State
The state is an institution which represents the organ by which a class maintains its rule and uses force to subjugate a lower class. The state is a product of class struggle and developed to suppress and maintain the exploitation of a lower class. Under capitalism, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is present to ensure the preservation of the socioeconomic system in the form of, for instance, passing laws defending private ownership and repressing working class movements through police and military force.[1]
Under the lower stage of socialism, the proletarian revolution abolishes the capitalist state machinery in all its forms and establishes a democratic state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, to represent its class interests, preserve and advance socialist construction, and suppress bourgeois and counter-revolutionary elements domestically and abroad. After the higher stage of socialism has developed, the state will wither away as the material basis from which it emerged, class antagonisms, no longer exist, with all of the population being integrated into the proletariat and the long-lasting distinctions between strata becoming non-existent.[1][2]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Vladimir Lenin (1917). The State and Revolution. Available on the Marxists Internet Archive.
- ↑ Frederick Engels (1880). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, ch. 3, Historical Materialism. Available on the Marxists Internet Archive.
"But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole: in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own times, the bourgeoisie. When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: "a free State", both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand."