Book Launch: State & Revolution

Join us for a discussion of V.I. Lenin’s key writing on the process of overthrowing capitalism, State and Revolution! Todd Chretien, editor of the new annotated edition from Haymarket Books, will present.

Lenin was hiding from the police during the 1917 Russian Revolution while he finished State and Revolution. Lenin’s most widely read—and most misunderstood—book describes the “monstrous oppression of the working people by the state” and how capitalism transforms whole areas of the globe into “military convict prisons for workers.” State and Revolution defends Marx and Engels’s argument that workers must dismantle, or “smash,” capitalist states through revolution from below, and replace them with radically democratic states.

This new edition features an introduction and hundreds of explanatory annotations by Todd Chretien that place Lenin’s work in its historical context. Chretien will kick off a discussion of the key insights from the book and their applicability to struggles against state violence and for liberation today.