Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/83

 pervading, rational: it will be ubiquitious, and there will be no way of escaping it.

The whole of society will have become one office and one factory with equal work and equal pay but this "factory" discipline, which the proletariat will extend to the whole society on the defeat of capitalism and the overthrow of the exploiters, is by no means our ideal and is far from our final end. It is but a foothold as we press on to the radical cleansing of society from all the brutality and foulness of capitalist exploitation: we leave it behind as we move on.

When all, or be it even the greater part of society, have learned how to govern the State, have taken this business into their own hands, have established a control over the insignificant minority of the capitalists, over the gentry with capitalist leanings, and over the workers thoroughly demoralized by capitalism—from this moment the need for any government begins to vanish. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment that it ceases to be necessary. The more democratic the "State" consisting of armed workers, which is "no longer really a State in the ordinary sense of the term," the more rapidly does every form of the State begin to decay. For when all have learned to manage and really do manage socialized production, when all really do keep account and control the idlers, gentlefolk, and such like "guardians of capitalist traditions," the escape from such general registration and control will inevitably become so increasingly difficult, so much the exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are very practical people, not sentimental intellectuals, and they will scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that very soon the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of any kind of social life will become a habit. The door will then be wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its second higher phase and along with it to the complete withering away of the State.