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    The State and Revolution
    The State and Revolution
    The State and Revolution
    Ebook205 pages2 hours

    The State and Revolution

    By V. I. Lenin and Antonio Negri

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    Lenin's most important and controversial theoretical text

    Lenin’s booklet The State and Revolution struck the world of Marxist theory like a lightning bolt. Written in the months running up to the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin turned the traditional socialist concept of the  state on its head, arguing for the need to smash the organs of the bourgeois state to create a ‘semi-state’ of  soviets, or workers’ councils, in which ordinary people would take on the functions of the state machine in a new and radically democratic manner.

    This new edition includes a substantial introduction by renowned theorist Antonio Negri, who argues for the continued relevance of these ideas.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVerso
    Release dateJan 30, 2024
    ISBN9781804292877
    The State and Revolution
    Author

    V. I. Lenin

    V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) was a pivotal figure in twentieth century radical politics. He was a theoretician and the leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party. He wrote widely, authoring books such as Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Pluto, 1996). His selected writings were collected in the volume Revolution, Democracy, Socialism (Pluto, 2008).

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    • 3/5
      Obviously The State and Revolution has had major historical impact. But it's the perverse product of an aggressive mind who is speaking without thinking clearly. Lenin misuses and abuses political terms--"dictatorship of the proletariat" comes to mind, since a dictatorship is leadership by one person, usually a military leader in times of crisis, and the proletariat is a class of people--and therefore his argument falls way short.

    Book preview

    The State and Revolution - V. I. Lenin

    The State and Revolution

    This title is one of a series published to commemorate the centenary of V. I. Lenin’s death. The others are as follows:

    Imperialism and the National Question, V. I. Lenin

    Lenin’s Childhood, Isaac Deutscher

    The Lenin Scenario, Tariq Ali

    Not by Politics Alone: The Other Lenin, edited

    by Tamara Deutscher

    The State and Revolution

    The Marxist Theory of the State

    and the Tasks of the Proletariat

    in the Revolution

    V. I. LENIN

    Introduction by Antonio Negri

    Introduction translated by Gregory Elliott

    The text we have used in this edition was transcribed by Zodiac

    and Brian Baggins and is available at marxists.org.

    This paperback edition first published by Verso 2024

    First published in English by International Publishers 1932

    © Verso 2024

    Introduction © Antonio Negri 2024

    All rights reserved

    The moral rights of the author have been asserted

    1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

    Verso

    UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

    US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

    versobooks.com

    Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

    ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-284-6

    ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-287-7 (US EBK)

    ISBN-13: 978-1-80429-286-0 (UK EBK)

    British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich, 1870–1924, author. | Negri, Antonio, 1933 author of introduction.

    Title: The state and revolution : the Marxist theory of the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution / V. I. Lenin ; introduction by Antonio Negri ; introduction translated by Gregory Elliott. Other titles: Gosudarstvo i revoli . English

    Description: New York : Verso, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2023029345 (print) | LCCN 2023029346 (ebook) | ISBN 9781804292846 (paperback) | ISBN 9781804292877 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. | Socialism. | State, The. | Revolutions.

    Classification: LCC HX314 .L3528313 2024 (print) | LCC HX314 (ebook) | DDC 320.1--dc23/eng/20230706

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029345

    LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029346

    CONTENTS

    Introduction by Antonio Negri

    Preface to the First Edition

    Preface to the Second Edition

    1: Class Society and the State

    I. The State: A Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms

    II. Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, etc.

