Abolition of the State.
When we review what has been set forth so far, we find that, with
the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production,
and their transformation into social property, those evils gradually
disappear that bourgeois society presents on all sides, and which are
becoming more and more unbearable. Class rule will cease. Society
will apply all its activities according to its own plans, and will
guide and control itself. By abolition of the wage system, the
exploitation of man by man, deception and fraud, adulteration of food,
speculation, etc., will be eradicated. The halls of the Temples of
Mammon will be empty, for stocks, bonds, promissory notes, mortgages,
etc., will have become waste-paper. The words of Schiller: “All old
scores shall be erased and the world shall make its peace,” will
be realized, and the scriptural saying: “In the sweat of thy brow
shalt thou eat thy bread,” will then prevail with the heroes of the
stock-exchange and the drones of capitalism, also. The employers
and capitalists will be relieved forever of that worry about their
property which, so they pathetically assure us, is often even harder
to bear than the workingman’s lot of uncertainty and privation. The
excitements of speculation, that give so many of our stock-jobbers
heart-diseases and apoplexy, and cause them to be the victims of
nervous prostration, will be spared them in the future. ~Freedom
from care~ will be their lot and that of their descendants, and they
will not deplore this lot.
With the abolition of private property and class antagonism, the
state, too, will gradually pass out of existence. “As the capitalistic
method of production converts ever greater numbers of the population
into proletarians, it creates the power that, under penalty of its
own destruction, is destined to bring about the transformation. Since
its tendencies are to convert into state property the socialized
means of production, it blazes the trail for the achievement of this
transformation....
“The state was the official representative of society as a whole, its
unification in a visible body; but it was this only ~in so far as
it was the state of that particular class~ which itself represented
society as a whole at its time; in antiquity, the slave-owning
citizen; in mediæval days, the feudal nobility; in our own day,
the bourgeoisie. By finally becoming the actual representative of
society as a whole, ~it renders itself superfluous~. As soon as there
will be no social class that needs to be repressed, as soon as the
conflicts and excesses will be removed that are rooted in the present
anarchistic methods of production and the individual struggle for
existence, there will be nothing to necessitate a special power of
repression, a state. The first act wherein the state will appear as
the true representative of the whole body social--the act of taking
possession of the means of production in behalf of society--will at
the same time be its last independent act as state. State interference
with social relations will become superfluous in one domain after
another and will finally fall into disuse. Instead of a government of
persons, there will be an administration of things and a direction
of the processes of production. The state will not be ‘abolished,’
it will die out.”[251]
Together with the state will vanish its representatives: ministers,
parliaments, standing armies, police, courts, lawyers and district
attorneys, prison officials, collectors of taxes and duty; in short,
the entire political apparatus. Armories and other military buildings,
palaces of justice and administration, prisons, etc., will then serve
better purposes. Tens of thousands of laws, decrees and regulations
will become just so much waste-paper; their only value will be an
historical one. The great and yet so petty parliamentary struggles,
during which the men of the tongue imagine that by their orations
they rule and guide the world, will disappear. They will make room
for colleges of administration and administrative delegations, whose
purpose will be to consider and determine the best means and methods
of production and distribution, to decide how large a quantity of
supplies is required, to introduce and utilize new appliances and
improvements in art, science, education, traffic, etc., to organize
and direct industry and agriculture. All these are practical, visible,
tangible objects that will be objectively viewed by all, because no
one will have any personal interests hostile to the interests of
society. It will be to the common interest of all to have everything
provided for and arranged in the most effective and advantageous
manner.
The hundreds of thousands of former representatives of the state will
enter various professions, and by their intelligence and strength
will help to increase the wealth and comforts of society. Neither
political nor common crimes will be known in the future. Thieves will
have disappeared, because private property will have disappeared, and
in the new society everyone will be able to satisfy his wants easily
and conveniently by work. Nor will there be tramps and vagabonds, for
they are the product of a society founded on private property, and,
with the abolition of this institution, they will cease to exist.
Murder? Why? No one can enrich himself at the expense of others,
and even the murder for hatred or revenge is directly or indirectly
connected with the social system. Perjury, false testimony, fraud,
theft of inheritance, fraudulent failures? There will be no private
property against which these crimes could be committed. Arson? Who
should find pleasure or satisfaction in committing arson when society
has removed all cause for hatred? Counterfeiting? Money will be but
a chimera, it would be “loves labor lost.” Blasphemy? Nonsense! It
will be left to good and almighty God himself to punish whoever has
offended him, provided that the existence of God is still a matter
of controversy.
Thus all the fundamental principles of the present “order” become a
myth. In later days parents will tell their children about them like
about legends of days gone by; and, when told of the persecutions to
which men of the new ideas were subjected, they will be impressed
by these accounts just as we are impressed by the accounts of the
burnings of heretics and witches. All the names of those “great” men
who distinguished themselves by their persecutions of the new ideas
and were applauded for it by their narrow-minded contemporaries, will
be forgotten. At best they will only attract the attention of the
historians engaged in the research of old documents. Unfortunately
we are not yet living in that happy age when humanity may breathe
~freely~.
[251] Fr. Engels--Mr. Eugen Duehring’s Transformation of Science.
Stuttgart, 1894.