Bourgeois Democracy and Anti-Labor Repression

(Quote of the Week)

In a polemic against German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, a renegade from Marxism and bitter opponent of the 1917 workers revolution in Russia, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained that “democratic” government in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries serves to veil the nature of the bourgeois state as a machine of organized violence against the exploited and oppressed.

Take the fundamental laws of modern states, take their administration, take freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or “equality of all citizens before the law,” and you will see at every turn evidence of the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy with which every honest and class-conscious worker is familiar. There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes or reservations in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a “violation of public order,” and actually in case the exploited class “violates” its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner. Kautsky shamelessly embellishes bourgeois democracy and omits to mention, for instance, how the most democratic and republican bourgeoisie in America or Switzerland deal with workers on strike.

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