    III. The State: An Instrument for the Exploitation of the Oppressed Class

    IV. The ‘Withering Away’ of the State, and Violent Revolution

    2: The Experience of 1848–51

    I. The Eve of Revolution

    II. The Revolution Summed Up

    III. The Presentation of the Question by Marx in 1852

    3: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871: Marx’s Analysis

    I. What Made the Communards’ Attempt Heroic?

    II. What Is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?

    III. Abolition of Parliamentarism

    IV. Organization of National Unity

    V. Abolition of the Parasite State

    4: Supplementary Explanations by Engels

    I. The Housing Question

    II. Controversy with the Anarchists

    III. Letter to Bebel

    IV. Criticism of the Draft of the Erfurt Programme

    V. The 1891 Preface to Marx’s The Civil War in France

    VI. Engels on the Overcoming of Democracy

    5: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State

    I. Presentation of the Question by Marx

    II. The Transition from Capitalism to Communism

    III. The First Phase of Communist Society

    IV. The Higher Phase of Communist Society

    6: The Vulgarization of Marxism by Opportunists

    I. Plekhanov’s Controversy with the Anarchists

    II. Kautsky’s Controversy with the Opportunists

    III. Kautsky’s Controversy with Pannekoek

    Postscript to the First Edition

    Notes

    Introduction

    Antonio Negri

    I

    When asked which book offers the best introduction to Marxism, I answer: The State and Revolution by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.¹ Why? Because, if Marx is the brains of Marxism, Lenin is its body; and, for materialists, the brain too is located in the body. Marxism is not an economic theory, but a critique of political economy, where critique, first of all, signifies one’s capacity for analysis by immersion in a chaotic, conflict-ridden world, materially dominated by bosses who exploit you and a sovereign who commands you. These relations – ‘exploits you’, ‘commands you’ – mean that such control involves your body: that is, the bodies, energy, passions and values of those who live and work on our planet. With The State and Revolution, Lenin places bodies within the daily struggle where economic demands and political passion, emancipatory effort and emancipatory power, are conjoined. In this initial approach, The State and Revolution signifies bodies in struggle against the materiality of capitalist control.

    This connection reveals an initial meaning of Marxism as critique: it signifies being within political economy, remaining inside the complex of acts of exploitation and means of power (of capitalism and sovereignty), inside the indissoluble bond that makes of them a state. The state is the exploitation of the bodies of labourers and command over the brains of subjects. Revolution is the critique exercised by bodies against this exploitation and sovereign power.

    Emerging from the inside, critique, at the same time, induces the power of the against. ‘Against’ signifies understanding how bodies can proceed against capital; hence it invites translating Capital – the inexhaustible book of Marxist critique – into the materialist experiment of a possible revolution. Because the ‘within-against’ conjugation follows, and determines, the materialist mutation of the set of bodies into classes and thus constitutes the red thread of subjectivation into class struggle. The pedagogy of Marxism, which is only science qua critique and only critique qua subjectivation, is planted on this peak of Lenin’s discourse. It is not possible to be Marxist other than within the Leninist paradox of the totality and the partial viewpoint. And notice then how Capital comes, so to speak, to be subjectivated – which does not mean abandoned to the pleasures of a philology that is invariably curious and sometimes dissolute, or to the ceremonies of a rebellious dogmatism. Rather, it means re-articulated in its historical relationship with struggles, in the different technical and political compositions of the two classes. As Roman Rosdolsky noted, the initial plan of Capital envisaged a chapter on the state. Marx was unable to write it as the continuation of the great chapters of economic critique he had already composed. But, in his historical writings and interventions in the International, the people and parties it comprised, he sketched a theoretical framework. There Lenin adopted it, and imparted to it a musculature, with the experience of a victorious class struggle taking the place of unclear incidents and occasional volcanic party polemics. Here, ‘subjectivation’ assumes its true meaning, as pedagogy and also as the apex of the operative synthesis of the ‘within and against’ we have registered in the pages of The State and Revolution.

    Within and against possibly suffice to put both Capital and Marx’s historical writings into prose. But The State and Revolution goes much further. The revolution, Lenin says, has begun. Where are we going? What is the beyond we are striving towards? And, here, Lenin’s subjective action twists towards reality, from utopia to science, from science to the concreteness of revolutionary force. It seems that we have returned to the beginning, and that enthusiasm for being located within and struggling against capital has matured as such in a perpetual motion. Such is not the case: here subjectivation makes it possible positively to itemize the transitions that ‘revolutionary deeds’ must accomplish in order to construct the beyond, in order to go beyond the beyond, from socialism to communism. And the road is mapped out with the intelligence and power of constituent praxis.

    Utopia is connected with reality and takes shape in conjunction with the attack on current class domination. Thus, the utopian ‘withering away of the state’ is understood in materialist terms as a constituent process. And we see this process completed, because it is no longer an ideal but a test for the subjectivity that transforms the real: Marx and Lenin are definitively recomposed – and with what force! Destroying the state and reconstructing the set of institutions that make a free existence possible become tasks accomplished in common. When we finish reading The State and Revolution, our bodies are engaged in that task.

    II

    The preface to the first edition of The State and Revolution is dated August 1917 and the ‘Postscript to the First Edition’ is dated 30 November. According to the latter,

    This pamphlet was written in August and September 1917. I had already drawn up the plan for the next, the seventh, chapter, ‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’. Apart from the title, however, I had no time to write a single line of the chapter; I was ‘interrupted’ by a political crisis – the eve of the October revolution of 1917. Such an ‘interruption’ can only be welcomed; but the writing of the second part of the pamphlet (‘The Experience of the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917’) will probably have to be put off for a long time. It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.

