The State and Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
The state, Lenin argues following Marx and Engels, is not a neutral arbiter reconciling class conflicts but the product of irreconcilable class antagonisms—a special coercive force standing above society to legalise and perpetuate class oppression. This fundamental Marxist position has been systematically distorted: bourgeois ideologists claim the state reconciles classes, while the more insidious Kautskyite distortion acknowledges the state as an organ of class rule but evades the necessary conclusion—that the oppressed class must smash the bourgeois state apparatus through violent revolution.
The state is distinguished from the old gentile order by territorial division and, crucially, by a public power of special armed bodies, prisons and coercive institutions separate from the self-acting armed organisation of the population. Even in democratic republics—the best political shell for capitalism—wealth exercises power indirectly through corruption, rendering universal suffrage merely a gauge of working-class maturity, nothing more.
Engels’ famous argument that the state “withers away” has been opportunistically reduced to a single point, obscuring the necessity of violent revolution. The bourgeois state does not wither away; it is abolished by revolution. What withers away afterwards is the proletarian semi-state. The proletariat must replace the bourgeois special force with its own special force for suppressing the bourgeoisie—the dictatorship of the proletariat. This integral revolutionary conception, inseparable from Engels’ panegyric on violent revolution, is replaced by eclecticism in official Social-Democratic literature.
Marx’s analysis of the Paris Commune corrected The Communist Manifesto: the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery but must smash it. The Commune replaced the smashed state with fuller democracy—abolition of the standing army, all officials elected and revocable, paid workmen’s wages. This transformed bourgeois democracy into proletarian democracy, creating a working, not parliamentary, body. Representative institutions remain, but parliamentarism as a privileged deputy caste is abolished.
The dictatorship of the proletariat expands democracy to the majority while suppressing the exploiting minority. Only in full communism, when classes have disappeared, does the state cease to exist and complete democracy become possible, after which it withers away as people grow accustomed to observing social rules without coercion. Between capitalist and communist society lies a political transition period whose state can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Kautsky’s capitulation to opportunism reduced revolution to winning a parliamentary majority, preserving the bureaucratic-military apparatus intact. Lenin insists the correct Marxist distinction is that Marxists aim for the complete abolition of the state only after the socialist revolution, recognising the proletariat must destroy the old state machine and replace it with an organisation of armed workers like the Commune. The Second International, by abandoning this revolutionary core, has sunk into opportunism.