Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/8

 State must be presented as fully as possible, in order that the reader may form an independent and complete judgment of the ideas of the founders of Scientific Socialism, and in order that their distortions by the present predominant Kautsky school may be proved in black and white and made plain to all.

Let us begin with the most popular of Engels' works, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, the sixth edition of which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 1894. Summarizing his historical analysis, Engels says:

"The State in no way constitutes a force imposed on Society from outside. Nor is the State 'the reality of the Moral Idea,' ‘the image and reality of Reason,' as Hegel asserted. The State is the product of Society at a certain stage of its development. The State is tantamount to an acknowledgment that the given Society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has broken up into irreconcilable antagonisms, of which it is powerless to rid itself. And in order that these antagonisms—these classes with their opposing economic interests—may not devour one another and Society itself in their sterile struggle, some force standing, seemingly, above Society, becomes necessary so as to moderate the force of their collisions and to keep them within the bounds of 'order'. And this force arising from Society, but placing itself above it, which gradually separates itself from it—this force is the State." (Pages 177–178 of the Sixth German edition.)

Here, we have, expressed in all its clearness, the basic idea of Marxism on the question of the historical role and meaning of the State. The State is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. When, where, and to what extent the State arises, depends directly upon when, where, and to what extent the class antagonisms of a given Society cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the State proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.

It is precisely on this most important and fundamental point that distortions of Marxism arise along two main lines.

On the one hand, the middle class (bourgeois) and particularly the lower middle classs (petty bourgeois) ideologists, compelled by the pressure of indisputable historical facts to recognize that the State only exists where there are class antagonisms and class struggles, "correct" Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the State is an organ for the reconciliation of classes. With the middle class and philistine professors and publicists, the State (and this frequently on the strength of generous references to