State and Revolution in the 21st Century: Is Lenin Still Relevant?

Revolutions of the 'Arab Spring' toppled governments but remain far from taking state power. Meanwhile, many activists in the Occupy movements are not certain that ought to be our goal to begin with. Lenin wrote State and Revolution towards the beginning of the greatest social crisis capitalism had yet witnessed, the 'thirty years' crisis' of 1914-1945, which resumed Marx and Engels' conceptions of the state as part of a larger argument about how revolutions must deal with state power as part of a broader international strategy to end war, colonialism and capitalist exploitation and oppression. In this panel we revisit it to revive the classic three-sided debate between anarchist, marxist and social democratic visions of social revolution and state power and draw some strategic and tactical lessons for the emerging world order of the 21st century.