BETWEEN July and August 1917, at a critical juncture in Russia’s revolutionary process, as power hung between the provisional government and the emerging soviets, Lenin appeared to take time out of the struggle to develop the classic analysis that he published in State and Revolution. In the process he forged an analysis which is of enduring importance for Marxists and the working-class movement.  

Lenin’s immediate concern was more practical: to continue his ideological battle against the revisionism that had led the eminent Marxists in the Second International to throw their weight behind imperialist slaughter in 1914 and to convince his comrades in the Bolshevik Party that the time had come to take state power and inaugurate the world’s first dictatorship of the proletariat.  

With the February revolution and the implosion of tsarism, Lenin believed, the Russian working class faced a simple choice — forward movement in the revolutionary process or a relapse into autocracy: the dual power situation could not hold. So the Bolsheviks and their growing majority within the key sections of the Russian working class had to be won to an understanding of the importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat because this was the precondition of any progress.  

What exactly is the dictatorship of the proletariat and why is it so important to Lenin? First, it is the form of political rule of the working class in a revolutionary situation. When the ruling class is unable to rule in the old way and the working class and its allies are unwilling to be ruled in the old ways, it is possible for power to pass from one class to the other. At the point when power, and most importantly state power, passes into the hands of the working class, leaving it in a position to dictate the direction and pace of change in society, then the working class can and must begin the dictatorship of the proletariat and make possible the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production.  

Second, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a new political form. It can’t just be a government in the state apparatus, nor can it simply take over the state apparatus intact. It has to be “a state that is ceasing to be a state.” What does this mean? In State and Revolution, Lenin went back over Engels and Marx’s writings on the state, recovering their unique and dialectical understanding of its essence. The state is a special body that comes into being with the division of society into antagonistic classes under capitalism. This antagonism is what creates the need for “special bodies of armed men,” supposedly floating above society and free of partial interests, but in reality guaranteeing the everyday economic exploitation of the capitalist order.

Over time, this state machinery becomes perfected, developing a bureaucracy, a standing army and in many cases a democratic shell through which the state projects its supposed independence. However, the state remains parasitic on the bourgeoisie through networks of material ties that bind it to the existing order. The form and substance of the state are inextricably tied to the capitalist mode of production.  

For this reason, Marx and Engels had argued that the attack on the state must be twofold. First, it must be seized as a whole and its force turned against capitalist class resistance. Second, its concentrated force must be dissolved back into society as the revolution progresses so that it withers away.

In The Civil War in France, Marx argued that the Paris Commune represented the first proletarian experiment in dissolving state power in this way. Writing in 1917, Lenin saw the emergence of the soviets — elected committees of workers’ deputies in factories, military units and among peasants — as a material development of the utmost importance: “The soviets are a new state apparatus which, in the first place, provides an armed force of workers and peasants; and this force is not divorced from the people, as was the old standing army, but is very closely bound up with the people.”

The soviets drew workers into government, drew the organs of the state closer to the people and trained them in exercising both executive and legislative functions. “Compared with the bourgeois parliamentary system,” Lenin said, “this is an advance in democracy’s development which is of worldwide, historic significance.” 

Third, the dictatorship of the proletariat had to uproot the property relations of capitalist society. Marx had explained this in The Civil War in France, the Critique of the Gotha Programme and elsewhere.

Lenin now applied it to the more developed conditions of 1917. Drawing on this analysis of imperialism, Lenin argued that a new stage of capitalist development had been reached, characterised by the emergence of large monopolies, finance capital and new levels of state intervention aimed at keeping capitalism going.

This “state monopoly capitalism,” as he called it, represented “the threshold of socialism” because it presented the working class with new instruments of social production, only requiring to be freed from the straitjacket of monopoly capitalism and private relations of production: “In addition to the chiefly ‘oppressive’ apparatus — the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy —the modern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely close connections with the banks and syndicates, an apparatus which performs an enormous amount of accounting and registration work, if it may be expressed this way. This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrested from the control of the capitalists; the capitalists and the wires they pull must be cut off, lopped off, chopped away from this apparatus; it must be subordinated to the proletarian soviets; it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nationwide.” 

The working-class movement today faces the challenge of contesting once more the state power of capital across the globe. And, once again, capitalism and its state have developed in important ways that we need to take account of. The importance of Lenin’s analysis was born out in the historical developments that followed.

The Soviet Union, the Peoples’ Democracies and the endurance of China, Cuba and others give us a rich vein of historical experience to mine. The working-class movement can only benefit from understanding Lenin’s approach and applying it to the present in the light of a century’s worth of experience in trying to make workers’ power a reality.