Lenin’s State and Revolution:  A Marxist Masterpiece

In The State and Revolution, Lenin built on Marx and Engels’s profound insights to thoroughly examine the class nature of the state and how to fight it. As part of the Bolshevik Party’s preparations for October, he skillfully dismantled the arguments of the anarchists and reformists, and explained the fundamental difference between a bourgeois state and one operated in the interests of the working class.

In this discussion, we will examine the rise and role of the state in class society—with special emphasis on the capitalist state and how to fight it—as well as the question of the withering away of the state during the socialist transition to classless, stateless, moneyless communism.

This discussion will be introduced by John Peterson, a leading member of the RCA.

Reading list:

Books

• The State and Revolution – V.I. Lenin
• The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter Three: Socialism and the State – Leon Trotsky

Articles

• Marxism and the State – Alan Woods
• Lessons of the Paris Commune – Leon Trotsky