Steve Bannon is no Leninist

“Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that’s my goal too,” replied Bannon. “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

~ Steve Bannon

Bannon is an idiot. Lenin was a Marxist. He believed that economies and societies evolved and that capitalism created the preconditions for socialism, which would create the preconditions for communism, which would then evolve into anarchy. Not bomb-throwing anarchy, but the “withering away of the state”.

Lenin didn’t want to”destroy the state”. Rather, he believed—as did Marx, and as do I—that humans and our economic relationships will evolve (perhaps over centuries) to the point where the coercive institutions of the state, e.g. police, prisons, perhaps even government as we’re used to, would no longer be necessary.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels adhered to the philosophy of dialectical materialism. They knew human economies were fluid over time and predicting the march of history was a fool’s errand. After the October Revolution the Russians made a major mistake by trying to move from a feudalistic economy to a socialistic one when the necessary preconditions didn’t exist.

Unfortunately, their (and Lenin’s) blunder still haunts us.

To reiterate – Steve Bannon, like far too many in his orbit, is an idiot.