1. The Main “Argument”: What Is It?[44]

2. The Question Is Not Posed in Class Terms.

3. History Teaches That There Has Always Been Dictatorship.

4. A Machine for Oppression.

A mental continuation of the ordinary line and pace of development.

A failure to grasp—or a “iconic” understanding of—the fact that the democratic bourgeois republic is itself a machine for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.

“The Law”: The greater the degree of democracy, the closer, in the event of any intensification of class struggle between deep-seated antagonists, one comes to pogroms or civil war (Russia in the days of Kerensky… Switzerland—strikes and demonstrations; America versus Black people, versus internationalists; Germany… I. 1919).

Freedom of assembly and of the press, as the most crucial rights—and as a paradigm: their actual status in practice.

“Equality”… between the exploited and the exploiter.

“Freedom”… for the exploiter.

The development unfolds in zigzags, concretely:

economic crisis the ruin of the masses the frenzied enrichment of the bourgeoisie brazen imperialist aggression and plunder—complete exposure of Wilhelm II, and now of the Entente a shift in morals over the course of four years of war brutalization, bestialization: all conducted through violence.

The marvels of technology: for what purpose? And mountains of corpses.

The weight of the crisis: upon whose shoulders does it fall?

Voting under the absolute dominance of the bourgeoisie.

Is it “understanding” on the part of all voters, or mere routine?

“Ver– und zertreten”![45]

The apparatus of bourgeois administration.

ΣΣ[46] = the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, [ hypocritically cloaked in pan‑national slogans

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat → the obligatory suppression of bourgeois resistance…

→ democracy for the mass of working people…

→ the majority of the “people”…

1. The Democratic Republic = a Machine for Suppression.

2. Ver– und zertreten.

3. Alienation from the masses.

4. The bourgeois apparatus.

5. “Freedom” of assembly (freedom for the exploiters).

6. “Equality”… in the press (for the exploiters).

6 bis: Democracy and Civil War Before the War.

7. Expansion = reformism, the bourgeois substitution of socialism.

8. Revolution = an intensified class struggle.

9. War and Its Aftermath.

10. Germany! 1919.

Written in February 1919.

First published in 1958 in the journal “Questions of the History of the CPSU,” No. 4.

Printed from the manuscript.