Book: The State and Revolution

Overview
Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 work The State and Revolution sets out to clarify the Marxist theory of the state and its role in socialist revolution. It argues that the state is not a neutral arbiter but an instrument of class domination, that the bourgeois state must be destroyed rather than taken over, and that a transitional form of power, proletarian dictatorship, will be necessary to suppress the old exploiting classes and begin the construction of a classless society. Drawing heavily on Marx and Engels, Lenin outlines a program for replacing parliamentary-bureaucratic rule with a commune-type democracy, and he sketches the conditions under which the state will ultimately wither away.

Historical context and purpose
Written between the February and October revolutions while Lenin was in hiding, the book responds to two adversaries: reformist social democrats who believed capitalism could be gradually reformed through parliament, and anarchists who called for the immediate abolition of the state. Lenin contends both currents misread Marx: the former sanitize his revolutionary conclusions, the latter ignore the need for organized force to defeat and deter counterrevolution.

The state as an instrument of class rule
Following Marx and Engels, Lenin defines the state as a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms, a special organization of force, standing armies, police, prisons, separated from the people and serving the dominant class. Under capitalism, even the most democratic republic cloaks the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: property and the command of capital limit real political participation, bureaucratic hierarchies insulate power from voters, and formal equality masks material inequality.

Smashing the bourgeois state: the Commune model
Lenin insists the proletariat cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes; it must smash and replace it. The Paris Commune of 1871 furnishes the model: elected and recallable officials, fusion of legislative and executive functions, abolition of the standing army in favor of the armed people, and officials paid workers’ wages. These measures attack bureaucracy at its roots, subordinate administrators to the masses, and create a state of a new type aimed at its own eventual dissolution.

Dictatorship of the proletariat and democracy
The dictatorship of the proletariat is not personal despotism but the organized power of the working class to suppress exploiters and reorganize society. Lenin argues that this dictatorship is the highest form of democracy for the vast majority, because it breaks the power of capital and enables the direct, active rule of workers through councils. Soviet power, with delegates subject to recall and bound to their electors, exemplifies this proletarian democracy as against passive, periodic voting in parliamentary systems.

Withering away and phases of communism
Lenin distinguishes socialism, the first phase of communist society, from its higher phase. In the lower phase, remnants of bourgeois right persist, distribution according to work rather than need, requiring a state to enforce the new norms and suppress resistance. Only when class distinctions disappear and labor becomes life’s prime want does coercive authority become unnecessary. Then the state, having lost its social function, withers away, while administration of things replaces government over people.

Polemics against opportunists and anarchists
Lenin accuses Kautsky and other social democrats of severing Marx’s theory of the state from revolution, reducing it to parliamentary tactics and idealizing bourgeois democracy. He rejects the idea that mere electoral victories can overcome the entrenched power of capital and its apparatuses. Against anarchists, he argues that abolishing the state at once is utopian; without a workers’ state to suppress the exploiters and coordinate the economy, the revolution would be defeated. The issue is not state versus no state, but what class wields it and with what measures.

Significance
The State and Revolution reasserts the revolutionary kernel of Marxism at a moment of crisis, proposing concrete institutional principles, armed people, recallable delegates, destruction of bureaucracy, for a workers’ republic. Though unfinished, it became a touchstone for debates about power, democracy, and transition, and a theoretical foundation for the Soviet model Lenin sought to inaugurate.