The overthrow of the State power, and with it, of the capitalist system, grows out of the everyday struggles of the workers. One is historically inseparable from the other.
As the organization of the workers grows, as their struggles become fiercer, while many non-proletarian elements like farmers, intellectuals, and exploited members of the lower middle class join the revolutionary movement, the final onslaught on the fortress of capitalism draws nearer. These struggles are the reaction of the masses to the misery wrought by the crisis of capitalism. The capitalists try to overcome the crisis by putting additional burdens on the shoulders of the masses, but they cannot cure the incurable disease. There comes a time when large sections of the population say that this simply “cannot go on”. The government seems to be entirely inept to cope with the political and social difficulties. The belief of the population in the wisdom and all-powerfulness of the “men higher up” is shaken. These risen are losing their confidence. The confidence off the masses in their own strength is growing apace. The struggles of the masses meanwhile become broader and deeper. The government tries suppression. It does riot succeed in crushing the spirit of revolt. It cannot stem the tide. The previous struggles of the workers count greatly. The clearer the class-consciousness of the workers, the more steeled they are in fighting, the better the revolutionary leadership they have developed in the course or years, the greater the number of friends they have allied with themselves from among the other oppressed classes, the more capable are they to deal the final blow.
It is not necessary that this final blow, i. e., the revolution, should come in connection with an imperialist war, although this is most likely. Capitalism will seek to prevent a revolution by plunging the country into war. War is to serve not only as a way out of the crisis but as a means to arouse the patriotism of the masses, to increase governmental terror (martial law), and to divert public attention from internal affairs. War, under such conditions, for a while retarding the revolutionary movement, may hasten it later when the war sufferings begin to tell on the masses.
A time comes when there is demoralization above, growing revolt below; the morale of the army is also undermined. The old structure of society is tottering. There are actual insurrections; the army wavers. Panic seizes the rulers. A general uprising begins.
Workers stop work, many of theirs seize arms by attacking arsenals. Many had armed themselves before as the struggles sharpened. Street fights become frequent. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, the workers organize Revolutionary Committees to be in command of the uprising. There are battles in the principal cities. Barricades are built and defended. The workers fighting has a decisive influence with the soldiers. Army units begin to join the revolutionary fighters; there is fraternization between the workers and the soldiers, the workers and the marines. The movement among the soldiers and marines spreads. Capitalism is losing its strongest weapon, the army. The police as a rule continue fighting, but they are soon silenced and made to flee by the united revolutionary forces of workers and soldiers. The revolution is victorious.
Armed workers and soldiers and marines seize the principal governmental offices, invade the residences of the President and his Cabinet members, arrest them, declare the old regime abolished, establish their own power, the power of the workers and farmers.
Can it be done? It has been done more than once. A workers’ revolution broke the backbone of tsarism in Russia in 1905, but was soon defeated. A workers’ revolution abolished tsarism in March 1917 when a provisional revolutionary capitalist government was established. A workers’ revolution was accomplished in Russia in November 1917 when the Soviet Government, which is the government of the workers and peasants, took power to hold it to the present time. A workers’ revolution took place in Germany in 1918, in Hungary and Bavaria in 1919, in China in 1927, in Spain in 1932. In most of these revolutions the workers were betrayed; they were either deprived by shrewd capitalist politicians of the fruits of their revolutionary struggle or defeated in armed combat, with the Socialists aiding the exploiters. In Russia the revolution has survived first of all because the workers had a strong, well organized Bolshevik (Communist) Party that headed their fight. The defeat of the other revolutions does not argue against the eventuality of revolution. In fact, revolutions are inevitable. They are a natural outcome of the existing system. Our time is a time of workers’ revolutions. If not all of the revolutions of the last 15 years succeeded in securing the workers’ rule, this was due either to the absence of a strong Communist Party entrenched among the workers, or to the absence of other strong working class organizations, or to the intervention of foreign imperialists, or to some of these causes combined. And in either case, the reformists were playing the role both of enemies within the working class betraying the revolution and of leaders of the capitalist forces from without the working class against the revolution — all in the name of “democracy” and “freedom”.
Can a revolution be won? Capitalism creates a situation where large masses of the people are dissatisfied, embittered, emboldened by intolerable hardships. Capitalism itself prepares the conditions for its cataclysm. If under conditions of a severe capitalist crisis the majority or even a considerable minority of the working class is ready to wage a determined armed fight for the overthrow of the capitalist system, then the revolution may be victorious, provided there is in existence a mass Communist Party recognized by the workers as their leader in struggles against capitalism.
A standard reformist argument against the revolution is: “The weapons of warfare are so strong in our days that the workers have no chance of winning in open conflict.” The wish is father to the thought of the reformists in this respect. Because they hate a revolution of the workers, they maintain that a revolution cannot win. What is true is that a revolution cannot win unless the armed forces, or at least part of them, join the workers. But, once they join, the workers have not only rifles and cannon but also airships and poison gas and battleships to fight the bosses. Poison gases are destructive, to be sure, but their destructive power can be turned also against the old system. There is no reason why the workers should not use them against the enemy when the final conflict has arrived. In all revolutions throughout history the armed forces of the old system were at the beginning stronger than the armed forces of the revolutionists.
