and scraps the present State machinery, setting up in its place a sort of State which is no longer a State in the present sense of the word, for by the very assumption of power the working class does away with all classes in society. This sort of State continues to function throughout the transition period towards complete Communism, using at the same time every means at its disposal, armed forces where necessary, etc., to do away with the remnants of class antagonisms and the resistance of the overthrown classes. As, however, the working class—or rather, it would be more correct now to say the workers' Republic—becomes consolidated and the remnants of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy disappear, as the Republic becomes more and more a purely workers' Republic with no exploited or oppressed classes, so this sort of transition State withers away, and its place is taken by an elected executive body organising the affairs of the whole society; and for the first time, since primitive Communism, and in a far more perfect form, carrying out the will and representing the whole of society and not one particular group or class.
And how far this analysis and prognostication of Engels is correct and to the point has been shown particularly by the experience in the Russian Revolution. Before it could become effective, before the working class could gain control, they had to break up, to scrap the whole capitalist form of the State. Even this cannot be done overnight, of course, but it is useless to try and simply modify it as Kerensky tried. And the Revolution in Germany and Austria is still ineffective, and will remain so until the workers finally leave off tinkering with the capitalist State and set up their own sort of transition State in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
How the opportunists of the Second International have distorted this teaching of Marx and Engels will be found excellently explained in Lenin's The State and Revolution.
The Nature of the Proletarian Transition State
In view of the history of the world during the last few years, it is of special importance to make some analysis of the most natural form of this sort of transition state of the proletariat, basing ourselves, of course, as we do throughout, on the Materialist Conception of History. Because the present State is based on territory and the election to the State organs are territorial, it does not, of course, follow that the transition State set up by the dictatorship of the proletariat need necessarily also be based on the present or similar electoral division. On the contrary, since it will be a workers' Republic, the most natural unit is the factory and workshop, or other place of work or union of similar workers—whether these be State, literary or skilled or unskilled manual workers. But this will exclude all the non-workers who can live on the wealth they have saved from the hands of the revolution, or who can live on the proceeds of illegitimate secret
