then, it can properly occur only after the working class has been thoroughly marshalled, drilled and disciplined for the event—"when the proletariat has had sufficient training in voluntary co-operation and self-government to be able to demonstrate its ability to successfully continue production and handle distribution so that all may be fed."
Marx, the great economist and social philosopher, has well pointed out that political action is a mere reflex of economic power; that as a class grows in wealth and conscious economic importance, it endeavors more and more to take part in political activities; that the government, in a class society, is an instrument of class domination—strong, as the class it represents is strong, or weak, as that class is weak. He also declares that the mission of the working class is to overthrow Capitalism, with its class government, and establish a new order of society based on economic equality, and therefore without classes or the forms of government that flow from class dominion. Frederick Engles, commenting on the later French revolution, concludes that the working class can never seize upon the ready made powers of the state and convert them to uses of its own. All our thinkers are quite agreed that the State, as such—the coercive instrument of economic class power—must disappear with the classes that have upheld it, and, in its place, must appear an "administration of affairs," an economic institution conforming to the needs and aspirations of an economically free and fluid industrial society. Therefore, the prime consideration of the proletariat is not to take over the powers of government by a mere conquest of the political state at the ballot box, but to develop and organize its economic powers, so that it may proceed by methods of its own to destroy the class power of its opponents and the hateful, hurtful institutions which that class power bolsters and maintains. Economic power constitutes the entire force of the capitalists—all modern institutions are based on that foundation—and
