Theory and Event 13:2 (2010) Socialist Modes of Governance and the “Withering Away of the State”: Revisiting Lenin’s State and Revolution 1 Zhivka Valiavicharska Introduction Written mostly in the wake of October 1917, State and Revolution remains Lenin’s most elaborate theoretical treatise on the architecture of socialist state governance. During a provisional liberal government with declining legitimacy and the imminent possibility of a government takeover by an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Soviets of the Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies, questions about the function of the state in the making of the socialist order became a matter of urgent address. Expanding on Marx and Engels’ unsystematic thoughts on the socialist state, Lenin wrote State and Revolution to articulate in detail the Bolshevik position against the different fractions of the Social-Democrats and the anarchists. He famously speaks of the gradual “withering away” of the administrative, judicial, and executive institutions of the state—an evolution towards the state's own self-annihilation, which will be paradoxically achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even the most sensitive readings of Lenin’s work seem to share a consensus about Lenin's formulations of state power: From his 1902 What Is to Be Done?, where he proposes an underground, centralized party structure as a strategic solution to the brutal crackdowns of the young Russian Social Democratic movement by the “political police” of the autocratic state, to his call for nationalizing banks and monopolizing grain production in his 1917 Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, Lenin retains the category of the state unchanged throughout, seen as a repressive apparatus of class domination. Such readings see its logical conclusion in the authoritarian and repressive machine during Stalin's regime. They also understand the socialist subject as positioned outside the party-state dyad, passively subordinated to a top-down authoritarian political regime. A close reading of State and Revolution speaks otherwise. Here I argue that by using the language of “withering away,” “disappearing” and “dying out” of the state, Lenin offers a vision of state power that functions by means other than violence and the law, a vision of a state that administers, regulates, and manages rather than rules by force. My interest, then, is in the ways the architects of socialism conceived of a radically different— socialist—subject in relation to the socialist state. The latter, by reorganizing property and state institutions, generated alternative practices of productive social subordination; they brought into reality subjective categories, self-understandings, and social practices and effects which we have yet to examine more closely. 1 Parts of this paper were presented at the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities “Imagining Justice and Injustice” at the University of California, Berkeley, April 2008. I thank Wendy Brown, Robert Meister, Brian Whitener, and Vessela Valiavitcharska, as well as the colleagues present at the conference, for their generously provided comments and suggestions. 1