2010-07-21 11:09:40 UTC
William Godwin: "Above all, we should not forget that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind; and that, however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present, it behooves us, as the friends of reason and the human species, to admit as little of it as possible, and carefully to observe whether, in consequence of the gradual illumination of the human mind, that little may not hereafter be diminished."
Karl Marx: "In place of the old bourgeois society the working class will set up, in the course of its development, the kind of association which excludes classes and their mutual opposition; there will no longer be any political power properly so-called, since it is political power which is the official expression of the opposition of classes within bourgeois society."
Friedrich Engels: "The victorious proletariat, like the commune (the Paris Commune), will be obliged immediately to lop off the worst sides of this evil, until a generation which has grown up in new free social conditions finds itself in a position to throw overboard all this clutter of statehood."
Karl Marx: "When there are no longer social classes which have to be kept in subjection, when there is no longer a rule of one class over another and a struggle for existence rooted in the present anarchy of production, when the clashes and violence resulting from it have been removed, then there will be nobody to crush and restrain, and then the necessity for state power, which at present performs this function, will vanish. The first act of the state will appear as the real representative of the whole society - the conversion of the means of production into social property - will be its last independent act in its capacity as a state. Intervention of state power in social relations will become gradually superfluous and will end of itself. The administration of men will be replaced by the administration of things and the management of the productive processes. The state is not "abolished", it dies away."
Friedrich Engels: "With the disappearance of classes the state will inevitably disappear. Society, which will organize production anew on the basis of a free and equal association of producers, will send the whole state machine to the place where it will then belong: to the museum of antiquities, along with the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
Friedrich Engels: "In the first place it (the Paris Commune) appointed to all official posts in administration, in the judiciary, in public education, persons elected by universal suffrage, and also introduced the right to recall those elected at any time by a decision of the electors. Secondly it paid to all officials from the highest to the lowest only the same wages paid to other workers."
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So, given this, in what way can Socialism be likened to burdensome, oppressive government? And on a similar note, how can it call for the blind allegiance to the state? History is a fickle thing; a political leader can destroy a nation under the banner of "proletarian revolution", but just because they say it doesn't make it so. Thus, one must look to the theorists responsible for Socialism's formation, and disregard history's attempts as nothing but the seizure of power by cruel, authoritarian leaders under the pretenses of social revolution and equality.