Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

dictatorship of the proletariat has always been the watershedbetween Marxism and all brands of opportunism and revisionism,between proletarian revolutionaries and all renegadesfrom the proletariat.According to the basic teachings of Marxism-Leninism, thekey question in every revolution is that of state power. Andthe key question in the proletarian revolution is that of theseizure of state power and the smashing of the bourgeois statemachine by violence, the establishment of the dictatorship ofthe proletariat and the replacement of the bourgeois state bythe proletarian state.Marxism has always proclaimed the inevitability of violentrevolution. It points out that violent revolution is the midwifeto socialist society, the only road to the replacement ofthe dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the dictatorship of theproletariat, and a universal law of proletarian revolution.Marxism teaches us that the state itself is a form ofviolence. The main components of the state machine are thearmy and the police. History shows that all ruling classesdepend upon violence to maintain their rule.The proletariat would, of course, prefer to gain power bypeaceful means. But abundant historical evidence indicatesthat the reactionary classes never give up power voluntarilyand that they are always the first to use violence to repressthe revolutionary mass movement and to provoke civil war,thus placing armed struggle on the agenda.Lenin has spoken of “civil war, without which not a singlegreat revolution in history has yet been able to get along, andwithout which not a single serious Marxist has conceived ofthe transition from capitalism to socialism”. 1The great revolutions in history referred to by Lenin includethe bourgeois revolution. The bourgeois revolution isone in which one exploiting class overthrows another, andyet it cannot be made without a civil war. Still more is this1V. I. Lenin, “Prophetic Words”, Collected Works, Russ. ed., Moscow,1950, Vol. XXVII, p. 457.367