Chapter VI, §2 — Revolutionary Language and an Unchanged Apparatus

V. I. Lenin · The State and Revolution

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Section summary

Lenin's treatment of Kautsky concentrates on the gap between opposing reformism in general and confronting the inherited state apparatus specifically. He argues that Kautsky's replies to Bernstein, and later writings on social revolution, leave open the possibility of winning power without fundamentally replacing that apparatus. Leaving all institutional questions to the future can therefore preserve the very assumption that an apparently revolutionary argument claims to reject.

The section does not demand a complete prediction of every future arrangement. Lenin distinguishes uncertainty about concrete forms from evasion of a principle he thinks the Commune has already established. He also challenges the argument that necessary administration makes bureaucracy permanent, insisting that functionaries need not form a privileged stratum. The reader's task is to reconstruct the disagreement precisely: what does each writer mean by winning power, which inherited functions remain, and what changes would keep those who perform them answerable to the wider population?

Key claims

Lenin argues that opposition to reformism can coexist with ambiguity about the future of the existing apparatus.
He distinguishes uncertainty over detailed institutional forms from avoidance of a claimed lesson of revolutionary experience.
Retaining administrative work does not, in his argument, require retaining a privileged bureaucracy.

Pause & reflect

For discussion

Use these questions for individual reflection or a study circle. Return to the passage to support your answer.

How does Lenin distinguish a legitimate refusal to predict details from an evasion of a central political question?
Why is the phrase winning power insufficient to resolve the disagreement he identifies? Give two different institutional meanings it could have.
What evidence would demonstrate a difference between necessary functionaries and a self-reproducing privileged stratum?

Terms in context

Kautsky: Karl Kautsky, a leading Second International theorist whom Lenin criticises for his interpretation of Marxism and the state.
Bernstein: Eduard Bernstein, the German socialist associated with revisionist arguments to which Kautsky and Lenin responded differently.
opportunism: Lenin's critical term for adapting socialist strategy to immediate accommodation with the existing order at the expense of transformative aims.

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