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Title: An important book, a questionable translator.
Review: _State and Revolution_ is a complicated book in the annals of Marxist thinking. Lenin assigns above all a class role to the State, and therefore ascertains correctly the necessity of a socialist state assuming a proletarian viewpoint. At the same time, Lenin's socialist state lacks a truly political dimension, as it remains, above all, a means for strictly administrative decision-making. Something that would gravely hamper the subsequent understanding of the political character of a future socialist state, specially when you think that this book was written while Lenin hid from the Kerensky government, that's to say just before the October Revolution. Neverthless, the problems put by the book have enormous present value. Therefore it must be taken as entirely questionable the decision to choose as translator an anti-communist like Service, something that would be quite like choosing a neo-stalinist to translate Trotsky's "Revolution Betrayed".
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