The State and Revolution (1917) is a book by Vladimir Lenin describing the role of the state in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. Citing Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Lenin investigates theoretical questions about the existence of the State after the proletarian revolution, addressing the arguments of anti-authoritarians, anarchists, social democrats, and reformists, in describing the progressive stages of societal change — the revolution, establishing “the lower stage of communist society” (the socialist commune), and the “higher stage of communist society” that will yield a stable society where personal freedom might be fully expressed. Lenin especially defends Marx’s theory of Communism, and Marxism generally; to wit, when old revolutionaries die, the bourgeoisie are not content with labelling them “enemies of the state”, because that would attract political radicals, so they attack the revolutionaries’ theoretic writings by ascribing to them an (anti-revolutionary) social-democratic mediocrity contrary to “the revolutionary nature of Marx”; such bourgeois intellectuals are the “revisionists” who transform a human being into an abstraction. The State and Revolution describes the inherent nature of the State as a tool for class oppression, a creation born of a social class’s desire to control the other social classes of its society when politico-economic disputes cannot otherwise be amicably resolved; whether a dictatorship or a democracy, the State remains the social-control means of the ruling class. Even in a democratic capitalist republic, the ruling class never relinquish political power, maintaining it via the “behind-the-scenes” control of universal suffrage — an excellent deception that maintains the idealistic concepts of “freedom and democracy”; hence, communist revolution is the sole remedy for such demagogy.