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."[58]

From the point of view of social democracy the basis of the Bolshevik state is reactionary and unsound.  The true Socialist policy is that set forth by Wilhelm Liebknecht in the following words:  “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 the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the suppression of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie."[59]

IV

Democracy in government and in industry must characterize any system of society which can be justly called Socialist.  Thirteen years ago I wrote, “Socialism without democracy is as impossible as a shadow without light."[60] That seemed to me then, as it seems to-day, axiomatic.  And so the greatest Socialist thinkers and leaders always regarded it.  “We have perceived that Socialism and democracy are inseparable,” declared William Liebknecht, the well-beloved, in 1899.[61] Thirty years earlier, in 1869, he had given lucid expression to the same conviction in these words:  “Socialism and democracy are not the same, but they are only different expressions of the same fundamental idea.  They belong to each other, round out each other, and can never stand in contradiction to each other.  Socialism without democracy is pseudo-Socialism, just as democracy without Socialism is pseudo-democracy."[62] Democracy in industry is, as I have insisted in my writing with unfailing consistency, as inseparable from Socialism as democracy in government.[63] Unless industry is brought within the control of democracy and made responsive to the common will, Socialism is not attained.