Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/7



1. The State as the Product of the Irreconcilability of Class Antagonisms

Marx's doctrines are now undergoing the same fate, which, more than once in the course of History, has befallen the doctrines of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes invariably have meted out to them relentless persecution, and have received their teaching with the most savage hostility, with most furious hatred, and with a ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, however, attempts are usually made to turn them into harmless saints, canonizing them, as it were, investing their names with a certain halo by way of "consolation" to the oppressed classes, with the object of duping them; while at the same time emasculating and degrading the real essence of their revolutionary theories, blunting their revolutionary edge. At the present time the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement are cooperating in this work of adulterating Marxism. They omit, obliterate, and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul, and push to the foreground and extol what is, or seems, acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the Socialist chauvinists are now "Marxists"—save the mark! And more and more do German bourgeois professors, erstwhile specialists in the demolition of Marx, speak now of the "National-German" Marx who, forsooth, has educated the splendidly organized working class for the present predatory war.

In these circumstances, with the distortion of Marxism so widespread, our first task is to resuscitate the real nature of Marx's teaching on the subject of the State. For this purpose it will be necessary to quote copiously from the works of Marx and Engels themselves. Of course, long extracts will make our text cumbersome, and will in no way add to its lucidity; but we cannot possibly avoid them. All, or at any rate, all the most essential passages in the works of Marx and Engels on the subject of the