The State and Revolution

Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in August and September 1917, in hiding across the Finnish border, a fugitive from the Provisional Government he would overthrow within weeks. He worked from a small blue notebook headed "Marxism on the State" - quotations from Marx and Engels he had gathered the previous year while arguing with Bukharin about whether a socialist revolution should seize the existing state or destroy it.

The book was published in 1918 and never finished. Its planned seventh chapter, on the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, was cut short by the October insurrection itself. In a one-page postscript Lenin explained the gap with a sentence that has outlived most of the book's arguments: "It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of revolution' than to write about it."

What he assembled in the chapters he did write is the most sustained attack on bureaucratic state power in the entire Marxist canon. Working through Marx on the Commune and Engels on the state, he sets out the case that the existing state cannot be taken over and used but must be broken; that its replacement is armed people rather than a standing army, officials elected and recallable on a worker's wage rather than a permanent civil service; and that the state so constituted is already beginning to wither, being no longer a state in the proper sense at all.

No political pamphlet of the twentieth century was printed more often or read more dutifully, and none stands in a stranger relation to the state that published it.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.