Lenin's Essential Works Vol.1

Includes: The State And Revolution What is to be done? Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism The State And Revolution: This book is not only interesting from the point of view of the simple restoration of their ideas. It is hot news because the question of the relationship between the proletariat and the state is the crucial question posed by the revolutionary action of the class. This question is of huge importance today because the World War has posed it directly for the proletariat. In fact, the very issue of the defence of the country is the corollary of the defence of the bourgeois state; the national question hangs on support for this State or, at least, in benevolent neutrality towards it, etc. All these partial questions, whatever their importance, are resolved according to the response given to the primary problem of the relations of the proletariat with the bourgeois state which gives itself the extraordinary name of the fatherland. The practical importance of this question becomes even more important because of the following: firstly because the state power of the bourgeoisie of all the advanced capitalist countries has been greatly strengthened by absorbing the economic organisations (unions, trusts, etc.); and then, because the proletariat must resolve, in practice, the question of taking power, that is to say, its dictatorship.N. Bukharin What is to be done? Lenin's work What Is To Be Done? was written at the end of 1901 and early in 1902. In "Where To Begin", published in Iskra, No. 4 (May 1901), Lenin said that the article represented "a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for print". Lenin began the actual writing of the book in the autumn of 1901. In his "Preface to the Pamphlet Documents of the 'Unity' Conference", written in November 1901, Lenin said that the book was in preparation "to be published in the near future". In December Lenin published (in Iskra, No. 12) his article "A Talk with Defenders of Economism", which he later called a conspectus of What Is To Be Done? He wrote the Preface to the book in February 1902 and early in March the book was published by Dietz in Stuttgart. An announcement of its publication was printed in Iskra, No. 18, March 10, 1902. In republishing the book in 1907 as part of the collection Twelve Years, Lenin omitted Section A of Chapter V, "Who Was Offended by the Article 'Where To Begin,'" stating in the Preface that the book was being published w