State and Revolution (Revised)

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State and Revolution (Revised)

$19.99

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Lenin's Blueprint for the Proletarian State

Written in August and September 1917, while Lenin was hiding from the Provisional Government in a hut near the Finnish border, The State and Revolution is his most sustained theoretical work. It is a return to first principles: what did Marx and Engels actually say about the state, about the dictatorship of the proletariat, about what happens after the revolution? Lenin wrote it as a polemic against both the liberal democrats and the reformist socialists who had, in his view, diluted Marxism into parliamentary respectability. The result is a compact, aggressive, closely argued text that insists the bourgeois state must be smashed, not reformed.

The Argument

The book proceeds through a systematic reading of Marx's Civil War in France, Engels's Anti-Duhring, and the lessons of the Paris Commune. Lenin's central claim is that the state is not a neutral administrative apparatus but an organ of class domination, and that a revolutionary state must replace the standing army and bureaucracy with armed workers organized from below. The famous promise that the state will "wither away" is here, but Lenin is careful to distinguish the withering-away (which belongs to the distant communist future) from the immediate task of constructing a workers' state strong enough to suppress the bourgeoisie. The tension between these two positions is the crux of the book and, arguably, of the entire Soviet experiment that followed.

Historical Significance

Lenin never finished the final chapter. The October Revolution interrupted him. He later noted, with characteristic dryness, that it was "more pleasant and useful to go through the experience of revolution than to write about it." The text he left behind became the theoretical cornerstone of the Soviet state and remains the single most important Marxist-Leninist treatise on political power.