Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/98

 sunk down into Opportunism. The experience of the Commune has been not only forgotten, but also distorted. Far from making vivid in the workers' minds the near approach of the time when they are to smash the old machinery of the State and substitute a new one, thereby making their political domination the foundation for a Socialist reconstruction of society, they have actually taught the workers the direct opposite and have represented the "conquest of power" in a way that left thousands of loopholes to Opportunism.

It was a fateful thing to have confused and hushed up the question of the relation of a proletarian revolution to the State at a time when the States, with their swollen military apparatus in a whirlwind of Imperialist rivalry, had become monstrous military beasts devouring the lives of millions of people, in order to decide whether England or Germany—this or that group of financial capitalists—should dominate the world.