From the foregoing it is evident that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society wholly and exclusively from the economic law of the motion of modern society. The socialisation of labour, which is advancing ever more rapidly in a thousand forms and which became especially strikingly manifest during the half-century after Marx’s death in the growth of large-scale production, capitalist cartels, syndicates and trusts, and in the gigantic growth in the dimensions and power of finance capital—this is the principal material foundation of the inevitable advent of socialism. The intellectual and moral engine and the physical executant of this transformation is the proletariat, which is educated by capitalism itself. Its struggle against the bourgeoisie, manifesting itself in various and ever richer forms, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat (the “dictatorship of the proletariat”). The socialisation of production cannot but lead to the transfer of the means of production into the ownership of society, to the “expropriation of the expropriators”. A tremendous increase in the productivity of labour, a reduction of the working day, the replacement of the remnants, the ruins of small-scale, primitive, fragmented production by collective perfected labour—these are the direct consequences of such a transition. Capitalism completely severs the connection between agriculture and industry, but at the same time its highest development prepares new elements of this connection, a union of industry with agriculture on the basis of the conscious application of science and the combination of collective labour, a new settlement of mankind (with the abolition of both rural isolation, estrangement from the world and savagery, and the unnatural concentration of gigantic masses in large towns). New forms of family life, new conditions in the position of women and in the upbringing of the rising generations are being prepared by the highest forms of contemporary capitalism: the employment of women and children, the disintegration of the patriarchal family by capitalism inevitably assume the most terrible, calamitous and repulsive forms in modern society. Nonetheless, “modern industry, by assigning as it does a decisive role in the socially organized process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons and to children of both sexes, creates the new economic basis for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Christiano-Germanic form of the family to be absolute as it is to hold the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms, which, moreover, form a series in historical development. Moreover, it is obvious that the fact that the collective working group is composed of individuals of both sexes and of all ages, must, under the appropriate conditions, inevitably become a source of humane development, whereas in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalist form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, it is a pestilential source of ruin and slavery” (“Capital”, Vol. I, end of Chapter XIII). The factory system shows us “the germ of the education of the future, when for all children over a certain age productive labour will be combined with instruction and gymnastics not only as a means of increasing social production but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings” (ibid.){81}. On the same historical basis, not only in the sense of explaining the past alone, but also in the sense of a fearless prevision of the future and of bold practical activity directed towards its realisation, Marx’s socialism also deals with the questions of nationality and of the state. Nations are an inevitable product and an inevitable form of the bourgeois epoch of social development. And the working class could not become strong, could not mature, could not take shape without “constituting itself within the nation”, without being “national” (“though not at all in the sense the bourgeoisie understands it”). But the development of capitalism increasingly breaks down national barriers, abolishes national isolation, and substitutes class antagonisms for national ones. Among the developed capitalist countries, therefore, it is wholly true that “the working men have no country” and that the “united action” of the workers, at least of the civilised countries, “is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat” (“Communist Manifesto”){82}. The state—organised violence—inevitably arose at a definite stage of development of society, when society split into irreconcilable classes and could not exist without a “power” standing apparently above society and to a certain degree isolated from it. Arising within class contradictions, the state becomes “the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of it, also becomes the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the ancient state was above all a state of slave-owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves; the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the serf peasants; and the modern representative state is the instrument for the exploitation of wage-labourers by capital” (Engels in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, where he expounds his own and Marx’s views){83}. Even the freest and most progressive form of the bourgeois state, the democratic republic, does not in any way eliminate this fact, but merely changes its form (the connection between the government and the stock exchange, the direct and indirect bribery of officials and the press, etc.). By leading to the abolition of classes, socialism thereby also leads to the abolition of the state. “The first act,” writes Engels in “Anti-Dühring,” “in which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society—the expropriation of the means of production in the name of the whole of society—is at the same time its last independent act as a state. The interference of state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the process of production. The state is not ‘abolished’; it withers away”{84}. “The society that organises production on the basis of free and equal associations of the producers will put the whole state machine where it will then belong: in the museum of antiquities, alongside the spinning wheel and the bronze axe” (Engels in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”){85}.

Finally, on the question of the attitude of Marx’s socialism towards the small peasantry, which will continue to exist in the epoch of the expropriation of the expropriators, it is necessary to point to a statement made by Engels, expressing the thoughts of Marx: “When we are in possession of state power, we shall not even dream of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (with or without compensation), as we shall be compelled to do with the big landowners. Our task in relation to the small peasants will consist first of all in transforming their private production and private property into co-operative, not by forcible means, but by example and the offer of social assistance for this purpose. And then, of course, we shall have ample means to demonstrate to the peasant all the advantages of such a transition, advantages which even now must be made clear to him” (Engels: “The Peasant Question in France and Germany”, Russian translation, Alexeyeva’s ed., p. 17, with errors. Original in “Neue Zeit”){86}.