Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/39



The present Government of Russia is what the Communists term a dictatorship of the proletariat. This means that the workers have become the ruling class in Russian society, and the intention is that they shall remain such until, through the operation of the new Communistic institutions, social class lines are wiped out by all the people physically fit becoming actual producers. The era of working class predominance, or dictatorship, is the period of transition from capitalism to Communism. That is what Russia is now passing through.

Hypocritical capitalistic writers profess to be shocked at the idea of social dictatorship by a single class. But they conveniently forget that in every country except Russia their own capitalist class, by its iron-bound control of the industries, the state, the press, the schools, etc., exercises the most rigid kind of a dictatorship. One difference between the system in Russia and those in other countries, however, is that the Communists, with their customary frankness, call theirs what it really is, a dictatorship; whereas the capitalists, with characteristic deceit, camouflage theirs under the high-sounding title of democracy. But the great difference is that the dictatorship of the proletariat is carried out for the purposes of lifting a great class out of slavery and to establish a free society, while the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is always created and used to degrade and exploit the masses of the people for the benefit of a few social parasites.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a militant defense of the workers' interests by the Communist Party. It is likewise a suppression of counter-revolutionary tendencies wherever they manifest themselves, whether through the malignant activities of avowed reactionaries or through the stupidities of a working class just freeing itself from its capitalistic training. The capitalists, aristocrats, and their many hangers-on who exploited the workers in pre-revolutionary days are frankly considered enemies of the new society and a menace to the people generally. When they lost the