Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/64

57 ''majority. The bourgeoisie, as a rule, will not submit: they will have to be overthrown.'' As long as there are Capitalist States as well as Socialist ones the bourgeoisie will always nourish the hope that they will one day conquer the proletariat, and once overthrown, they will begin anew to organize resistance. As long as the process of revolution is still unfinished, as long as no Socialist order appears in the place of the capitalist chaos—order which will show to the masses by concrete acts the benefits of the conditions resulting from the new rule—so long will the bourgeoisie find elements amongst the wavering and vacillating portions of the proletariat and the petit-bourgeoisie which will allow themselves to be persuaded that under bourgeois rule they would be spared all the difficulties and hardships inseperable from the struggle. In the West, in the developed capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie are best organized, and where they have a large measure of support amongst the aristocracy of labor (as was the case in Russia, by the way) the fight for power will obviously be much keener than it was in Russia, as the proletariat will have to oppose to the relatively greater might of the bourgeoisie a still more decisive measure of violence.

In these circumstances the talk of dictatorship without terrorism is nothing more than an attempt to put the proletariat off their guard, the only result of which would be that they would approach the fight unconscious of the danger and therefore would the more easily fall a prey to the bourgeoisie.

However, we may console ourselves with the thought that the working class is not sentimental, and that it will meet hard facts with hard facts. The working class, like every other aspiring class which represents the future of humanity, and which gathers in itself all aspirations after what is good and great, is fundamentally generous and for a time easily lulled to sleep, and very easily when the sleeping draught is administered by people in whom it trusts, and who speak to it as supporters of the dictatorship. The danger threatens the working class that it will attain to power through the