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	Workers Hammer No. 217	Winter 2011-2012

Quote of the issue

On bourgeois democracy

Writing in January 1919, immediately before the crushing of the Spartakist uprising in Germany, Bolshevik leader VI Lenin laid out the alternative — workers power or the rule of the capitalist class. Lenin explained that a bourgeois parliament, including a constituent assembly, is nothing but a fig-leaf for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Pointing to the lessons drawn by Karl Marx from the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune, when the proletariat briefly held power, Lenin argued that what is necessary is the dictatorship of the proletariat, under which the state will serve the interests of the working masses on the road to building a classless communist society.

The whole course of the German revolution...clearly shows how history has formulated the question in relation to Germany:

“Soviet power” or the bourgeois parliament, no matter under what signboard (such as “National” or “Constituent” Assembly) it may appear.

That is how world history has formulated the question. Now, this can and must be said without any exaggeration.

“Soviet power” is the second historical step, or stage, in the development of the proletarian dictatorship. The first step was the Paris Commune. The brilliant analysis of its nature and significance given by Marx in his The Civil War in France showed that the Commune had created a new type of state, a proletarian state. Every state, including the most democratic republic, is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another. The proletarian state is a machine for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. Such suppression is necessary because of the furious, desperate resistance put up by the landowners and capitalists, by the entire bourgeoisie and all their hangers-on, by all the exploiters, who stop at nothing when their overthrow, when the expropriation of the expropriators, begins.

The bourgeois parliament, even the most democratic in the most democratic republic, in which the property and rule of the capitalists are preserved, is a machine for the suppression of the working millions by small groups of exploiters. The socialists, the fighters for the emancipation of the working people from exploitation, had to utilise the bourgeois parliaments as a platform, as a base, for propaganda, agitation and organisation as long as our struggle was confined to the framework of the bourgeois system. Now that world history has brought up the question of destroying the whole of that system, of overthrowing and suppressing the exploiters, of passing from capitalism to socialism, it would be a shameful betrayal of the proletariat, deserting to its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, and being a traitor and a renegade to confine oneself to bourgeois parliamentarism, to bourgeois democracy, to present it as “democracy” in general, to obscure its bourgeois character, to forget that as long as capitalist property exists universal suffrage is an instrument of the bourgeois state.

— VI Lenin, “Letter to the workers of Europe and America”, 21 January 1919, Collected Works, Volume 28