Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/46

 "Without this last condition the Communal constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion."

The Utopians had busied themselves with the "discovery" of the political forms under which the Socialist reconstruction of Society could take place. The Anarchists turned away from the question of political forms of any kind. The Opportunists of modern Social-Democracy have accepted the capitalist political forms of a parliamentary democratic State as the limit which cannot be overstepped; they have broken their foreheads praying before this idol, and they have denounced as Anarchism every attempt to destroy these forms.

Marx deduced from the whole history of Socialism and of political struggle that the State was bound to disappear, and that the transitional form of its disappearance (the transition from the political State to the non-State) would be the "proletariat organized as the ruling class." But Marx did not undertake the task of "discovering" the political "forms" of this future stage. He limited himself to an exact observation of French history, its analysis and the conclusion to which the year 1851 had led, viz., that matters were moving towards the destruction of the capitalist machinery of the State.

And when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst forth, Marx, in spite of the failure of that movement, in spite of its short life and its patent weakness, began to study what political forms it had disclosed.

The Commune was the form "discovered at last" by the proletarian revolution, under which the economic liberation of labor can proceed. The Commune was the first attempt of a proletarian revolution to break up the bourgeois State, and constitutes the political form, "discovered at last" which can and must take the place of the broken machine. We shall see below that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, in different surroundings and under different circumstances, have been continuing the work of the Commune, and have been confirming Marx's brilliant analysis of History.