Description:

Description: 'The State and Revolution' is a book by Vladimir Lenin describing the role of the state in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin's direct and simple definition of the State is that "the State is a special organization of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class." Hence his denigration even of parliamentary democracy, which was influenced by what Lenin saw as the recent increase of bureaucratic and military influences: "To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament – this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics."

Review

The State and Revolution is Lenin's most sustained work of political theory, written in hiding during August and September 1917, just weeks before the October Revolution would give him the chance to test its propositions in practice. The timing is essential to understanding the text: this is not an academic treatise but a weapon forged in the heat of political crisis, an argument meant to arm a revolutionary movement with theoretical clarity at the precise moment when theoretical clarity mattered most.

The book's central project is an act of intellectual archaeology. Lenin insists that Marx and Engels's actual teachings on the state have been systematically buried, diluted, and falsified by the very parties that claimed to carry their banner. The "forgotten words" of Marxism, as Lenin repeatedly calls them, concern the nature of the state as an instrument of class domination, the necessity of smashing (not merely inheriting) the bourgeois state apparatus, and the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional form that would itself eventually wither away. Lenin's polemical targets are not conservatives or liberals but the leaders of the Second International -- especially Karl Kautsky, whom he accuses of replacing revolutionary dialectics with comfortable eclecticism.

The strongest sections are Lenin's analysis of the Paris Commune of 1871 and his close reading of Marx's The Civil War in France. Here the argument achieves genuine analytical force. The Commune's practical measures -- elected and recallable officials, the abolition of the standing army in favor of the armed people, the reduction of all official salaries to workmen's wages -- are presented not as utopian fantasies but as concrete historical experiments from which practical lessons can be drawn. Lenin is at his most persuasive when arguing that these measures represent a qualitative transformation of democracy itself, converting representative institutions from "talking shops" into "working bodies."

The theoretical architecture of the book rests on a crucial distinction between two processes: the revolutionary abolition of the bourgeois state, which requires violence, and the gradual withering away of the proletarian state, which follows from the elimination of class antagonisms. Lenin accuses opportunists of collapsing these into a single gradualist narrative of peaceful reform. His reading of Engels's Anti-Duhring on this point is genuinely illuminating -- he shows how a passage about the state "withering away" was systematically divorced from its revolutionary context and made to serve the purposes of reformism.

The book also contains Lenin's most extended discussion of what comes after revolution. His treatment of the "first phase" and "higher phase" of communist society, drawn from Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, is notable for its sobriety. He repeatedly insists on the impossibility of leaping straight to communism, acknowledging that "bourgeois law" -- distribution according to labor rather than need -- will persist for an entire historical epoch. This is Lenin the anti-utopian, insisting that revolution must work with "people as they are now."

Yet the text has significant limitations that the intervening century has made starkly visible. Lenin's confidence that state administration can be reduced to "simple operations of registration, filing, and checking" that "any literate person" can perform reflects a profound underestimation of the complexity of modern governance. His vision of the entire economy organized "on the lines of the postal service" anticipates the bureaucratic gigantism that would characterize the Soviet state, even as the text itself rails against bureaucracy. The irony is structural, not accidental: the book's framework provides no mechanism for preventing the revolutionary state from developing its own class of administrators with their own material interests.

The final chapter is a single paragraph followed by a note explaining that the author was "interrupted" by the October Revolution itself -- "it is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of revolution' than to write about it." This famous unfinished ending has become one of the most commented-upon silences in political literature, a gap between theory and practice that the subsequent history of the Soviet Union would fill in ways Lenin could not have anticipated.

Read today, The State and Revolution remains essential not because its prescriptions proved workable but because its diagnostic framework -- the analysis of how states function as instruments of class power, how democratic forms can coexist with substantive unfreedom, how radical movements are domesticated through institutional capture -- retains a disquieting relevance. It is a book that asks questions larger than the answers it provides.

Reviewed 2026-03-25

Notable Quotes

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

Opening of Chapter I on how revolutionary thinkers are treated after death — revolution, ideology, canonization, co-optation

The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

Lenin's definition of the state drawn from Engels's Origin of the Family — state theory, class antagonism, political power

According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of "order", which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.

