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of June, brought us the horrible butcheries of the Commune, and hundreds of smaller butcheries of laborers; a dictatorship which runs out into the disfranchisement of the working class and deprives the proletariat of the enjoyment not only of political rights, but also of simple legal rights; a dictatorship which has expressed itself in dozens of exceptional laws and force laws and which we Germans have to thank for the Anti-Socialist law, the penitentiary bill and class law decrees such as the Loebtau judgment and the perjury trial at Essen. And if "King Stumm," who is now king in the realm of "social reform," should accomplish his purpose of annihilating every organization of workingmen, what in comparison with such a dictatorship would be the dictatorship of a Marius or a Sulla or of the French convention of 1792–1794? The political power which the social democracy aims at and which it will win, no matter what its enemies may do, has not for its object the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, but the suppression of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Just as the class struggle which the proletariat carries on is only a counter struggle in self-defense to resist the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat; and the end of this struggle by the victory of the proletariat will be the abolition of the class struggle in every form.
We Social Democrats know that the laws according to which political and social evolution goes on can no more be changed or stopped by us than by the authorities of capitalistic society. We know that we can no more introduce at will socialistic production and a socialist form of society than the German Kaiser nine years ago could carry out his February proclamations against the representatives of the capitalistic class struggle. Therefore we were able to watch
