The State and Revolution

Contents

1. Preface 4 min 6

   Dated August 1917, when Lenin was hiding in Finland after the July Days. The war, he argues, has fused the state with the great capitalist combines and made the question of the state an immediate, practical one: an international proletarian revolution is coming, and the socialist leaders who rallied to "their" governments in 1914 have buried what Marx and Engels taught about it. The book will restore that teaching, expose Kautsky as its chief distorter, and draw the lessons of 1905 and 1917, a part Lenin never wrote.

2. I Class Society and the State 41 min 20

   Lenin starts from Engels's Origin of the Family: the state arises where class antagonisms cannot be reconciled, and consists above all of "special bodies of armed men", prisons and officials standing above society. It is the instrument of the economically dominant class, the democratic republic included, where wealth rules through bribery and the stock exchange. From Engels's Anti-Dühring he draws the distinction that organises the whole book: the bourgeois state does not "wither away" but must be destroyed by revolution; what withers away afterwards is the proletarian semi-state, and with it democracy itself.

3. II The Experience of 1848–51 27 min 13

   The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto already contain the idea that the proletariat needs a state only as "the proletariat organized as the ruling class", a state that begins to die as soon as it is born. From the revolutions of 1848–51, and the Eighteenth Brumaire's account of how every revolution perfected the bureaucratic-military machine instead of breaking it, Marx drew the more concrete conclusion: this machine must now be smashed. Lenin argues that imperialism has made that conclusion general, and turns it on the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries sharing out posts in the Provisional Government.

4. III The Experiences of the Paris Commune of 1871: Marx’s Analysis 49 min 18

   The Paris Commune answered the question of what replaces the smashed machine. Following Marx's Civil War in France, Lenin lists its measures: the standing army replaced by the armed people, all officials elected, recallable and paid a worker's wage, and a "working" body that both made and carried out the laws in place of a parliament. This "more complete democracy" changes the state's character, since the majority now suppresses the minority. Against Bernstein, who saw Proudhon's federalism in it, Lenin insists the Commune meant voluntary, democratic centralism, and he sketches socialism as the whole economy run like the post office, under the armed workers.

5. IV Supplementary Explanations by Engels 1 h 1 min 20

   Engels's later writings fill in Marx's analysis. The Housing Question shows the proletarian state expropriating houses without the old bureaucracy; the 1873 polemic "On Authority" ridicules anarchists who would abolish the state at a stroke; the 1875 letter to Bebel proposes dropping the word "state" for Gemeinwesen, since the Commune "was no longer a state in the proper sense". The 1891 critique of the Erfurt draft demands a unitary democratic republic as "the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat", and the 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France sums up the Commune's safeguards. Engels's remark that a communist party aims at the end of democracy too closes the chapter.

6. V The Economic Foundation of the Withering Away of the State 47 min 16

   Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme supplies the economics of withering away. Between capitalism and communism lies a period of transition whose state "can be no other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat": democracy for the majority and suppression of the exploiters. Communism then has two phases. In the first ("socialism") the means of production are common but goods are still distributed according to work, so "bourgeois right" and a state to enforce it survive; in the higher phase, with abundance and the end of the division between mental and manual labour, the rule becomes "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", and the state dies out. Meanwhile the whole of society is to become "one office and one factory" under the strictest accounting and control by the armed workers.

7. VI The Vulgarization of Marx by the Opportunists 42 min 13

   Why did the best-known Marxists forget all this? Plekhanov's Anarchism and Socialism (1894) skipped the question of the state altogether. Kautsky, in his polemics against Bernstein (1899), The Social Revolution (1902) and The Road to Power (1909), always spoke of conquering state power but never of breaking the machine, and in 1912 he answered the left radical Pannekoek by reducing revolution to winning a parliamentary majority over the existing ministries. Lenin concludes that the Second International has sunk into opportunism, and calls for a break with it and for a republic of Soviets on the model of the Commune.

8. Afterword 1 min 2

   A short postscript dated 30 November (13 December) 1917: Lenin had planned a seventh chapter on the experience of 1905 and 1917, but "the eve of the November Revolution" interrupted him. "It is more pleasant and more useful to live through the experience of a revolution than to write about it."

9. Appendix: Bourgeois Democracy and Proletarian Dictatorship 31 min 8

   Appended to this American printing: Lenin's theses for the founding congress of the Communist International (Moscow, March 1919), answering the socialist conference at Berne that had condemned Bolshevism in the name of democracy. "Pure democracy", he argues, is always bourgeois democracy, a dictatorship of capital; freedom of assembly and of the press are empty while the rich own the halls and the presses; the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg under a social-democratic government proves the point. Soviet power is presented as the new, higher democracy, and the congress calls on communists everywhere to win majorities in soviets.