State and Revolution

This is Lenin’s classic work which systematically expounded Marxist state theory, proletarian revolution and the theory of proletarian dictatorship. It was written between August-September 1917. According to Lenin’s original plan, there should be seven chapters. Lenin drew up a detailed outline of the seventh chapter “Experience of the Russian Revolution in 1905 and 1917”. But the writing of chapter couldn’t be realized since he was intensely occupied in leading the October Revolution. In May 1918, the first six chapters were published separately as the first Vol. in Petrograd. In the second edition of 1919, Lenin added the third section of the second chapter “The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852”. This book is included in Vol. 25 of the first edition and Vol. 31 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

In the preface of the first edition, Lenin briefly explained the historical background of this book. The World War I, which broke out in 1914, accelerated and intensified the transition of monopoly capitalism into state monopoly capitalism, causing unprecedented misery and disaster to working people, triggering a magnificent anti-war and strike movement of the international proletariat and the national liberation movement in the eastern colonial and semi-colonial countries. The rapid upsurge of the proletarian revolutionary movement against the bourgeoisie has put the fundamental question of the revolution, namely the seizure of power, on the agenda and became a practical significance. However, the opportunists, represented by Bernsteinism and Kautskyism, which dominated the socialist parties in various countries, not only pandered to and supported the imperialist wars of partition and re-partition of the weaker nations on behalf of the interests of their own governments and nations, but also strenuously distorted and falsified the Marxist doctrine of the state, advocating the "parliamentary road" "peaceful transition" to socialism, which had an extremely negative impact on the proletarian revolutionary movement.

The struggle to liberate the working masses from the influence of the bourgeoisie, especially the imperialist bourgeoisie, would not have been possible without fighting the opportunist prejudices on the question of the State. For this reason, Lenin carefully studied the literature of Marx and Engels on the state from the autumn of 1916 and made notes on "Marxism on the State" in order to prepare a theoretical work on the Marxist attitude towards the state. In February 1917, in the Russian calendar, the Bolshevik Party took advantage of the revolutionary situation created by the World War I to lead the Russian proletariat and working masses in strikes and uprisings, overthrew the Tsarist government and created councils which were called as the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, consequently there occurred a situation wherein Soviets co-existed alongside the bourgeois provisional government.

In February 1917 (Russian Calandar), the Bolshevik Party took advantage of the revolutionary situation created by the World War I to lead the Russian proletariat and working people to strike and uprise. They overthrew the Tsarist government, created the Soviets represented by workers and soldiers, and created a situation of “dual power”. Since the masses of workers and peasants lacked political experience, Menshevik and the social revolutionaries stole the Soviets’ leadership. On May 3, the provisional government absorbed six Mensheviks, including Nikolay Chkheidze, and the social revolutionaries to form a coalition government, which continued its criminal imperialist war abroad and suppressed the resistance of the revolutionary people domestically. On July 3, 100,000 workers and soldiers in Petrograd held a demonstration demanding the overthrow of the coalition government. The bloody suppression by the coalition government was called the July Incident. Then, the coalition government forcibly disarmed the workers, banned Pravda, ordered the arrest of Lenin and persecuted other leaders of the Bolshevik Party, and the power completely fell into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Lenin argued that July Incident showed that the dual power situation and the possibility of peaceful progress of the revolution no longer existed. The most urgent task at present for the Russian proletariat armed forces to take power and overthrow the bourgeois state and to establish a Soviet Republic under the dictatorship of the proletariat. In order to guide the upcoming proletarian revolution in Russia and facilitate the international proletarian revolution, Lenin managed to escape from the manhunt of the provisional government in the summer of 1917. In a thatched hut by the lake Laszlaff on the Russian-Finnish border, he wrote this brilliant book State and Revolution.

The book includes two prefaces and six chapters. In the first chapter, basing himself on the writings of Marx and Engels, Lenin expounded the basic issues of state such as the origin, essence, characteristics, functions, relationship between withering away and on the issue of violent revolution.

At the same time, he exposed and criticized the distortions on the nature of the state by bourgeois and Russian petty-bourgeois democrats, emphasized that the state had always been an organ and the tool of class rule, and bourgeois democracy is no exception. From the second to fourth chapters, Lenin examined and summarized the formation and development of Marx and Engels’ state theory and the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He comprehensively summarized the lessons of the revolutionary practice from 1848 to 1917, emphatically elaborated how the proletariat treated the state issue during the revolution and pointed out that the proletarian revolution must smash the bourgeois state machine and replace it with a new type of Paris Commune-style proletarian state.

