Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/49

 Speaking of the conversion of the Blanquists after the Commune, and under the influence of its experience, to the Marxist point of view, Engels, it so happens, formulates it as "The necessity for political action by the proletariat and for proletarian dictatorship, as the transition towards the abolition of classes, and, together with them, of the State. …" (Page 55.)

Those who are addicted to hair-splitting, or bourgeois "exterminators of Marxism," will perhaps see a contradiction between this admission of the "abolition of the State" and the repudiation of a formula, like that of the Anarchists, contained in the quotation from the Anti-Duehring given above. It would not be surprising if the Opportunists wrote down Engels, too, as an "Anarchist," for the Socialist-chauvinists are now more and more adopting the fashion of accusing the Internationalists of Anarchism.

That, together with the abolition of classes, the State will also be abolished—this Marxism has always taught. The well-known passage of the "withering away of the State" in the Anti-Duehring does not accuse the Anarchists merely of being in favor of the abolition of the State, but of spreading the theory that it is possible to accomplish this "within twenty-four hours." In view of the complete distortion by the present predominating "Social-Democratic" doctrine concerning the relation of Marxism to Anarchism, of the question of the abolition of the State, it will be especially useful to recall one particular controversy of Marx and Engels with the Anarchists.

This dispute occurred in 1873. Marx and Engels then contributed articles against the Proudhonist "Autonomists" or "Anti-Authoritarians" to an Italian Socialist review, and it was only in 1913 that these articles appeared in German in the Neue Zeit.

"If the political struggle of the working class [wrote Marx, ridiculing the Anarchists for their repudiation of political action] assumes a revolutionary form, if the workers, in place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, set up their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they commit a terrible crime and offer an insult to principle, because, forsooth, the workers, in order to meet the miserable, gross requirements of the moment, in order to crush the resistance of the capitalist class, cause the State to assume a revolutionary and transitional form, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the State." (Neue Zeit, 1913–14, year 32, vol. I, page 40.)