Engels came to express his views on this subject when establishing that the term ‘Social-Democrat’ was scientifically wrong.

In a preface to an edition of his articles of the seventies on various subjects, mostly on ‘international’ questions (Internationales aus dem Volkstaat), dated 3 January 1894, i.e., written a year-and-a-half before his death, Engels wrote that in all his articles he used the word ‘Communist’, and not ‘Social-Democrat’, because, at that time, the Proudhonists in France and the Lassalleans[8] in Germany called themselves Social-Democrats.

For Marx and myself, it was therefore absolutely impossible to use such a loose term to characterise our special point of view. Today things are different, and the word [‘Social-Democrat’] may perhaps pass muster [mag passieren], inexact [unpassend, unsuitable] though it still is for a party whose economic programme is not merely socialist in general, but downright communist, and whose ultimate political aim is to overcome the whole state and, consequently, democracy as well. The names of real political parties, however, are never wholly appropriate; the party develops while the name stays.[9]

The dialectician Engels remained true to dialectics to the end of his days. Marx and I, he said, had a splendid, scientifically exact name for the party, but there was no real party, i.e., no mass proletarian party. Now (at the end of the nineteenth century) there was a real party, but its name was scientifically wrong. Never mind, it would “pass muster”, so long as the party developed, so long as the scientific inaccuracy of the name was not hidden from it and did not hinder its development in the right direction!

Perhaps some wit would console us Bolsheviks in the manner of Engels: we have a real party, it is developing splendidly; even such a meaningless and ugly term as ‘Bolshevik’ will ‘pass muster’, although it expresses nothing whatever but the purely accidental fact that at the Brussels-London Congress of 1903 we were in the majority. Perhaps now that the persecution of our Party by republicans and ‘revolutionary’ petty-bourgeois democrats in July and August has earned the name ‘Bolshevik’ such universal respect, now that, in addition, this persecution marks the tremendous historical progress our Party has made in its real development – perhaps now even I might hesitate to insist on the suggestion I made in April to change the name of our Party. Perhaps I would propose a ‘compromise’ to my comrades, namely, to call ourselves the Communist Party, but to retain the word ‘Bolshevik’ in brackets.

But the question of the name of the Party is incomparably less important than the question of the attitude of the revolutionary proletariat to the state.

In the usual argument about the state, the mistake is constantly made against which Engels warned and which we have in passing indicated above, namely, it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means also the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means the withering away of democracy.

At first sight this assertion seems exceedingly strange and incomprehensible; indeed, someone may even suspect us of expecting the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed – for democracy means the recognition of this very principle.

No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state, which recognises the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organisation for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another.

We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all organised and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed. In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.

In order to emphasise this element of habit, Engels speaks of a new generation, “reared in new, free social conditions”, which will “be able to discard the entire lumber of the state” – of any state, including the democratic-republican state.

In order to explain this, it is necessary to analyse the economic basis of the withering away of the state.

Endnotes

  1. Lassalleans – supporters of the German petty-bourgeois socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, members of the General Association of German Workers founded at the Congress of Workers’ Organisations, held in Leipzig in 1863, to counter-balance the bourgeois progressists who were trying to gain influence over the working class. The first President of the Association was Lassalle, who formulated its programme and the fundamentals of its tactics. The Association’s political programme was declared to be the struggle for universal suffrage, and its economic programme, the struggle for workers’ production associations, to be subsidised by the state. In their practical activities, Lassalle and his followers adapted themselves to the hegemony of Prussia and supported the Great Power policy of Bismarck. “Objectively,” wrote Engels to Marx on 27 January 1865, “this was a base action and a betrayal of the whole working-class movement to the Prussians.” Marx and Engels frequently and sharply criticised the theory, tactics, and organisational principles of the Lassalleans as an opportunist trend in the German working-class movement.

  2. See Friedrich Engels, “Vorwort zur Broschüre Internationales aus dem ‘Volksstaat’ (1871-1875)”, Marx-Engels, Werke, Bd. 22, Berlin, 1963, S. 417-18.