ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the way in which the concept of the state outlined by Marx and Engels was developed and used by other Marxists, in particular by Kautsky and Lenin. The most detailed treatment of the state is to be found in Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, written a year after Marx's death. Bureaucracy was for Marx only 'the low and brutal form' of the 'state centralization that modern society requires'. 'The modern state', writes Kautsky, 'grew with and through the capitalist class, just as, in turn it has become the most powerful support of that class. Each has promoted the interests of the other. Towards the end of 1918 Kautsky published The Dictatorship of the Proletariat to which Lenin immediately responded with The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
