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The State and Revolution

Vladimir Lenin

Revolutionary Marxism (Marxism-Leninism)

The single most influential text on Marxist revolutionary strategy, written by Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Lenin argues that the state is always an instrument of class rule, that the workers cannot simply take over the existing state but must smash it, and that a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' must precede the eventual withering away of the state. Essential — and chilling — for understanding twentieth-century communism.

About the author

Russian revolutionary and political theorist (1870–1924), founder of Bolshevism and first leader of the Soviet state. Lenin adapted Marxism into a doctrine of disciplined vanguard revolution; The State and Revolution, written while in hiding in 1917, is his fullest statement of Marxist theory of the state, completed just before he led the October Revolution.

Synopsis

Drawing on Marx and Engels, Lenin argues that the state arose with class society as the organized power of the ruling class, that bourgeois democracy is a veiled dictatorship of capital, and that the proletariat must destroy the existing state apparatus and build its own. After a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat suppresses the old ruling class, classes and with them the state will 'wither away.'

Core passage idea

Paraphrase · Public domain

Lenin argues that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the existing state machinery and wield it for its own purposes, but must smash it and replace it with a state of a new type — the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin's insistence on smashing rather than reforming the state, and on a transitional 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' marks the decisive break between revolutionary and democratic socialism. Read against the history that followed, it is also a key to how that doctrine hardened into one-party rule.

To avoid a bubble

Pair with the democratic socialists Lenin attacks (Bernstein, Kautsky) and with liberal and anti-totalitarian critics (Arendt, Solzhenitsyn) who trace the path from Lenin's 'dictatorship of the proletariat' to one-party terror.

Reading note

Read it as the theoretical hinge of twentieth-century communism, and deliberately against both the reformists Lenin condemns and the later critics of the regimes his ideas produced. Theory and historical consequence belong together here.

Best paired with

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.

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