How Capital Produces Capitalists and Capitalism, and Then Socialism - Part 6 of 13

As Lenin points out, if you want to change that mode of production it cannot be done simply by demanding that the state goes down some alternative path, as the Narodniks sought to do, on the back of their subjectivist sociology. Nor can it be done simply by changing the government, or even by seizing control of the apparatus of the state. It can only be done on the basis of changing society itself, of changing which class is economically and socially dominant, and whose ideas, thereby, become dominant, and so capable of infusing the spirit of the state itself. 

“And so, in order to compel the wheel of history to turn in the other direction, one must appeal to “living individuals” against “living individuals”... appeal to a class against a class. For this, good and pious wishes about “nearest roads” are highly inadequate; this requires a “redistribution of the social force among the classes,”... This is the only and hence the nearest “road to human happiness,” a road along which one can not only soften the negative aspects of the existing state of things, not only cut its existence short by speeding up its development, but put an end to it altogether, by compelling the “wheel” (not of state, but of social forces) to turn in quite another direction.” 

(Lenin – The Economic Content of Narodism) 

This is simply a restatement of the point made by Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme that the state is not some autonomous body separated from society, and so society cannot be changed by simply capturing or attempting to “perfect” the state, but only by changing society, which then changes the nature of the state itself. 

“The German Workers' party — at least if it adopts the program — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases.” 

(Marx – Critique of The Gotha Programme, Chapter 4)

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