Lenin wrote his book The State and Revolution in 1917.

He gives his views on the State and what form it was to take under socialism, and his views about what it would, or might, become as it withered away when socialism turned into full communism. 

Marxists believed the State was always a product of class antagonism. The state is, in fact, an organ of class rule for the oppression of one class over another. If class antagonism could be reconciled, there would be no need for the state, but since they can’t, the state arises. The power of the state is essentially legally ordained bodies of armed men, prisons, the legal system, etc. 

Marxists believed that when the means of production were inevitably seized by the working class, and private property would be abolished, eventually, there would come a time when classes themselves would cease to exist. At that point, without different classes, there would be no more class conflict to uphold and therefore the entire reason for the state would vanish and the state itself would wither. 

Marx had originally taught that socialism would arise out of the ashes of capitalism. Capitalism would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and the working class would take over. Lenin thought this would only happen through violent revolution. He pushed for the supremacy of an educated Marxist vanguard that would instruct the working class in Marxism and lead the revolution. 

When the working class seized power and the means of production and had control of the state, what would this new state look like?

Since Marxists believed the entire reason and purpose of a state was the suppression of one class over another, then the new workers’ state would naturally be a tool for suppressing the bourgeois. He reasoned that with the change from a bourgeois state to a proletariat state, the old mindsets wouldn’t just vanish. The revolutionary Marxists would need to suppress those tendencies with an iron hand. Lenin never sees a benevolent state, that would be a contradiction in Marxist terms. If there is a state, the only reason for its existence is to oppress. Lenin meant for the Socialist state to be a means of suppressing the bourgeois. 

There is frequent mention of democracy. I should probably clarify the distinctions. Lenin saw democracy in the west as bourgeois democracy. Bourgeois democracy essentially favored the capitalists and bourgeois. He saw the system as rigged against the workers, even when they had the vote.

The basis for this is that Marxists saw the working-class proletariat as the majority of people in a society. IF those workers were truly free, they would simply vote out the bourgeois. Since they didn’t, they must not be free. Marxists thought that true freedom, true democracy, would come when everyone supports Marxism. And of course at that point, democracy as a tool for determining the will of the people would no longer be necessary because we’d all be on the same page anyway, so there would be no need to vote about it. 

Lenin makes a technical distinction between these two stages of Socialism. The first, which he calls socialism, is when the state has to enforce compliance with Marxist goals through an iron discipline. Active suppression of bourgeois (anyone who doesn’t support the Marxists) values is a part of this state. This first phase, Lenin admits, will not resolve inequalities. Injustice and inequality will still exist, because inequality in abilities will still exist.

The second stage, which he calls communism, is the stage where the populace, through engrained realignment of values, voluntarily comply with the Marxists’ goals and everyone lives happily ever after. By this time, Lenin says, production will have increased enormously because the capitalists will no longer own the means of production, and people will love their labor for labor’s sake. Everyone will work voluntarily because they love it so much, and people will take only according to what they need. 

Lenin is insistent that Marxists are not utopians. He never promises that the second stage will actually even arrive. They forecast it, but don’t promise it. Without the promise of the utopia, what they CAN promise is that they’ll take over everything, rule with an iron fist, and actively use the state to oppress those that disagree with them. 

Lenin spends a portion of the book countering other Marxist theoreticians. He calls them philistines, opportunists, or revisionists. There is a religious zealotry about the way these men pored over the writings of Marx and Engels as if their writings were holy writ. They would argue over how words were parsed, and the interpretations would vary accordingly. Lenin sees himself as the most orthodox of Marxists, and his advocacy of violent revolution as the only way socialist revolution would ever be accomplished. 

For all the Marxists claims of the ideology being the most practical, scientific and well-reasoned using Hegelian dialectics, what I find a Marxist characteristic is an overly dogmatic approach.

Hegelian dialectics was supposed to enable Marx to make the most accurate models of economics ever conceived. The process of considering the entirety of history using dialectics would consistently bring a more nuanced understanding of the significance of events. Engels, for instance, in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, told us that an exact replication of the universe, its evolution, and its consequences for man can only be understood through dialectics and its regard for fluidity.

I’ll give Marx credit too for submitting his ideas as scientific. He looked at data, he hypothesized what was happening, and he made predictions as to where that would lead. That is, indeed, a scientific approach.

But then, the Marxists seemed to get locked in. The Hegelian dialectic approach seems to have stopped and there is no more consideration of the fluidity of the events in a complex system.

Marxists locked into the most hardline predictions. They wrote capitalist axioms in stone, and then reasoned syllogistically that if X then Y; X therefore Y. The Hegelian dialectic should have them reconsidering their predictions in the face of the constant fluidity in the complex system of economics and society. But they don’t. They just keep going back to Marx as if he were a prophet from on high. The things they saw as inevitable in capitalist societies simply didn’t turn out that way.

Marx thought that greedy capitalists would always win out over more careful capitalists. As such, capitalism was doomed to increasingly concentrate until it all broke down. But it didn’t happen that way. Unions came about and businesses came to agreements with labor. Regulation of businesses for the common good came into play. Workers’ rights increased. There were a thousand small adjustments that rendered Marx’s predictions moot. There was fluidity in the historical developments, as they should have known from the dialectical approach, but they ignored it after Marx.