The State and Revolution

“The question of the relation of the socialist proletarian revolution to the state, therefore, is acquiring not only practical political importance, but also the significance of a most urgent problem of the day, the problem of explaining to the masses what they will have to do before long to free themselves from capitalist tyranny.”

Traditional Marxist theory tended to accord the state relatively little importance— since the state was viewed as merely the agent of the capitalists, then the destruction of capitalism would simply cause the state to wither away. Lenin is not deviating from that basic thesis, but he is noting that in the wake of the First World War, capitalism has accumulated so much power within state institutions that socialists are going to have to reckon with the particularities of the state before they can undertake a successful revolution.

“All the social-chauvinists are now ‘Marxists’ (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the ‘national-German’ Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!”

After three years of World War I, Lenin is still furious at the socialist parties, including those of Marx’s native Germany, who supported their country’s march to war in the summer of 1914 (See: Background). In Lenin’s view, The Whitewashing of Marxist Theory further enables the enormous concentration of wealth and power in the state, although this unfortunate development could also prove advantageous if it spurs the proletariat into revolutionary fervor.

“By the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century the world had been completely divided up among these ‘rivals in conquest’, i.e., among the predatory Great Powers. Since then, military and naval armaments have grown fantastically and the predatory war of 1914-17 for the domination of the world by Britain or Germany, for the division of the spoils, has brought the ‘swallowing’ of all the forces of society by the rapacious state power close to complete catastrophe.”

Marxism is a theory of historical determinism, where everything that happens is the direct and inevitable result of what occurred before. For Lenin, the outbreak of the First World War is the outcome of the European powers struggling for external markets against one another, as capitalism requires.