Marx's theory of the state however, he already saw some limitations to that model: By the time he wrote "The German Ideology" (1846), Marx viewed the state as a creature of the bourgeois economic interest. Two years later that idea was expounded in "The Communist Manifesto" This represents the high point of conformance of the state theory to an economic interpretation of history: The forces of production determine peoples' production relations; their production relations determine all other relations, including the political. ("Determines" is the strong form of the claim, Marx also uses "conditions". Also, even "determination" is not causality, and some reciprocity of action is
The Communist Manifesto in theory; Marxist works such as the "Manifesto" or "Das Kapital" were read primarily by party theoreticians. On the other hand, small, dedicated militant parties and Marxist sects in the West took pride in knowing the theory; Hobsbawm says "This was the milieu in which 'the clearness of a comrade could be gauged invariably from the number of earmarks on his Manifesto. Following the October Revolution of 1917 that swept the Vladimir Lenin-led Bolsheviks to power in Russia, the world's first socialist state was founded explicitly along Marxist lines. The Soviet Union, which Bolshevik Russia would become a part of,