Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/101

 over the oppressors and exploiters, i. e., the bourgeoisie,  for the purpose of overcoming the resistance of the exploiters, in their struggle to remain in control.

History teaches that an oppressed class never could acquire power without going through a period of dictatorship, i. e., a period of conquest of the political power and of forcible suppression of the desperate and frantic resistance, shrinking from no crime, that is always displayed by exploiters. The bourgeoisie, whose control is now defended by Socialists who prate of "essential dictatorship" and who are body and soul for "essential democracy," won its domination in the civilized countries by means of a series of revolutions and civil wars, by means of the forcible suppression of royal power, of feudal power, of slave-holders, and of their attempts to re-establish themselves. In books, in pamphlets, in the resolutions of their congresses, in their speeches, Socialists in all countries have explained to the people a thousand, nay, a million times, the class-nature of this bourgeois revolution. That is why the present defense of "bourgeois democracy" in speeches on "essential democracy," and the present denunciation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the outcry against "essential dictatorship," constitutes a direct betrayal of Socialism, and actual defection into the camp of the bourgeoisie, a denial of the right of the.proletariat to its proletarian revolution, a defense of bourgeois reformism at an historical crisis when bourgeois reformism the world over has collapsed and the war has created a revolutionary situation.

In explaining the class-nature of bourgeois civilization, of bourgeois parliamentarism, all Socialists have uttered the thought set forth with the utmost scientific exactness by Marx and Engels: that the most democratic bourgeois republic is nothing but a machine for the oppression of the laboring class by the bourgeoisie, of the mass of workers by a handful of capitalists. There is not a single former revolutionary, not a single erstwhile Marxist among those who now declaim against dictatorship and in favor of democracy who did not at one time swear, by all that he held most holy, that he acknowledged this basic truth of Socialism. Now, however, when there is a ferment among the proletariat and a movement aimed at the destruction of this machine of