Prefaces¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin opens this chapter by establishing the state as the central theoretical and practical question of the epoch. The imperialist war, he argues, has driven the fusion of monopoly capitalism with the state apparatus to an extreme, transforming the advanced capitalist hinterlands into “military convict prisons for the workers.” The intensification of oppression and the mounting horrors of the protracted war are pushing the masses toward revolution, making the proletariat’s relationship to the state a matter of urgent, concrete action, not abstract speculation.
Lenin’s key claim is that the dominant socialist parties of the Second International have betrayed Marxism by capitulating to the bourgeois state. He names the trend “social-chauvinism”—socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds—and provides a sweeping indictment of its leading figures across Europe: Plekhanov, Potresov, and Tsereteli in Russia; Scheidemann and David in Germany; Guesde and Vandervelde in France and Belgium; Hyndman and the Fabians in England. These leaders, Lenin contends, have adapted servilely to the interests of “their” national bourgeoisie and “their” state, which are engaged in an imperialist war for the division and re-division of colonial booty. The struggle to free the working class from bourgeois influence is impossible, he insists, without first destroying opportunist prejudices about the state.
The chapter draws its theoretical context from the work of Marx and Engels, whose theory of the state Lenin promises to examine in detail, focusing on aspects that opportunists have ignored or distorted. He singles out Karl Kautsky, the most prominent theorist of the Second International, as chiefly responsible for these distortions. The Second International (1889–1914) is dismissed as having suffered “miserable bankruptcy” in the present war. Lenin also situates his analysis within the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the latter then completing its first stage in early August 1917. He frames the Russian Revolution not as an isolated event but as a link in the chain of socialist proletarian revolutions being generated by the imperialist war.
The polemic is sharp and unsparing. Lenin is arguing against the entire official leadership of international socialism, which he accuses of substituting reformist adaptation for revolutionary intransigence. The Fabian Society, noted in the appended footnote, is dismissed as an “extremely opportunist trend” of bourgeois intellectuals who denied the necessity of class struggle and revolution. The preface ends with a clear political purpose: to explain to the masses what they must do to free themselves from capitalist tyranny, making the question of the state “the most urgent problem of the day.”