The State and Revolution

Class Society and the State

Marx’s doctrines are now undergoing the same fate, which, more than once in the course of History, has befallen the doctrines of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes invariably have meted out to them relentless persecution, and have received their teaching with the most savage hostility, with most furious hatred, and with a ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, however, attempts are usually made to turn them into harmless saints, canonizing them, as it were, investing their names with a certain halo by way of “consolation” to the oppressed classes, with the object of duping them; while at the same time emasculating and degrading the real essence of their revolutionary theories, blunting their revolutionary edge. At the present time the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement are cooperating in this work of adulterating Marxism. They omit, obliterate, and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul, and push to the foreground and extol what is, or seems, acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the Socialist chauvinists are now “Marxists”—save the mark! And more and more do German bourgeois professors, erstwhile specialists in the demolition of Marx, speak now of the “National-German” Marx who, forsooth, has educated the splendidly organized working class for the present predatory war.