Proletarian vs. Bourgeois Dictatorship

(Quote of the Week)

The October 1917 Russian Revolution provoked a storm of opposition from pseudo-socialists who denounced it as a crime against “democracy.” Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin polemicized against these apologists for capitalist rule, exposing bourgeois democracy as simply a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the exploited and oppressed. Only the proletarian seizure of power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, a workers state to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, can begin to lay the basis for a classless world communist society of plenty in which the state has withered away.

Marx and Engels in their last joint preface to the Communist Manifesto (in 1872) considered it necessary specially to warn the workers that the proletariat cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made (that is, the bourgeois) state machine and wield it for its own purpose, that it must smash it, break it up….

It is sheer mockery of the working and exploited people to speak of pure democracy, of democracy in general, of equality, freedom and universal rights when the workers and all working people are ill-fed, ill-clad, ruined and worn out not only as a result of capitalist wage-slavery, but as a consequence of four years of predatory war, while the capitalists and profiteers remain in possession of the “property” usurped by them and the “ready-made” apparatus of state power. This is tantamount to trampling on the basic truths of Marxism which has taught the workers: you must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this “democracy,” its historically conditional and limited character. Never share the “superstitious belief” in the “state” and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another….

The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy—democracy for the rich—and establish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants, whereas now (even in the most democratic—bourgeois—republic) the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majority of working people.

—V.I. Lenin, “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” (December 1918)