The State and Revolution

Lenin's booklet State and Revolution is widely recognised to be a lightening bolt in Marxist theory. Written in the months immediately running up to the October Revolution of 1917, Lenin turned the traditional socialist concept of the state on its head, arguing for the need to smash the organs of the bourgeois state and for them to be replace by a "semi-state" of soviets, or workers' councils, in which ordinary people would take on the functions of the state machine themselves in a new and radically democratic manner. This new edition includes a substantial new introduction by renowned theorist Antonio Negri, who argues for the continued relevance of these ideas.