State ownership they saw an outcome of the
necessary centralization of capital and its growth into huge monopolies.
Society would be forced to use the power of the State to control, and
eventually to own, these menacing aggregations of capital in the hands
of a few men. Both Marx and Engels saw clearly enough that State
monopoly does not destroy the capitalistic nature of the productive
forces. "The modern State, no matter what its form, is essentially a
capitalist machine.... The more it proceeds to the taking over of
productive forces, ... the more citizens does it exploit. The workers
remain wage workers--proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done
away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it
topples over. _State ownership of the productive forces is not the
solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical
conditions that form the elements of that solution._"[27]

State ownership, then, was not considered by Marx and Engels in itself a
solution of the problem. It is only a necessary preliminary to the
solution. The essential step, either subsequent or precedent, is the
capture of political power by the working class. By this act the means
of production are freed "from the character of capital they have thus
far borne, ..." and their "socialized character" is given "complete
freedom to work itself out."[28] "Socialized production upon a
predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible. The development of
production makes the existence of different classes of society
thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion as anarchy in social
production vanishes, the political authority of the State dies out. Man,
at last the master of his own form of social organization, becomes at
the same time the lord over Nature, his own master--free.

"To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical
mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the
historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to
the new oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions
and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish,
this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian
movement, scientific socialism."[29]

Engels declares that the State, such as we have known it in the past,
will die out "as soon as there is no longer any social class to be held
in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual str