Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/15

 but also is becoming a direct impediment to production. Classes will vanish as inevitably as they inevitably arose in the past. With the disappearance of classes the State, too, will inevitably disappear. When organizing production anew on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, Society will banish the whole State machine to a place which will then be the most proper one for it—to the museum of antiquities side by side with the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."

It is not often that we find this passage quoted in the propagandist literature of contemporary Social Democracy. But even when we do come across it, it is generally quoted as some sacred or ritual formula, that is, merely to show official respect for Engeis, without any attempt to gauge the width and the depth of the revolutionary act presupposed by this "banishment of the whole State machine to the museum of antiquities." And often one cannot trace even the least comprehension of what Engels calls the State machine.

Engels' words regarding the "withering away" of the State enjoy such a popularity, are so often quoted, and reveal so clearly the essence of the common adulteration of Marxism in an opportunist sense, that we must examine them in detail. Let us give the whole argument from which they are taken:

"The proletariat seizes control of the State authority and, first of all, converts the mans of production into State property. But by this very act it destroys itself as a proletariat, destroying at the same lime all class differences and class antagonisms, and with this, also, the State as such. Past and present Society, which moved amidst class antagonisms, had to have the State, that is, an organization of the exploiting class for the support of its external conditions of production, therefore, in particular, for the forcible retention of the exploited class in such conditions of oppression {such as slavery, serfdom, wage labor) as are determined by the given methods of production. The State was the official representative of the whole of Society, its embodiment in a visible corporation; but it was such only in so far as it was the State of that class which, in the given epoch, alone represented the whole of Society, In ancient times it was the State of the slave-owners—the only citizens of the State; in the middle ages it was the State of the feudal nobility; in our own times it is the State of the capitalists. When, ultimately, the State really becomes the