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When,
in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and
all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association
of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of
one class for oppressing another. If the
proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by
the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means
of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling
class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production,
then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions
for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and
will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. |