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

a people’s democratic dictatorship under the leadership of theproletariat, i.e., a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.In February 1948 the reactionaries inside Czechoslovakia,backed by U.S. imperialism, plotted a counter-revolutionarycoup d’état to overthrow the people’s government by an armedrebellion. But the government led by the Communist Partyimmediately deployed its armed forces and organized armedmass demonstrations, thus shattering the bourgeois plot fora counter-revolutionary come-back. These facts clearlytestify that the February event was not a “peaceful” seizureof political power by the working class from the bourgeoisiebut a suppression of a counter-revolutionary bourgeois coupd’état by the working class through its own state apparatus,and mainly through its own armed forces.In summarizing the February event Gottwald said:Even before the February event we said: one of the basicchanges compared with what existed before the war isprecisely that the state apparatus already serves new classesand not the previous ruling classes. The February eventshowed that the state apparatus, in this sense, played anoutstanding role. . . . 1How can the above instances be regarded as precedents forpeaceful transition?Lenin said:Kautsky had to resort to all these subterfuges, sophistriesand fraudulent falsifications only in order to dissociatehimself from violent revolution, and to conceal his renunciationof it, his desertion to the liberal labour policy, i.e.,to the bourgeoisie.And he added, “That is where the trouble lies.” 21Klement Gottwald, Speech at the Plenary Session of the CentralCommittee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, November 17,1948.2V. I. Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky”,Selected Works, Eng. ed., FLPH, Moscow, 1952, Vol. II, Part 2, p. 44.381