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Yogthos

“Whatever the shape, so long as it is a bourgeois state, so long as it preserves private ownership of the land, factories and private capital and upholds wage slavery, it remains a tool of the ruling classes for oppressing the “masses. The working class has a very clear idea what it must do with this state machine. It must wrench it from the bourgeoisie, break it and replace it with new machinery serving the working class and its allies.”

... To maintain and preserve their rule, the landlords had to have a machine for keeping great numbers of people in submission. When a feudal state was a monarchy, it was ruled by a single person; when it was a republic, it was ruled by elected representatives of the nobility. That did not change the essence of the state. 
 The next important stage in the development of the state was capitalism. It began to emerge towards the end of the middle ages when, after the discovery of America, world trade expanded, extraction of precious metals increased, gold and silver became means of exchange, and the turnover of money helped to build enormous fortunes. 
 Society was reorganised. Its division into lords and serfs was ended. The laws were proclaimed to be the same for everyone. They extended equal protection to all and protected property from those who had none. 
 Yet, despite the change, the state continued as a machine helping the capitalists to subjugate the workers and poorest peasants, who were, however, nominally free. The capitalist state promulgated universal suffrage while bourgeois ideologists loudly denied that the state had anything to do with classes, contending that it expressed the will of the people.  All such doctrines merely glossed over the essence of the capitalist state.”

Excerpt From
ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism
USSR
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