Lenin on the Necessity of a Worker's State and Vanguard Leadership

"The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to

crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population — the peasants, the

petty bourgeoisie, and semi­proletarians — in the work of organizing a socialist economy

By educating the workers' party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming

power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the

teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without

the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. By contrast, the opportunism now prevailing trains the

members of the workers' party to be the representatives of the better­paid workers, who lose touch with the

masses, "get along" fairly well under capitalism, and sell their birthright for a mass of pottage, i.e., renounce

their role as revolutionary leaders of the people against the bourgeoisie.

Marx's theory of "the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class", is inseparably bound up with

the whole of his doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. The culmination of this rule

is the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat."

The State and Revolution

by V.I. Lenin