PostScript to the First Edition¶
Core Argument¶
Lenin’s postscript to the first edition of State and Revolution is a brief but historically charged note, written from Petrograd on 30 November 1917, just weeks after the October insurrection. Its core narrative thrust is the abrupt suspension of theoretical work by revolutionary practice. Lenin explains that the pamphlet was composed in August and September 1917, with a planned seventh chapter—‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’—already outlined but never written. The reason is stark: he was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis, the eve of the October Revolution. This interruption, he declares, can only be welcomed.
The key claim here is not merely biographical but political. Lenin asserts the primacy of revolutionary action over its written analysis. The unfinished chapter, he implies, is now being lived rather than composed. The ‘experience of revolution’ is more pleasant and useful to go through than to write about. This is a pointed inversion of the traditional Marxist intellectual’s priority: the pamphlet’s theoretical work on the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the withering away of state power is now to be tested and verified in practice. The postscript thus functions as a declaration that history has overtaken the text.
The historical context is decisive. The pamphlet was written in the months between the February Revolution and the October seizure of power, a period of intense political struggle within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin was then in hiding, completing the work as a theoretical weapon against reformist and opportunist distortions of Marxism—particularly those of the Second International and the Mensheviks. The postscript signals that the coming revolution would provide the ultimate refutation of those positions.
The polemical edge is implicit but unmistakable. By welcoming the interruption, Lenin dismisses the notion that revolutionary theory can or should be completed before revolutionary practice begins. He argues against any separation of the two, and against those who would postpone action until all theoretical questions are settled. The postscript is a quiet but firm rebuke to pedantry and scholasticism within the revolutionary movement. It is also a statement of confidence: the October Revolution is the living proof of the pamphlet’s central theses. The unfinished chapter is not a failure but a triumph.