oses reforms, and I may add that the most
important of them all for the working class have not been presented by
Socialist deputies, but by the bourgeois [capitalists]. Free and
compulsory education was not proposed by Socialists." That is to say,
Lafargue believed that reforms extremely beneficial to the working class
might be enacted without any union of Socialists with non-Socialists,
without the Socialists gaining political power and without their even
constituting a menace to the rule of the anti-Socialist classes.
Capitalism of itself, in its own interest and without any reference to
Socialism or the Socialists, may go very far towards developing a
society which in turn develops an ever growing and developing working
class, though without increasing the actual political or economic powers
of this class when compared with its own.

In Germany especially, Marx's co-workers and successors developed marked
hostility to "State Socialism" from the moment when it was taken up by
Bismarck nearly a generation ago (1883). August Bebel's hostility to the
existing State goes so far that he predicts that it will expire "with
the expiration of the ruling class,"[180] while Engels contended that
the very phrase "the Socialist State" was valueless as a slogan in the
present propaganda of Socialism, and scientifically ineffective.[181]

Engels had even predicted, as long ago as 1880, that the coming of
monopolies would bring it about that the State, being "the official
representative of capitalistic society," would ultimately have to
undertake "the protection of production," and that this necessity would
first be felt in the case of the railways and the telegraphs. Later
events have shown that his prediction was so correct that even America
and England are approaching the nationalization of their railways, while
the proposal to nationalize monopolies is rapidly growing in popularity
in every country in the world, and among nearly all social classes.

Engels did not consider that such developments were necessarily in the
direction of Socialism any more than the nationalization of the railways
by the Czar or the Prussian government. On the contrary, he suggested
that it meant the strengthening of the capitalism.

"The modern State," he wrote in 1880, "no matter what its form, is
essentially a capitalistic machine, the State of the capitalists, the
ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it
proceeds to the ta