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 place, that deduction from his proposition which is directed against the Opportunists.

One can wager that out of every ten thousand persons who have read or heard of the "withering away" of the State, 9,990 do not know at all, or do not remember, that Engels did not direct his conclusions from this proposition against the Anarchists alone. And out of the remaining ten, nine do not know the meaning of "a free popular state" nor the reason why an attack on this watchword contained an attack on the Opportunists. This is how History is written! This is how a great revolutionary doctrine is imperceptibly adulterated and adapted to current philistinism! The reference to the Anarchists has been repeated thousands of times, had been vulgarized in the crudest fashion possible, until it has acquired the strength of a prejudice, whereas the reference to the Opportunists has been hushed up and "forgotten."

"A free popular State" was the demand in current use in the program of the German Social Democrats of the 'seventies. There is no political substance in this slogan other than a pompous middle-class circumlocution of the idea of democracy. In so far as it pointed in "lawful" manner at a democratic Republic, Engels was prepared "for a time" to justify it from a propaganda point of view. But this slogan was really Opportunist, for it not only exaggerated the attractiveness of bourgeois democracy, but also conveyed a misunderstanding of the Socialist criticism of the State in general. We are in favor of a democratic Republic as the best form of the State for the proletariat under Capitalism, but we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in in the most democratic middle-class Republic. Furthermore, every State is a "particular power of suppression" of the oppressed class. Consequently, no state is either "free" or "popular." Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the 'seventies.

Fifth, in the same work of Engels from which everyone remembers this arguments on "withering away" of the State, there is also a disquisition on the nature of a violent revolution; and the historical appreciation of its role becomes, with Engels, a veritable panegyric of a revolution by force. This, of course, no one remembers. To talk or even think of the importance of this idea, is not considered respectable by our modern Socialist parties, and in the daily propaganda and agitation among the masses it plays no part whatever. Yet it is indissolubly bound up with the "withering away" of the State in one harmonious whole. Here is Engels' argument: