Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/19

 "That force also plays another part in History (other than that of the perpetuation of evil), namely, a revolutionary part; that, as Marx says, it is the midwife of every old Society when it is pregnant with a new one; that force is the instrument and the means by which social movements hack their way through and break up the dead and fossilized political forms;—of all this not a word by Herr Duehring. Duly, with sighs and groans, does he admit the possibility that for the overthrow of the system of exploitation, force may, perhaps, be necessary, but most unfortunate, if you please, because all use of force, forsooth, demoralizes its user! And this is said in face of the great moral and intellectual advance which has been the result of every victorious revolution! And this is said in Germany, where a violent collision—which might, perhaps, be forced on the people—should have, at the very least, this advantage that it would destroy the spirit of subservience which has been permeating the national mind ever since the degradation and humiliation of the Thirty Years' War. And this turbid, flabby, impotent parson’s mode of thinking dares offer itself for acceptance to the most revolutionary party History has ever known!" (P. 193, third German edition.)

How can this eulogy of a revolution by force, which Engels propounded to the German Social Democrats between 1878–94, that is, up to the very day of his death, be reconciled with the theory of the "withering away" of the State, and combined into one doctrine? Usually the two views are combined by a process of eclecticism, by an unprincipled, sophistic, arbitrary selection of passages here and there (to oblige the powers that be)—and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred (if not more often), it is the idea of the "withering away of the State" that is especially emphasized. Dialectics is replaced by eclectics—this is the most usual, the most widespread method used in the official Social-Democratic literature of our day in respect of Marxist teachings. Such a substitution is, of course, not new: one can see it even in the history of classic Greek philosophy. In the process of camouflaging Marxism as Opportunism, the substitution of eclecticism for dialectics is the best method of deceiving the masses. It gives an illusory satisfaction. It seems to take into account all sides of the process, all the tendencies of development, all the contradictory factors, etc., whereas, in reality, it offers no consistent revolutionary view of the process of social development at all.

We have already said above and shall show more fully at a later stage that the teaching of Marx and Engels regarding the