Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/106

 is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Individuals who express their indignation at the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg but who cannot perceive this truth demonstrate nothing but their stupidity or their hypocrisy. In one of the most free and advanced republics of the world, in the German Republic, "freedom" consists in the freedom to kill, unpunished, the arrested leaders of the proletariat. Nor can things be otherwise so long as capitalism maintains itself, for the development of democracy does not diminish but heightens the war of the classes, which as a result and under the influence of the world war has now reached the boiling point.

Throughout the whole civilized world the deportation, persecution, and imprisonment of the Bolsheviki is the order of the day, as, e. g., in one of the most free bourgeois republics, Switzerland. Note also the Bolsheviki-pogroms in America, and the like. From the standpoint of "essential democracy," it is simply ridiculous that progressive, civilized, democratic countries, armed to the teeth, should be afraid of a few dozen individuals coming from backward, hungry, ruined Russia, which is denounced as savage, and criminal in millions of copies of bourgeois newspapers. It is clear that the social condition which can produce so clamorous a contradiction is in reality a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Under circumstances such as these the dictatorship of the proletariat is not only fully justified as a means toward dispossessing the exploiters and toward suppressing their resistance, but it is also absolutely necessary for the whole mass of workers as their only protection against the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie which has led to the war and is preparing for new wars.

The chief point which Socialists do not understand and which constitutes their shortsightedness in matters of theory, explains their dependence upon bourgeois prejudice, accounts for their political betrayal of the proletariat, is this, that in capitalist society, in the event of a sharpening of the class-struggle which is its foundation, there can be no middle way between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dreams of a third possibility are but the reactionary lamentations of the petit bourgeois. The experience of more than a century of evolution of bourgeois democracy and of the labor-movement in all advanced countries, and especially the experience of the last five years, bears witness to this fact. The entire theory of political