The State and Revolution: The Marxist Doctrine of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution

The central claim is that the proletariat must smash the bourgeois state machine rather than simply seize it and use it for its own purposes. Lenin rejects the Social-Democratic view—associated with Karl Kautsky—that the working class can win state power through parliamentary means and then gradually transform society using the existing state apparatus. Drawing on Marx and Engels, Lenin argues the state is always an organ of class domination, a 'special repressive force' that cannot be repurposed. The revolution must destroy this machine and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin argues that the proletarian state established after the revolution is a transitional, 'semi-state' that exists only to suppress the bourgeoisie. Once class antagonisms are abolished and there is no longer any class to hold in subjection, the repressive apparatus becomes unnecessary and gradually 'withers away.' Lenin stresses that this withering applies only to the post-revolutionary proletarian state—the bourgeois state is not 'withering' but must be 'put an end to' by revolutionary force. Complete democracy under the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes, in effect, a state that is already beginning to decompose.

Lenin wrote the book in exile in Finland in August–September 1917, while fleeing a warrant from the Provisional Government. Its immediate polemical target was Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of German Social Democracy, whom Lenin accused of distorting Marx and Engels' teaching on the state to justify parliamentary collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Lenin aimed to recover what he saw as the authentic Marxist doctrine: that revolution requires the violent destruction of the bourgeois state, not its capture through elections.

The State and Revolution says remarkably little about the role of the Bolshevik Party in the revolutionary state—Miliband counts only three brief references to the party in the entire work. After October 1917, Lenin's position shifted dramatically. By 1919, he was asserting that 'the dictatorship of the working class is carried into effect by the party of the Bolsheviks,' and by 1921 he stated bluntly that 'the dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible except through the Communist Party.' This later doctrine of one-party rule is fundamentally different from the utopian, mass-democracy vision of the 1917 text.

The most common misreading treats the book as a straightforward blueprint for the Soviet state that actually emerged after 1917. In fact, The State and Revolution was never completed—Lenin left it unfinished—and its vision of armed workers, revocable officials, and the abolition of the standing army bore little resemblance to the bureaucratic, one-party state that crystallized under his own leadership. Some scholars argue it represents an 'intellectual deviation' that conformed neither to Lenin's previous thought nor to his subsequent practice. It was written in a moment of revolutionary enthusiasm, not as a plan for governance.

What Is to Be Done? (1902) is a polemic about revolutionary organization, arguing that a vanguard of professional revolutionaries must bring socialist consciousness to workers who cannot develop it spontaneously. The State and Revolution (1917) is a theoretical work about the state itself—what it is, why it must be smashed, and what replaces it. The earlier text emphasizes party discipline and centralization; the later text, written in the heat of revolution, emphasizes mass participation, armed workers, and the rapid decomposition of state bureaucracy. They address different problems and belong to different moments in Lenin's career.