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 policy of the revolutionary class, a policy arising directly from the _actual evolution_ of capitalistic militarism, in fact, dictated by the evolution. Only after having disarmed the bourgeoisie can the proletariat, without betraying its historic mission, cast all weapons to the scrap-heap; and there is no doubt that the proletariat will do this, but only then, and not by any possibility before then.