Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/21



The first production of a mature Marxism—The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto—date from the very eve of the Revolution of 1848. As a result of this fact, we find in them, side by side with the statement of the general principles of Marxism, a reflection, to’a certain degree, of the concrete revolutionary situation at that time. Consequently, it will possibly be more to the point to examine what the authors of these works wrote about the State immediately before they drew conclusions from the experience of the years 1848–51.

"The working class," wrote Marx, in The Poverty of Philosophy, "will in the course of its development, replace the old bourgeois society by a society which will exclude classes and their antagonisms; there will no longer be a political authority in the proper sense of the word, since political authority is the official expression of the antagonism of classes within the bourgeois society." (German edition, 1885, p. 182.)

It is instructive to compare, side by side with this general statement of the idea of the disappearance of the State with the disappearance of classes, the statement contained in the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels a few months later—to be precise, in November, 1847:

"Tracing the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we followed up the more or less hidden civil war within an existing society to the point at which it is transformed into open revolution, and the proletariat establishes its rule by means of violent overthrow of the capitalist class. … We have already seen that the first step in the Workers' Revolution is the transformation (literally "the promotion") of the proletariat into the ruling class, the conquest of democracy. … The proletariat will use its political supremacy in order gradually to wrest the whole of capital from the capitalist class, to centralize all the instruments of production in the hands of the State, that is, of