The Genesis of State and Revolution

Abstract

Mayakovsky's panegyric captures the disparate elements of Lenin's legacy, from the utopian aspirations of State and Revolution to the organisational imperatives which preoccupied Lenin before and after 1917. The utopian elements stemmed from Lenin's rapprochement with Left Marxism in the annus mirabilis of 1917. Because this rapprochement coincided with a surge of maximalist aspirations from below, it issued in the success of the Bolshevik revolution, and the immortalisation of State and Revolution as the theoretical manifesto of that revolution. The tension existing between Lenin's writings of 1917 and the organisational beliefs he expressed before and after this period has often been remarked. What perhaps has not been sufficiently explored is the extent to which Lenin's position in 1917 arose from a personal reappraisal of Marxist theory (a reappraisal which preceded the February Revolution) rather than from a purely tactical grasp of the revolutionary possibilities entailed by the collapse of Tsarist Russia. In other words, and in another terminology, State and Revolution was the product of both a determinate political conjuncture and a determinate theoretical conjuncture.