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 so easy, simple and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of the slaves, serfs and wage laborers, and will cost the human race far less. And it is compatible with the diffusion of democracy over such an overwhelming majority of the nation that the need for any special machinery for suppression will gradually cease to exist. The exploiters are unable, of course, to suppress the people without a most complex machine for performing this duty; but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple "machine"—almost without any "machine" at all, without any special apparatus—by the simple organization of the armed masses (such as the Councils of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, we may remark, anticipating a little).

Finally, only under Communism will the State become quite unnecessary, for there will be no one to suppress—"no one" in the sense of a class, in the sense of a systematic struggle with a definite section of the population. We are not Utopians, and we do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses by individual persons, and equally the need to suppress such excesses. But, in the first place, for this no special machine, no special instrument of repression is needed. This will be done by the armed nation itself, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern Society, parts a pair of combatants or does not allow a woman to be outraged. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses which violate the rules of social life, is the exploitation of the masses, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to "wither away." We do not know how quickly and in what stages, but we know that they will be withering away. With their withering away the State will also wither away. Marx, without plunging into Utopia, defined more fully what can now be defined regarding this future epoch: namely, the difference between the higher and lower phases (degrees, stages) of Communist Society.

In the Criticism of the Gotha Program Marx disproves in detail the Lassallean idea of the receipt by the workers under Socialism of the "undiminished" or "full product of their labor." Marx shows that out of the whole of the social labor of Society, it will be necessary to deduct a reserve fund, a fund for the expansion of industry, the replacement of "worn-out" machinery,