Daily Inspiration Quote by Friedrich Engels

Abolition is a guillotine; “withers away” is a houseplant left without water. Engels’ phrasing is a strategic downgrade in drama, and that’s precisely why it hits. He’s arguing that the socialist project isn’t a perpetual war against “the state” as an abstract villain. It’s an economic and administrative reconfiguration so thorough that the coercive machinery we call the state becomes unnecessary, then quietly irrelevant. The verb does ideological work: it naturalizes a political outcome, making a historically violent institution sound like something that simply loses its purpose.

The context is Engels’ late-19th-century attempt to systematize Marxism against two pressures at once: anarchists who wanted immediate state smash-and-grab, and reformists who treated the existing state as a neutral tool to be captured. “Not abolished” rebukes the fantasy of instant purity; “withers away” rebukes the fantasy of permanent bureaucratic management. The subtext is managerial and oddly cautious: the revolution still needs a transitional state, but only as a scaffold. Keep it up too long and it stops being scaffolding and starts being the building again.

There’s also a quiet rhetorical insurance policy here. If the state doesn’t wither, something has gone wrong - but the failure can be blamed on incomplete conditions rather than the theory. Engels turns a promise into a timeline without a date, a comforting teleology that can function as critique, justification, or alibi, depending on who’s speaking.