The Fraud of Bourgeois Democracy

(Quote of the Week)

Writing at the close of World War I, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin exposed bourgeois democracy as a cover for brutal exploitation and oppression, a facade to conceal the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Lenin’s 1918 work—a continuation of his 1917 classic The State and Revolution—polemicized against apologists for “democratic” bourgeois rule, centrally Karl Kautsky, a leading German Social Democrat who bitterly opposed the 1917 October Revolution and soviet rule (i.e., workers democracy).

If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of “pure democracy” as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy. (Let us say in parenthesis that “pure democracy” is not only an ignorant phrase, revealing a lack of understanding both of the class struggle and of the nature of the state, but also a thrice-empty phrase, since in communist society democracy will wither away in the process of changing and becoming a habit, but will never be “pure” democracy.)

“Pure democracy” is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers. History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy....

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.... 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)