60 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION 61 transition period, whose state can be nothing else than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. The theory of Marx is the practice of the proletarian revolution in Russia. The dictatorship of the proletariat ruthlessly annihilates the rights and ideology of the old regime, particularly when these are expressed in the activity of a counter revolutionary moderate Socialism.
It was not a single issue, but the unity of all issues, internal and international, that produced the ascendancy of the Bolsheviki.
The issue of peace was a dominating one, because it expressed in an acute form the antagonisms between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Peace, as well as the fundamental internal problems, constituted a class issue, soluble only through uncompromising class action.
system is not an expression of democracy, but of the ruling class requirements of Capitalism. Parliamentarism, presumably representing all classes, actually represents and promotes the requirements of the ruling class alone. The division of functions in the parliamentary system into legislative and executive has for its direct purpose the indirect smothering of the oppositionthe legislature talks, and represents democracy, while the executive acts autocratically. The proletarian revolution annihilates the parliamentary system and its division of functions, legislative and executive being democratically united in one body as in the Russian Councils of Workers and Peasants. Socialism, and this has been either denied or concealed by the moderate Socialist abolishes the parliamentary system, substituting a system of the administration of things, a proletarian state functioning through the organized producers.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels projected a determining phase of the proletarian revolution. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state that is, of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production. And in his Criticism of the Gotha Program Marx says: Between the capitalist and the communist systems of society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. This corresponds to a political The Bolshevist attitude on peace is fundamental and revolutionary. The slogan of a democratic peace is a mockery, if the peace is to be concluded by bourgeois governments; a peace concluded in this way, on no matter what terms, even on the terms of no annexations, no indemnities, and disarmament, is not a democratic peace, is in fact an imperialistic peace fundamentally, if it is not accompanied by the overthrow of Imperialism. world at peace may still be dominated by Imperialism. democratic peace means simply a peace on the basis largely of the status quo ante, an imperialistic status. Moreover, there are nations, such as Great Britain and the United States, whose imperialistic interests are served by a democratic peace. Great Britain Imperialism is on the defensive, and its interests would be amply promoted by a democratic peace on the basis of the status quo ante, as this would constitute a defeat of German Imperialism. The United States is even more interested in this sort of peace, as American Imperialism is playing the old game of balance of power: neither an aggrandized Germany nor an aggrandized Britain, neither a crushed Britain nor a crushed Germany. Either eventuality would prove disadvantageous to American Imperialism, hence its slogan of a democratic peace.
Socialism, accordingly, aims at a revolutionary peace, a peace concluded by the proletariat through its international overthrow stage of the revolution, and not to a later. Proposed measures are dynamic, not static. The November Revolution having organized a revolutionary proletarian government, the Constituent Assembly corresponded to an older set of facts, and was no longer necessary; it had to be dispersed.