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if these twenty million little communes began acting independently! What chaos and anarchy we should have! Nor would it he surprising that if such groups began, independently of each other, to usurp the wealth of the rich, nothing but a sharing-out would result. And sharing-out leads, as we have seen above, to the reign of capital all over again, to violence and oppression of the labouring masses.
CHAPTER V.
TO COMMUNISM THROUGH PROLETARIAN
DICTATORSHIP,
How is the communist order to he instituted? How is it to be attained? To this the Communist Party gives the following answer: Through the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Dictatorship means a power of iron, a power that shows no mercy to its foes. The dictatorship of the working class means the governing power of the working class, which is to stifle the bourgeoisie and the landowners. Such a government of the workers can only arise out of a Socialist revolution of the working class, which destroys the bourgeois State and bourgeois power, and builds up a new State on its ruins—that of the proletariat itself and of the poorest elements supporting it.
This, in fact, is the reason why we stand for a workers' State, whilst the anarchists are against it. That means to say that we, communists, want 'a workers' government which we MUST HAVE PROVISIONALLY, UNTIL THE WORKING CLASS HAS COMPLETELY DEFEATED ITS OPPONENTS, THOROUGHLY DRILLED THE WHOLE OF THE BOURGEOISIE, KNOCKED THE CONCEIT OUT OF IT, AND DEPRIVED IT OF THE LAST SHRED OF HOPE EVER TO RISE AGAIN TO POWER.
And so you, communists, are for force, we may be asked. Certainly, we shall reply. But we, are for REVOLUTIONARY FORCE. First of all we think that by mere gentle persuasion the working class will never attain anything at all. The road of compromise, as preached by the mensheviks and the socialist revolutionaries, will lead nowhere. The working class will achieve liberty in no other way except through a revolution, that is to say, through the overthrow of the power of capitalism,
