Page:The Paris Commune - Karl Marx - ed. Lucien Sanial (1902).djvu/62

 Rh remedies. In the first place it filled all positions of administration, justice, and instruction, through election by universal suffrage, the elected being at all times subject to recall by their constituents. And secondly, it paid for all services, high or low, only the same pay that other workers received. The highest salary that it ever paid was six thousand francs. Thus a check was put to all place-hunting and career-making, even without the imperative mandate under which delegates to the representative bodies were placed, quite superfluously.

This disruption of the power formerly possessed by the State, and its replacement by a new power that was truly democratic, is described in detail in the third chapter of the Civil War. But it was necessary to enter here once more upon some of its features, because in Germany the superstition concerning the State has been transmitted from philosophy into the general consciousness of the bourgeoisie, and even of many workers. According to the conception of philosophy, the State is the "realization of the Idea," or the philosophic equivalent of the Kingdom of God upon earth—the sphere in which eternal truth and righteousness are, or ought to be, realized. There follows from this a superstitious reverence for the State and all its adjuncts, a superstition that is all the more natural, since from our very childhood we have grown up in the idea that the affairs and interests common to the whole of society could not be provided for in any other way than had been the practise hitherto, namely, through the State and its highly paid functionaries. And people imagine they have taken a very bold step, when they have once freed themselves from the belief in monarchy and swear now by the democratic republic. But in reality the State is nothing else than a machine for the oppression of one class by another class,