Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/9

 Marx), becomes a mediator and conciliator of classes. According to Marx, the State is the organ of class domination, the organ of oppression of one class by another. Its aim is the creation of order which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression and moderates the collisions between the classes. But in the opinion of the lower middle class politicians, the establishment of order is equivalent to the reconciliation of classes, not to the oppression of one class by another. To moderate class collisions does not mean according to them, to deprive the oppressed class of certain definite means and methods in its struggle for throwing off the yoke of the oppressors, but to conciliate the oppressed class.

For instance, when in the Revolution of 1917, the question of the real meaning and role of the State arose, in all its importance as a practical question demanding immediate action on a wide mass-scale, all the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks rattled down, suddenly and without reservation, to the lower middle-class theory of the "conciliation of classes by the State." Innumerable resolutions and articles by publicists of both these parties were saturated through and through with this purely middle-class and philistine theory of conciliation. That the State is the organ of domination over a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its social antipode, this the lower middle-class democracy is never able to understand. Their attitude towards the State is one of the most telling proofs that our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks are not Socialists at all (which we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but only lower middle-class democrats, with a phraseology very nearly Socialist.

On the other hand, the distortion of Marx by the Kautsky school is far more subtle. "Theoretically," there is no denial that the State is the organ of class domination, or that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is forgotten or overlooked is this: If the State is the product of the irreconcilable character of class antagonisms, if it is a force standing above society and "separating itself gradually from it," then it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible without a violent revolution, and without the destruction of the machinery of State power, which has been created by the governing class and in which this "separation" is embodied. This inference, theoretically quite self-evident was drawn by Marx, as we shall see later, with the greatest precision from a concrete historical analysis of the problems of revolution. And it is exactly this inference which Kautsky—as we shall show fully in our subsequent analysis—has "forgotten" and distorted.