Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/423

 wish,—stand to the special problems of the Soviet rule during the present concrete period? Both quesions [sic] deserve serious consideration.

That the dictatorship of individuals has very frequently in the history of the revolutionary movements served as an expression and a means of realization of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes, is confirmed by the undisputed experience of history. With bourgeois democratic principles, the dictatorship of individuals has undoubtedly been compatible. But this point is always treated adroitly by the bourgeois critics of the Soviet Government and by their petty bourgeois allies. On the one hand, they declare Soviet rule to be simply something absurd and anarchically wild, carefully avoiding all our historical comparisons and theoretical proofs that the Soviets are a higher form of democracy; nay, more, they are the beginning of a Socialist form of democracy. On the other hand, they demand of us a higher democracy than the bourgeois democracy and argue: with your Bolshevist (i. e. Socialist, not bourgeois) democratic principles, with the Soviet democratic principles, individual dictatorship is absolutely incompatible.

Extremely poor arguments, these. If we are not anarchists, we must admit the necessity of a state; that is, of force, for the transition from Capitalism to Socialism. The form of compulsion is determined by the degree of development of the particular revolutionary class, then by such special circumstances as, for instance, the heritage of a long and reactionary war, and finally by the forms of resistance of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. There is therefore absolutely no contradiction in principle between the Soviet (Socialist) democracy and the use of dictatorial power of individuals. The distinction between a proletarian and a bourgeois dictatorship consists in this: that the first directs its attacks against the exploiting minority in the interests of the exploited majority; and, further, in this,—that the first is accomplished (also through individuals) not only by the masses of the exploited toilers, but also by organizations which are so constructed that they arouse these masses to historical creative work (the Soviets belong to this category of organization).

With respect to the second question, the significance of individual dictatorial power from the standpoint of the specific problems of the present period, we must say that every large machine industry—which is the material productive source and basis of Socialism—requires an absolute and strict unity of the will which