15 THE STATE AND REVOLUTION 14 THE CLASS STRUGGLE ther presentation of the views of Marx and Engels on the state as it now is.
The final summing up of his views is given by Engels in his most popular work, as follows: ment with the industrialists, or merely a friendly understanding? What is the role played by the Chernovs, Tseretellis, Avksentyeffs and Skobeleffs. Are they direct aids of the millionaire grafters, or only indirect aids?
The complete domination of wealth is more real in democratic republics for the reason that it is no longer dependent on the awkward political robe of capitalism. The democratic republic is the best possible garment for capitalism, and capital therefore, once having acquired this splendid cloak (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretellis, and associates. proceeds with all the greater hopefulness to lay the foundations of its power, since it is assured that no change whatever, in personnel, or institutions, or parties, can, in the bourgeois democratic republic, cause that power to tremble.
We must also observe that Engels, with great definiteness, calls the general suffrage right an instrument of bourgeois rule. This right, he says, evidently with the long experience of the German Social Democracy in mind, is. An indicator of the degree of maturity of the working class. It cannot give, and never will give more than this with the state organized as it is now.
Petit bourgeois democrats of the stamp of our and mensheviks, as well as their true brothers, the social chauvinists and opportunists of Western Europe, hope for great things from the general suffrage right. They thus disseminate and put into the minds of the people the false idea that the general right of suffrage is calculated, with the state as it now is, to secure an actual reflection of the will of the majority of the toilers as well as its enforcement.
For the present we may only call attention to this false idea and point out that the perfectly clear, precise, concrete declaration of Engels is distorted at every step in the propaganda and agitation of the official (i. e. opportunistic) socialist parties. complete exposition of the falsity of this teaching, which Engels merely touches upon, will be found in our fur Thus the state has not existed forever. There were societies which got along without it, which had not the slightest conception of the meaning of the state or of state power. At a certain stage in the economic development, which coincided with the splitting up of society into classes, the state became a necessity by virtue of this split. We are now rapidly approaching that stage in the development of production, when the existence of these classes will not only cease to be a necessity, but will become an outright hindrance to production.
The classes will disappear as inevitably as, in the past, they have appeared. And with the passing away of the classes will inevitably be associated the passing away of the state. The society which reorganizes production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will send all its state machinery to the place where it really belongs, namely, the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze hatchet.
We do not often come upon this quotation in the propagandist and agitational literature of our present day SocialDemocracy. But even where this extract is found, it is most usually quoted, as it were, as an act of ceremonial piety, as a genuflexion before an ikon, an official expression of respect for Engels, without for a moment considering what a broad and deep revolutionary thought is contained in this sending the whole state machinery to the museum of antiquities. Nor do we meet, for the most part, with any understanding of what Engels calls the state machinery.