    So, the book was born inside the revolution, in August– September 1917 (when, following an initial unsuccessful attempt at insurrection in July, Lenin was compelled to flee Moscow). In composing it, Lenin used his notes on ‘Marxism and the State’, written in Switzerland in the period immediately preceding his return to Russia. In Switzerland, where he had been forced to seek refuge from Kraków, then in Austrian Poland, which refused Russian citizens residence after the outbreak of war, Lenin wrote a triple series of texts. The first was a set of philosophical studies, collected in the notebooks on Hegel; the second was devoted to the study of imperialism and was to become his popular essay on the subject; finally, there were the notebooks on ‘Marxism and the State’ which represent the immediate antecedent to August 1917.

    We have already seen that the opuscule came to a halt at the seventh chapter. As regards the preceding chapters, Lenin offered a general overview of definitions of class society and the state in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, he reconstructed this concept from Marx’s writings on the 1848 revolutions. Chapter 3 was devoted to the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 and Marx’s analysis of it. Chapter 4 contains additional explanations and follows the writings of Marx, and especially Engels, in the polemic with German social democracy (in particular, Lenin takes up the critiques of the Erfurt and Gotha programmes). In Chapter 5, Lenin directly tackles the problem of the ‘withering away of the state’ and defines the material bases for this process. Chapter 6 contains a further ferocious attack on Georgi Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky – in short, on the social-democratic opportunism of the Second International. Of Chapter 7, as noted, only the plan exists.

    In a sense, the outline of The State and Revolution is pedagogical enough, proceeding from recuperation of Engels’s hypotheses on the origins of the state and analysing the maturation in Marx of a class standpoint, nourished by the experience of the struggles of 1848 and 1871. The discourse then switches to the communist programme and confronts the positions of the parties of the Second International, polemicizing with social-democratic reformism regarded as opportunism. The original plan envisaged, in conclusion, an analysis of the experience of the 1917 Revolution, in order to affirm the actuality of the communist programme and demonstrate its mass maturity. But, at this point, Chapter 7 is missing. Let us read its outline in full:

    1 New ‘popular creation’ in the Revolution. Quid est? (Plekhanov, 1906). 2 Lessons of 1905 (resolutions of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, 1906). 3 Eve of the 1917 Revolution: theses of October 1905. 4 Experience of 1917. Rise of mass movement, Soviets (their scope and weakness; dependency of the petty bourgeoisie. 5 Prostitution of the Soviets by the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks: militia, armed people; military section, the ‘sections’; economic section; exploration of 3–5 July; ‘independence’ of the power of party organizations. 6 The Kornilov episode: degeneration of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries; the negotiation of 14–19 September. 7 ‘Messianism’. Who will begin?

    Even today, rereading this conclusion makes one shiver at the incredible foresight and enormous force conveyed by this incipit.

    III

    However, a reader unaccustomed to studying the class struggle might get the impression from these brief mentions of the history of the text (internal to its composition) that it was, as it were, occasional, tactical. Evidence of this would be the fact that the text amasses references to the Marxist tradition in order to polemicize against social-democratic revisionism and the forces opposed at the time to the advance of the revolution. The occasional character of the essay would take precedence over its radicalism. Viewed thus, we are dealing with the continuation of an ideological battle bound up with the specific location of the Bolshevik Party in the Socialist International. The text is indeed consistent with earlier polemics and theoretical clashes, resuming and developing their themes. The battle against Plekhanov rests on the battle against Kautsky, and it, in turn, on Engels’s firm rejection of the Erfurt Programme as well as Marx’s of the Gotha Programme, and so on and so forth. From this perspective, it would not be mistaken to regard the text as a tactical, ideological weapon – or to put it another way, it does not convey truth and invention.

    But to read it exclusively in this light is seriously inadequate. For what makes The State and Revolution a classical text of political thought is not the repetition of the critique of social chauvinism, but – at a crucial moment, in the heat of insurrection – a destructive critique of the very concept of the state and the foundation of a different concept of power, with greetings to all those who for more than a century have repeated that Marxism lacks a doctrine of the state.

    Let us see, then, how this project unfolds in Lenin’s thinking in a dramatic, dawning situation. On the one hand, the concept of the state is isolated from the powers it arrogates to itself as general organizer and motor of the functioning of society. The administrative and productive functions the state machine claims to comprise and nurture can be stripped from its definition. Already in the Paris Commune, these functions had been absorbed and expressed in new institutional forms of the social, rather than being subordinate bodies or apparatuses of

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