the ideal of socialism is sufficient in most cases to end all
argument. Add to this program military discipline for the masses,
barracks for homes, and a ruling bureaucracy, and you have complete the
terrifying picture that is held up to the workers of every country, even
to-day, as the nefarious, world-destroying design of the socialists.

It is, therefore, altogether proper to inquire if these were in reality
the aims of the Marxists. Many sincere opponents of socialism actually
believe that these are the ends sought, while the casual reader of
socialist literature may see much that appears to lead directly to the
dreadful State tyranny that Bakounin has pictured. But did Marx actually
advocate State socialism? In the Communist Manifesto Marx proposed a
series of reforms that the State alone was capable of instituting. He
urged that many of the instruments of production should be centralized
in the hands of the State. Moreover, nothing is clearer than his
prophecy that the working class "will use its political supremacy to
wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all
instruments of production in the hands of the State."[25] Indeed, in
this program, as in all others that have developed out of it, the end of
socialism would seem to be State ownership. "With trusts or without,"
writes Engels, "the official representative of capitalist society--the
State--will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production."
Commenting himself upon this statement, he adds in a footnote: "I say
'have to.' For only when the means of production and distribution have
actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and
when, therefore, the taking them over by the State has become
economically inevitable, only then--even if it is the State of to-day
that effects this--is there an economic advance, the attainment of
another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by
society itself." "This necessity," he continues, "for conversion into
State property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse
and communication--the post-office, the telegraphs, the railways."[26]

Here is the entire position in a nutshell. But Engels says the State
will "have to." Thus Engels and Marx are not stating necessarily what
they desire. And it must not be forgotten that in all such statements
both were outlining only what appeared to them to be a natural and
inevitable evolution. In