Some of our recent discussions seem to have lost track of the aim of this whole debate. With all the different exegeses on "gentile" society, the dissertations on absolute monarchy and the scholastic war of quotes back and forth, we risk losing sight of the fact that the ICC did not embark on these discussions to show off our reading notes or to rival academic treatises on “the state”. We are trying to shed some light on questions which will become extremely urgent and tangible in a moment of revolution and we do this from a direct commitment to the revolutionary process.
The discussion going on now about the resolution concerning the state after the victory of the proletarian revolution must not be seen as some sort of speculation on an abstract theme. The theoretical work of a political group is different from that of a bourgeois centre for scientific research. The latter is composed of specialists who study this or that discipline by placing themselves “outside it”. Their “objectivity” resides in their professed “neutrality”. Research is a professional business.
1) Early in the succession of the various modes and forms of social production after the dissolution of the simple and crude communism of primitive times, the state appeared at a certain moment, determined by the economic development within a given territory. The state supplanted the consanguineous gens. Its existence was necessary both because of the growth (though still very slight) of social wealth and because production remained incapable of satisfying the expanding needs of the collectivity.
In opposition to the draft resolution on the state in the period of transition, which asserts that there is no mode of production in the transition period, the Toronto comrades state that: "When the workers dominate politically, they dominate the economy since they already have the levers of production, literally, in their own hands". And: "Socialised production is the mode of production, that is, production of use values, the communist mode of production in embryo".
Definition: When the class conscious world proletariat has overthrown the bourgeois order on a world scale, when all states have been over-thrown, when all opposing armies have been defeated, in short, when the “civil war” has been won, then, by definition, the so-called period of transition has begun.
To begin with, we must recognise the importance of the problem of the period of transition. The platform itself points this out in the section concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat:
The experience of the Russian revolution has shown the complexity and seriousness of the problem of the relationship between the class and the state in the period of transition. In the coming period, the proletariat and revolutionaries cannot evade this problem, but must make every effort to resolve it.
In the Platform adopted at the First Congress of the ICC in January 1976, the question of the relationship between the proletariat and the state in the period of transition remained "open":
The experience of the Russian Revolution has shown the complexity and seriousness of the problem of the relationship bet-ween the class and the state in the period of transition. In the coming period, the proletariat and revolutionaries can-not evade this problem, but must make every effort to resolve it.[1]
The following text is an attempt to put for-ward a general conception of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat without trying to come to any definite conclusions. It is a contribution to the present discussion on the period of transition dealing with the basic question of the form and content of the proletarian dictatorship. A more detailed explanation, especially of the more problematic points, will be under-taken in another document.