Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/58

 32 A very clear statement of the steady intensification of the war against democracy that has been going on ceaselessly in Soviet Russia has been made by Isaac A. Hourwich, recently legal adviser for the Russian Soviet Bureau in America:

"All movements heretofore have been movements of minorities or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is an independent movement of the enormous majority." From the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. …

The Bolshevik revolution dealt a heavy blow to that theory. In Russia the proletariat is only a minority—this fact is not disputed by either the Bolsheviki or the anti-Bolsheviki, and it is this minority that seized the political power and established a dictatorship of the proletariat. … This is the essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Communist Parties of all countries and even the Socialist Center [i.e., the Menshevists and other orthodox Marxists] have accepted the new formula—the dictatorship of the proletariat through the Soviets, and have renounced "democracy" in the sense in which that term had been understood in all socialist platforms prior to the Bolshevik revolution. At times the old word "democracy" is still used, but a new meaning is read into it. In the discussion of the 21 points many communist leaders have outspokenly declared against democracy and in favor of dictatorship.

The truth is that experience has demonstrated to the communists that even in the most highly developed capitalistic countries (except, perhaps England) the proletariat is as yet not the majority of the adult population. Therefore, the proletariat is as yet powerless to establish socialism through the machinery of democracy. The proletariat is accordingly faced with the alternative of postponing the establishment of