In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later
that year, The October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the short intervening period he spent in Finland,
he wrote his impassioned, never-completed master work on The State and Revolution ... This powerfully argued book
offers both the rationale for the new regime and a wealth of insights into Leninist politics. It was here that
Lenin justified his personal interpretation of Marxism, savaged his opponents and set out his trenchant views on
class conflict, the lessons of earlier revolutions, the dismantling of the bourgeois state and the replacement
of capitalism by the, dictatorship of the proletariat. The result, as Robert Service suggests in his stimulating
Introduction, is 'a choral ode to action, intolerance, combat and collectivism, the anthem of Bolshevism in its
revolutionary era'. Immediately established as a standard text, it was selectively cited by leaders from Stalin
to Gorbachev in support of programmes which differed in important ways. As both historical document and political
statement, its importance can hardly be exaggerated.
Table of Contents
Translator's Notes
Introduction:
The Writing of the Book
The Contents
The Style
A Marxist Interpretation?
The Book and Political Theory
Political Conditions at the Time
The Book is Published
The Uses of the Book
The Book and Its Fate
The State And Revolution
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Edition
Chapter I: Class Society and the State
1. The State as the Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Contradictions
2. Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, Etc.
3. The State as an Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class
4. The "Withering Away" of the State and Violent Revolution
Chapter II: The State and Revolution�The Experience of 1848-51
1. The Eve of the Revolution
2. The Revolution in Summary
3. The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852
Chapter III: The State and Revolution�The Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871�Marx's Analysis
1. What was Heroic about the Communards' Attempt?
2. With What is the Smashed State Machine to be Replaced?
3. The Eradication of Parliamentarianism
4. Organization of the Unity of the Nation
5. The Destruction of the Parasite State
Chapter IV: Continuation: Supplementary Clarifications by Engels
1. The Housing Question
2. The Polemic with the Anarchists
3. Letter to Bebel
4. Critique of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme
5. The 1891 Preface to Marx's The Civil War in France
6. Engels on the Overpowering of Democracy
Chapter V: The Economic Basis for the Withering Away of the State
1. The Presentation of the Question by Marx
2. The Transition from Capitalism to Communism
3. The First Phase of Communist Society
4. The Higher Phase of Communist Society
Chapter VI: The Vulgarization of Marxism by the Opportunists
1. Plekhanov's Polemic with the Anarchists
2. Kautsky's Polemic with the Opportunists
3. Kautsky's Polemic with Pannekoek
Chapter VII: The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 [unfinished text]
