Struggling to pull my thoughts together for this article. My basic thesis is that a latent prometheanism underlies much of orthodox Marxism which structures the workerism/productivism of those tendencies. It therefore also inflects their understandings of power and the state.

There's a passage in Lenin's State and Revolution where he basically says that the state withers away once we've all figured out how to reproduce its functions autonomously. We must all become the police in order to do away with 'The Police' in other words.

So it sounds like we don't *actually* do away with all of the problems of Statism; what Lenin promises us in the aftermath of the drudgery we have to go through first, is that we won't 'need' a KGB anymore because we'll all be informing the cop in our head anyway.

Another way of putting this is that power will have been internalised to such an extent that power operates in a deeply intersubjective mode akin to Foucault's panopticism. It's not eliminated, merely displaced, out from Parliament to all of us policing each other and ourselves.

And of course in a sense, power has always worked this way. The sovereign was decapitated long ago. But where power congeals in the state, it can be undone, ameliorated, struggled against in an open-ended war of position.

But with Lenin the tendency is to see the state as necessary; it becomes progressively less necessary (withers away) precisely insofar as each and all of us reproduce the functionings of the state in our daily lives. Terrifying.

Each of us policing ourselves and each other at one and the same time. The state only becomes redundant for Lenin at the precise moment at which we've already become active active and willing participants in a new, and much more insidious, police order.

btw if you want to check any of this, I don't have a specific page reference as I was working from my Kindle edition, but it's from the section of State and Revolution on 'The Higher Phase of Communist Society', here somewhere: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm#s4