The State and Revolution

In Marxist theory, “bourgeois” (plural: “bourgeoisie”) refers to those who earn money without having to actually produce anything, because they control the means of production. They use the proletariat as workers who do all the physical labor without having any ownership stakes. The “bourgeois state” in Lenin’s work applies to the European powers and the United States, industrialized states where the apparatus of state power serves to protect the interests of property owners at the expense of the workers. Lenin insists on the need for a violent revolution to destroy the bourgeois state, after which a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (see below) will stamp out any remnants of the bourgeois state.

Class consciousness refers to the development of awareness among the proletariat that they constitute a distinct class, a class which is oppressed and manipulated by the bourgeoisie for its own ends. Marxist theorists like Lenin assert that this class consciousness takes time to develop, as the bourgeoisie manipulate the proletarians through patriotism, parliamentary democracy, and religion to disguise the nature of class exploitation. Marxists believe that, once the proletariat masses have developed a sufficient level of consciousness, revolution will become possible.

Lenin calls the stage after the revolution against the bourgeois state the "dictatorship of the proletariat,” presenting it as an intermediate stage before full communism can be achieved. He argues that, once the proletariat has seized control of the state and its apparatus, they will use the state to eradicate any last traces of the bourgeoise’s power. Lenin asserts that, once this has been achieved, class warfare itself will end, leading to the withering away of the state itself and the birth of true communism.

Co-authored by Karl Kautsky (See: Key Figures), the so-called Gotha Program was an official party platform issued by the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1891. It replaced the Gotha Program of 1875, which had avowed "The Socialist Labor Party of Germany endeavors by every lawful means to bring about a free state and a socialistic society” (“The Gotha and Erfurt Programs.” Hanover College). The Erfurt Program struck a comparatively more militant tone, proclaiming the imminent demise of capitalism. However, it cited the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse to argue that revolution was unnecessary, and so the more important task at hand was to help workers prepare for the economic shocks to come and train them in the art of socialist administration. Marx had died in 1883, but Engels issued a fierce rebuke to Kautsky, arguing that although peaceful means could bring Germany and other nations fairly close to true socialism, only a revolution could make a clean break, as the bourgeois would never let go of their interests peacefully.

As Marxists fiercely debated one another over political strategy, Lenin and his allies used the term “opportunist” to describe those whose political calculations steered them away from the ultimate goal of working-class liberation through revolution. In Lenin’s use of the term, he means ostensibly socialist parties who are constantly finding excuses to downplay the revolutionary urgency of Marxism, even encouraging the possibility of cooperation with the bourgeois order. Lenin accuses them of being motivated by selfish ends, because they benefit from participation in that order and are afraid to lose their privileges. Therefore, even if they claim to be socialists or Marxists, in Lenin’s view they are agents of the bourgeoisie, working intentionally or unintentionally to remove any threat that socialism might pose to the status quo.

In 1871, France suffered a devastating military defeat against Prussia, in which the Emperor Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) was captured and his government collapsed. As officials tried to establish a new republic, a group of national guards seized the capital and proclaimed a socialist state. From March to May 1871, they sought to model social democracy, granting workers a stake in their companies, easing the payment of debts, and abolishing child labor. Its government was loosely administered at best, and so it provided ample room for feminists, anarchists, communists, and others to advance their own priorities. Ultimately, the Third Republic was able to mount forces sufficient to suppress the Commune, but it lived on as an inspiration for those seeking to replicate the same project on a much larger scale. Lenin invokes the Paris Commune multiple times in State and Revolution as a case study of what a revolutionary society could look like.