Lenin: As I have had occasion to point out more than once…the dictatorship of the proletariat is not only the use of force against the exploiters, and not even mainly the use of force. The economic foundation of this use of revolutionary force, the guarantee of its effectiveness and success is the fact that the proletariat represents and creates a higher type of social organization of labor compared with capitalism. This is what is important, this is the source of the strength and the guarantee that the final triumph of communism is inevitable. The feudal organization of social labor rested on the discipline of the bludgeon, while the working people, robbed and tyrannized by a handful of landowners, were utterly ignorant and downtrodden. The capitalist organization of social labor rested on the discipline of hunger, and, not-withstanding all the progress of bourgeois culture and bourgeois democracy, the vast mass of the working people in the most advanced, civilized and democratic republics remained an ignorant and downtrodden mass of wage-slaves or oppressed peasants, robbed and tyrannized by a handful of capitalists. The communist organization of social labor, the first step towards which is socialism, rests, and will do so more and more as time goes on, on the free and conscious discipline of the working people themselves who have thrown off the yoke both of the landowners and capitalists. This new discipline does not drop from the skies, nor is it born from pious wishes; it grows out of the material conditions of large-scale capitalist production, and out of them alone. Without them it is impossible. And the repository, or the vehicle, of these material conditions is a definite historical class, created, organized, united, trained, educated and hardened by large-scale capitalism. This class is the proletariat. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote2834