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Classics The State and Revolution

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

Lenin's State and Revolution argues that the state is not a neutral arbiter of class interests but an organised instrument of class rule — "groups of armed men" (the army, police, and bureaucracy) defending the property and privileges of the exploiting class. The central thesis is that the working class cannot simply take over the existing state apparatus and repurpose it for socialist ends; it must smash it and replace it with a fundamentally different form of political organisation — a workers' state that begins to wither away as class distinctions dissolve. The text is simultaneously a restoration of Marx and Engels's original theory of the state against the distortions of reformist and opportunist currents, and a practical intervention into the revolutionary situation of 1917, arguing that the Soviets (workers' councils) represent the embryonic form of this new state power.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is rooted in the classical Marxist tradition, drawing systematically on Marx's The Civil War in France, Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. Lenin's key theoretical move is to recover the distinction between the "withering away" of the state (the Marxist position) and the "abolition" of the state (the anarchist position). The state, for Lenin, does not disappear overnight; it persists in transitional form as the "dictatorship of the proletariat" — a workers' state that is no longer a state in the bourgeois sense because it represents the majority against the minority. The theoretical innovation is the insistence that the Paris Commune of 1871 provides the concrete institutional model: universal suffrage with immediate recall, all officials elected and paid workers' wages, the abolition of the standing army in favour of the armed people, and the fusion of legislative and executive power. Lenin situates himself within the revolutionary wing of Marxism, explicitly counterposing Marx and Engels's own positions to the "vulgarisation" carried out by the Second International's leading figures — Kautsky, Plekhanov, and others — who had reduced the question of the state to a matter of winning parliamentary majorities.

Conjunctural Relevance

Written between July and September 1917, the text is a direct intervention into the dual-power situation in Russia, where the Provisional Government (a bourgeois state apparatus) coexisted with the Soviets (organs of workers' and soldiers' democracy). Lenin's argument is that the Kerensky government's repression of the Bolsheviks in July 1917 had confirmed that the bourgeois state would not tolerate a peaceful transition of power. The text is therefore a theoretical justification for insurrection: the working class must transfer "all power to the Soviets" and dismantle the old state machinery. The conjuncture is one of war, economic collapse, and mass radicalisation — conditions under which the question of state power becomes immediate and inescapable. Lenin's postscript, added after the October insurrection, notes that the "happy" task of explaining how to smash the state had already been overtaken by events, but the theoretical lessons remained essential for the international working class.

Where the Argument Continues

The article itself is a summary and promotional text for the book, not a full analysis. The argument continues in the full text of State and Revolution itself, which remains the definitive Marxist treatment of the state. Within the IDOM corpus, the question of the state is developed further in articles on the nature of the bourgeois state under neoliberalism, analyses of the state's role in managing capitalist crises, and critiques of reformist illusions in "changing the system from within." The broader Marxist tradition extends the argument through Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (on the degeneration of the workers' state under Stalinism), and through contemporary debates on the character of the state in semi-peripheral economies. The question of what a workers' state looks like in the 21st century — beyond the historical models of 1871 Paris and 1917 Russia — remains an open theoretical and practical problem.

Connections

  • Marx, The Civil War in France — the primary source for Lenin's analysis of the Commune
  • Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — the theoretical foundation for the state as a product of class society
  • Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme — on the transitional period and the dictatorship of the proletariat
  • Kautsky, The Social Revolution — the object of Lenin's polemic against opportunism
  • Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed — extends the analysis to the question of the degenerated workers' state
  • Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society — a later Marxist contribution to state theory, though from a different political tradition
  • IDOM articles on the state under neoliberalism, the nature of the "deep state," and the state's role in pandemic management

Key Quotes

  1. "The state is an instrument for the oppression of the exploited classes by the ruling class. The state cannot be neutral."

  2. "Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society."

  3. "Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement."

  4. "To establish socialism, the only solution to the problems faced by the world today, it will not be possible for the working class to use the state as it currently exists, but it needs to overthrow it."

  5. "Stripped of all non-essentials, the state is in the final analysis 'groups of armed men': the army and the police, in defence of the ruling class."