In this patrons-only episode we discuss Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 The State and Revolution. When he’s not snarkily dragging his political opponents for their opportunism and philistinism, Lenin tries to work through some of the most hotly contested ideas in Marxian political theory, including the role of the state in capitalist society and its ‘withering away’ after the revolution, the problems of bourgeois parliamentarianism and bureaucracy, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. How could this polemical intervention still be relevant for us today, over a hundred years after the October Revolution and in a very different world than Lenin’s own? Join us and find out, tovarisch!
This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:
patreon.com/leftofphilosophy
References:
Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, trans. Robert Service (New York: Penguin, 1992)
Ralph Miliband, “Lenin’s The State and Revolution”, at Jacobin: https://jacobin.com/2018/08/lenin-state-and-revolution-miliband
Music:
Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com