The resolution of the last (Moscow) Congress of the Soviets advocates, as the most important problem at present, the creation of “efficient organization” and higher discipline.  Such resolutions are now readily supported by everybody.  But that their realization requires compulsion, and compulsion in the form of a dictatorship, is ordinarily not comprehended.  And yet, it would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd opportunism to suppose that the transition from capitalism to Socialism is possible without compulsion and dictatorship.  The Marxian theory has long ago criticized beyond misunderstanding this petty bourgeois-democratic and anarchistic nonsense.  And Russia of 1917-18 confirms in this respect the Marxian theory so clearly, palpably, and convincingly that only those who are hopelessly stupid or who have firmly determined to ignore the truth can still err in this respect.  Either a Kornilov dictatorship (if Kornilov be taken as Russian type of a bourgeois Cavaignac) or a dictatorship of the proletariat—­no other alternative is possible for a country which is passing through an unusually swift development with unusually difficult transitions and which suffers from desperate disorganization created by the most horrible war.[71]

This dictatorship is to be no light affair, no purely nominal force, but a relentless iron-hand rule.  Lenine is afraid that the proletariat is too soft-hearted and lenient.  He says: 

But “dictatorship” is a great word.  And great words must not be used in vain.  A dictatorship is an iron rule, with revolutionary daring and swift and merciless in the suppression of the exploiters as well as of the thugs (hooligans).  And our rule is too mild, quite frequently resembling jam rather than iron.[72]

And so the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship of a single person, a super-boss and industrial autocrat:  We must learn to combine the stormy, energetic breaking of all restraint on the part of the toiling masses with iron discipline during work, with absolute submission to the will of one person, the Soviet director, during work.[73]

As I copy these words from Lenine’s book my memory recalls the days, more than twenty years ago, when as a workman in England and as shop steward of my union I joined with my comrades in breaking down the very things Lenine here proposes to set up in the name of Socialism.  “Absolute submission to the will of one person” is not a state toward which free men will strive.  Not willingly will men who enjoy the degree of personal freedom existing in democratic nations turn to this: