Marx, proved, however, a long while ago, that the dictatorship of the proletariat does not consist in replacing the bourgeoisie by the proletariat at the same governmental machine. The task of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to break up the machinery of government created by the bourgeoisie, and to replace it by a new one, created on a different basis and reposing on a new co-relation of the classes.
The dictatorship of the proletariat appears in the programmes of the Socialist parties not later than the seventies of the nineteenth century. However, during the whole period of the Second International, it did not once, on any occasion, become the practical duty of the day, and attracted the attention neither of the practical workers nor of the theoreticians of the Labour movement; and only when, in 1914–18, through the veil of democracy, parliamentarism, and political liberty, the unmistakable features of the bourgeois dictatorship became clearly discernible, did the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat become a real force. It became a force because, as Marx says, it took possession of the proletarian masses.
In the 1903 programme of the Russian Social Democratic Party—a programme which aspired to be only a precise and improved statement of the programmes of the Social Democratic parties already in existence, and which at the time, in 1903, united both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks—the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was expressed as follows:
"The necessary condition for the social revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is the conquest by the proletariat of a political power that will allow it to crush all resistance on the part of the exploiters." This definition is embodied without alteration in the programme of the Russian Communist Party.
The authors of the 1903 programme could not foresee the actual circumstances in which the proletariat of any country would have to take the power into its hands. They certainly did not attempt at the time to define in
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