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 a book that ends mid-sentence. Lenin drafted it in a Helsinki hideout in August and September of 1917, finished six chapters and a paragraph of the seventh, then put down his pen and went to Petrograd to make a revolution. A postscript dated November 30, 1917 explains the abandonment with characteristic dryness: "It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of revolution' than to write about it." That sentence is usually quoted as charm. It is the most consequential line in the pamphlet. The unwritten Chapter VII, which was to draw the lessons of 1905 and 1917 for the smashing of the bourgeois state, is not a missing appendix; it is the place where the book's argument would have had to meet its own historical test, and the place where, on the evidence of everything Lenin actually did over the next six years, the argument would have had to be rewritten. To read The State and Revolution honestly is to read it with that absence held in view.

What the book most distinctively is, then, is a doctrinal recovery operation conducted in pamphlet form on the eve of an event its author knew was about to begin. Lenin's purpose is not to think a new thought about the state but to dig out and reassemble a teaching he says has been buried under three decades of opportunist sediment by Bernstein, Plekhanov, and above all Karl Kautsky. Almost everything in the book is a quotation from Marx or Engels with Lenin standing behind it, jabbing his finger at the page. He acknowledges the method openly at the start of Chapter I and warns the reader that "long quotations will render the text cumbersome" but are unavoidable. They are unavoidable because the book is, before it is anything else, a piece of textual policing: a demonstration that the canon — The Civil War in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire, the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Anti-Dühring, the letters to Weydemeyer and Bracke and Bebel — says one thing and that the official socialist parties of the Second International have, by silent substitution, replaced it with something else. Read this way, the book is unusually rigorous. Read as independent political theory, it is unusually thin, because Lenin programmatically refuses to think anything Marx and Engels did not first authorize him to think.

The argument itself can be stated quickly, and Lenin states it quickly. The state is "a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms." It arises where class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled, and its existence proves that the antagonism cannot be reconciled — the formulation is from Lenin's gloss on Engels's Origin of the Family in Chapter I and it carries the book's entire weight. From this it follows that every state is the dictatorship of one class over others; that the bourgeois state, with its standing army, police, prisons, and bureaucracy — "special bodies of armed men" — is the political shell within which capital actually rules; and that the most democratic of bourgeois republics is, in Lenin's most lapidary phrase, "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." The Kerensky republic, freshly installed in Petrograd as Lenin wrote, was the contemporary example, and the example was meant to sting.

From this diagnosis Lenin derives the book's two famous prescriptions, which are really one prescription with two phases. The proletariat cannot inherit the bourgeois state machine and turn it to its own purposes; it must smash it. "All previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed." In its place the proletariat must erect a state of its own, a "special organization of force" for the suppression of the bourgeoisie — the dictatorship of the proletariat — and this proletarian semi-state will in turn, as classes disappear, "wither away," along with democracy as a form of state, leaving the higher phase of communism in which society administers itself. The two motions are inseparable: "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.'" Anyone who keeps the first half and drops the second is an anarchist; anyone who keeps the second and drops the first is a Kautskyite. This symmetry — the double dissociation from anarchism and from parliamentary socialism — is the structural frame Lenin works inside for the entire book.

Chapter II's contribution is to turn that frame into a touchstone. Reading Marx's 1852 letter to Weydemeyer (a letter Lenin only added to the book as a third section in the 1919 edition, after the revolution he was making had begun to require harder boundaries between friends and enemies), Lenin announces: "Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois." It is an extraordinary sentence to set down. With one passage from a private letter, half a century old, Lenin proposes to draw the line that separates real Marxists from impostors. The line conveniently runs between him and almost every prominent socialist intellectual of the period. The reader who notices that this looks less like a touchstone than a loyalty oath has noticed something the book never wants to discuss.

Chapter III is the doctrinal heart and, on its own terms, the most persuasive thing in the book. Working passage by passage through Marx's Civil War in France and the 1871 letter to Kugelmann, Lenin extracts from the seventy-two days of the Paris Commune what he calls the "at last discovered" political form of proletarian rule. The Commune abolished the standing army and the police and put the people in arms. It made every official, from the highest down, elective and instantly recallable by the body that elected him. It cut all official salaries to a skilled workman's wage. It fused executive and legislative functions into a single "working, not parliamentary" body and amputated parasitic bureaucracy. It organized national unity through a centralism that was voluntary and democratic rather than bureaucratic. Lenin's gift here is patient compression: he assembles Marx's scattered observations into something close to a constitution and presents it as empirically discovered rather than designed. He is careful, against an obvious objection, to mark a sharp distance from anarchism. "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." The socialist revolution, he insists, takes "people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and 'foremen and accountants.'" Foremen and accountants. The phrase deserves to be set against the prescriptions of Chapter III with some care, because it concedes — almost in passing — that the dictatorship of the proletariat is going to need a great many people doing the kind of jobs that, in a less polemical book, one would call administration.

Chapter IV is the chapter of supplements. Lenin walks through The Housing Question, Engels's 1873 anti-anarchist polemics, the 1875 letter to Bebel, the 1891 critique of the draft Erfurt Programme, and the 1891 preface to The Civil War in France, marshaling each text to triangulate Marxism between the anarchists on one side and the German revisionists on the other. The most useful thing in this chapter is the way Lenin lets Engels do his unembarrassed work for him. Against the anarchists who refuse the very notion of revolutionary authority, Engels writes — and Lenin quotes — "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." Against the Lassallean slogan of the "free people's state," Engels writes in his 1875 letter to Bebel: "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." The honesty of these formulations is unsettling and clarifying at once. They strip the dictatorship of the proletariat of any softening verbal cushion and present it as what it is: the deliberate, organized application of force by one class against another. This is the book at its most morally serious, and one of the reasons it is harder to dismiss than its rhetorical surface suggests.

Chapter V, on the economic basis of the withering away, is where the argument turns furthest from polemic and most clearly toward the future, and where its weaknesses are most easily missed because the prose is at its most lyrical. Reading Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme, Lenin distinguishes two phases of the post-capitalist order. In the lower phase — what later usage will call socialism — society has not yet escaped the "narrow horizon of bourgeois law." Distribution is regulated according to labor performed, equal right is still in principle a right of inequality, and a state of armed workers is still needed to enforce the standard. Only in the higher phase, when "the antithesis between mental and physical labor has vanished, after labor has become not only a livelihood but life's prime want," will society be able to inscribe on its banners the famous formula from Marx, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Bourgeois democracy is unmasked in passing as "democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich"; proletarian democracy is defined, in a single sentence Lenin clearly meant as a banner, as "democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people." Between the two there is the transition, and the transition is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The pivot in this chapter — the one that has aged the worst — is Lenin's appeal to large-scale capitalist administration as proof that the bureaucratic caste is technically unnecessary. Capitalism, he argues, has already simplified the functions of administration to operations of "recording, filing, and checking" through the postal service, the banks, the railways, the trusts. Any literate worker can perform these operations at a workman's wage. The post office, in Engels's image that Lenin warmly takes up, is the model for the socialist state. Under socialism, he writes in Chapter VI in his reply to Bernstein, "all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing." This is the most utopian sentence in the book, and the artifacts themselves, in cataloguing the strength of the various arguments, flag the bureaucracy claim as speculative rather than strong. It is. The idea that the technical content of administering a continent-sized economy reduces to bookkeeping is the kind of claim a person can only make if he has never actually run anything larger than a small underground party. The unwritten Chapter VII would have had to confront the fact that the Soviets did not, in the event, replace ministries with rotating committees of armed workers paid workmen's wages; the bureaucracy returned, larger and harder, almost immediately after the revolution. Lenin was honest enough later, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky and elsewhere, to begin admitting some of this. The State and Revolution is the last work in which he could write as though the problem did not exist.

Chapter VI is the book's longest sustained polemic and its least generous chapter. Lenin tracks Kautsky across a quarter century — the 1899 reply to Bernstein, The Social Revolution of 1902, The Road to Power of 1909, and finally the 1912 exchange with Anton Pannekoek — to argue that the leading theorist of the Second International had silently substituted "conquest of state power" via parliamentary majority for the smashing of the state, and that this substitution, repeated by Plekhanov in his 1894 Anarchism and Socialism, ripened into the catastrophe of August 1914, when the parties of the International rallied behind their own bourgeoisies and the war. The textual reading is real. Kautsky did soften, evade, and eventually replace the formulations Lenin recovers, and Pannekoek's 1912 insistence that the proletarian revolution must destroy the state apparatus is the position of which Kautsky's reply is a measured retreat. Where the chapter wears badly is in its tone. Plekhanov is a swindler, Kautsky is a renegade, the Mensheviks Tsereteli and Chernov are petty-bourgeois democrats with a "superstitious reverence" for the state who are busy "distributing the spoils" of office in Kerensky's coalition. The artifacts mark the chapter's central thesis as contested, and contested it should be — not because Lenin is wrong that the Second International evaded the question of the state, but because the conclusion he draws from that evasion (that anyone who hesitates at his formulation is on the side of the bourgeoisie) is the kind of premise that, once installed, makes argument with one's nominal comrades impossible. The reader who notes how directly the rhetorical economy of this chapter foreshadows the later economy of Bolshevik factional politics has noted something Lenin himself, in 1917, would not have wanted noted.

And then the book breaks off. The single paragraph of Chapter VII announces only the subject — the lessons of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 — and the editor's note explains that the manuscript ends there. A reader who comes to The State and Revolution from outside the Marxist canon should understand how much depends on this. Everything that has come before is exegesis and polemic: a reconstruction of what Marx and Engels said about the state and the demonstration that the official socialist parties had walked away from it. Chapter VII is where Lenin would have had to make his own case in his own terms, with the concrete material of two revolutions in front of him, including one whose dictatorship of the proletariat his book had already preauthorized. The postscript turns the absence into a punchline. But the absence is not a punchline. It is the place where the doctrine would have had to answer for itself, and the place where, as the history of the next decade made clear, the doctrine could not answer for itself in the form in which the book leaves it. The Soviets did not in fact replace ministries with rotating committees of armed workers. The standing army returned. The bureaucracy was not amputated; it was rebuilt and enlarged. Officials were not paid workmen's wages, were not subject to instant recall, and the line between the working body of the Soviets and a parliamentary form began to blur and then to collapse. The proletarian semi-state did not wither; it hardened. None of this is The State and Revolution's fault in the narrow sense — the book was overtaken by the event it had tried to anticipate — but a serious reading has to ask what in the theory left it so unprepared to describe what it produced.

What it produced, on its own terms, was the founding text of a tradition. The artifacts place the book inside the materialist, communist-socialist, and Marxist canons, with anti-imperialist and critical-theoretic and broadly radical resonances, and the placement is exactly right. The State and Revolution is the work that fixed for a century the Leninist account of state power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the withering away, and the smashing-versus-conquest dichotomy as the diagnostic battery of revolutionary Marxism. It is the work against which Eurocommunism, Western Marxism, and council communism all defined themselves; it is the work to which insurgent movements from the 1920s through the colonial revolutions of the mid-century returned for vocabulary. Lenin's reading of the Paris Commune in Chapter III is the canonical reading: armed people, recall, workmen's wages, fused legislature and executive, the breaking of the parasitic state. Whatever else one believes about that program, one cannot understand twentieth-century Marxism without it, and one cannot understand Lenin's own subsequent practice — the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the doctrine of the vanguard party as the executor of class consciousness, the construction of a centralized one-party state — without seeing how each move is licensed, and how each move quietly strains, by what is set down here.

The book's place in its own tradition is therefore peculiar. It is both the most lucid statement of orthodox Marxism's theory of the state and, by the standards the artifacts apply to its source quality, mixed work as scholarship. Lenin handles the Marx and Engels textual sources with serious philological care — he cites specific editions, gives the German originals, dates letters precisely, notes which passages were published where and when. The cross-references in the apparatus run to a real and impressive library: Engels's Origin of the Family in the sixth German edition of 1894, Anti-Dühring in its third edition, The Housing Question of 1872, the 1873 anti-anarchist articles, the 1875 letter to Bebel from Bebel's memoirs, the 1891 letter to Kautsky on the Erfurt Programme draft, the 1891 preface to The Civil War in France; Marx's Poverty of Philosophy in the 1885 German edition, the Communist Manifesto in the seventh German edition of 1906, the fourth Hamburg edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire with Engels's preface, the Critique of the Gotha Programme as published in Neue Zeit in 1891, the letters to Weydemeyer and Kugelmann excerpted by Mehring; Bernstein's Premises of Socialism of 1899, Kautsky's successive works from 1899 to 1918, Pannekoek's "Mass Action and Revolution" of 1912, Plekhanov's Anarchism and Socialism of 1894, Bebel's Our Aims. The work as exegesis within a fixed canon is real. The work as independent political analysis is not, and the polemical register — opponents are scoundrels, philistines, renegades — is not incidental but structural. Lenin's method has no room for the possibility that Kautsky might be partly right; the touchstone, once installed, sorts the world into Marxists and frauds and there is nowhere else to stand.

