The State and Revolution

Karl Marx, like Lenin, was both a political theorist and a political actor. He and his frequent co-author, Friedrich Engels (whom Lenin quotes frequently in State and Revolution), were major figures in the International Workingmen’s Association, later known as the First International. As the name indicates, this was an attempt to coordinate political action among workers across Europe, and to build momentum for a revolutionary movement that would succeed where the anti-monarchical revolutions of 1848 failed.

However, the organization failed to reconcile differences among its own members, most notably Marx and the Russian anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin. Marx called for a dictatorship of the proletariat (See: Index of Terms) to oversee the dismantling of the capitalist state, with this dictatorship serving as an intermediary step prior to the achievement of pure communism. By contrast, Bakunin insisted on a mass revolt against all forms of authority, so that the passing of the state would lead directly to anarchism.

The Second International formed in 1889, now composed entirely of socialists. However, divisions within the socialist movement were just as acute, particularly on the question of whether the capitalist system could be subject to reform, or would have to be overthrown by force. Lenin was a fierce proponent of the latter view, and where Marx had predicted that the proletariat would eventually develop class consciousness and seize control over the means of production, Lenin suggested that a “vanguard” of professional revolutionaries would have to spur the workers into action. In 1903, Lenin’s Russian Social Democratic Labor Party voted on whether to establish a leadership along the lines of Lenin’s vanguard, causing some of the delegates to walk out in protest. Their defection left Lenin’s position in the majority, and so he claimed the title “Bolshevik” (roughly meaning “the majority faction”) and called his opponents “Mensheviks” (those of the “minority faction”) to emphasize their sidelined position.

As the Bolsheviks turned toward preparing a revolution, other socialist parties throughout Europe were enjoying great success as fully legitimate members of the political process. In 1912, the German Socialist Party (SDP) became the largest party in the Reichstag (German Parliament) and the British Labor Party was making considerable increases in its vote share. Any hope of these parties working across national boundaries to advance the common good of the working class was shattered with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. Many members of the socialist parties supported their own country’s declarations of war, either for fear of appearing unpatriotic or in the belief that victory for their state was necessary for international socialism. Lenin, then living in Switzerland, was appalled at what he viewed as a betrayal of socialism’s internationalist and pacifist principles. He grew even more persuaded that there was no way for a socialist revolution to succeed within the bounds of the existing power structure.

Following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917, Lenin at last returned to Russia. He found his country experimenting with its own parliamentary government, including several socialist parties. He wrote State and Revolution to insist that only the complete destruction of the bourgeois state would enable the liberation of the workers. In November 1917 (October in the old Russian calendar), the Bolsheviks would turn theory into practice and seize control of the state.