Daily Inspiration Quote by Friedrich Engels

Engels drops the sentimental mask from the word "freedom" and replaces it with a colder, more operational vocabulary: power. The line is a bracing admission that the revolutionary State, in his view, is not a neutral umpire that suddenly becomes virtuous once the right class holds office. It is an instrument, and instruments are defined by use. For Engels, the proletariat seizes the State precisely because politics is coercion at scale; to pretend otherwise is liberal fairy tale. The point isn’t to celebrate repression, but to puncture the comforting idea that emancipation arrives through gentler governance. It arrives through winning.

That bluntness also functions as a defense against two audiences. To bourgeois critics, Engels is saying: spare us the outrage at "authoritarianism" when your State already disciplines workers daily; you only notice the fist when it’s not yours. To impatient radicals, he’s arguing that the State is transitional, not sacred. The dictatorship of the proletariat is framed as a temporary set of restraints aimed at dismantling class enemies and class structures alike.

Context matters: Engels is writing in the shadow of 1848’s failed revolutions and the Paris Commune’s brief, bloody experiment. Those defeats taught Marxists that entrenched elites do not abdicate politely. Subtext: freedom is not the absence of force; it is the absence of a class that must be forced. When that condition holds, "the State" stops being a special apparatus of domination and dissolves into administration. It’s an audacious promise, and also a tell: Engels knows the hardest part is not taking the State, but making it disappear once it’s useful.