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 This alone is the kind of "abolition" of the State against which Marx protested, refuting the Anarchists. He protested not against the theory of the disappearance of the State when classes disappear, or its abolition when classes have been abolished, but only against the proposition that the workers should deny themselves the use of arms, the use of organized force, that is, the use of the State, for the purpose of "breaking the resistance of the capitalist class." Marx purposely emphasizes, in order that the true sense of his contentions against the Anarchists: might not be perverted, "the revolutionary and transitional form" of the State necessary for the proletariat. The proletariat only needs the State temporarily. We do not at all disagree with the Anarchists on the question of the abolition of the State as a final aim. But we affirm that, for the attainment of this aim, we must make temporary use of the weapons and methods of the State against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the annihilation of all classes. Marx chooses the sharpest and clearest mode of stating the position against the Anarchists. Having cast off the yoke of the capitalists, ought the workers "to lay down their arms" or should they use them against the capitalists in order to break their resistance? And the systematic employment of arms by one class against the other, what is that if not a "transitional form of the State"?

Let every Social-Democrat ask himself whether that was the way in which he examined the question of the State in his discussions with the Anarchists! Was that the way in which the vast majority of the official Social-Democratic parties of the Second International treated it?

Engels develops these same ideas in even greater detail and more simply. He first of all ridicules the muddled ideas of the Proudhonists who call themselves "Anti-Authoritarians," that is, who denied every form of authority, or subordination of power. Take a factory, a railway, a vessel on the open seas, said Engels; is it not clear that not one of these complex technical concerns, based on the use of machines and the ordered co-operation of many people, could function without a certain amount of subordination, and, consequently of authority or power? "When I use these arguments," writes Engels, "against the most hopeless Anti-Authoritarians, they can only give me the following answer, 'Ah, that is true, but the question is not of the authority we confer on our delegates, but of a certain commission.' These people think that a thing can be altered by merely changing its name."