esting to know how our American admirers and defenders of
Bolshevism, who are all anti-conscriptionists and ultra-pacifists, so far
as can be discovered, reconcile their position with that of the Bolsheviki
who base their state, not as a temporary expedient, _but as a matter of
principle_, upon universal, compulsory military service! What, one wonders,
do these American Bolsheviki worshipers think of the teaching of these
paragraphs from an article by Lenine?[89]

Disarmament is a Socialistic ideal. In Socialist society there
will be no more wars, which means that disarmament will have been
realized. But he is not a Socialist who expects the realization of
Socialism _without_ the social revolution and the dictatorship of
the proletariat. Dictatorship is a government power, depending
directly upon force, and, in the twentieth century, force means,
not fists and clubs, but armies. To insert "disarmament" into our
program is equivalent to saying, we are opposed to the use of
arms. But such a statement would contain not a grain of Marxism,
any more than would the equivalent statement, we are opposed to
the use of force.

* * * * *

_A suppressed class which has no desire to learn the use of arms,
and to bear arms, deserves nothing else than to be treated as
slaves_. We cannot, unless we wish to transform ourselves into
mere bourgeois pacifists, forget that we are living in a society
based on classes, and that there is no escape from such a society,
except by the class struggle and the overthrow of the power of the
ruling class.

In every class society, whether it be based on slavery, serfdom,
or, as at the present moment, on wage-labor, the class of the
oppressors is an armed class. Not only the standing army of the
present day, but also the present-day popular militia--even in the
most democratic bourgeois republics, as in Switzerland--means an
armament of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat....

How can you, in the face of this fact, ask the revolutionary
Social Democracy to set up the "demand" of "disarmament"? _To ask
this is to renounce completely the standpoint of the class
struggle, to give up the very thought of revolution_. Our
watchword must be: to arm the proletariat so that it may defeat,
expropriate, and disarm the bourgeoisie. This is the only possible