State and Revolution

Why does a book written more than a hundred years ago continue to spark debate and inspire the political imagination of the global left in the 21st century? Why do left-wing politicians and parties still come to power in different countries today, including in the West?

We will discuss these questions at our meeting this Sunday and examine Vladimir Lenin’s State and Revolution as one of the most radical attempts to rethink the politics of emancipation.

Lenin views the experience of the Paris Commune not as a historical failure, but as a breakthrough — an attempt to abolish the state as an apparatus of domination and replace it with forms of direct, democratic self-governance.

We will explore why the Commune becomes for Lenin an example of a “non-state state,” how he criticizes parliamentarism, bureaucracy, and the professional army, and why these ideas continue to resonate with contemporary libertarian left movements.

Special attention will be given to the text’s contradictions: the tension between its anti-authoritarian impulse and the subsequent history of the Soviet state, as well as how State and Revolution is read today outside the Leninist canon — in the context of horizontal movements, communalism, autonomism, and radical democracy.

This session will be of interest to those who want to look at Lenin without dogma — as a thinker who attempted to imagine a world without the state, domination, and alienated power — and to understand why this project remains unfinished yet still relevant.

The meeting will be led by Pan Volynsky, a philosopher and historian, and a descendant of Polish-Soviet dissidents.