For the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!

(Quote of the Week)

V.I. Lenin’s classic 1917 work, The State and Revolution, is a seminal analysis of the nature of the state and its historical development as a centralized instrument of force in the hands of the dominant social class. Polemicizing against proponents of the bourgeois model of parliamentary democracy, Lenin, writing on the eve of the October Revolution, drew the line between revolutionary Marxism and opportunist betrayal. Invoking the revolutionary boldness of the 1871 Paris Commune—when the Parisian proletariat briefly held power before being drowned in blood—Lenin underlined the necessity of proletarian revolution overthrowing the bourgeois order and smashing the machinery of the capitalist state, replacing it with a workers state.

Marx’s critico-analytical genius saw in the practical measures of the Commune the turning-point which the opportunists fear and do not want to recognise because of their cowardice, because they do not want to break irrevocably with the bourgeoisie, and which the anarchists do not want to see, either because they are in a hurry or because they do not understand at all the conditions of great social changes. “We must not even think of destroying the old state machine; how can we do without ministries and officials?” argues the opportunist, who is completely saturated with philistinism and who, at bottom, not only does not believe in revolution, in the creative power of revolution, but lives in mortal dread of it (like our Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries)....

We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight—not to “shift the balance of forces,” but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy bourgeois parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

—V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)