III.
In bourgeois revolutions bloodshed, terror, and political murder were the indispensable weapons of the rising classes.
The proletarian revolution requires no terror for the realisation of its aims; it looks upon manslaughter with hatred and aversion. It has no need for such means because the struggle it conducts is not against individuals but against institutions. It enters the arena with no naive illusions, the dispersal of which would prompt it to have recourse to revenge. The proletarian revolution is not the desperate attempt of a minority forcibly to transform the world in accordance with its own ideal. On the contrary, it is the action of great masses, of millions of people, called upon to carry out their historic mission and to make a reality of what has become an historic necessity.
But the proletarian revolution is at the same time also the death knell of all slavery and oppression. This is the reason why the capitalists, junkers, petty bourgeoisie and officers, and the beneficiaries and parasites of exploitation and class rule, are rising like one man to fight to the death against the proletarian revolution.
It were madness to suppose that the capitalists will submit voluntarily to the Socialist verdict of a parliament or a national assembly, that they will calmly surrender their property, their profits, their privileges of exploitation. All ruling classes have fought obstinately to the end for their privileges. The Roman patricians, as well as the feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the English nobles and the American slaveowners, the boyars (large estate owners) of Wallachia and the silk manufacturers of Lyons—all shed rivers of blood. They trampled upon corpses, they committed murder, arson, and state treason, they precipitated civil war for the purpose of defending their privileges and power.
The imperialist capitalist class, as the last offspring of the caste of exploiters, surpasses all its predecessors as far as brutality, open cynicism, and rascality. are concerned.
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