From the foregoing, it is evident that Marx deduces the inevitability of the transformation of capitalist society into socialist society and wholly and exclusively from the economic law of the development of contemporary society. The intellectual and moral motive force and the physical executor of this transformation is the proletariat, which has been trained by capitalism itself. It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historic development. Marx's socialism places the problems of nationality and of the state on the same historical hooting, not only in the sense of explaining the past but also in the sense of a bold forecast of the future and of bold practical action for its achievement.
Nations are an inevitable product, an inevitable form, in the bourgeois epoch of social development.
The development of capitalism, however, breaks down national barriers more and more, does away with national seclusion, and substitutes class antagonisms for national antagonism. Thus, the state of antiquity was above all the state of the slave-owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labor by capital. By leading to the abolition of classes, socialism will thereby lead to the abolition of the state as well. The state interference in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the direction of the processes of production.