Everything that is being said, on the ground of principle, against the rule by force of the Russian working class, means nothing else than the disavowal not only of the teachings of Marx, but of the plainest facts of the past. When a Renner does not blush to assert with scientific mien that the political revolution—that is, the employment of brute force—contradicts the character of the Socialist revolution, because the Socialist revolution demands the organization of a new economic system and not force, that only means that this former Marxist, with the Lassallean enthusiasm for the state, is not a worshipper of the state idea after the manner of Lasalle, as he has been characterized, but an ordinary capitalistic sophist. Just because the Social Revolution must transform the entire economic system of Capitalism, which gave to one class unheard-of privileges, it must necessarily arouse the strongest opposition of this class, an opposition which can only be broken by the use of guns. And the stronger Capitalism is developed in a country, just so much more ruthless, just so much wilder will the defensive struggle be, just so much bloodier the proletarian revolution, and just so much more ruthless the measures by means of which the victorious working class will hold down the defeated capitalist class. But the mollusks from the "Also-Marxist" camp, the opponents of the Russian workers' revolution, answer us that it is not a question of refusing to recognize the principle of proletarian dictatorship, but that they decline to recognize the dictatorship in a country where the proletariat is in the minority, and where the dictatorship degenerates into a rule of the minority over the majority, as is supposed by them to be the case in Russia. This argument is a cowardly evasion.
Never, in any country, will the Revolution begin as an act of the majority of the population. Capitalism never signifies the physical control of the means of production only, everywhere it signifies simultaneously the intellectual control of the masses of the people, even in the most highly developed capitalist countries. Under the pressure of misery and want, under
— 21 —
