Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/59

 In Germany the Federated State is the transition to the complete unitary State, and the "revolutions from above" of 1866 and 1870 must not be turned backwards, but must be completed by a "movement from below."

Engels not only shows no indifference to the question of the form of the State, but, on the contrary, analyzes with the greatest possible care the transitional forms, in order to establish, from the concrete historical peculiarities of each separate case, from what and to what the given transitional form is evolving.

Engels, like Marx, insists from the point of view of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution, on democratic centralism, on the one and indivisible republic. The Federal Republic is considered by him to be either an exception and a hindrance to development, or a transitional form between a monarchy and a centralized republic—a "progressive step" in certain definite conditions. And amongst these definite conditions arises the problem of nationalities.

With Engels, as with Marx, in spite of their pitiless criticism of the reactionary nature of the small States, often in concrete cases hidden from the eye under the cloak of the national question, there is nowhere a trace of any desire to ignore the national question—a desire of which the Dutch and Polish Marxists are often guilty, as a result of their most justifiable opposition to the narrow, middle-class nationalism of "their" little States.

Even in England, where the geographical conditions, the common language, and the history of many centuries would seem to have put an end to the national question of the separate small divisions in England—even here Engels is cognizant of the patent fact that the national question has not yet been overcome, and recognizes, in consequence, that the establishment of a federal republic would be a "progressive" step. Of course; there is no trace here of a renunciation of criticism of the defects of the Federal Republic or of the most determined propaganda and fight for a unitary and democratically centralized republic.

But Engels' conception of a centralized democracy is not of that bureaucratic order with which the middle-class ideologists (including Anarchists) identify it. Centralism does not, with Engels, in the least exclude the wide local autonomy which combines a voluntary defense of the unity of the State by the communes and districts with the absolute abolition of all bureaucracy and all "ordering about" from above.

"And so we want a unitary Republic [writes Engels, setting out the programatic views of Marxism on the State], but not