"Only the Proletarian Dictatorship, which recognizes neither inherited privileges nor rights of property, but which arises from the needs of the hungering masses, can shorten the period of the present crisis; and for this purpose it mobilizes all materials and forces, introduces the universal duty to labor, establish the regime of industrial discipline, thus to heal in the course of a few years the open wounds caused by the war and also to raise humanity to new undreamed-of heights. "The whole bourgeois world accuses the Communists of destroying liberties and political democracy. This is not true. Having come into power the proletariat only asserts the absolute impossibility of applying the methods of bourgeois democracy, and it creates the conditions and forms of a higher _working class democracy_.... "The peasant of Bavaria and Baden who does not look beyond his church spire, the small French wine-grower who has been ruined by the adulterations practiced by the big capitalists, the small farmer of America plundered and betrayed by bankers and legislators--all these social ranks which have been shoved aside from the main road of development by Capitalism, are called on paper by the regime of political democracy to the administration of the State. In reality, however, the finance-oligarchy decides all important questions which determine the destinies of nations behind the back of parliamentary democracy.... "The proletarian State, like every State, is an organ of suppression, but it arrays itself against the enemies of the working class. It aims to break the opposition of the despoilers of labor, who are using every means in a desperate effort to stifle the revolution in blood, and to make impossible further opposition. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which gives it the favored position in the community, is only a provisional institution. As the opposition of the Bourgeoisie is broken, as it is expropriated and gradually absorbed into the working groups, the proletarian dictatorship disappears, until finally the State dies and there are no more class distinctions....