Referring often to Marx and Engels’ own work, Lenin launches a polemic critique of the contradictions of early 20th-century capitalism as well as those evident in neoliberalism today: namely its reframing of a shift in the mode of exploitation (e.g., serfdom to wage slavery) as a shift “away from” exploitation. Similarly, the narrative of an increasingly more removed state apparatus under federal republics than monarchies comes under scrutiny as Lenin argues that the state, defined as the oppression of one class by another, is only more present.

But Lenin also believed that the state was a tool that could be wielded by a class for its own interests and to subordinate other classes. For this reason, he emphasizes Marx’s “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and interprets this as the seizure of state power by the working classes, before communism can be fully achieved. This question of the state and its nature has truly occupied much of my thought ever since my reading of the Communist Manifesto. In fact, communist theorists and activists have been the most diverse and polarized about the nature and purpose of the state. All I can say about this work is that Lenin is a true revolutionary, and he spoke (and led) with a revolutionary fervour. Beyond the Russian Revolution and his successors, and the relationship between the USSR and a communist analysis of the state, however, my own conclusions are still wanting.

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