Both Marx and Engels freely predicted the
setting up of "a dictatorship of the proletariat"--the phrase which the
Bolsheviki have made their own.
Yet, the Bolsheviki are not Marxians. Their Socialism is as little Marxian
as Russian. When Marx and Engels forecasted the establishment of
proletarian dictatorship it was part of their theorem that economic
evolution would have reduced practically all the masses to a proletarian
state; that industrial and commercial concentration would have reached such
a stage of development that there would be on the one side a small class
of owners, and, on the other side, the proletariat. There would be, they
believed, no middle class. The disappearance of the middle class was, for
them and for their followers, a development absolutely certain to take
place. They saw the same process going on with the same result in
agriculture. It might be less rapid in its progress, but not one whit less
certain. It was only as the inevitable climax to this evolution that they
believed the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would be achieved. In other
words, the proletariat would be composed of the overwhelming majority of
the body politic and social.
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