1. Class Society and the State¶
Core Argument¶
In the opening chapter of his polemic, Lenin establishes the Marxist theory of the state as the necessary starting point for revolutionary strategy. The state, he argues, is not a neutral arbiter but a direct product of irreconcilable class antagonisms. It emerges when society, split by conflicting economic interests, requires a power that appears to stand above it in order to maintain a semblance of ‘order’. In reality, this power is an organ of class rule, legalising and perpetuating the oppression of one class by another. The very existence of the state proves that class contradictions cannot be resolved within the existing social framework.
Lenin identifies two key distortions of this truth. The first, propagated by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologists, presents the state as a force for class reconciliation. The second, more subtle distortion comes from the Kautskyites, who accept that the state is an organ of class rule but evade the revolutionary conclusion: that the liberation of the oppressed class requires the destruction of the state apparatus, not its capture and reform. The state’s public power—its special bodies of armed men, prisons, and coercive institutions—exists precisely because a self-acting armed populace is impossible under class division. The democratic republic, Lenin insists, is merely the best political shell for capitalism, and universal suffrage a gauge of working-class maturity, not an instrument for realising the majority’s will.
Drawing on Engels, Lenin outlines the fate of the state. The proletariat, upon seizing power and socialising the means of production, abolishes itself as a class and thereby abolishes the state as such. When the state becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. State interference ‘dies down’; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things. Crucially, Lenin stresses that this ‘withering away’ applies only to the proletarian state after the revolution. The bourgeois state does not wither away; it must be abolished by the proletariat in a violent revolution. The replacement of one special coercive force by another cannot happen peacefully. Lenin insists that Engels’s theory of the state is inseparably bound up with the necessity of violent revolution—a point systematically ignored by opportunists who seek to reconcile the working class to the very machinery of its own subjugation.