By educating a workers' party, Marxism educates also the advance-guard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and of leading the whole community to Socialism; fit to direct and organize the new order, to be the teacher, guide, leader of all the toiling and exploited in the task of building up their common life without the capitalist and against the capitalists. As against this, the Opportunism predominant at present breeds in the labor movement a class of representatives of the better-paid workers, who lose touch with the rank and file, "get on" fairly well under capitalism, and sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, i. e., renounce the role of the revolutionary leaders of the people against the capitalist class.
"The State, i.e, the proletariat organized as the ruling class"—this theory of Marx's is indissolubly connected with all his teachings concerning the revolutionary part to be played in History by the proletariat. The fulfillment of this part requires the proletarian dictatorship, the political supremacy of the proletariat.
But, if the proletariat needs the State, as a particular form of organization of force against the capitalist class, the question almost spontaneously forces itself upon us: Is it thinkable that such an organization can he created without a preliminary breaking up and destruction of the machinery of government created for its own use by the capitalist class? The Communist Manifesto leads us straight to this conclusion, and it is of this conclusion that Marx wrote when he summed up the practical results of the revolutionary experience gained between 1848 and 1851.
2. The Results of Revolution.
On this question of the State with which we are concerned, Marx summarizes his conclusions from the revolutions of the years 1848–1851 in the following way (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte):
"Nevertheless, the Revolution is thorough. It is still passing through its purgatory. It is doing its work systematically. By December 2, 1851 (the day of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat) it had fulfilled half its program; now it is fulfilling the other half. First, it perfected its parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now, when this has been accomplished, it is drawing the executive power through the perfecting process; it reduces that power to its simplest terms; isolates it, sets it up against itself as its sole reproach—all in order to concentrate against it all the forces of destruction. (The italics are ours.)
22
