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Questions about violence and Marxism

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The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of “withering away".

How does Marx expect the proletarian state to simply wither away? Can those who has never tasted power, come into possession and then relinquish power voluntarily? Having once imposed proletarian order after smashing state machinery, how is the new state expected to represent and not reproduce the structures that it has chosen to destroy through violence? I argue that the proletarian state will require and rely on extant state machinery to indoctrinate the citizens. After all the proletarian revolution does away with the bourgeois state but not with the bourgeoisie themselves. Or are the proletarians to conduct a vindictive reprisal and systematically persecute people identified as bourgeoisie?

I can identify with (as a member of the petty bourgeois) the proletariat and the peasantry in so far as derision for the “bureaucratic-military state machine” is concerned. Perhaps my bourgeois background is reflected most in my disavowal of violence as the means to an end. I have read of social transformations that occurred without the violence prescribed by Marx and Co. I ask - was the freedom struggle in India a revolution? If it was, then was it just a bourgeois revolution?


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