GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF COMMUNISM
without making use of their advantages in a last desperate
battle or in a series of battles/ 9
Thus " the transition from
Capitalism to Communism forms a whole historical epoch".
THE PROLETARIAN STATE. During the revolutionary
epoch, what Lenin calk a "quasi-State" of the workers
is created in place of the existing bourgeois State. This
quasi-State will of necessity be a class organization, in that
it will function as the representative of the revolutionary
working class. "In order to break down the resistance of
the bourgeoisie," says Marx, "the workers invest the State
with a revolutionary and temporary form." It follows that
the State during this period will be oppressive and auto*
eratic; it is described by Lenin, "not as an organization
of order, but as an organization of war"; it will exercise
compulsory powers, and it will not seek to represent all
the parties within the State. On the contrary, it will repre-
sent one party only, the proletariat, and wUl be definitely
used by that party to suppress the bourgeoisie.
"Since the State/! says Engels, "is only a temporary
institution which is to be made use of in the revolution
in order to forcibly suppress the opponents, it is perfectly
absurd to talk about a free, popular State: so long as the
proletariat needs the State, it needs it not in the interests
of freedom, but in order to suppress its opponents; and
when it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the State
as such ceases to exist."
Communist theory, therefore, does not countenance the
suggestion that, during the transitional revolutionary period,
democracy in the sense in which the word is understood in
England and America, can ever be a practical form of
government. The dispossessed bourgeoisie must, during this
period, be excluded from the government, and die State
cannot, therefore, be completely representative in the
sense in which the liberal political theorists of the last
century who thought of democracy in terms of universal
adult suffrage, envisaged and commended representative
government*