Marx: ‘The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery’ (Vorwärts, 7 and 10 August 1844). He famously turned Frederich Hegel on his head, arguing that the explanation of the social world lay not in the development of ideas but in the development of the material conditions of life. And in the Manifesto he concluded: ‘In place of the bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, shall we have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’
Marx’s collaborator, Fred. Engels: “But neither the conversion into joint stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organization with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is then the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all the capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship isn’t abolished; it is rather pushed to the extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution” (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880).
Tellingly, Lenin wrote of Russia in 1918: ‘reality says that State capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’ (The Chief Task of Our Time)
Originally, fascist referred to the followers of Benito Mussolini, who was dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. Racism and anti-Semitism, though it did exist, did not play a prominent role in Italian fascism, unlike the German Nazi variant. Fascism was — and is – an authoritarian, nationalistic and anti-socialist political ideology that preaches the need for a strong state ruled by a single political party led by a charismatic leader. Hitler and the Nazis came to power with the support of more than ten million workers.
The first concentration camp to be opened was for the incarceration of officials of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties. And on May 10th 1933 in Berlin banned books were burnt openly by students from the Wilhelm Humboldt University, all of them members of right-wing student organizations and watched by some 70,000 people. Marx’s friend and distant relative, the poet Heinrich Heine wrote some one hundred and ten years earlier ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.’
