131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Their practical result is systematic subjugation and slavery, horror in the shape of justice and
a mechanistic apparatus. Dictatorship is nothing but a military-bureaucratic-police machine,
born from the rationalist spirit. In contrast, the revolutionary use of force by the masses is an
expression of immediate life, often wild and barbaric, but never systematically horrible and
inhuman.
The dictatorship of the proletariat also meant for Sorel, as for those who see it in the context
of intellectual history, a repetition of 1793. When the revisionist Bernstein expressed the
opinion that this dictatorship would probably be that of a club of talkers and literati, he
certainly had in mind the imitation of 1793. Sorel answered him: The concept of a
dictatorship of the proletariat is the received inheritance of the ancien régime. 19 It had the
consequence that a new bureaucratic and military apparatus had to be set up in place of the
old one, as the Jacobins had done. It would be a new regime of intellectuals and ideologists,
but not proletarian freedom. Even Engels, from whom the phrase stems and who thought that
a dictatorship of the proletariat would end as in 1793, was in Sorel's eyes a typical
rationalist. 20 But it does not follow from this that the proletarian revolution must happen as a
revisionist-pacifist-parliamentarian revolution. Rather in the place of the mechanically
concentrated power of the bourgeois state there appears a creative proletarian force—
"violence" appears in place of power. This is only a belligerent act, not a juridical and
administrative measure. Marx did not yet know the difference, because he still lived with
traditional political conceptions. The proletarian, unpolitical syndicates and the proletarian
general strike have created specifically new means of struggle, which make the simple
repetition of old political and military tactics completely impossible. For the proletariat, the
only danger is that it might lose its weapons through parliamentary democracy and allow
itself to be paralyzed. 21
If one may reply to an irrationalist theory as decisive as this one with argument, 22 one must
point out its numerous discrepancies—not its logical mistakes, but its inorganic
contradictions. Above all
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