“But this is force and violence,” somebody will contend. “Don’t you Communists know that the use of force and violence is wrong?” We reply to this, first, that if being a “red-blooded American” means anything, it means that you must not take punishment lying down, that you must offer resistance; secondly, that it is not the workers but the capitalists and their State that start the use of force and violence. When you wish to stay on in your place of work and the employer who wants you “fired” sends for the watchmen and has you thrown out, it is he that uses force. When you wish to stay on in the apartment of a house you and the like of you have built, and the landlord calls the sheriff to evict you, it is he that uses force. When you go out on a demonstration in the open in front of a governmental office and the government sends the police and armed thugs to beat you up and disperse you, it is the government that is using force. When you are thrown in jail for refusing to transport ammunition in time of war, it is the government that is using violence against you. Force and violence are the daily bread of the exploiters and their government in dealing with the exploited. Force and violence are the very essence of the State. When the warehouses are bulging with foodstuffs you and the like of you have produced while you, the hungry, are kept from them by the armed force of watchmen and police, force and violence are used against you. How can you live and breathe if you do not resist? How can you defend your fundamental interests if you do not defy boss restrictions? To defy boss restrictions, to resist the attacks of the enemy class is just as natural for the working class as it is for a red-blooded human being not to take punishment lying down.
What a picture! Those who live on your sweat and blood tell you it is not “right” to resist this robbery. Those who hold the big stick over you tell you to be meek as a lamb. Those who make the oppressive laws against you preach among you about the sanctity of the law. This is boss law, boss justice, boss ideas of right and wrong. If the workers were to submit they would not be able to live; they would be reduced to something worse than chattle slavery.
We Communists say the workers cannot have respect for boss law and boss morality directed against them. The class interests of the working class — these are the supreme law for the workers. Defending their lives and their future they must inevitably come into conflict with boss law. Defending their very lives they are driven to stand up against boss force. Fighting against the boss system they are defending not only their own class interests but the interests of mankind. For capitalism has reduced mankind to a state of chronic misery, poverty, insecurity, fear, periodic carnage, insane luxury for the few, hunger and degradation for the many — a state that simply cannot continue if mankind is to progress. Capitalism is decaying and, to save humanity, this putrid wound on its body must be removed.
When you fight capitalism you are doing what is right and just and lawful from the point of view of your class interests and of the future of humanity. You are not “outlaws” the way the capitalist world brands revolutionary fighters. You are fighting for a higher morality and a higher law that will forever abolish exploitation — the morality and the law of the social revolution.
Having crushed the capitalist state the social revolution, acting through armed workers and soldiers, will establish the Soviet State as the instrument of the workers’ and poor farmers’ power.
The Soviet State was first established in Russia, but it was later introduced wherever workers seized power in Bavaria, Hungary and large sections of China. The Soviets are composed of Deputies elected at the places where men and women work. In cities, the Soviets are elected by the workers in factories, plants, offices and educational establishments. In villages, the Soviets are elected by all working peasants. Each person engaged in any kind of work is entitled to a vote. Owners of wealth, capitalists, land-owners, and other exploiters, as long as they have not yet been turned into useful citizens working for the community, are excluded from suffrage. They have no voice in the administration of public affairs. On the other hand, suffrage is extended to vastly greater numbers of working people than is the case under capitalism. The Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasant Deputies form the local government everywhere. Representatives of the local Soviets form the central Soviet which is the government of the country.
The Government of the Soviets is a government of those who work. It is elected in the places of work from among those who work, and it is responsible to those who elected it. It consists exclusively of workers and peasants, which means that it is the greatest democracy in the world. It is a real government of the rank and file. Exploiters are barred from it. Its deputies and other officials are paid no more than the average wage of a skilled worker. Its deputies are subject to instant recall by their electors. Under the Soviets the workers and peasants are armed, and police and judicial functions are carried out by the workers and peasants themselves.
This government has the great task of taking away from the owners the plants, factories, railroads, banks and turning them into public property to be administered by the workers for the common benefit of all. In other words, it is the task of the Soviets to abolish private property in the means of production and to establish Socialist production and distribution.
This cannot be accomplished peacefully. The exploiters won’t give up their loot even after their State power is crushed. They will have to be routed. The Soviet government will have to expropriate the expropriators by force. The latter will conspire and plot against the new system; they will organize counter-revolutionary uprisings. The Soviet State will have to crush these with an iron hand. The former exploiters will be given no quarter. The old system of robbery with all its rubbish will have to be cleared away. This means that the Soviet State must be ruthless; it must destroy the counter-revolutionary forces — the quicker the better for the workers and for the future of mankind. This is why the Soviet State is named Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It is the reverse of capitalist dictatorship. It does not pretend to be a government treating all on the basis of equality. It openly declares itself to be a class government directed against the former ruling class. It uses force and violence against that class. It is avowedly an instrument for the expropriation and suppression of the former exploiters and oppressors. It is a government of the formerly exploited and oppressed. And it does away with exploitation and oppression forever. As soon as private property is abolished, as soon as the industrial machinery of the country has become socialized, as soon as the individual farmers have been induced, for their own advantage, to unite in collective farms, exploitation of man by man ceases to exist. That means freedom.
With the workers coming into their own, the road is open for economic and cultural progress undreamed of under capitalism. Production is rapidly increased. Standards of living rise higher and higher. Education, letters, art, invention blossom under proletarian rule. Exploitation of man by man is abolished, although some inequality between the earnings of skilled and unskilled workers still lingers for a while. Later this remnant of old times is also wiped out. Differences between farmers and workers disappear. Minority nationalities, oppressed and kept backward under capitalism and granted self-determination by the revolution, rapidly develop. The whole country becomes one big working community on a high plane. The rule is soon established: “let each person work according to his ability; let each person receive from the common stock of goods according to his needs.” This is Communism.
Man himself changes under such conditions. Soon the State is no more needed. In a classless society there is nobody to suppress or keep in check. Highly cultured men and women, bred in a spirit of collective life, masters of nature and of their own society, do not need the big stick of the State. They manage their affairs without the State force. Mankind is free, forever.
Next: VII. The Communist Party