much the reverse of a hardship if I had to read my books and
meet my friends in such a place; nor do I think I am better off to live
in a vulgar stuccoed house crowded with upholstery that I despise, in
all respects degrading to the mind and enervating to the body to live
in, simply because I call it my own, or my house."

From the viewpoint of this historical materialism, the State loses its
attribute of permanence and becomes the product of definite economic
conditions--in a word, it is the child of economic inequality. "The
State," in the words of Engels, "is the result of the desire to keep
down class conflicts. But, having arisen amid these conflicts, it is as
a rule the State of the most powerful economic class that by force of
its economic supremacy becomes also the ruling political class, and thus
acquires new means of subduing and exploiting the oppressed masses. The
antique State was, therefore, the State of the slave owners for the
purpose of holding the slaves in check. The feudal State was the organ
of the nobility for the oppression of the serfs and dependent farmers.
The modern representative State is the tool of the capitalist exploiters
of wage labor."[28]

"The State, then," Engels says on another page of the same work, "did
not exist from all eternity. There have been societies without it, that
had no idea of any State or public power.[29] At a certain stage of
economic development, which was of necessity accompanied by a division
of society into classes, the State became the inevitable result of this
division. We are now rapidly approaching a stage of evolution in
production, in which the existence of classes has not only ceased to be
a necessity, but becomes a positive fetter on production. Hence, these
classes must fall as inevitably as they once arose. The State must
irrevocably fall with them. The society that is to reorganize production
on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will
transfer the machinery of the State where it will then belong--into the
Museum of Antiquities by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze
ax."[30]

In another work, he says: "The first act by virtue of which the State
really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of
society--the taking possession of the means of production in the name of
Society--this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State.
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain afte