V.I.Lenin - The State and Revolution

Lenin's State and Revolution is a remarkable work. It is likely the only book of Marxist theory that was written during a revolution that deals with the fundamental political questions of that revolution. It was written while Lenin was in temporary exile in Finland having fled a temporary burst of anti-Bolshevik reaction on the part of the Provisional Government in the late Summer of 1917. It bears the hallmark of intense engagement with Marx's writing on the State and the pressure of revolutionary organising.

As the title suggests the key question of the book is the state and Lenin looks at Marx's writings on two revolutionary moments - the 1848 revolution and the Paris Commune to understand the tasks of the revolutionary movement in 1917. My Penguin edition has a sneering introduction by the historian Robert Service who mocks Lenin's politics and writing in State and Revolution. Service claims that no one would have read and understood S&R in 1917 as it required an engagement with classical Marxist texts that few would have even heard about. What Service doesn't comprehend is that Lenin is clearly writing the book in order to clarify his own ideas, in order to win them within the Bolshevik party. 

As such Lenin repeatedly tackles the key question of the role of the state from different directions. He begins with Marx and Engels assertion that the state is the "product of the irreconcilability of class contradictions" and "arises where, when and to the extent that class contradictions objectively cannot be reconciled". This leads him into a critique those in the Russian Revolution who think that classes can be reconciled by the state itself, and in turn to Karl Kautsky's "distortion of Marxism" which denies that "the state is an organ of class rule." 

Lenin's discussions on the Paris Commune cannot be reduced simply to understanding the role of the state and emphasising Marx's argument that the state must be smashed. He also explores it fo context on what a workers' state must do - i.e. be "not a parliamentary but a working institution", tackling the parliamentarians who would get elected but leave the real business of the state to others, "behind the scenes" without accountability or control. Lenin writes:

The Commune replaces the venal and rotten parliamentarianism of bourgeois society with institutions in which freedom of opinion and discussion do not degenerate into deception, for the parliamentarians themselves have to work, have to execute their own laws, have to test their results in real life and to answer directly to their electors. Representative institutions remain, but parliamentarianism does not exist here as a special system, as the division of labour between the legislative and the executive, as a privileged position for the deputies. We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, be we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarianism if our criticisms of bourgeois society are not mere empty words for us, if the aspiration to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie is our serious and sincere desire.

Since the state is a antagonistic institution of class rule, the workers' state is the same. Suppressing the old ruling class and the capitalists, in the interest of the majority of society (workers and peasants in the case of Russia). Here Lenin argues for the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" - the idea that in the aftermath of revolution, the reality of the socialist state is one that oppresses the counter-revolutionary minority - the old capitalist class. This concept is one that Service finds particularly repugnant. But for Marx, and Lenin, the state must whither away alongside the class antagonisms themselves. Only then can people live and become "accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse... without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state."

Lenin's polemic, at it's heart, is a powerful working through of the Marxist theory of the state written in the midst of revolution. It is easy to bemoan what is missing - the chapters on the "Russian experience" of 1905 and 1917 were never written and one can only imagine how they might have been useful to generations of revolutionaries since 1917. But don't let this prevent you reading it - there is so much here that can guide us today. Recently I read an interview with two Sudanese socialists grappling with the same concepts that were posed to Lenin in 1917 by the actuality of revolution. In their interview they both quoted liberally from State and Revolution. No greater tribute to this work can be made.

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