Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [31]
All history, therefore, is the history of class struggle. “But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages—the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas” (42).
The proletariat will rise up in a working-class revolution and replace the bourgeois as the ruling class. It will “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible” (42).
Marx and Engels argue, almost as an aside, that “of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by despotic inroads on the rights of property and the conditions of bourgeois production.” And they acknowledge that at least initially, there will be societal dislocation and misery. “[B]y means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production” (42).
Once the state is under the control of the proletariat, its objectives will generally include the following ten tenets (42, 43):
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance
4. Centralization of the property of all emigrants and rebels
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common play
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, but a more equable distribution of the population over the country
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
After all remnants of bourgeois society are eliminated, having been replaced with a classless workers’ paradise, the centralized, all-powerful state shall wither away. “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 organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeois is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself in 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