Lots of interesting observations from Engles on social democracy in the years after Marx's passing, when it rapidly expanded along with electoral suffrage for working classes.
Friedrich Engels (1884): The Relative Autonomy of the State: Weekend Reading
Weekend Reading: Friedrich Engels (1884): The Relative Autonomy of the Statehttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf: 'The state... is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed.... The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital. Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which balances the nobility and the bourgeoisie against one another...
...and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest achievement in this line, in which ruler and ruled look equally comic, is the new German Empire of the Bismarckian nation; here the capitalists and the workers are balanced against one another and both of them fleeced for the benefit of the decayed Prussian Cabbage-Lord Junkers.
Further, in most historical states the rights conceded to citizens are graded on a property basis, whereby it is directly admitted that the state is an organization for the protection of the possessing class.... This political recognition of property differences... marks a low stage in the development of the state. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which in our modern social conditions becomes more and more an unavoidable necessity and is the form of state in which alone the last decisive battle between proletariat and bourgeoisie... no longer officially recognizes differences of property. Wealth here employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this... by plain corruption of officials... and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange, which is effected all the more easily the higher the state debt mounts and the more the joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production itself.... In addition to America, the latest French republic illustrates this strikingly, and honest little Switzerland has also given a creditable performance in this field. But that a democratic republic is not essential to this brotherly bond between government and stock exchange is proved not only by England, but also by the new German Empire, where it is difficult to say who scored most by the introduction of universal suffrage, Bismarck or the Bleichroder bank....
The oppressed class... the proletariat... in the measure in which it matures towards its self-emancipation... constitutes itself as its own party and votes for its own representatives, not those of the capitalists.... On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand...
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