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 “And when the revolution has completed this second part of its preliminary work, Europe will rise to exclaim in triumph, 'Well grubbed, old mole!' … This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its multi-form and artificial machinery of government, with its army of half a million officials, side by side with a military force of another half million, this frightful parasitic organism covering as with a net the whole body of the French society and blocking up all its pores, had arisen in the period of absolute monarchy, at the time of the fall of Feudalism: a fall which this organism had helped to hasten."

The first French Revolution developed centralization, "but at the same time increased the scope, the attributes, the number of servants of the central Government. Napoleon completed this government machinery."

The Legitimist and the July monarchies "contributed nothing but a greater division of labor." … "Finally, the Parliamentary Republic found itself compelled, in its struggle against the Revolution, along with its repressive measures, to increase the resources and the centralization of the State. Every Revolution brought this machine to greater perfection instead of breaking it up. (The italics are ours.) The political parties, which alternately struggled for supremacy, looked upon the capture of this gigantic governmental structure as the principal spoils of victory." (Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1907 German edition, pp. 98–99.)

In this remarkable passage Marxism makes a great step forward in comparison with the position of the Communist Manifesto. There the question of the State is still extremely abstract; most general ideas and expressions are employed. Here the question becomes concrete, and the conclusions are most precise, definite, practical; all former revolutions helped to perfect the machinery of Government, whereas now we must shatter it, break it to pieces.

This conclusion is the chief and fundamental point in the Marxist theory of the State, yet it is exactly this fundamental point which has been not merely completely "forgotten" by the dominant official Social-Democratic parties, but absolutely distorted (as we shall see later) by the foremost theoretician of the Second International, Karl Kautsky.

In the Communist Manifesto are set out the general lessons of History, which force us to see in the State the organ of class domination, and bring us to the necessary conclusion that the proletariat cannot overthrow the capitalist class without, as a