Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/63

56 conditions of the question they will allow the proletariat to wade through a capitalist sea of mud and blood and still expect them to remain as white and spotless as Antigone. The watchword, "Dictatorship without Terrorism", is the last refuge of the bourgeoisie.

In the first place, how shall we come to supreme power? Shall we be able to definitely establish the fact that we have a majority of the people behind us, even when we have? It is obvious that that is almost impossible. When the time is ripe for the domination of the working class the demand will be expressed in the sharpest revolutionary fight in which the bourgeoisie, as well as the proletariat, will put forth all their efforts, and in which democratic forms will be swept away.

The bourgeoisie will oppose the White Terror to the coming proletarian dictatorship. They will suppress the workers' Press, dissolve the workers’ organizations and attempt to provoke the proletariat into premature outbreaks in order to overthrow them. It will scarcely be possible to ascertain, by any kind of elections, which side has the majority. And it is doubtful if the class-conscious proletariat, striving for the mastery, will ever, at any time before accession to power, have the majority of the people behind them. The workers, as long as Capitalism lasts, will not only be under the influence of the bourgeois Press, and bourgeois education and inherited superstitions, but they will also be impressed by the power of the bourgeoisie. The most oppressed or the most mentally active elements of the working class will free themselves from these influences in the process of revolution. As for the great majority of the proletariat, the belief in their own strength and in their own capacity to rule will grow only through the acts of the revolutionary workers' government, through their own struggles and their own experiences. But even if the Communists advance guard of the proletariat were to gather a majority and if it were mathematically established—even then it would be too much to expect that the bourgeoisie would submit to the