VI
   
Ramsay MacDonald disposes of the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat in a couple of words as if it were a subject for a discussion on freedom and democracy.
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But it is not. It is time to act, it is too late for discussions.
   
The most dangerous thing about the Berne International is its verbal recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. These people are capable of recognising everything, of signing everything, as long as they can keep at the head of the labour movement. Kautsky now says that he is not opposed to the dictatorship of the proletariat! The French social-chauvinists and Centrists put their names to resolutions in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat!
   
But they deserve not the slightest confidence.
   
It is not verbal recognition that is needed, but a complete rupture in deeds with the policy of reformism, with prejudices about bourgeois freedom and bourgeois democracy, the pursuit in deeds of the policy of revolutionary class struggle.
   
Attempts are being made to recognise the dictatorship of the proletariat in words, in order to smuggle in along with it the "will of the majority", "universal suffrage" (this is exactly what Kautsky does), bourgeois parliamentarism, rejection of the idea that the entire bourgeois machinery of state must be destroyed, smashed, blown up. These new evasions, new loopholes of reformism, are most of all to be feared.
   
The dictatorship of the proletariat would be impossible if the majority of the population did not consist of proletarians and semi-proletarians. Kautsky and Co. try to falsify this truth by arguing that "the vote of the majority is required for the dictatorship of the proletariat to be recognised as "valid".
   
Comical pedants! They fail to understand that voting within the bounds, institutions and customs of bourgeois parliamentarism is a part of the bourgeois state machinery that has to be broken and smashed from top to bottom in order to give effect to the dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to pass from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy.
   
They fail to understand that when history places the dictatorship of the proletariat on the order of the day it is not voting, but civil war that decides all serious political problems.
   
They fail to understand that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the rule of one class, which takes into its hands the entire machinery of the new state, and which defeats the
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bourgeoisie and neutralises the whole of the petty bourgeoisie -- the peasantry, the lower middle class and the intelligentsia.
   
The Kautskys and MacDonalds recognise the class struggle in words, but in deeds forget about it at the most decisive moment in the history of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat -- at the moment when, having seized state power, and supported by the semi-proletariat, the proletariat with the aid of this power continues the class struggle until classes are abolished.
   
Like real philistines, the leaders of the Berne International repeat bourgeois-democratic catchwords about freedom, equality and democracy, but fail to see that they are repeating fragments of ideas concerning the free and equal commodity owner, fail to understand that the proletariat needs a state not for the "freedom", but for the suppression of its enemy, the exploiter, the capitalist.
   
The freedom and equality of the commodity owner are as dead as capitalism. And the Kautskys and MacDonalds will never be able to revive it.
   
The proletariat needs the abolition of classes -- such is the real content of proletarian democracy, of proletarian freedom (freedom from the capitalist, from commodity exchange), of proletarian equality (not equality of classes -- that is the banality which the Kautskys, Vanderveldes and MacDonalds slip into -- but the equality of the working people who overthrow capital and capitalism).
   
So long as classes exist the freedom and equality of classes is a bourgeois deception. The proletariat takes power, becomes the ruling class, smashes bourgeois parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy, suppresses the bourgeoisie, suppresses all the attempts of all other classes to return to capitalism, gives real freedom and equality to the working people (which is practicable only when the private ownership of the means of production has been abolished ), and gives them not only the "right to", but the real use of, what has been taken from the bourgeoisie.
   
He who fails to understand this content of the dictatorship of the proletariat (or what is the same thing, Soviet power, or proletarian democracy) is misusing the term dictatorship of the proletariat.
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I cannot here develop these ideas in greater detail; I have done so in The State and Revolution and in the pamphlet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. I shall conclude by dedicating these remarks to the delegates to the Lucerne Congress[81] (August 10, 1919) of the Berne International.
   
July 14, 1919