The Bourgeois Dictatorship Grows Increasingly Insecure

What the, "war on terror" really means is,

'Look and anyone but me.'

 
Third (Communist) International

1. Faced with the growth of the revolutionary movements in many countries, the bourgeoisie and their agents among the workers are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defense of the rule of the exploiters.
Condemnation of dictatorship and defense of democracy are particularly prominent among these arguments. The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument, relentlessly repeated by the capitalist media are obvious to all who refuse to betray the fundamental principles of socialism.
2. Firstly, this argument employs the concepts of ‘democracy in general’ and ‘dictatorship in general’, without posing the question of the class concerned. This non-class or above-class presentation, which supposedly is popular, is an outright travesty of the basic tenet of socialism.
Namely, its theory of class struggle, which socialists who have sided with the bourgeoisie recognize in words but disregard in practice. For in no civilized capitalist country does ‘democracy in general’ exist; all that exists is bourgeois democracy.
And its not a question of ‘dictatorship in general’, but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain their domination.
3. History teaches us that no oppressed class ever did, or could, achieve power without going through a period of dictatorship, i.e., the conquest of political power and forcible suppression of the resistance always offered by the exploiters – a resistance that is most desperate, most furious, and that stops at nothing.
The bourgeoisie, whose domination is now defended by the socialists who denounce ‘dictatorship in general’ and extol ‘democracy in general’, won power in the advanced countries through a series of insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slaveowners and their attempts at restoration.
In books, pamphlets, congress resolutions and propaganda speeches, socialists everywhere have explained thousands upon millions of times to the people the class nature of these bourgeois revolutions and this bourgeois dictatorship.
That is why the present defense of bourgeois democracy under cover of talk about ‘democracy in general’ and the present howls and shouts against proletarian dictatorship under cover of shouts about ‘dictatorship in general’ are an outright betrayal of socialism.
They are, in fact, desertion to the bourgeoisie, denial of the proletariat’s right to its own, proletarian, revolution, and defense of bourgeois reformism at the very historical juncture when bourgeois reformism throughout the world has collapsed and the war has created a revolutionary situation.
4. In explaining the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system, all socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels.
The most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists.
There is not a single revolutionary, not a single Marxist among those now shouting against dictatorship and for democracy who has not sworn and vowed to the workers that he accepts this basic truth of socialism.
But now, when the revolutionary proletariat is in a fighting mood and taking action to destroy this machine of oppression and to establish proletarian dictatorship, these traitors to socialism claim that the bourgeoisie have granted the working people ‘pure democracy’, have abandoned resistance and are prepared to yield to the majority of the working people.
They assert that in a democratic republic there is not, and never has been, any such thing as a state machine for the oppression of labour by capital.