This is the book's deepest internal tension and the one a serious review has to name. The State and Revolution presents itself as a recovery of what Marx and Engels actually wrote, and on this dimension it is genuinely careful. But it also presents itself as the operating manual for the form of state that a victorious proletarian revolution should erect, and on this dimension it is something stranger: a set of prescriptions — recall, workmen's wages, fused legislature and executive, the universal arming of the people, the abolition of parliamentarism, the takeover of the capitalist apparatus intact and its administration by armed workers — that derive their authority not from any empirical study of how large modern societies actually function but from a single seventy-two-day experiment in 1871. The Commune is doing an enormous amount of work in this book. It is the test case, the proof of concept, the source of the constitution, and the answer to every objection. It is also a city government that lasted ten weeks before being drowned in blood. To build the political form of a continental revolution on the precedent of the Commune, without seriously asking whether the precedent scales, is a category of confidence that a less polemical writer would have had to interrogate. Lenin does not interrogate it because the interrogation would weaken the polemic, and the polemic is, for him in August 1917, more urgent than the interrogation.

The honest weaknesses, then, are several and they are visible in the book itself if one reads it with attention rather than reverence. The technical case for the abolition of bureaucracy rests on an analogy between socialist administration and the post office that does not survive contact with the scale of the work to be done. The political case for the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional form has no internal account of what is to prevent the transitional form from becoming permanent — the "withering away" is presented as following automatically from the disappearance of classes, but the artifacts mark this thesis as contested for good reason, since the disappearance of classes is itself an effect, not a cause, and a state apparatus that has the means and the personnel to suppress the bourgeoisie also has the means and the personnel to suppress whomever it next defines as the bourgeoisie. The book has nothing to say, because Marx and Engels had nothing to say to it, about what happens if the workers' state encounters peasants, or nationalities, or dissenting socialists, or simply the problem of a literate bureaucracy that develops its own interests. The unwritten Chapter VII would have been the place where these questions came due. They did come due, on schedule, the moment the Bolsheviks took power. The book's silence on them is structural.

And yet — and this is the strange durability of the thing — none of these objections actually erase the book. The State and Revolution is still the clearest statement in the canon of the proposition that every state is an instrument of class rule, that the most democratic of bourgeois republics is no exception, and that any politics of fundamental social transformation must have an answer to the question of state power that does not reduce to capturing the existing state and operating it from within. The Kautskyite position the book attacks — that a parliamentary majority and a "compliant" government will do the work — has its modern descendants, and Lenin's reading of how that position drifts, by silent substitution and selective forgetting, from the texts that were supposed to authorize it, is a piece of analysis with continuing diagnostic uses. The chapter on the Commune, whatever one believes about its scalability, remains the most carefully assembled portrait we have of a moment in which a working-class population briefly ran a major city by election and recall and at workmen's wages. The book is, in short, simultaneously a serious political-theoretical achievement and a piece of self-deceiving polemic — and the deception and the achievement are not separable, because the same intransigence that makes the prescriptions feel inevitable to a sympathetic reader is what makes it impossible for the book to think honestly about its own difficulties.

Who should read it. Anyone trying to understand the twentieth century has to. The State and Revolution is the text behind which the Soviet state, the Comintern, the international Communist movement, and every Marxist-Leninist polity of the next eighty years claimed to stand, and the discrepancies between what it prescribed and what those polities became are not external to the text but legible inside it for a reader willing to look. Anyone trying to understand contemporary Marxist debates about state power, dual power, prefigurative politics, the relationship between movements and parties, or the durable problem of bureaucracy in left organizations will find that the vocabulary of those debates was largely set here. And anyone interested in the genre of the political pamphlet — the form of writing that tries to be intellectual reconstruction and call to action at the same time — will find one of its purest examples, with all the gains in clarity and all the losses in self-criticism that the form entails. What it is not is a sufficient guide to the question it asks. The question of what the proletariat does on the morning after the smashing of the bourgeois state is the question Chapter VII was supposed to answer, and the chapter is not there. The reader who notes the absence, and refuses to fill it in from the certainties of the first six chapters, is the reader who is using the book well.

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