As far as theorists go, Lenin might be the most direct and pragmatic. He strikes me as someone who took seriously the Marxist injunction to not merely interpret the world, but to change it as well. For this reason, the conceptual breakdown of the state that drives the work has a clear purpose: to refute various misreadings of the “withering away of the state” that Lenin attributes to the anarchists and social democrats of the 19th century.
The state, according to these figures, must either be won by the proletariat in a parliamentary setting, or must be dissolved overnight. Lenin is clear that both of these prescriptions rest upon fundamental misunderstandings of Marxism. The first ignores the necessity of the dictatorship of the Proletariat, while the second ignores the reality of historical process. The state will wither away, that is for sure, but it will only be able to wither after all classes have been abolished by means of eliminating all relations to production, which can only happen as a result of the Proletarier seizing the state apparatus and preventing the exploiters from getting it back through a little exploitation of its own.
I wonder, if in the aftermath of the horrors of the USSR, Lenin’s advocacy of violent revolution and necessary exploitation will ever be heeded again. Can we fight fire with fire, exploitation of one class with exploitation of the right one?