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63 | Lenin's State and Revolution (Patreon)

Published:
2023-04-17 10:00:03
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

In this patrons-only episode we discuss Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 The State and Revolution. When he’s not snarkily dragging his political opponents for their opportunism and philistinism, Lenin tries to work through some of the most hotly contested ideas in Marxian political theory, including the role of the state in capitalist society and its ‘withering away’ after the revolution, the problems of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bureaucracy, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. How could this polemical intervention still be relevant for us today, over a hundred years after the October Revolution and in a very different world than Lenin’s own? Join us and find out, tovarisch!

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, trans. Robert Service (New York: Penguin, 1992)

Ralph Miliband, “Lenin’s The State and Revolution”, at Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2018/08/lenin-state-and-revolution-miliband 

Music:

Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Comments

William Bell

The music at the start cracked me up :D

Satchmo Distel

The Miliband essay is excellent on the strengths and weaknesses of Lenin's model. Essentially neither Marx nor Lenin solved the problem of exactly how the proletariat can govern a complex state. They could keep electing then replacing the state officers but eventually there needs to be a state that can offer stability and security, which a constantly revolving door of officials would not provide. You'd need the proletariat to develop a consensus but how exactly would that occur? OTOH how many legitimate states has capitalism produced? The closest might be Scandinavia, which has had a much more progressive system than anything seen in the UK or US.

Sam Schick

Big fan of the heat from Gil, get them politicians. I also feel like it cannot be overstated that one key factor in how we are such a governable society is the high level of dysfunction in our news media. It’s plainly evident that conglomerated media has doubled down on consensus making in support of their affiliate candidates or party, usually in some form of culture war and are exemplar of a market failure that is starving a critical organ of a free society. With a government full of political entrepreneurs who are funded by corporate interests and media that is produced by the same corporate interests the average citizen of the United States is wading through a state of alienation. We see on a daily basis a government that is unwilling to do anything to control the economy in a way that could actually affect the material conditions of the American working class while the media shrugs and says “it’s crazy how there isn’t anyway to fix this and there’s no one to hold accountable.” The only way we are encouraged to enfranchise ourselves in the democratic process is by trying to make life shitty for the people who don’t think like us, all we can get our government to do is to try and make life less bearable for the opposing political belief system.

Alexander

Lillian has been so grumpy lately. I love it.

Nemisa

As an anarchist from one of the most left-leaning FSU countries I have a lot of conflicting feelings about Lenin (both of my grandmas came from petty kulaks, one of the grandpas was from a persecuted ethic group, but another was an example of Soviet social mobility and could climb the party ladder coming from poverty). I think that Lenin is a mid theorist, but an experienced and convicted revolutionary and propagandist (not in a pejorative sense). His writing is up-to-date and engaging, he reads a lot, and many of his differences with doctrinal Marxism (which I'm much closer to ideologically) come from grassroot political experience. However, some of his ideas I personally find inexcusable. 1. Purposeful misrepresentation and discrediting of anarchism. I think he is partially to blame for anarchism's reputation as epistemological cowardice and overall immature theory. I fully understand that he did it for the purposes of effective propaganda, but this alone makes him disingenuous to me. I think that a political philosopher, especially socialist one, has to strive for clarity. To me it's like reading "capitalism good" in an introduction of a Popper's book - I don't want to participate in these kinds of mental gymnastics, bro. 2. The lack of state theory (which is a monumental issue to tackle, I understand) in later years led him to believe that direct democracy is preferable and everyone has to be in the party. The downsides of this approach are described already in Aristotle, and this also was used by Stalin as a pretense to flood the party with bootlicking opportunists of the kind that requested to raise their "public enemy" execution quota to make a career. 3. Mainly off topic for this text, but militant atheism. Another comment I'd like to add. I understand your criticism of US politics because it is actually ridiculous. You can see the contradictions of late liberalism from your standpoint. However, you need to also keep in mind that the majority of countries in the world haven't achieved the positive developments of liberalism you take for granted. Lillian rightfully pointed this out in a previous episode saying "but I don't want to live in an illiberal world". I agree with Lea Ypi that a revision and incorporation of some aspects of liberalism and democracy into socialism are absolutely necessary, otherwise the contestatory totalitarian left regimes will appear as the inevitable manifestation of socialist theory's agnosticism towards civil and political rights of an individual. Moreover, the purposeful washing out of state structures by the American left is precisely one of the reasons of its current political impotence - the left cannot even achieve their own goals legally anymore with such weak state institutions. It's a shaky ground to put your political program on. Sorry for the huge comment, love you all!!!

Paul Bowman

Enjoyed the discussion but a couple of historical context problems with Lilian's intro. S&R was published not on the eve of the Revolution, but in the middle of its first phase, at a time when things were going very badly for the Bolsheviks in general and Lenin in particular. Specifically S&R was rushed out by Lenin while in exile in Finland due to the repression from the failed uprising in the July Days. Lenin is desperate to convince the forerunner of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Council of the need to not accept the Kerensky Duma but muster soldier support for another attempt to otherthrow the parliament by military mutiny. By the time this proto-MRC was turned into the MRC proper in October, the Bolsheviks had won a majority on it (thanks partly to Kerensky's blunders), but at the time Lenin was writing S&S - crucially - the anarchists still held the balance of power on this body, that Lenin desperately needed to influence. So Lil's assertion that the mentions of anarchists do not relate to them having any significant political importance at that conjuncture is kinda the opposite of the real situation. FYI, the key historical reference here would be Alexander Rabinowitch's "The Bolshevik's Come to Power". Unfortunately as I've just moved house my copy is somewhere in a mountain of boxes of books still lurking in the spare room, otherwise I'd give chapter and verse.

Paul Bowman

PS: given the historical context, it's open to question as to how serious Lenin was in all of the intentions laid out in S&R compared to just writing the things he thought would sway his intended audience. Certainly after the October coup, the Bolsheviks didn't entirely dismantle the Tsarist state (although a lot of it was already in collapse). But anyway, that's for each to make their own judgement call on.