today for the reasons given by Engels.
Engels in fact says that in a republic or other type of free country "one can conceive of a peaceful development towards Socialism." Lenin is skeptical about this but he was writing in a time of world war and social revolution while Engels wrote in a time of relative peace.
But Engels is all for the democratic republic and does not think that the working class can come to power in any other form of government. He writes: "Our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic." In fact he even equates "the dictatorship of the proletariat" with the "democratic republic", writing that the democratic republic "is the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Those who reject the concept of the dictatorship of the working class, being innocent of dialectics, unwittingly are rejecting the democratic republic as well. The use of the term, however, is another matter.
To be clear, he is not saying that a democratic republic is the dictatorship of the proletariat but that the dictatorship of the proletariat is one species of the genus democratic republic. Lenin points out that a democratic republic can arise under capitalism and this would advance the class struggle which would lead "to such an extension, development, unfolding and sharpening of that struggle that as soon as the possibility arises for satisfying the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses this possibility is realized inevitably and solely in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the guidance of the masses by the proletariat."
"Dictatorship" is not a term that goes over well in the US and there is no good reason to use it since, as the context of Lenin's quote reveals, it is equivalent to "the guidance of the masses" by the working class.
Lenin points out that Engels does not have a one size fits all view of the state and the stages of transition. Engels, according to Lenin, "tries to analyze with the utmost care the transitional forms, in order to establish in accordance with the concrete historical peculiarities of each separate case, from what and to what the given transitional form is evolving." This is an important point to bear in mind with regard to differences between a unitary and a federal republic.
Engels thought that only the form of a unitary centralized republic was suitable for the use of the working class in a transition to socialism. But the US is not such a republic-- it is a federal republic. The difference is that each state or subdivision of a federal republic has its own government, legal system, and legislature and the federal government has two houses in its legislature-- one elected by the people based on population and the other representing the states making up the federation. The second house (in the US the Senate) is undemocratic in that a little state with a small population has the same voting power as a large state with millions of people. A unitary republic would have one house with representatives based on the population.
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