In response to the distortion of opportunists, Lenin elaborated Marx and Engels’ thoughts on the dictatorship of the proletariat, revealed the fundamental difference between proletarian democracy and bourgeois democracy, and clarified that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a new type of democracy and a new type of state (dictatorship) which is no longer the state proper.

In the fifth chapter, based on the basic theory of Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme, Lenin focused on the conditions for the withering away of the proletariat state, especially the economic basis for the withering away of the state, and clarified that the economic basis for the withering away of the state was a great development of communism. He also explained the transition period theory of Marxism and the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He developed the theory of the two stages of communism, and emphasized the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat during the transition period. In the sixth chapter, Lenin criticized the process and performance of Kautsky and others who avoided, distorted and vulgarized Marxism, such as blindly worshiping the state, denying the revolutionary task of smashing the old state machine, blindly trusting bureaucracy, limiting the goals of the proletarian political struggle to “gaining over the majority of the parliament” and “making the parliament become the master of the government” and other erroneous views. He emphasized that the struggle against opportunism must be firm when the proletarian revolution was coming. The basic idea running through this book was that the proletarian revolution must completely smash the bourgeois state machine, establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The main contents and viewpoints are as follows:

(1)The class nature of the state on issues of origin, essence and function and the the withering away of the state. To prove wrong the fallacy of the bourgeoisie and opportunists who tried hard to cover up the class nature of the state, Lenin quoted Engels’ basic views on the theory of the state in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, combined theory with practice to concisely and comprehensively expound the basic principles of the origin, essence, characteristics and functions of the state. He thus defended and developed the Marxist theory of the state. (A) The state is the symptom and the result of class contradictions. Bourgeois thinkers, especially petty-bourgeois thinkers, distorted Marxism precisely in this regard and described the state as an organ of class reconciliation. This vulgar “reconciliation” theory of philistinism was in fact a high-profile petty-bourgeois democracy disguised by socialism. If class reconciliation was possible, the state would neither appear nor stay long. (B) The state is essentially an organ of class rule, an apparatus with which one class oppresses the other. Since the class society, the state had the power that came from within the society but increasingly ascended above the society and increasingly alienated from the society, with its constituent organs such as the standing regular army, prisons, police, etc. The state had special public power with powerful tools, and it was the tool for the economically dominant class to rule and exploit the oppressed class. Lenin affirmed Engels’ idea that universal suffrage was a tool of the bourgeois rule. He also pointed out that democratic republic was the best political shell that a capitalist society could adopt. He criticized petty-bourgeois democrats such as Russia’s Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, as well as various social chauvinists and opportunists in Western Europe who absurdly argued and wanted the people to believe that “universal suffrage” could truly reflect the will of most workers, thus concealing the class essence of exploitation and oppression. (C) The bourgeois state is a “special force to suppress” the bourgeois class and it will not “die out on its own”. It is a general rule that a proletarian state will replace the bourgeois state through a violent revolution. With the possession of economic means of production by the whole society and full democracy in politics, the proletarian state established after the socialist revolution will “die out on its own” and leave the arena of history. Lenin pointed out that the violent revolution thought of Marx and Engels and the theory of “state withering away on its own” were closely linked as a whole, which was the basis for correctly understanding the violent revolution and all the theories of Marx and Engels. Social chauvinists and the Kautskyists deceived the masses and whitewashed bourgeois democracy with the false slogan of “free people’s state”, which distorted and betrayed the Marxist theory of violent revolution and the theory of “the withering away of the state”.

(2) The necessity to smash the bourgeois state machine and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(A) Marx’s and Engels’ theory on the dictatorship of the proletariat. Based on the timeline from 1847 to 1894, Lenin expounded the development of Marx’s and Engels’ state theory and the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He combined the experience of Russian revolutionary struggle and social reality, Lenin repeatedly demonstrated the importance and necessity of dismantling the bourgeois state machine and establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin pointed out that before 1848 Revolution, Marx and Engels used the most general concepts and statements to express the thought of the dictatorship of the proletariat in their works such as The Communist Manifesto, and the wording was very abstract. Marx and Engels only specified the task, but did not specify the solution. After 1848 Revolution, Marx took a big step forward in summing up the revolutionary experience of 1848-1851 in 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He raised the specific question and accurately concluded that the state machine must be broken and destroyed. However, he did not raise the question of how to replace the bourgeois state with a proletarian one. Lenin spoke highly of Marx’s rigorous scientific attitude in studying the state theory and the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1871, the first power of the proletariat in human history—The Paris Commune, has emerged. For this, Marx not only rejoiced at the heroism of the commune fighters, but also saw the progress of the world’s proletarian revolution and the significance experience from this great mass revolution. Based on this experience, Marx re-examined his theory and figured out a way to replace the smashed bourgeois state machine. In The Civil War in France, Marx clearly pointed out that the working class could not simply own the ready-made state machine and use it to achieve its own goals. The main lesson of Paris Commune was of great significance, so Marx and Engels added it to the German preface of The Communist Manifesto in 1872. That was as an extremely important revision. Lenin criticized opportunists for distorting this important revision to a fallacy of “emphasizing the idea of slow development and not advocating power-seizing”. He stressed that Marx meant that the working class should smash and destroy the “ready-made state machine” instead of simply seizing it. The state that the proletariat needed was by no means a state maintaining exploitation system, nor could it be a state established by the peaceful development of the so-called bourgeois democratic state. Instead, it should be a completely new type of state established by the proletariat through violent revolution, on the basis of breaking up the bourgeois state machine, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(B) The dictatorship of the proletariat as a new state form.

