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 have substituted for the class war dreams of harmony between classes, have imagined even the transition to Socialism, in a dream, as it were—that is, not in the form of the overthrow of the supremacy of the exploiting class, but as a peaceful submission of the minority to the fully enlightened majority. This lower middle-class Utopia, indissolubly connected with the vision of a State above classes, in practice led to the betrayal of the interests of the toiling class; as was shown, for example, in the Revolutions of 1848 and 1871, and in the "Socialist" participation in bourgeois ministries in England, France, Italy and other coutries at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.

Marx fought all his life against this lower middle-class Socialism—now reborn in Russia in the Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary parties. He carried his analysis of the class war logically right up to the doctrine on political power and the State.

The overthrow of capitalist supremacy can be accomplished only by the proletariat as the particular class which is being prepared fer this work and is provided both with the opportunity and the power to perform it, by the economic conditions of its existence. While the capitalist class breaks up and dissolves the peasantry and all the lower middle classes, it welds together, unites and organizes the town proletariat. Only the proletariat—on account of its economic role in production on a large scale—is capable of leading all the toiling and exploited masses, who are exploited, oppressed, crushed by the capitalist often more, not less, than the town proletariat, but who are incapable of carrying on the struggle for freedom unaided.

The doctrine of the class-war, as applied by Marx to the question of the State and of the Socialist revolution, leads inevitably to the recognition of the political supremacy of the proletariat, to its dictatorship, i. e., authority shared with none else and relying directly upon the armed force of the masses. The overthrow of the capitalist class is feasible only by the transformation of the proletariat into the ruling class, able to crush the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and to organize, for the new settlement of economic order, all the toiling and exploited masses.

The proletariat needs the State, the centralized organization of force and violence, both for the purpose of crushing the resistance of the exploiters and for the purpose of guiding the great mass of the population—the peasantry, the lower middle-class, the semi-proletariat—in the work of economic Socialist reconstruction.