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When, in the course of development, class distinctions have

disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the

hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power

will lose its political character. Political power, properly so

called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing

another. If the proletariat during its contest with the

bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to

organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it

makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force

the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these

conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of

class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have

abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class

antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free

development of each is the condition for the free development of

all.