ABSTRACT
The continuing power and seductiveness of Lenin's themes in contemporary history, inasmuch as their prescriptions may still be advocated, and their consequences defended, at the cost of human suffering. Sartre to attempt a definition of human freedom, and consequently of the nature of revolution, that escapes the one-dimensional logic and the naive optimism of the ontologically based traditional Marxian theories. Sartre's analysis presents an incisive account of the process of revolutionary transformation, and then revolutionary degeneration. Each step can be illustrated by events and processes from the Russian experience. This chapter shows that Lenin's whole thesis is startlingly irrelevant to the question of the state and revolution. Lenin's problematic ensured that politics is an ontological impossibility. His measures for the abolition of bureaucracy and the extension of democracy are irrelevant to the revolutionary moment because these are the natural, inevitable, components of such a moment. Yet politics is a product of living in time.
