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V. I. LENIN
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ladimir Ilyich Lenin was hiding from the police during the
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1917 Russian Revolution while he finished State and
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Revolution. Lenin’s most widely read—and most T
misunderstood—book describes the “monstrous oppression of E
the working people by the state” and how capitalism transforms A
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whole areas of the globe into “military convict prisons for D
workers.” State and Revolution defends Marx and Engels’s R
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argument that workers must dismantle, or “smash,” capitalist
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states through revolution from below, and replace them with
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radically democratic states.
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This new edition features an introduction and hundreds of T
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explanatory annotations by Todd Chretien that place Lenin’s work
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in its historical context. Chretien provides insight into some of N
the book’s most controversial points, many of which are still being
debated in movements today, from the Arab Spring revolutions
to upheavals in Greece and Venezuela, to the fight against mass
incarceration in the United States.
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State and Revolutionis an indispensable guide to confronting
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the political and bureaucratic structures that stand between I
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humanity and the creation of a socialist world based on fulfilling L
human need. No revolutionary should be without it. E
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Todd Chretien is a frequent contributor to Socialist Worker and
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the International Socialist Review. TN
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R A
ETIENND IN STATE
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CE AND
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REVOLUBYT TODD CIHREOTIEN N
ISBN: 978-1-60846-498-2 $14.95
www.haymarketbooks.org
Political Science
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State and Revolution
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State and Revolution
V. I. Lenin
Annotated and Introduced
by Todd Chretien
Haymarket Books
Chicago, Illinois
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© 2014 V. I. Lenin and Todd Chretien
Haymarket Books
PO Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
[email protected]
www.haymarketbooks.org
ISBN: 978-1-60846-498-2
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Special discounts are available for bulk purchases by organizations and
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773-583-7884 or [email protected].
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation
and the Wallace Action Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Printed in Canada by union labor.
Cover design by Rachel Wilsey.
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For Isabela
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Table of Contents
A Note on the Translation and Footnotes ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction
A Beginner’s Guide to State and Revolution 1
The State and Revolution
The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks
of the Proletariat in the Revolution 35
Preface to the First Edition 37
Preface to the Second Edition 39
Chapter 1: Class Society and the State 41
Chapter 2: The Experience of 1848–51 59
Chapter 3: The Experience of the Paris Commune
of 1871−Marx’s Analysis 73
Chapter 4: Continuation: Supplementary Explanations by Engels 95
Chapter 5: The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State 121
Chapter 6: The Vulgarization of Marxism by the Opportunists 143
Chapter 7: The Experience of the Russian Revolutions
of 1905 and 1917 163
Postscript to the First Edition 165
Historical and Literary Chronology 167
Biographical and Organizational Glossary 173
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A Note on the Translation
and Footnotes
The first edition of State and Revolutionwas published in Russian
in 1918, with a second edition in 1919. The work was translated
into English and used by the American Communist Party for
membership education as early as 1921. This edition follows that printed
in Lenin’s Collected Works, volume 25, published by Progress Publishers
in Moscow. I have made minor grammatical changes to the text to con-
form to modern American usage, which I have noted only in the cases
where there is any possible change in meaning.
The text itself was downloaded from the Marxist Internet Archive;
I made any necessary corrections from there. Many thanks to Zodiac and
Brian Baggins for transcribing the work into the archive. In the version
printed in the Collected Works, the editors sometimes included Lenin’s
commentary within the text of large block quotes from other authors. I
have disaggregated Lenin’s commentary from these quotes when this
makes things easier for the reader. Sometimes Lenin cites page numbers
for citations he uses in the text. I have placed those citations in the foot-
notes, but also cited more accessible versions in English.
Where possible, I refer readers to Robert C. Tucker’s Marx-Engels
Reader because it is widely available. There are sometimes small differ-
ences between the translations in Tucker and those used by Lenin, but
these are minor and do not alter the meaning of any quotations. For ci-
tations not listed in Tucker, I have cited the Marx-Engels Collected Works
published by Progress Publishers and International Publishers. Most
works cited are also readily available at the Marxist Internet Archive, al-
though I have decided not to include URLs in the footnotes. There is
one exception: I have cited URLs from the Marxist Internet Archive in
chapter VI for works by Pannekoek and Kautsky not available in print.
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