performers watch the conductor’s baton and act accordingly, so here all will consult the statistical reports and will direct their work accordingly.
The State, therefore, has ceased to exist. There are no groups and. there is no class standing above all other classes. Moreover, in these statistical bureaux one person will work to-day, another to-morrow. The bureaucracy, the permanent officialdom, will disappear. The State will die out.
Manifestly this will only happen in the fully developed and strongly established communist system, after the complete and definitive victory of the proletariat; nor will it follow immediately upon that victory. For a long time yet, the working class will have to fight against all its enemies, and in especial against the relics of the past, such as sloth, slackness, criminality, pride. All these will have to be stamped out. Two or three generations of persons will have to grow up under the new conditions before the need will pass for laws and punishments and for the use of repressive measures by the workers’ State. Not until then will all the vestiges of the capitalist past disappear. Though in the intervening period the existence of the workers’ State is indispensable, subsequently, in the fully developed communist system, when the vestiges of capitalism are extinct, the proletarian State authority will also pass away. The proletariat itself will become mingled with all the other strata of the population, for everyone will by degrees come to participate in the common labour. Within a few decades there will be quite a new world, with new people and new customs.
22. The Development of productive Forces in the communist System. (The Advantages of Communism.)
As soon as victory has been achieved and as soon as all our wounds have been healed, the communist system will rapidly develop the forces of production. This more rapid development of the forces of production will be due to the following causes.