Defining the state as fundamentally an organ of class rule, against reformist interpretations — state theory, class rule, oppression

A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell, it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.

On how wealth controls democratic republics despite formal political equality — democracy, capitalism, corruption, wealth and power

Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.

Engels on the eventual fate of the state once class divisions are overcome — withering away of the state, historical materialism, progress

To prune Marxism to such an extent means reducing it to opportunism, for this "interpretation" only leaves a vague notion of a slow, even, gradual change, of absence of leaps and storms, of absence of revolution.

On how the theory of the withering away of the state has been vulgarized into gradualism — opportunism, revolution vs. reform, distortion of theory

The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of "withering away".

The distinction between abolishing the bourgeois state and the withering away of the proletarian state — revolution, state theory, dialectics

Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx's letter to Weydemeyer on what was original in his theory of class struggle — class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, Marxist theory

The next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people's revolution on the Continent.

Marx's key lesson from the Paris Commune in his letter to Kugelmann — Paris Commune, revolution, state apparatus

This is exactly a case of "quantity being transformed into quality": democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from the state (= a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is no longer the state proper.

On how the Commune replaced the state machine with fuller democracy — democracy, Paris Commune, transformation of the state

Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old "state power" have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing, and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary "workmen's wages".

On the simplification of state functions under capitalist development — bureaucracy, administration, state functions

To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament--this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.

Lenin's critique of bourgeois parliamentarism, following Marx on the Commune — parliamentarism, democracy, representation

We are not utopians, we do not "dream" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now.

Against utopianism, insisting on working with people as they actually are — anti-utopianism, pragmatism, revolution

In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy. And at best it is an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat will have to lop off as speedily as possible.

Engels's critique of the superstitious belief in the state — state worship, ideology, critical thinking

Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another.

On the relationship between democracy and the state — democracy, state theory, freedom

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty"--supposedly petty--details of the suffrage, in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly, in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,--we see restriction after restriction upon democracy.

Lenin on how capitalism restricts democracy for the majority — capitalism, democracy, inequality, exclusion

So long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.

Engels on the proletariat's need for the state as an instrument of coercion, not freedom — state theory, freedom, coercion, transition

The expression "the state withers away" is very well-chosen, for it indicates both the gradual and the spontaneous nature of the process. Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for we see around us on millions of occassions how readily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolt, and creates the need for suppression.

On how people will eventually learn to observe social rules without coercion — human nature, habit, social order, withering of the state

From 1852 to 1891, or for 40 years, Marx and Engels taught the proletariat that it must smash the state machine. Yet, in 1899, Kautsky, confronted with the complete betrayal of Marxism by the opportunists on this point, fraudulently substituted for the question whether it is necessary to smash this machine the question for the concrete forms in which it is to be smashed, and then sough refuge behind the "indisputable" (and barren) philistine truth that concrete forms cannot be known in advance!

On Kautsky's evasion of the question of smashing the state machine — opportunism, revisionism, revolutionary theory

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian means.

Engels's description of revolution as the most authoritarian act possible — revolution, authority, violence, political realism

This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present may be 'honestly' meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and 'honest' opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all.

On honest opportunism being the most dangerous kind — opportunism, political strategy, self-deception

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished, after labor has become not only a livelihood but life's prime want, after the productive forces have increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly--only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois law be left behind in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Marx on the higher phase of communist society — communism, human development, equality, freedom

I was "interrupted" by a political crisis--the eve of the October revolution of 1917. Such an "interruption" can only be welcomed; but the writing of the second part of this pamphlet will probably have to be put off for a long time. It is more pleasant and useful to go through the "experience of revolution" than to write about it.

The famous postscript explaining why the final chapter was never written — theory and practice, revolution, irony

Dialectics are replaced by eclecticism--this is the most usual, the most wide-spread practice to be met with in present-day official Social-Democratic literature in relation to Marxism. This sort of substitution is, of course, nothing new; it was observed even in the history of classical Greek philosophy.

On how dialectics are replaced by eclecticism in vulgar interpretations of Marxism — dialectics, eclecticism, theoretical method

The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay. But this "factory" discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters, will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal. It is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress.

Lenin on the whole of society becoming a single office under the first phase of communism — socialism, administration, discipline, transition