Book Details

Lenin’s greatest single work. Lenin wrote The State and Revolution in August and September 1917, when he was in hiding. The need for such a theoretical work was mentioned by Lenin in the second half of 1916. It was then that he wrote his note on “The Youth International”, in which he criticised Bukharin’s anti-Marxist position on the question of the state and promised to write a detailed article on the Marxist attitude to the state. In a letter to A.M. Kollontai on February 17 (N.S.), 1917, he said that he had almost got ready material on that question (See Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 286). This material was written in a small hand in a blue-covered notebook headed “marxism on the State”. In it he had collected quotations from the works of Marx and Engels, and extracts from the books by Kautsky, Pannekoek and Bernstein with his own critical notes, conclusions and generalisations. When Lenin left Switzerland for Russia in April 1917, he feared arrest by the Provisional Government and left the manuscript of “Marxism on the State” behind. When in hiding after the July events, Lenin wrote in a note: “Entre nous, if I am knocked off, I ask you to publish my notebook ‘Marxism on the State’ (it got held up in Stockholm). It is bound in a blue cover. All the quotations from Marx and Engels are collected there, also those from Kautsky against Pannekoek. There are a number of remarks, notes and formulas. I think a week’s work would be enough to publish it. I consider it important because not only Pkekhanov, but Kautsky, too, is confused....” When Lenin received his notebook from Stockholm, he used the material he had collected as a basis for his masterly book The State and Revolution.