Lenin explained Marx’s thoughts on the state system and the form of political power of the Paris Commune. He clearly pointed out that the Commune was the first attempt, and “finally-discovered” political form that could and should have been used to replace the broken bourgeois state machine. The Paris Commune fundamentally changed the state system: it was linked to the public ownership of the means of production; it abolished the standing army of the bourgeoisie. In the Commune, all public officials were chosen by election and could be replaced. In particular, the privileges of officials were abolished and their salaries were reduced to the level of ordinary workers’. The state was changed from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy, from the democracy of the oppressors to the democracy of the oppressed, from the “special state power” to suppress a certain class to the suppression of the oppressors by the majority of workers and peasants. Therefore, the Commune was a more complete and thorough democracy. Based on Marx’s thought that the Paris Commune was a non-parliamentary organ that “both administrates and legislates” and Engels’ supplementary explanation of the Paris Commune experience, Lenin discussed the importance of establishing an administrative organ like the Paris Commune in the future, and designed a blueprint for the socialist countries.

Lenin elaborated on Marxist measures taken by the Paris Commune to replace the “smashed state machine”, which was the state system and political form of the Commune. On this basis, he studied in depth the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He further elaborated on the future state form that Marx did not made explicit and concrete, thus further developed the Marxist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(C) The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat a necessity during the transition from capitalism to communism.

“The theory of state withering-away” is an important part of Marx and Engels’ theory of the state. Lenin affirmed Marx’s and Engels’ views on the state and on the withering away of the state. What Marx wrote in Critique of the Gotha Programme on the dictatorship of the proletariat was different from that in The Communist Manifesto. Marx has emphasized that the transition from a capitalist to a communist society must go through a “political transition period”. The state in this period could only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. This was a scientific conclusion established by Marx based on the analysis of the historical mission of the proletariat, the reality of the development of capitalist society and the irreconcilable and antagonistic material interests between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Lenin concluded that the transition from capitalism to communism would, of course, produce various political forms, but their essence would necessarily be the same: all would be essentially the dictatorship of the proletariat. The experience of the Soviets created by the masses in Russia’s two revolutions proved that the Soviets was another form of dictatorship of the proletariat after the Paris Commune. The dictatorship of the proletariat in the transitional period was needed not only for suppressing the resistance of the domestic exploiting classes and defending the invasion and subversion of the external enemies, but also for removing the remains of the old society. This was to create economic, political and cultural conditions for the eventual elimination of class and the transition to a classless society and realize communism. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat was the highest form of the revolutionary role of the proletariat.

(D) The core of Marxist state theory is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Class struggle was often regarded as the core of Marxism. Lenin thought this was incorrect. This was because the theory of class struggle was not founded by Marx but by the bourgeoisie before Marx. Class struggle theory was generally acceptable to the bourgeoisie. If one only recognizes class struggle, he cannot be counted as a Marxist because he stay within the scope of bourgeois ideology and bourgeois politics. Limiting Marxism to the theory of class struggle was to castrate, distort Marxism and turn it into something acceptable to the bourgeoisie.

Lenin concluded that the application of the class struggle theory to the state and the socialist revolution by Marx would inevitably lead to the recognition of the political rule and the dictatorship of the proletariat, namely, a power that did not share control with anyone but relied directly on the armed forces of the masses. Only by transforming the proletariat into a ruling class could the desperate resistance that the bourgeoisie was bound to carry out be suppressed, and all exploited working people be organized to establish a new economic structure, and the bourgeoisie be overthrown. Therefore, Lenin clearly put forward that the core of Marx’s state theory was the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that only those who recognized class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat were Marxists. This was the touchstone to distinguish true and false Marxists. It was precisely on this issue that not only all opportunists and reformists, but also all “Kautskyists” who wavered between reformism and Marxism became poor mediocre people and petty-bourgeois democrats who denied the dictatorship of the proletariat.

(3) The consistency between the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist democracy.

