The State and Revolution

By Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin. The State and Revolution is Lenin's most significant work, in which he totally rejects the institutions of Western democracy and presents his vision of the final perfection of communism. For anyone who seeks to understand the twentieth century, capitalism, the Russian revolution, and the role of communism in the tumultuous political and social movements that have shaped the modern world, this book offers unparalleled insight and understanding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Release date: Apr 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9780486849294

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DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

General Editor: Susan L. Rattiner Editor of This Volume: Janet B. Kopito

Copyright

Copyright © 2021 by Dover Publications

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2021, is a republication of a standard English edition of the work first published in Russian in 1917. A new introductory Note has been prepared specially for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich, 1870-1924, author.

Title: The state and revolution / Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Other titles: Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia. English

Description: Dover Thrift Editions. | Garden City, New York: Dover Publications 2021. | Series: Dover thrift editions | Summary: Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin. The State and Revolution is Lenin’s most significant work, in which he totally rejects the institutions of Western democracy and presents his vision of the final perfection of Communism. For anyone who seeks to understand the twentieth century, capitalism, the Russian revolution, and the role of Communism in the tumultuous political and social movements that have shaped the modern world, this book offers unparalleled insight and understanding—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020045426 | ISBN 9780486848082 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. | Socialism. | State, The. | Revolutions

Classification: LCC HX314 .L351713 2021 | DDC 320.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045426

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Note

PERHAPS THE MOST significant shaper of modern Russia, Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in 1870 in Simbirsk (later renamed Ulyanovsk), near the Volga River. Lenin grew up in a family that prized education as well as political activism— his brother Aleksandr was executed for his part in planning the assassination of Emperor Alexander III. An excellent student, Lenin attended Kazan University but was banished after participating in antigovernment activities. Fluent in German, he eagerly read Marxist works, banned at the time. After taking law school exams, he was a public defender for the peasants in Samara, whom he saw as victims of bias in the existing class system. He then moved to St. Petersburg, where he continued his political involvement. Continuing his activism, Lenin met with Marxist contemporaries in Europe but was arrested in Russia and sent to Siberia for three years.

In 1902 Lenin published What Is to Be Done?, in which he outlined a plan for a Marxist revolution in Russia and else­ where. He had come to believe that this revolution would result from the efforts of a select group of dedicated activists rather than the workers themselves. A violent uprising in 1905 destabilized Russia, but government reforms intermit­ tently restored order. It wasn’t until World War I (1914) that the groundwork was laid for a true revolution. In March

1917, food shortages in Russia led to protests, and Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. A Provisional Government stepped in, and allies such as France and Britain regarded this as a positive development toward constitutional rule. Lenin, who had been living in Switzerland and supporting German efforts to destabilize Russia and create conditions promoting a revolution, returned home on April 16, 1917, denouncing the Provisional Government. Supported by Lenin and Leon Trotsky, a powerful Russian leader, the Bolshevik Central Committee cast their votes for the revolution. As Lenin had envisioned, the uprising was led by a small group that was at the helm of this enormous country. By 1918, the Bolsheviks had succeeded in installing the Communist Party as the law of the land. As the Germans marched in, the US, along with Russia’s European allies, Britain and France, sent troops to stem the tide of Bolshevism.

Russia was now in the midst of a civil war. Tsar Nicholas II and his family were murdered on July 17, 1918, while opponents of the Bolsheviks went on the offensive in a series of assassination attempts. In August 1918, Lenin was struck by two bullets, one of which tore through his neck; he survived the attack. His would-be assassin was executed. Trotsky and Lenin created a massive Red Army from remnants of the Russian Imperial forces, massacring their opponents. In an attempt to restructure Russia’s economy through seizures of food to support the Communist war effort, Lenin instead created conditions that ultimately would lead to famine in 1921. After millions died, the Communist government had no choice but to open up the markets.

As Joseph Stalin’s predecessor, Lenin brought a reign of terror that would pave the way for the brutality of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and early ’50s. Lenin’s Communist Party supported the overthrow of capitalist countries in Western Europe, but more successful was the start of the reorganization of Russia into what became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. After suffering a series of strokes, Lenin died on January 21, 1924. He was fifty-three.

Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in the summer of 1917; it was published in 1918. Lenin prefaces the work by proclaiming the tendency of those in power to initially persecute revolutionary thinkers before developing an acceptable revision of their philosophy. In the case of Marxism, the bourgeoisie promotes a distorted view of the philosophy that Lenin wishes to restore to its original iconoclastic principles. To illustrate this point, Lenin writes in Chapter II that Karl Marx fought all his life against this petty-bourgeois socialism.

In order to present his case in The State and Revolution, writes Lenin, it will be necessary to quote at length from the works of Marx and Engels. Of course, long quotations will make the text cumbersome … but we cannot possibly avoid them. Having thus laid the foundation for his methodology, Lenin proceeds in this six-chapter work to analyze relevant passages from the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, coauthors of the highly influential 1848 work The Communist Manifesto, within the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historical developments—the revolts against monarchies in France, Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire between 1848 and 1852; the Paris Commune, a socialist government that ruled briefly in France in 1871; the French Revolution; and, most significantly for Lenin, the 1917 revolution in Russia. Revolution does not take place in a vacuum, and the relevant context for any revolution for Lenin is the state, which is a special organization of force; it is the organization of violence for the suppression of some class. Lenin believed that after revolution, the new state would eventually wither away.

In fact, he writes in Chapter II, World history is now undoubtedly leading to the ‘concentration of all the forces’ of the proletarian revolution on the ‘destruction’ of the state machine on an incomparably larger scale than in 1852.

Other topics of interest to Lenin in The State and Revolution are the role of imperialism in strengthening the state machine; Marx’s analysis of the achievement of the Communards during the Paris Commune; the bourgeois vs. the people’s revolution of the early twentieth century; and the need for the workers to organize large-scale production on the basis of what capitalism has already created. The aftereffects and lessons of the Paris Commune provide a thematic thread throughout. As Lenin states at the close of Chapter III: We shall see below that the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in different circumstances and under different conditions, continued the work of the Commune and corroborated Marx’s brilliant historical analysis. Engels also turned to the Commune to analyze how the proletariat might find living quarters in his work The Housing Question (published serially in 1872 and 1873), which Lenin relates to questions of the powers of the state. In later chapters, Lenin discusses the relation of democracy and capitalism to socialism as well as the transition of a capitalist society to a Communist society: "under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another…only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is no one to be suppressed—‘no one’ in the sense of a class (Chapter V). Ultimately, according to Lenin, The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work and equality of pay." More than a century later, we can only judge whether, to any extent, the goals of Lenin, Marx, and Engels were achieved.

CHAPTER I: CLASS SOCIETY AND THE STATE

1. The State as the Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms

WHAT IS NOW happening to Marx’s doctrine has, in the course of history, often happened to the doctrines of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes relentlessly persecute them, and treat their teachings with malicious hostility, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the consolation of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarizing it and blunting its revolutionary edge. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists in the labor movement concur in this revision of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of its doctrine, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social chauvinists are now Marxists (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois professors, erstwhile specialists in the extermination of Marxism, are speaking of the national-German Marx, who, they aver, trained the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of conducting a predatory war!

In such circumstances, in view of the incredibly widespread nature of the distortions of Marxism, our first task is to restore the true doctrine of Marx on the state. For this purpose it will be necessary to quote at length from the works of Marx and Engels. Of course, long quotations will make the text cumbersome and will not help to make it popular reading, but we cannot possibly avoid them. All, or at any rate, all the most essential passages in the works of Marx and Engels on the subject of the state must necessarily be given as fully as possible, in order that the reader may form an independent opinion on the totality of views of the founders of scientific socialism and on the development of those views, and in order that their distortion by the now prevailing Kautskyism may be documentarily proved and clearly demonstrated.

Let us begin with the most popular of Engels’ works, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staates, the sixth edition of which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 1894. We must translate the quotations from the German originals, as the Russian translations, although very numerous, are for the most part either incomplete or very unsatisfactory.

Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says:

Reviews for The State and Revolution

[jrgoetziii · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Obviously The State and Revolution has had major historical impact. But it's the perverse product of an aggressive mind who is speaking without thinking clearly. Lenin misuses and abuses political terms--"dictatorship of the proletariat" comes to mind, since a dictatorship is leadership by one person, usually a military leader in times of crisis, and the proletariat is a class of people--and therefore his argument falls way short.