More than one hundred years after it was written, Lenin's pamphlet The State and Revolution remains the clearest exposition of the role of the state and the need for the masses to destroy it in order to bring about a society without class divisions of any sort. Today, as in 1917, the left is still divided between reformists who want to operate within the confines of the capitalist state and revolutionaries who oppose it, and Lenin's pamphlet remains a touchstone for these debates.