This is the presentation at our discussion forum on 7th June 2026.
This chapter is magnificent, in my estimation, and the core of this work by Lenin. The Chapter, and arguably the book itself (since this is its core) is a restatement of a crucial work by Marx, which was never published until after Marx’s death (the Critique of the Gotha Programme – published in 1891, whereas Marx died in 1883).
It is in four discreet sections, which stand together in explaining this subject matter in a fairly straightforward, but rich and subtle manner. It explains the stages of the emergence of socialist society out of capitalism via the dictatorship of the proletariat, and then the later emergence of Communism out of the socialism that it is possible to build today. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or go into a learned set of extended these on this. So, I don’t propose to go through this in great depth, but rather to give a sketch of the main points. What I would advise, however, is to study this chapter in particular several times. It contains the political ballast to not only understand the whole of Lenin’s small book, but there is also a linear progression from some of the material particularly in section 3 of this book, to understand Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, which we studied earlier.
The other point that is worth noting is that none of this is developed in terms of any particular national terrain. It is taken as given that that we are discussing the overcoming of capitalism as a whole, and not any nationally-isolated posing of the question. In this regard, this citation of Marx is significant:
“…the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have this in common, that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense it is possible to speak of the ‘present-day state’, in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)
It is clear that this is about developed capitalism in its entirety, and none of this implies any national isolationism or perspective of socialism in one country.
The first part of this is on the Presentation of the Question by Marx. Lenin briefly looks at two letters, Marx’s letter to Wilhelm Bracke of May 5, 1875, and Engels’ letter to August Bebel of March 28, 1875, which address basically two facets of the same question in different ways – the nature of the state in the immediate aftermath of a working-class revolution. Engels argued against Bebel, who was fond of agitation in favour of such things as a ‘people’s state’ or a ‘free state’, that the state was not a weapon of liberation, but something that our aim is to abolish. Engels argued that socialists should stop using demands about the state in agitation, and instead talk about the ‘community’.
Whereas Marx had written at some length about the ‘future state in communist society’, which would seem to imply the opposite of Engels’s argument. Lenin pointed out that they were just emphasising particular aspects of their joint views to address different questions, and were united in their basic position. Lenin thus quotes Marx:
“The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state. (ibid)
So, you have the three-pointed scientific answer Marx produced, and which Lenin elaborates and popularises in this work. Lenin quotes Marx
“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”
and continues:
“Previously the question was put as follows: to achieve its emancipation, the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeoisie, win political power and establish its revolutionary dictatorship.
“Now the question is put somewhat differently: the transition from capitalist society–which is developing towards communism–to communist society is impossible without a ‘political transition period’, and the state in this period can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”
He notes such achievements as the SPD, in organising “…a larger proportion of the workers into a political party than anywhere else in the world.”. One million in party itself, and 3 million in unions, out of 15 million.
Yet notwithstanding this:
“If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”–supposedly petty–details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for ‘paupers’!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,–we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
“Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analysing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!”
He notes that capitalist democracy has this character, and does not proceed, as the opportunists say, towards greater democracy. Instead:
“.. forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.
“…Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.”
He quotes Engels to Bebel: “the proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist”. Thus:
“Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the ‘state’, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less.”
But there is a fundamental difference between this, and the bourgeois state:
“…the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple ‘machine’, almost without a ‘machine’, without a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed people.”
The ‘machine’ is the armed people – we are talking about a semi-state. So, then Lenin goes (with Marx) into the first phase of communist society. Again, he quotes Marx:
“What we have to deal with here [in analysing the programme of the workers’ party] is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it comes.”
In particular, he notes that the revolution expropriates capitalist property, and each worker receives the share of the product of society proportionate to that which they contributed. This is formal equality.
“The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society. Every member of society, performing a certain part of the socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the amount of labour which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.”
But it is not real equality, because the individuals receiving these equal shares, are themselves unequal. “But people are not alike: one is strong, another is weak; one is married, another is not; one has more children, another has less, and so on” Therefore this:
“…is an application of an equal measure to different people who in fact are not alike, are not equal to one another. That is why the ‘equal right’ is violation of equality and an injustice. In fact, everyone, having performed as much social labour as another, receives an equal share of the social product “
What this leads to is a paradox; that under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and even under the lower stage of communism, such inequalities, which Lenin acknowledges are unjust, are still inescapable and cannot be simply wished away. This Marx, and then Lenin, calls “bourgeois right”. This is part of material reality. Lenin again quotes Marx as to why that is:
“… these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged, after prolonged birth pangs, from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”
Thus, the state, even the bourgeois state (or part of its social function), cannot be abolished by decree alone. It continues to exist, and must continue to exist in some form, until social development renders it superfluous in a more distant future:
“In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois law’. Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.
“It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!”
This became the crucial issue after the Russian revolution, when the proletariat conquered power in a huge, backward, overwhelmingly peasant country. Though in formal terms the state was the owner of the entire collectivised economy, the ‘bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’ had its power enhanced by the difference of material productivity between Soviet Russia and its imperialist enemies. The only basis upon which the power of this necessary apparatus could diminish was by a harmonious development of the productive forces, which presupposed the joint efforts of the proletariats of all, or at least several, advanced countries. But with the first, materially backward, workers state plunged into political isolation, the ‘bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’ that Marx spoke of and Lenin amplified/elaborated, became relatively more powerful against the masses, and were able to politically expropriate the working class, while maintaining the property relations of the proletarian revolution, for several decades. This is all explicable, and explained, by this chapter, in essence and in embryo.
The flip side of this is that given a sufficient development of the productive forces, the state, including the administration of distribution we are talking about, obviously ceases to be economically justified:
“Democracy means equality. The great significance of the proletariat’s struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes. But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labour and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing further from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know…”
“When the majority of the people begin independently and everywhere to keep such accounts and exercise such control over the capitalists (now converted into employees) and over the intellectual gentry who preserve their capitalist habits, this control will really become universal, general, and popular; and there will be no getting away from it, there will be ‘nowhere to go’.
“The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and pay.
“But this “factory” discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters, will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal. It is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress”.
And quoting to conclude this:
“From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism–from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the “state” which consists of the armed workers, and which is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”, the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.
“Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state.”
