Lenin's The State And Revolution

Section 1 

 "During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. " - Lenin

this made me think of liberal co opting of left wing figures. or Like how republicans will post stuff on MLK day . Or how the labor movement of the past won us many things normalized today, but their struggles have been erased, deliberately.

"The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable."

Very important one liner^^

"For instance, when, in the revolution of 1917, the question of the significance and role of the state arose in all its magnitude as a practical question demanding immediate action, and, moreover, action on a mass scale, all the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks descended at once to the petty-bourgeois theory that the “state” “reconciles” classes. Innumerable resolutions and articles by politicians of both these parties are thoroughly saturated with this petty-bourgeois and philistine “reconciliation” theory. That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand. Their attitude to the state is one of the most striking manifestations of the fact that our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks are not socialists at all (a point that we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petty-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology."

so basically this part is about reformist sects of socialists. Lenin is rightfully pointing out that when push comes to shove those who aren't committed to the proletarian struggle will reveal themselves as such. This brought me to the thought about avoiding sectarianism/ultraleftism; for those who are trying to choose what specific left wing group they join, one can get caught in the Menasha of different groups histories and founders, a search for the truest communist option, but ultimately the most objective metric is that people are getting together and developing class consciousness. For every leftist group leader that theoretically gets cold feet, several more people will have developed revolutionary struggle.