class of people in whose hands power is concentrated.
(LCW 'the vote of the majority' is required for the dictatorship of the
1.419.)
According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ
for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of
'order,' which legalises and perpetuates this oppression by
moderating the conflict between the classes. (LCW 25.387.)
A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state
power. (LCW 25.389.)
Thus, every form of class society—slave-owning, feudal, capitalist
—is a dictatorship of the ruling class. The form of state varies. In
capitalist—that is, bourgeois—society it may be more or less
democratic; it may allow for parliamentary elections based on universal
suffrage; but it is still a dictatorship—'a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
masked by parliamentary forms' (LCW 30.100):
Bourgeois democracy, which is invaluable for educating the
proletariat and training it for struggle, is always narrow,
hypocritical, spurious and false; it always remains democracy for
the rich and a swindle for the poor. (LCW 28.108.)
Accordingly, while urging the workers to make full use of bourgeois
democratic rights 'in the spirit of the most consistent and resolutely
revolutionary democracy' (LCW 21.409), Lenin warned them that it
was an illusion to suppose that they could win power by parliamentary
means. This was the main issue between him and the revisionists of his
day:
The most dangerous thing about the Berne International is its
verbal recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.... Attempts
are being made to recognise the dictatorship of the proletariat in
words in order to smuggle in along with it the 'will of the majority,'
'universal suffrage' (this is exactly what Kautsky does), bourgeois
parliamentarism, rejection of the idea that the entire bourgeois
machinery of the state must be destroyed, smashed, blown up. These
new evasions, new loopholes of reformism, are most of all to be
feared.
The dictatorship of the proletariat would be impossible if the
majority of the population did not consist of proletarians and semi-
proletarians. Kautsky and Co. try to falsify this truth by arguing that
141 From Marx to Mao Tse-tung
proletariat to be recognised as 'valid'. Comical pedants! They fail to
understand that voting within the bounds, institutions and customs
of bourgeois parliamentarism is a part of the bourgeois state
machinery that has to be broken and smashed from top to bottom in
order to pass from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy.
(LCW 29.510.)
It follows that all attempts to use the apparatus of the bourgeois state,
which serves to protect bourgeois rights, for the purpose of abolishing
those rights, are doomed to failure:
It is the greatest delusion, the greatest self-deception, and a
deception of the people, to attempt by means of this state apparatus
to carry out such reforms as the abolition of landed estates without
compensation, of the grain monopoly, etc. This apparatus...is
absolutely incapable of carrying out reforms which would even
seriously curtail or limit the rights of 'sacred private property,' much
less abolish those rights. That is why it always happens, under all
sorts of 'coalition' cabinets, which include 'socialists,' that these
socialists, even when individuals among them are perfectly honest,
in reality turn out to be either a useless ornament or a screen for the
bourgeois government, a sort of lightning conductor, to divert the
people's indignation from the government, a tool for the government
to deceive the people.... So it has been and so it always will be so
long as the old bourgeois, bureaucratic state apparatus remains
intact. (LCW 25.369.)
Consequently, the bourgeois state can only be overthrown by force.
The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie must be replaced by the dictatorship
of the proletariat:
The essence of Marx's theory of the state has been mastered only
by those who realise that the dictatorship of a single class is
necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for
the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for
the entire historical period which separates capitalism from
'classless society,' from communism. Bourgeois states are most
varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states,
whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat /15