ABSTRACT
… IN THE classics of Marxism the state was viewed as a superstructural by-product of an economic base geared to exploitation, to be destroyed as a result of the outcome of the class struggle in the victory of the revolutionary proletariat. This was so because the state, it was held, was the instrument of coercion in the hands of the ruling class, designed, with all its accoutrements in the form of police, armed forces, courts, laws, etc., to keep that class in power and to exploit the unpropertied working masses. While the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the latter would immediately take the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat for purposes of destroying the opposition and facilitating the transition to socialism (or communism), the direct aim of the temporary dictatorship was to be the abolition of coercion and exploitation and therefore the abolition of the instrument which made such possible, the state. As the Manifesto declared, “Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” Therefore:
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.1
