The State and Revolution

Lenin writes that, like all great revolutionary thinkers, Marx was demonized in his lifetime and then, after his death, turned by his enemies into a “harmless icon” (1.1) by dulling the edge of his revolutionary politics. The bourgeois—those who own the capitalist means of production—will use this defanged Marx as a way to trick the working classes into accepting a pseudo-revolutionary program that actually serves the interests of their overlords. It is therefore important to clarify Marx’s own position, particularly on the subject of the state, given how socialists in his native Germany backed their country’s march to World War I.

Lenin quotes Engels’s view that the state is an attempt to regulate class conflict by assigning the enforcement of law and order to an ostensibly neutral entity. Some take this to mean that the state plays a positive role in ameliorating class conflict, but for Marx, the appearance of social order is always in fact the oppression of one class at the hands of another. Those who insist on the state’s ability to repair class conflict are “not socialists at all (a point that we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petty-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology” (1.1).

Other professed Marxists, like Karl Kautsky (See: Key Figures), failed to come to the obvious conclusion that socialism requires a violent revolution and the destruction of state power. Lenin insists that Marx stated this plainly, but theorists like Kautsky are afraid of embracing the full implications of Marxist thought.

The state is defined by its territory. To those who live under a state, this seems entirely natural, but the state only achieved that power by establishing supremacy over the various communities which had previously inhabited that territory, whether tribes or classes. The very purpose of the state is to keep those other entities subordinate through police and prisons. Such institutions succeed because people have been tricked into thinking them normal. However, the very existence of such institutions proves that society has been torn asunder and is held together only by coercion.

A modern society tends to produce such antagonisms primarily because of the struggle to control the means of industrial production. Without police, the classes would arm themselves for fighting against each other. As class antagonisms grow sharper, the need for concentrated state power increases. Greater state power in turn leads to imperialist foreign policies, ultimately leading to the “predatory war of 1914-17 for the domination of the world by Britain or Germany” (1.2), which completed the subordination of society to the power of the state. Lenin argues that it is much to the shame of the socialist parties that they celebrated this war as a triumphant “defense of the fatherland” (1.2).

The agents of the state can extract taxes because they have authority, even if they have no respect among the population. These ostensibly neutral actors are in fact helping the dominant classes to oppress the lower, although sometimes a rough balance of power emerges. In addition to their direct coercive power, they use financial instruments like banks and stock markets that grant the upper classes access to the public treasury.

Democracies are particularly adept at securing class privilege because the right to vote tricks the working classes into thinking they have political power, even though their representatives all serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. Lenin draws again upon the works of Engels, who wrote that the state has not existed for all time, and so we should not expect it to last forever. The state came about at a particular phase of class struggle and will wither away as that struggle evolves. However, Lenin believes that socialist parties ignore this part of Engels’s thought, or if they do acknowledge it, it is mostly quoted “in the same manner as one bows before an icon” (1.3).

Engels famously declared that once the proletariat take control of the means of production, the class struggle ends, and thus the state “dies down of itself” (1.4). For some Marxists, this has suggested the possibility of gradual, nonviolent change, but Lenin angrily rejects this interpretation. In his view, Engels demanded revolution against the “bourgeois state” (1.4), at which point the proletarian state then fades away on its own. The bourgeois state is composed of the repressive apparatus used to keep the workers down, and clearly that requires violent action to overcome.

Engels also clarifies that the state only begins to wither away after the proletariat has linked society with the means of production, which cannot happen until bourgeois control has ended. Lenin argues that people have forgotten that Engels was also directing his argument against “opportunists” (1.4) more interested in their own political fortunes than in the interests of the workers. Such opportunists talk of a “people’s state” (1.4) to replace the bourgeois state, but all states are oppressive to one extent or another, and would therefore require abolition. Lenin insists that Engels is perfectly clear on the need for force to destroy the bourgeois state, arguing that bypassing that portion of his argument can only be willful ignorance.

Having clarified that Marx and Engels demanded the violent abolition of the bourgeois state, Lenin now moves toward a more detailed analysis of how they perceived the revolutionary situation in their own day.