Lenin then turns from the theoretical positions of the Narodniks to their political programme and actions. Central to the problem with the Narodniks political programme is the point referred to above. They failed to recognise that the Russian state itself was already a capitalist state. The political regime in Russia was not bourgeois but Tsarist, a combination of feudalism and Asiatic despotism. This only serves to illustrate the point made by Marx, in his own political writings, that the political regime, the superficial political structure, and form of government, is not the same as the state itself, as a permanent body, whose function is to preserve and advance the interests of the ruling class, and dominant property on which it rests, whose interests have become the interests of the state (in its broader sense as the polity contained within a definite set of geographical borders) itself. The state is the state of the ruling social class, which has become such because the specific property relations that define it, and from which it is reproduced, have themselves become dominant, either by expressing their superiority over previous forms, or because those previous forms, and/or the classes resting on them, collapsed, or were destroyed. In this latter scenario, it does not mean that what follows is progressive. The bourgeoisie in Cambodia were destroyed, but the property relations established in place of bourgeois relations, by Pol Pot's regime, represented a step back to a form of feudal production. When the slave owning societies collapsed, it resulted in the ruination of the contending classes.
But, many kinds of political regime can exist along with the same mode of production, and the social dictatorship of a class resting on it. The bourgeoisie became the dominant social class in Britain, in the 17th century. It was represented mostly by the merchant capitalists, and financial capitalists, capitalist production still being mostly small-scale, based in the towns, spreading into the countryside via the Putting Out System, where Yeoman farmers also began to develop into capitalist farmers. But, the bourgeoisie did not prove strong enough to create a political regime appropriate for its rule. The merchant and financial bourgeoisie had had a symbiotic relation to the landlord class since at least the time of Elizabeth I, as they acted as the pioneers not only of opening up new trade routes, to bring new exotic commodities, to the tables of the rich, but also of establishing colonies in these far flung regions, which were the source of new rents and interest payments for all of the rentier classes. 
The Civil War asserted the dominance of the bourgeoisie, but the collapse of its parliament, and institution of Cromwell's dictatorship, illustrated its weakness, and political immaturity. The same happened in France, and the dictatorship of Napoleon, and, in the case of a different ruling class, i.e. the proletariat, with the rise of Stalin, in Russia, in 1924, or, in reality, with Lenin in 1917.
The British state was already a capitalist state, in the 17th century. Its actions were founded upon the interests of the British bourgeois merchant class, which, in combination with the old landlord class sent out its representatives to develop foreign markets, and to create its colonial empire. The social dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, was expressed in the fact that it was on its revenues, from such trading and financial activity, that the wealth of the nation now depended, expressed in the dominance of the ideas of the Mercantilists. Indeed, it was the activity of Charles I, in attempting to increasingly tax those revenues that led to the Civil War, just as later it was the taxes imposed by George III, on the American colonial bourgeoisie that led to its revolution. The dominance of that bourgeoisie and of the bourgeois ideas that flowed from its economic and social dominance, was reflected, ideologically, in the writing of the political philosophers and theorists of the time, such as in Locke's Second Treatise on Government. It was those ideas that permeated civil society, and thereby, the state.
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