V.I. Lenin

State and Revolution

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Lenin wrote State and Revolution, one of his most important works, in the summer of 1917, in preparation for the October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party in Russia. Lenin surveys the writings of Marx and Engels on the question of the state, in particular those aspects that had been distorted by the opportunist leaders of the Second International. Essential for understanding the Marxist attitude toward the state.

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Lenin wrote State and Revolution, one of his most important works, in the summer of 1917, in preparation for the October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolshevik Party in Russia. Lenin surveys the writings of Marx and Engels on the question of the state, in particular those aspects that had been distorted by the opportunist leaders of the Second International. Essential for understanding the Marxist attitude toward the state.

Chapter I: Class Society and the State
The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms
Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, etc.
The State: An Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class
The “Withering Away” of the State, and Violent Revolution

Chapter II: The Experience of 1848-51
The Eve of Revolution
The Revolution Summed Up
The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852

Chapter III: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx’s Analysis
What Made the Communards’ Attempt Heroic?
What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?
Abolition of Parliamentarism
Organization of National Unity
Abolition of the Parasite State

Chapter IV: Supplementary Explanations by Engels
The Housing Question
Controversy with the Anarchists
Letter to Bebel
Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme
The 1891 Preface to Marx’s “The Civil War in France”
Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy

Chapter V: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State
Presentation of the Question by Marx
The Transition from Capitalism to Communism
The First Phase of Communist Society
The Higher Phase of Communist Society

Chapter VI: The Vulgarization of Marxism by Opportunists
Plekhanov’s Controversy with the Anarchists
Kautsky’s Controversy with the Opportunists
Kautsky’s Controversy with Pannekoek

Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was the founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and a central figure within the Marxist movement from the end of the 19th century until his death in 1924. In October 1917 he, along with Leon Trotsky, led the Russian Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power and established the first workers’ state.

In 1902 Lenin published What is to be Done?, a major theoretical work which critiqued the trade unionist perspective that sought to limit the struggles of workers to economic questions. He insisted on the necessity of a political solution to capitalist exploitation and outlined a theory of the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the working class.

Lenin led the split with the Mensheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903, maintaining that the forthcoming revolution in Russia could not be of a solely bourgeois-democratic character. Over the course of the next 14 years he fought a long struggle against Menshevism. This ultimately culminated in his issuing in April 1917 of a set of political theses that unequivocally called for a proletarian socialist revolution in Russia.

Lenin was an ardent defender of internationalism. In 1914, when the German Social Democratic Party, the leading section of the Second International, abandoned Marxism by supporting German imperialism in World War I, Lenin fought against this national chauvinist perspective. In defense of the outlook of world revolution, he advocated the founding of the Third International. His Imperialism, published in 1917, identified the origins of the bloodbath engulfing Europe at the time in the inner workings of capitalism.

Lenin made major contributions to the development of Marxist philosophy, leaving behind a voluminous body of writings. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was his defense of dialectical materialism and a withering critique of efforts by figures with ties to the Bolshevik Party to substitute idealist forms of thinking for materialist philosophy.

Lenin died in January 1924 after a series of strokes, which had left him incapacitated for many months prior. In his Last Testament, suppressed for many years by the rising Soviet bureaucracy, he called for the removal of Joseph Stalin from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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