“Saving” Marx from the applications made of his thought in political practice is not difficult, but it does not exempt us from criticizing that thought. The first, sensational distortion occurred with the Bolshevik revolution. That revolution was to take place at the highest point of capitalist development. Therefore, in England, or, alternatively, in Germany. Lenin “jumped” the stage of the bourgeois revolution and not even the brilliant Trotsky managed to save with his proposal for a permanent revolution the “socialism in one country”, wanted and implemented by Stalin, which became a tragedy. Marx’s error consisted in interpreting history in a unilinear and deterministic way, as if capitalist development contained within it the elements that would lead to socialism.
To this error was added a serious deficiency in Marx’s thinking. As Norberto Bobbio polemically pointed out more than forty years ago, while referring to the Italian Communists, Marx never elaborates a theory of the socialist state. In fact, he could not do it because, after a presumably brief dictatorship of the proletariat (in any case, of the majority), the transition to socialism would be accompanied and characterized by the replacement of the government of men over men with the administration of things. He would have no need for the state and its structures, but not even for politics: other than scienti c socialism, pure indomitable utopia. Not even Lenin, despite the writing of state and revolution, did I elaborate a theory of the socialist state and its government. He was interested in how to conquer the state, not how to build a socialist state: “Soviet plus electrification” appears to be a terribly naive simplification. Stalin’s solution, on the other hand, was “one party plus bureaucracy”.
That said, Marx knew more about it as I demonstrate in his excellent field analysis in Luigi Bonaparte’s Il XVIII Brumaio (1852), in which there are many and acute ideas that would allow us to sketch out a theory of the state in the con ict between classes. The Chinese revolution (1949) also emerged from Marxian schemes, but the Long March had at least the merit of tempering a ruling class. Mao soon understood that if the Party was to maintain a revolutionary spirit it was essential to fight the bureaucratization that had gripped the Soviet regime, already with Stalin and much more with his mediocre successors. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), which, among other things, was entrusted with the task of “firing on the headquarters”, had to keep the spirit of change high. It was not only a political disaster, but also an economic one. It had no theoretical foundation nor could it build it by giving political power to peasants, workers and soldiers and to the Red Guards. Once again, and since then, the Party has shown itself to be a flexible and resilient organism, as Marx never would have thought, capable of making itself and maintaining itself the backbone of the Chinese state. That a revolutionary opportunity could be produced by a small group of men from different social backgrounds, such as the Cuban barbudos, that could be characterized as an avant-garde that takes the revolution from the sierra to the city and that establishes the first elements of socialism as it happened in Cuba since 1959 by Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara and another distortion of the revolutionary linearity traced by Marx. In truth,
Elsewhere too, some post-Marxist scholars argued, communism could serve as a development ideology rather than a philosophy of history. Elsewhere too, including Cuba, the absence of a Marxist theory of the state means that the central role in politics and economics was acquired by the Party. That was to be the party of the working class, not the party of intellectuals or officials. The last distortion, of which Marx is responsible, but only in part, has once again led to the bureaucratization and, ultimately, to the collapse of the communisms that have come about.
