4. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

This question must be considered under three main heads: a. The dictatorship of the proletariat as the instrument of the proletarian revolution; b. the dictatorship of the proletariat as the rule of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie; c. the Soviet power as the form of State embodying the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The question of the dictatorship of the proletariat is, above all, the question of the fundamental meaning of the proletarian revolution. The proletarian revolution, with its movement, its impetus, and its achievements, only becomes a reality through the dictatorship of the proletariat. This dictatorship is the chief fulcrum of the proletarian revolution, its main instrument. The first aim of the dictatorship is to break the resistance of the defeated exploiters. Next, it must lead the revolution onward to the final victory, to the complete triumph of socialism. The revolution can achieve the first conquest of the bourgeoisie, the overthrow of bourgeois dominion, without the dictatorship of the proletariat. But if the resistance of the bourgeoisie is to be crushed, if the conquests of the revolution are to be maintained, if the final victory is to be won by the establishment of socialism, this special revolutionary organ, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be created in the appropriate phase of the revolution.

Lenin says: “The fundamental question of the revolution is the question of power”. Does this mean that the revolution is the seizure of power and nothing more? It does not, for the seizure of power is only the first step. When deprived of power in any one country, the bourgeoisie still remains (for various reasons) stronger than the proletariat which has overthrown it. Power has not merely to be seized; it has to be held, to be consolidated, to be made invincible. To fulfil these aims, it is necessary, on the morrow of the first overthrow of the bourgeoisie, to work along three main lines: 1. We must break the resistance of the landowners and capitalists who have been deprived of power and expropriated by the revolution, and must frustrate their efforts to restore the dominion of capital.

2. We must organise the process of socialist reconstruction by rallying all the toilers to the support of the proletariat, and by preparing for the gradual disappearance of classes.

3. We must arm the revolution, must organise the army of the revolution for the fight against the enemies outside our borders, for the fight against imperialism.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is essential to the performance of these three tasks. Lenin writes:

The transition from capitalism to socialism occupies an entire historical epoch. While the transition is still going on, the exploiters will continue to cherish hopes of a capitalist restoration, and these hopes will find practical expression in attempts to bring about such a restoration. After their first serious defeat, the exploiters (who never expected anything of the kind, and can hardly believe in it now that it has taken place) throw themselves with redoubled energy, with furious passion, with implacable hatred, into the battle for the recovery of their lost paradise, into the fight to restore their family fortunes, to regain “comfortable “positions for those whom the “rabble would now condemn to poverty and ruin (or to the simple necessity of work!). . . . The lead of these capitalist exploiters will be followed by the broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie. Experience in all countries has shown that the members of this stratum of the population have no steadfastness; that to-day they will march with the proletariat; but to-morrow, alarmed by the difficulties of the revolution, panic-stricken at the first check to the workers’ advance, they grow nervous, do not know where to turn, and rush whining from one camp to another. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xv., p. 467.)

For a long time after its overthrow, the bourgeoisie remains stronger than the victorious proletariat, and has therefore good grounds for attempting to re-establish its position. Lenin writes:

If the exploiters have been defeated in one country only (and this is what usually happens, for simultaneous revolutions in many countries are exceptional), they remain very much stronger than the exploited. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xv., pp. 466-467.)

How can we account for the strength of the bourgeoisie after” it has been overthrown? There are three reasons:

1. There is the power of international capital, the strength and the intimacy of the international ties that unite the bourgeoisie. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xvii., pp. 117-118.)

2. There is the fact that for a long time after the revolution — the exploiters necessarily retain a number of enormous advantages. They have money (which cannot be immediately done away with); they have portable property; often valuables to a considerable amount; they have personal ties, together with organisational and administrative experience and a knowledge of all the “secrets” of government (habits, methods, means, possibilities); they are better educated; they have close connexions with the leading technicians (who are all bourgeois in their modes of life and ways of thought); they are profoundly versed in the art of war (this is very important); and so on, and so on. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xv., p. 466.)

