laws, thus doing away with all bureaucracy and gradually with the incubus of permanent officialdom.
Finally, Engels sums up his teaching on the State and our attitude towards it thus: "The State has not always existed. There have been societies without it that had no idea of the State or of State power. At a given stage of economic development which was, of necessity, bound up with the division of society into classes, the State became the inevitable result of this division. We are now rapidly approaching a stage of development in production, in which the existence of classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but is becoming a positive fetter on production. Hence these classes must fall as inevitably as they once inevitably arose. With the disappearance of classes, the State, too, must inevitably disappear. The society that will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers will banish the whole State machine to the most suitable place for it: into the museum of antiquities by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
We shall give but one more passage dealing with this subject to illustrate Engels' views as to how the proletariat must deal with the State, namely, from the anti-Dühring we promised above:—
"The proletariat takes control of the State authority, and, first of all, converts the means of production into State property. But by this very act it destroys itself, as a proletariat, destroying a§ it does all class differences and class antagonisms and with this also the State. Past and present society, which moved amidst class antagonisms, had need of the State to enforce the will of the possessing classes on the exploited. … In ancient times it was the State of the slave-owners—the only citizens of the State; in the Middle Ages it was the State of the feudal nobility; in our own times it is the State of the capitalists. When, ultimately, the State really becomes the representative of the whole of society it will make itself superfluous. From the time when, together with class domination and the struggle for individual existence, resulting from the present anarchy in production, those conflicts and excesses which arise from this struggle will all disappear, from that time there will be nobody to be oppressed; there will, therefore, be no need for any special form of oppression—no need for the State. The first act of the State, in which it really acts as the representative of the whole of Society—namely, the assumption of control over the means of production on behalf of society—is also its last independent act as a State. The interference of the authority of the State with social relations will then become superfluous in one field after another, and finally will cease of itself. The authority of the government over persons will be replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The State will not be 'abolished,' it will wither away."
Thus, in gaining power, the working class, organising itself as a ruling class by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat, breaks up
