The State and Revolution

We are taking a break from Capital to read some Lenin. Please read the entirety of The State and Revolution prior to this meeting. We will be seated upstairs at Lestats with a red sign.

The State and Revolution is a 1917 book by Vladimir Lenin that outlines his theory of the state as an instrument of class oppression, arguing that a proletarian revolution is necessary to overthrow the bourgeois state and establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a transitional phase to communism, where the state would eventually wither away. Written while in hiding before the October Revolution, it justifies the need to "smash" the existing state machinery, not just seize it, and replace it with a new form of workers' power (soviets).