Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/197

 side. Of all the instruments of production the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself. The organisation of the revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which can be engendered in the bosom of the old society. Is that to say that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination, comprised in a new political power? No.

The essential condition of the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes, as the condition of the emancipation of the third estate of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates, all orders.

The working class will substitute, in the course of its development, for the old order of civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be political power, properly speaking, since political power is simply the official form of the antagonism in civil society.

In the meantime, the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle between class and class, a struggle which, carried to its highest expression, is a complete revolution. Would it, moreover, be matter for astonishment if a society, based upon the antagonism of classes, should lead ultimately to a brutal conflict, to a hand-to-hand struggle as its final dénonment?

Do not say that the social movement excludes the political movement. There has never been a political movement which was not at the same time social.

It is only in an order of things in which there will be no longer classes or class antagonism that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Until then, on