Lenin exposed and criticized opportunists’ absurd statement that the dictatorship of the proletariat was to eliminate democracy and oppose socialist democracy, and clarified the relationship between the dictatorship of the proletariat and democracy. He argued that democracy and dictatorship are a unified and indivisible dialectical relationship, and democracy in class society was only the political ruling means of a certain class and has class meaning. According to Marx’s experience in analyzing the Paris Commune, he grasped the essence of capitalist democracy. Lenin profoundly revealed that the real essence of bourgeois parliamentary system was to allow the oppressed to decide once every few years who in the oppressed class would represent and suppress them in parliament, thus revealing the fundamental difference between proletarian democracy and bourgeois democracy: democracy in capitalist society was incomplete and hypocritical democracy, which only served the rich and only for the few to enjoy. The dictatorship of the proletariat during the transition from capitalism to communism changed the form of democracy. It not only simply expanded the scope of democracy and enabled democracy for the first time a democracy for the poor, for the people and not for the rich, but also strongly repressed on those who exploited and oppressed the people. This meant to exclude them from democracy. Proletarian democracy is a form of state. On the one hand, like any other state, it used violence against people in an organized and systematic way. On the other hand, it recognized that all citizens were equal and had equal rights to determine the state system and govern the state. In this way, Lenin revealed that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a state with new democracy and new dictatorship.

Lenin quoted Engels’ summary of the correct measures taken by the Paris Commune to prevent the state and its organs from changing from public servants to masters of the society. Then Lenin pointed out that the Commune’s measures showed that when democracy expanded to a certain limit, complete democracy would and should become socialism. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist democracy were not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, socialist democracy under the dictatorship of the proletariat was higher than capitalist democracy and was the highest form of democracy.

Lenin also explained the process of democratic evolution and the stages of development. He pointed out that only in a communist society, when the capitalists’ resistance was completely fought back, when the capitalists disappeared and when class was eliminated, could true democracy be realized. Only then would democracy begin to die out. The more complete democracy was, the faster it would become unnecessary and died out on its own. Lenin warned people not to forget that the withering away of a state was the withering away of democracy, and the withering away of a state was the withering away of democracy.

(4) The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is the advanced development level of communism.

Lenin expounded Marx’s thought in Critique of the Gotha Programme that the communist society was divided into the first stage and the advanced stage. He clearly pointed out that in the advanced stage of communism, the state and the law would die out. He called Marx’s “the first stage of the communist society” or the lower stage “the socialist society”. He revealed the basic characteristics of the two stages and analyzed the relationship between the development of the future communist society and the withering away of the state. He argued that the socialist society, which just evolved from capitalism and still bore traces of the old society in all aspects, had already owned the means of production and realized the socialist distribution principle of “He who does not work, neither shall he eat” and “An equal amount of labor for an equal quantity of products”. However, it had not eliminated the “unequal rights” of giving equal products to different work by different people, which was inevitable in the first stage of communist society. Therefore, in this stage, the state did not completely wither away. We still needed to adhere to the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to safeguard the public ownership of the means of production. At the same time, we needed to strictly supervise over the amount of labor and consumption to ensure equal labor and product distribution. For the state to wither away completely, there must be complete communism. The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state necessitated an advanced level in the development of communism, or the advanced level in the development of productive forces. In the advanced stage of communism, people could go beyond the “narrow definition of bourgeois rights” and started to get used to, rather than have to, abide by the basic rules of public life. There would be no class to suppress and no need to have a national institution to compel people to follow the rules. The state would thus wither away completely. When a state withered away, democracy, as one of a state form, also withered away.

Lenin pointed out that the withering away of the state was a long and “gradual” process.

The first stage of socialist society provided possibility for the development and liberation of productive forces by dispossession of capitalists from the means of production. However, we do not know and cannot know at what speed the productive forces would develop and at what speed to become developed enough to break the division of labor, eliminate the antagonism between mental and physical labor, and transform labor into “the first need of life”.

Passage from the so-called formal equality to the real equality, that is, to achieve the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. It was impossible to know what stage mankind would go through and through what measures to achieve this highest goal. Marxists could only demonstrate the inevitability of the withering away of the state and point out that its length would depend on the development speed of communism in the advanced stage. The day or the specific form of the withering-away was unpredictable because there was no material available to predict such things.

Lenin’s State and Revolution has great theoretical and practical significance. In theory, it inherits, defends and develops Marxism’s state theory, especially the theory of proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship. It draws a clear principled line between Marxism and opportunism of the Second International on a series of issues. It has armed the Bolshevik Party and Russian proletariat both ideologically and politically. In practice, it guided the great October Revolution to victory and greatly contributed to the development of the international communist movement.