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The more precarious the position of the workers' revolution is, and the more enemies it is Surrounded by, the more ruthless should be the workers' government, the heavier should be the hand of the revolutionary workers and of the poorest elements of the peasantry, and the more energetic should be the dictatorship. State government in the hands of the working class is an axe held in readiness against the bourgeoisie. In a Communist order, when the bourgeoisie has ceased to exist, and with it class divisions and every kind of external as well as internal danger, then the axe will be needed no longer. But in the transition period, when the enemy is still showing his fangs, and is ready to drown the whole working class in a sea of blood (let us recall to mind the shooting of the Finnish workmen, the executions at Kiev, executions of workmen and peasants all over the Ukraine and in Lithuania!), we will agree that to go unarmed, to act without this axe of State government, would be an act of folly.
Two parties are clamouring against the dictatorship of the working class. On the, one side are the Anarchists; these, being against every kind of government, are therefore against the government of the workers and peasants. To these we can say, "If you are against the workers using means of force against the bourgeoisie, then get you to a convent!"
On the other side, against the dictatorship of the workers we have the Mensheviks and the Right Socialist Revolutionaries (though they were themselves formerly in favour of it). These, are against encroaching upon the liberty . . . . of the bourgeoisie. They are backing up the purse-proud bourgeois to get for him that which he once possessed, and enable him peacefully to saunter along the Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd or the Tverskaya at Moscow, etc. They maintain that the working class is "not yet ripe" for a dictatorship. To them we can say, "You, sirs, defenders of the bourgeoisie, go to the bourgeoisie whom you love so much, but do leave the working class and the poor peasantry alone."
Just because the Communist Party is an adherent of the most rigid iron dictatorship of the workers over capitalists—small sweaters, late landowners, and all other similar delightful relics of the old bourgeois order—it is for that very reason the extremest and most revolutionary of all existing groups and parties. "Through a mercilessly firm government of the workers, through a proletarian dictatorship—to Communism!" This is