3. There is the force of habit, together with the power of small-scale production. Unfortunately, small-scale production is still widespread, continually (day by day and hour by hour), with elemental energy, and in vast proportions, generating capitalism and the bourgeoisie. . . . If we want to make an end of classes, we must do something more than drive out landowners and capitalists (we have done that without much difficulty); we must make an end of small-scale production. Now, it is impossible to drive out the petty producers, it is impossible to suppress them offhand; we have, for the time being, to live with them as best we may, while we are transforming them. This transformation is indispensable. We can achieve it; we can re-educate them, but a lengthy, tedious, and carefully considered organisational task lies before us. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xvii., p. 118 and pp. 135-136.)

That is why Lenin says:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a fight, fierce and ruthless, of the new class against an enemy of preponderant strength, against the bourgeoisie, whose determination to resist has been increased tenfold by its overthrow. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xvii.)

He also writes in this connexion:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a hard-fought fight against the forces and traditions of the old society; a fight that is both bloody and unbloody, both violent and passive, both military and economic, both educational and administrative. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xvii., p. 136.)

Obviously, these tasks cannot be hurried; we shall not be able to finish them within the space of a few years. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from Capitalism to socialism, must not be contemplated as a fleeting period whose whole content is a number of doughty revolutionary deeds and impressive decrees. It will be an entire historical epoch, an era of civil wars and international conflicts, of steadfast organisational work and economic reconstruction, of advances and withdrawals, of victories and defeats. This lengthy historical epoch is essential, not only to create the economic and cultural prerequisites for the complete victory of socialism, but also to provide an opportunity for the proletariat, first of all to educate itself and to consolidate its forces so that it may become capable of carrying on the administration of the country, and secondly to re-educate and transform the petty-bourgeois sections of the community so as to ensure the organisation of socialist production.

This is how Marx looked at the matter (he was apostrophising the workers, at the close of the year 1851):

You will have to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and international wars, not only in order to change external conditions, but also in order to change yourselves and in order to fit yourselves for the exercise of political power. (Enthüllungen über den Kommunistenprozess zu Köln, p. 52 of the fourth reprint, Berlin, 1914.)

Developing Marx’s thought, Lenin wrote:

During the dictatorship of the proletariat, it will be necessary to re-educate millions of peasants and petty proprietors, hundreds of thousands of employees, officials, and bourgeois intellectuals; to subject them all to the proletarian State and to proletarian guidance; to rid them of bourgeois habits and traditions... . In like manner, it will be necessary, in the course of a long struggle and under the aegis of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to re-educate the proletarians themselves—for even proletarians do not shake off their petty-bourgeois prejudices in the twinkling of an eye, as if by miracle, through the grace of the Virgin Mary, thanks to watchwords, resolutions, or decrees; but only as the outcome of a tedious and difficult mass struggle against massed petty-bourgeois influences. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xvii., pp. 197 and 198.)

Enough has been said to show that the dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean a mere change of the personnel of the government, a change of cabinet as it were, while the old economic and political order persists unaltered. Mensheviks and opportunists in all lands, dreading the dictatorship as they dread the plague, and (in their alarm) substituting the notion of the “conquest of power”? for the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, usually water down the idea still farther by thinking of the conquest of power as nothing more than a change of cabinet—as the installation of a new ministry composed of such men as Scheidemann and Noske, MacDonald and Henderson. There is no need to waste words in proving that such a cabinet change has nothing in common with the dictatorship of the proletariat, with the conquest of real power by the real proletariat. So long as bourgeois order remains in being, to put the Scheidemanns and the MacDonalds in power, to let them form what is called a “government”, can mean nothing more than to put a new tool into the hands of the bourgeoisie, nothing more than to plaster the sores of imperialism, nothing more than to give the bourgeoisie weapons for use against the revolutionary movement of the oppressed and exploited masses. Such a government serves as a screen at times when the capitalists find it inconvenient, disadvantageous, or difficult, to oppress and exploit the masses openly. It is true that the formation of such a government is symptomatic, is an indication that a certain uneasiness, a certain disorder, prevails in the capitalist camp. None the less, behind the screen of the “labour “cabinet, capitalism continues to govern. From the government of a MacDonald or a Scheidemann to the real conquest of power by the proletariat, it is as far as from earth to heaven. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a change of ministry, but a new State, with new central and local administrative organs; it is a proletarian State which rises like the phoenix out of the ashes of the old bourgeois State.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not established upon the foundation of the bourgeois system of things; it is established in the course of the destruction of that system, after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, when the landowners and the capitalists are being expropriated, when the most important means of production are being socialised, and when the proletarian revolution is making its way by force. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a revolutionary authority forcibly imposed upon the bourgeoisie.

