the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry through the Soviets. The ultimate test of the proletarian revolution is the test of armed force, since the ruling class and its allies will resort to the desperation of revolt to crush the proletarian regime. The supremacy of the proletariat, accordingly, inevitably means civil war, more or less intense according to circumstances; the transition period being characterized by civil war, the proletarian state retains the repressive character of the old state until the bourgeoisie is completely crushed. The state is an instrument of coercion: the bourgeois state is an instrument for the coercion of the proletariat; the revolutionary proletarian state—the dictatorship of the proletariat—is an instrument for the coercion of the bourgeoisie, until the complete ascendancy of Socialism renders repression unnecessary, when the state as state, utterly disappears.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels projected a determining phase of the proletarian revolution: "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state—that is, of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible Of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production." And in his Criticism of the Gotha Program Marx says: "Between the capitalist and the communist system of society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. This corresponds to a political transition period, whose state can be nothing else than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." The theory of Marx is the practice of the proletarian revolution in Russia. The dictatorship of the proletariat ruthlessly annihilates the rights and ideology of the old regime, and relentlessly crushes all counter-revolutionary movements.
Civil war being a phase of the transition from Capitalism to Socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat is constrained to use force in its struggle against the counter-revolution. But the use of force is not a finality: it is a process of revolutionary development. The use of force is as temporary as the dictatorship of the proletariat itself: a necessary means of pushing on the Revolution
