The Sham of Bourgeois Democracy

(Quote of the Week)

V.I. Lenin, leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought the working class of Russia to power, exposed bourgeois democracy as nothing other than the dictatorship of the capitalist class. His 1918 work, excerpted below, is a polemic against German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, a bitter opponent of proletarian revolution and an apologist for “democratic” bourgeois rule.

Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? This does not mean that we must not make use of bourgeois parliament (the Bolsheviks made better use of it than probably any other party in the world, for in 1912-14 we won the entire workers’ curia in the Fourth Duma). But it does mean that only a liberal can forget the historical limitations and conventional nature of the bourgeois parliamentary system as Kautsky does. Even in the most democratic bourgeois state the oppressed people at every step encounter the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the “democracy” of the capitalists and the thousands of real limitations and subterfuges which turn the proletarians into wage-slaves. It is precisely this contradiction that is opening the eyes of the people to the rottenness, mendacity and hypocrisy of capitalism. It is this contradiction that the agitators and propagandists of socialism are constantly exposing to the people, in order to prepare them for revolution!

—V.I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)