The State is an instrument in the hands of the dominant class, used to break the resistance of the adversaries of that class. In this respect, the dictatorship of the proletariat does not differ fundamentally from the dictatorship of any other class, seeing that the proletarian State is an instrument used to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie. But in another respect there is a fundamental difference. Hitherto, the class State has always been the dictatorship of an exploiting minority over the exploited majority, whereas the dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of the exploited majority over the exploiting minority.

To put it briefly, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the rule of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, a rule unrestricted by law, based upon force, enjoying the sympathy and the support of the labouring and exploited masses. (Cf. The State and Revolution.)

From this two important inferences may be drawn.

First inference. The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot possibly be “complete democracy”; cannot be democracy for all, for the rich as well as the poor. Lenin writes:

The dictatorship of the proletariat must be a State that embodies a new kind of democracy, for the proletarians and the dispossessed; and a new kind of dictatorship, against the bourgeoisie. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xiv., part II., p. 324.)

The sermons of Kautsky and Co. on “universal” equality, “pure” democracy, “complete” democracy, and the like, are but bourgeois verbiage to mask the indisputable fact that there can be no equality between exploited and exploiters. The theory of “pure” democracy is the theory of a favoured labour caste which has been tamed by the imperialist robbers and has learned to feed out of their hands. It was formulated in order to plaster the sores of capitalism, to camouflage imperialism, and to give the exploiters moral strength in their fight against the exploited masses.

Under capitalism, there can be no real “freedom” for the exploited, were it only for the reason that the buildings, the printing presses, and the paper supplies necessary for the utilisation of this freedom are in privileged hands, in the hands of the exploiters. Under capitalism, the exploited masses cannot effectively participate in the government of the country, were it only because in the countries where bourgeois democracy is most fully developed; governments are set up, not in reality by the people, but by such financiers and industrialists as Rothschild, Stinnes, Rockefeller, and Morgan. Under capitalism, democracy is capitalist democracy, the democracy of the exploiting minority, based upon a restriction of the rights of the exploited majority and directed against that majority. Only under the dictatorship of the proletariat can there be real freedom for the exploited masses, and only under the dictatorship of the proletariat can the workers and the peasants effectively participate in the government of the country. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, democracy is proletarian democracy, the democracy of the exploited majority, based upon a restriction of the rights of the exploiting minority and directed against that minority.

Second inference. The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot arise as the outcome of the peaceful development of bourgeois society and bourgeois democracy. It can only arise as the outcome of the destruction of the bourgeois State machine, the bourgeois army, the bourgeois bureaucracy, and the bourgeois police force.

Marx and Engels, guided by the experience of the Paris Commune, wrote:

The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes. (The Civil War in France, Truelove, London, 1871, p. 15.)

