MARX, ENGELS, LENIN & UTOPIA

In 1917, V. I. Lenin finished writing what he considered his most important work, The State and Revolution. It's full of quotations from Marx and Engels and seems like a good introduction to Marxism. I was struck by their naive conception of human nature:

Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists has been definitively crushed, when the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e. when there is no difference between the members of society in their relation to the social means of production), only then does 'the state . . . disappear' and does it become possible to speak of freedom. Only then will a truly complete democracy, democracy without any exceptions whatever, become possible and be realized. And only then will democracy begin to wither away because of the simple fact that, relieved of capitalist slavery, of countless horrors, savageries, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for ages and repeated for thousands of years in all copybooks — and to observing them without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state.

Only habit can, and undoubtedly will, have such an effect; for there are millions of times that we see around us how easily people become accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that rouses indignation, nothing that calls forth protest and revolt and creates the need for suppression.