Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/107

 economy bears on this subject-matter; it is the whole content of Marxism, which demonstrates the necessity of a bourgeois dictatorship in every factory, the dictatorship which can be terminated only by the class which through the development of capitalism itself undergoes a constant development of its own, a growth in size, unification, and strength, namely, the class of the proletariat.

The second theoretical and political error of the Socialists consists in the fact that they do not- understand that forms of democracy have undergone inevitable changes in the course of thousands of years, beginning with their germs in antiquity and the succession of one ruling class upon another. In the republics of ancient Greece, in the city-states of the Middle Ages, in advanced capitalistic states, democracy has had a variety of forms and varying degrees of inclusiveness. It would be gross stupidity, indeed, to assume that the most profound revolution in the history of mankind, the first transfer of power from the hands of the minority, the exploiters, to the hands of the majority, the exploited, can be accomplished within the structure of the old bourgeois parliamentary democracy, without great upheavals and the creation of new forms of democracy, new institutions, new conditions for their functioning, etc.

The dictatorship of the proletariat resembles the dictatorship of the other classes in that, like every other dictatorship, it is called into being by the necessity of suppressing with force the resistance of the class that is losing its political power. The fundamental difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of the other classes, the dictatorship of the mediaeval holders of great estates, of the bourgeoisie in all capitalist countries, consists in the fact that the dictatorship of the great landlords and of the bourgeoisie was a suppression by force of the resistance of the overwhelming majority of the population, i. e., the working masses. In contrast to this, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a suppression by force of the resistance of the exploiters, i. e., of the decided minority of the population—the great landlords and the capitalists.

From this it follows that, in general, the dictatorship of the proletariat must bring with it not only an inevitable alteration of democratic forms, and institutions, but such an alteration as