Again, writing to Kugelmann in 1871, Marx said:

The aim of the proletarian revolution is no longer (as used to be thought) to transfer the bureaucratic and military machine from one set of hands to another, but to smash that machine. This is the indispensable prerequisite for any genuine folk-revolution on the Continent. Marx’s reservation “on the Continent” has given the opportunists and mensheviks of all lands the chance of shouting in chorus that at any rate as regards certain countries that were not on the continent of Europe (Britain and the United States) he conceded the possibility of the peaceful development of bourgeois democracy into proletarian democracy. Marx did, in actual fact, admit this possibility, and he had good reason for doing so in regard to the Britain and the United States of the early seventies, before the days of monopolist capitalism and imperialism, and at a time when in those countries (owing to the peculiar conditions of their development) militarism and bureaucracy were but little in evidence. That was at an epoch when imperialism was in its infancy. But several decades later, when the position in the English-speaking lands had radically changed, when imperialism had grown to its full stature and was dominant in all capitalist countries without exception, when militarism and bureaucracy had become established in Britain and the United States as well as on the continent of Europe, and when the exceptional conditions favourable to a peaceful development in the English-speaking world had passed away— then Marx’s reservation “on the Continent” had become obsolete, and what he said of continental Europe applied with equal force to Britain and the United States. In 1917, Lenin wrote:

Nowadays, in the epoch of the first great imperialist war, Marx’s reservation lapses. Britain and the United States, which have been up till now (thanks to their exemption from militarism and bureaucracy) the last and greatest embodiments of Anglo-Saxon “freedom”, have at length come, like the other nations, to wallow in the foul and bloody mire of bureaucratic and militarist institutions, which establish a universal tyranny. To-day in Britain and the United States, no less than elsewhere, the smashing, the destruction of “the ready-made State machinery “(which in those lands has during the years 1914-1917 achieved the same imperialist perfection as on the continent of Europe) “is the indispensable prerequisite of any genuine folk-revolution”. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xiv., part II., p. 327.)

In other words, as far as the imperialist countries are concerned, we must regard it as a universally applicable law of the revolutionary movement that the proletarian revolution will be effected by force, that the bourgeois State machine will have to be smashed, as an indispensable preliminary to the revolution.

No doubt in the distant future, if the proletariat has triumphed in the chief countries that are now capitalist, and if the present capitalist encirclement has given place to a socialist encirclement, it will be possible for a “peaceful” transition to be effected in certain capitalist countries where the capitalists, in view of the “unfavourable” international situation, will deem it advisable “of their own accord” to make extensive concessions to the proletariat. But this is to look far ahead, and to contemplate extremely hypothetical possibilities. As concerns the near future, there is no warrant for any such expectations. That is why Lenin is perfectly right when he says:

The proletarian revolution cannot take place without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois State machine and its replacement by a new machine. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xv., p. 453.)

The triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat means the crushing of the bourgeoisie, the break-up of the bourgeois State machine, and the replacement of bourgeois democracy by proletarian democracy. That is plain enough. But what are the organisations through whose instrumentality these colossal undertakings can be carried out? It can hardly be supposed that the old forms of proletarian organisation, which are rooted in the soil of bourgeois parliamentarism, will prove equal to the task. The question is, what new types of organisation will be able, not only to smash the bourgeois State machinery and clear the fragments away, not only to substitute proletarian democracy for bourgeois democracy, but also to constitute the foundations of the proletarian State authority.

The soviets are this new type of proletarian organisation.

What is the secret of the strength of the soviets, as compared with organisations of the familiar kind?)

1. Soviets are the most comprehensive mass organisations of the proletariat, being the only organisations to which all the workers, without exception, belong.

2. Soviets are the only mass organisations which enrol all the oppressed and exploited, workers and peasants, soldiers and Sailors, so that, through the instrumentality of the soviets, the political leadership of the mass struggle by the proletarian vanguard can be effectively realised.

3. Soviets are the most powerful instruments of the revolutionary struggle of the masses, of the political activity of the masses, of the revolt of the masses; they are instruments competent to break the power of financial capital and its political satellites.

4. Soviets are the direct organisations of the masses, consequently the most democratic, and therefore the most influential, mass organisations; thus they are able to have a maximal effect in the way of inducing the masses to participate in the upbuilding of the new State, facilitating its administration, and, to the greatest possible extent, developing the revolutionary energy, the initiative, and the creative faculty of the masses in the struggle for the destruction of the old order and the upbuilding of the new proletarian order.

