Measures against unemployment mean also measures to secure means of subsistence for strikers. The government will have to undertake them, if it is anxious not to undermine the very foundation of its existence. Nothing will remain for the capitalists but to declare a lock-out, to close down factories and plants. Since capitalists can wait longer than labor in case of interrupted production, nothing will remain for a labor government but to meet a general lock-out by expropriating the factories and plants and by introducing in the biggest of them state or communal production.
In agriculture, similar problems will present themselves through the very fact of land-expropriation. We cannot imagine a proletarian government expropriating large private estates with agricultural production on a large scale, cutting them into pieces and selling them to small owners. For it the only open way is to organize in such estates coöperative production under communal or state management. This, however, _is the way of Socialism_.
Social-Democracy can never assume power under a double obligation: to put the _entire_ minimum program into operation for the sake of the proletariat, and to keep strictly _within the limits_ of this program, for the sake of the bourgeoisie. Such a double obligation could never be fulfilled. Participating in the government, not as powerless hostages, but as a leading force, the representatives of labor _eo ipso_ break the line between the minimum and maximum program. _Collectivism becomes the order of the day._ At which point the proletariat will be stopped on its march in this direction, depends upon the constellation of forces, not upon the original purpose of the proletarian Party.
It is, therefore, absurd to speak of a _specific_ character of proletarian dictatorship (or a dictatorship of the proletariat _and_ the peasantry) within a bourgeois revolution, viz., a _purely democratic_ dictatorship. The working class can never secure the democratic character of its dictatorship without overstepping the limits of its democratic program. Illusions to the contrary may become a handicap. They would compromise Social-Democracy from the start.
Once the proletariat assumes power, it will fight for it to the end. One of the means to secure and solidify its power will be propaganda and organization, particularly in the village; another means will be a _policy of Collectivism_. Collectivism is not only dictated by the very position of the Social-Democratic Party as the party in power, but it becomes imperative as a means to secure this position through the active support of the working class.