can vote."[56]
Of course it is only as a temporary measure that this dictatorship of a
class is to be maintained. It is designed only for the period of transition
and adjustment. In time the adjustment will be made, all forms of social
parasitism and economic exploitation will disappear, and then it will be
both possible and natural to revert to democratic government. Too simple
and naive to be trusted alone in a world so full of trickery and tricksters
as ours are they who find any asurance in this promise. They are surely
among the most gullible of our humankind!
Of course, the answer to the claim is a very simple one: it is that no
class gaining privilege and power ever surrenders it until it is compelled
to do so. Every one who has read the pre-Marxian literature dealing with
the dictatorship of the proletariat knows how insistent is the demand that
the period of dictatorship must be _prolonged as much as possible_. Even
Marx himself insisted, on one occasion at least, that it must be maintained
as long as possible,[57] and in the letter of Johann von Miquel, already
quoted, we find the same thought expressed in the same terms, "as long as
possible." But even if we put aside these warnings of human experience and
of recorded history, and persuade ourselves that in Russia we have a wholly
new phenomenon, a class possessing powers of dictatorship animated by a
burning passion to relinquish those powers as quickly as possible, is it
not still evident that the social adjustments that must be made to reach
the stage where, according to the Bolshevik standards, political democracy
can be introduced, must, under the most favorable circumstances
conceivable, take many, many years? Even Lenine admits that "a sound
solution of the problem of increasing the productivity of labor" (which
lies at the very heart of the problem we are now discussing) "requires at
least (especially after a most distressing and destructive war) several
years.
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