Section 23 of 27 · About 22 minutes

Chapter V, §4 — The Conditions for Distribution According to Need

V. I. Lenin · The State and Revolution

The source opens on its original site. The summary and questions below are original study material.

Section summary

The higher phase requires more than a new legal owner of productive resources. Lenin follows Marx in identifying changes in productive capacity, the division of labour, and the place of work in people's lives. Only under substantially changed conditions could distribution cease to depend on enforcing equivalent individual contributions and move toward meeting needs. Lenin explicitly declines to give a timetable for that development.

He contrasts this distant possibility with the immediate tasks of the first phase: organising production, recording labour and resources, and broadening participation in administration. Literacy and the coordination developed under capitalism are supposed to make that participation feasible. He also describes universal workplace discipline as transitional rather than the final ideal. The crucial causal claim is that people learning to administer social production would reduce the need for a separate governing apparatus. Readers should examine whether that claim adequately addresses expertise, scarcity, conflict, and the possibility that coordination itself generates new concentrations of power.

Key claims

Lenin makes the higher phase conditional on economic, social, and cultural development and gives no fixed timetable.
The move beyond contribution-based distribution requires overcoming inherited divisions and limitations, not ownership change alone.
He expects widespread practical administration to reduce the need for a separate state, while treating initial discipline as transitional.

Pause & reflect

For discussion

Use these questions for individual reflection or a study circle. Return to the passage to support your answer.

Which conditions distinguish the higher phase from the first phase? Explain why a declaration or decree could not establish them.
How is technical expertise different from privileged political control? Where does Lenin's administrative argument depend on that distinction?
Could universal accounting become a new form of domination? Assess that risk against the mechanisms Lenin expects to make the apparatus unnecessary.

Terms in context

higher phase of communist society: The projected development in which productive and social conditions permit distribution by need and the complete disappearance of state coercion.
division of labour: The organisation of tasks into differentiated roles, including the entrenched separation of intellectual and manual work criticised here.
productive forces: Human skills, knowledge, technology, and material capacities used in production; their development is a condition in Lenin's account.

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