The Soviet power is the unification and transformation of the local soviets to constitute a general State organisation, the State organisation of the proletariat as the vanguard of the oppressed and exploited masses and as the ruling class. This unified State organisation is the Soviet Republic.

The essential nature of the Soviet power is this, that the most revolutionary and most comprehensive organisations of those very classes which have been oppressed by the capitalists and the landowners, have now become “the permanent and exclusive foundation of the whole State power, of the whole State apparatus”; that the masses—which even in the most democratic republics (where by law all men are equal) “are as an actual fact by manifold devices excluded from participation in political life and from the enjoyment of democratic rights and liberties””—have now been enabled to share effectively and permanently in the democratic administration of the State. (Cf. Lenin, Works, Russian edition, vol. xvi., p. 44.)

That is why the Soviet power is a new form of State organisation, essentially different from the old bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary form; a new type of State, adapted, not for the exploitation and oppression of the labouring masses, but for their full and final liberation from every kind of oppression and exploitation—adapted for the work of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin was right when he said that the establishment of the Soviet power “marks the end of the era of bourgeois-democratic parliamentarism, and the opening of a new chapter in universal history, the epoch of proletarian dictatorship”.

What are the main characteristics of the Soviet power?

1. The Soviet power is, of all State organisations possible while classes continue to exist, the most comprehensive and the most democratic. In actual fact, seeing that the Soviet power is the expression of the smychka, the expression of the collaboration of the workers and the exploited peasants in the struggle against the exploiters, and is dependent upon the smychka in all its activities, it is, consequently, the power exercised by the majority of the population over the minority, is the State of that majority, is the embodiment of a majoritarian dictatorship.

2. The Soviet power is the most international of all the State organisations that are possible in a class society, for, by making an end of all national oppression and by being based upon the collaboration of the labouring masses of various nationalities, it facilitates the coalescence of these masses to form a federation of States.

3. The Soviet power, in virtue of its structure, facilitates the guidance of the oppressed and exploited masses by their vanguard, the proletariat, which forms the stalwart and preeminently class-conscious core of the soviets. “The experience of all movements of oppressed classes, the experience of the worldwide socialist movement, teaches us that the proletariat alone is competent to bring together the scattered and comparatively backward sections of the labouring and exploited population, and to lead them onward.” (Lenin, Works, Russian edition, vol. xvi., p. 45.) The structure of the Soviet power favours the application of the knowledge gained by such experience.

4. The Soviet power, uniting legislative and executive authority into a single organ, and replacing territorial electoral areas by electoral units based on production (factories and workshops), establishes direct ties between the workers and the labouring masses, on the one hand, and the administrative apparatus on the other, and teaches the former how to use the latter.

5. The Soviet power (and only the Soviet power) is able to withdraw the army from bourgeois command, and to change it from an instrument for the oppression of the people (which is what it is under the bourgeois system) into an instrument for freeing the people from the yoke of the bourgeoisie at home and abroad.

6. “The Soviet power (and only the Soviet power) can destroy, once and for all, the old bourgeois bureaucratic and judicial apparatus.” (Lenin, loc. cit.)

7. The Soviet form of State (and no other form of State), admitting the mass organisations of the workers, and the exploited generally, to direct and unconditional participation in the management of public affairs, is able to pave the way for the gradual dying out of the State, which is an essential phase of the progress towards the stateless communist society of the future.

Thus the Republic of Soviets is the long sought and at length discovered political form within whose framework the economic emancipation of the proletariat, the complete triumph of socialism, will ultimately be realised.

The Commune of Paris was the germ of this political form, The Soviet power is its culmination.

That is why Lenin says:

The Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Delegates is not only a higher type of democratic institution; it is, furthermore, the only form capable of ensuring an almost painless transition to socialism. (Works, Russian edition, vol. xv.)