Lenin's theoretical account of the Marxist theory of the state — written in hiding in August 1917, arguing that the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced with a workers' state that will eventually wither away.
The state as an instrument of class oppression: the bourgeois state cannot be taken over and used for socialist ends — it must be smashed. The dictatorship of the proletariat: a transitional state that uses force against the former ruling class. The withering away of the state: as class distinctions dissolve, the coercive state becomes unnecessary. The Paris Commune as the model. Written just before the October Revolution and never finished.
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