Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/44

 for on this point they have themselves diverged from Marxism. Marx does differ both from Proudhon and Bakunin on the point of Federalism (not to speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat). Federalism is a direct fundamental outcome of the Anarchist petty middle-class ideas. Marx is a centralist; and in the above cited quotation of his speculations there is no withdrawal from the central position. Only people full of middle-class "supersitious faith" in the State can mistake the destruction of the bourgeois State for the destruction of centralism.

But will it not be centralism if the proletariat and the poorest peasantry take the power of the State into their own hands, organize themselves quite freely into communes, and co-ordinate the action of all the communes for the purpose of striking at Capital, for the purpose of crushing the resistance of the capitalists, in order to accomplish the transference of private property in railways, factories, land and so forth, to the nation, to the whole of Society? Will that not be the most consistent democratic centralism? And proletarian centralism at that?

Bernstein simply cannot conceive the possibility of voluntary centralism, of a voluntary union of the communes into a nation, a voluntary fusion of the proletarian communes in the business of destroying capitalist supremacy and the capitalist machinery of government.

Like all philistines, Bernstein can imagine centralism only as something from above, to be imposed and maintained solely by means of bureaucracy and militarism.

Marx, as though he foresaw the possibility of the distortion of his ideas, purposely emphasizes that the accusation against the Commune that it desired to destroy the unity of the nation to do away with a central authority, was a deliberate falsehood. He purposely uses the phrase "to organize the unity of the nation" so as to oppose the conscious, democratic, proletarian centralism to the capitalist, military official centralism.

But none so deaf as those who will not hear. And the Opportunists of the modern Social-Democracy do not, on any account, want to hear of the destruction of the State, of the removal of the parasite.

We have already quoted the words of Marx on this subject, and must now supplement them.