| Audio File: The State and Revolution |
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| By Jorge Martin | |
| Monday, 07 July 2008 | |
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Jorge Martin talks on Lenin's The State and Revolution, which he completed just before the October revolution in order to arm the Bolsheviks ideologically for the tasks of state power. Lenin explains the historic necessity for the emergence of the state as a tool of class rule, and that the state grows as economic differentiation in society grows, requiring the supression of the oppressed majority by the priviledged minority. In dealing with anarchist and reformist conceptions of the state, Marxism explains that the working class cannot lay hands on the ready-made state machinery and that the worker's state is historically unique, being in the possession of the majority of society, the working class. The State and Revolution
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"...no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle of the classes, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society." - Marx in a letter to Weydenmeyer (1852) |
Workers of the world, unite!