Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“ That is a Utopia. But to break up at once the old bureaucratic machine and to start immediately the construction of a new one, enabling us gradually to abolish bureaucracy—this is not a Utopia, it is the experience of the Commune, it is the direct and necessary task of the revolutionary proletariat. Capitalism simplifies the functions of "the Government." It makes it possible to throw off autocratic methods and to bring it all down to a matter of the organization of the proletariat (as the ruling class) hiring "workers and clerks" in the name of the whole Society. ”

“ Capitalists mean by freedom of the press the freedom of the rich to bribe the press, the freedom to employ wealth in the manufacture and the falsification of so-called public opinion. Once again, the defenders of "pure democracy" reveal themselves as in reality the defenders of this most vile and purchasable system of control by the rich over the means of enlightening the poor, as betrayers of the people seeking with fair but lying phrases to divert them from their concrete historical task of freeing the press from the control of capital. ”

“ We have but to overthrow the capitalists, to crush with the iron hand of the armed workers the resistance of these exploiters, to break the bureaucratic machine of the modern State—and we have before us a highly technically-fashioned machine freed of its parasites, which can quite well be set going by the united workers themselves, hiring their own technical advisers, their own inspectors, their own clerks, and paying them all, as, indeed every "State" official, with the usual worker's wage. ”

“ In order to win a real equality and a real democracy for the working masses, for the workers and peasants, it will be necessary first to deprive the capitalists of the possibility of hiring writers, of buying publishing plants, of bribing newspapers. And to accomplish this it will be necessary to shake off the yoke of capitalism, to dethrone the exploiters, and to break their resistance. Capitalists have always meant by "freedom" the freedom of profits for the rich and the freedom of the poor to perish of starvation. ”

“ It was a fateful thing to have confused and hushed up the question of the relation of a proletarian revolution to the State at a time when the States, with their swollen military apparatus in a whirlwind of Imperialist rivalry, had become monstrous military beasts devouring the lives of millions of people, in order to decide whether England or Germany—this or that group of financial capitalists—should dominate the world. ”

“ The whole of society will have become one office and one factory with equal work and equal pay but this "factory" discipline, which the proletariat will extend to the whole society on the defeat of capitalism and the overthrow of the exploiters, is by no means our ideal and is far from our final end. It is but a foothold as we press on to the radical cleansing of society from all the brutality and foulness of capitalist exploitation: we leave it behind as we move on. ”

“ Together with an immense expansion of democracy—for the first time becoming democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the rich folk—the dictatorship of the proletariat will produce a series of restrictions of liberty in the case of the oppressors, exploiters and capitalists. We must crush them in order to free humanity from wage-slavery; their resistance must be broken by force. It is clear that where there is suppression there must also be violence, and there cannot be liberty or democracy. ”

“ The war, more than anything else, has served to open the eyes of the workers, to tear the false veil from bourgeois democracy, and to reveal to the people the whole abyss of war-time speculation and profiteering. In the name of freedom and equality the bourgeoisie has conducted this war; in the name of freedom and equality the purveyors of war-munitions have become incredibly rich. ”

“ It is precisely the conditions of life under Capitalism, which are the cause, and there is no other, why the officials of our political parties and trade unions are corrupt—or, rather, have the tendency to become corrupt, to become bureaucrats, that is, privileged persons detached from the masses, and standing above it. This is just the essence of bureaucracy, and until the capitalists have been expropriated and the bourgeoisie overthrown, nothing can prevent even workers' officials from being to some extent "bureaucratized." ”

“ People think they are making an extraordinary big step forward if they rid themselves of faith in a hereditary Monarchy and become partisans of a democratic republic. Whereas, in reality, the State is nothing more than an apparatus for the oppression of one class by another, in a democratic republic, not a whit less than in a Monarchy. At the best the State is an evil inherited by the proletariat after coming out victorious in the struggle for class supremacy. ”

“ These gentlemen, have they ever seen a revolution? Revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritative thing possible. Revolution is an act in which part of the population forces its will on the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, cannon, i. e., by most authoritative means. And the conquering party is inevitably forced to maintain its supremacy by means of that fear which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Had the Paris Commune not relied on the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie would it have lasted longer than a single day? ”

“ To organize our whole national economy like the postal system, but in such a way that the technical experts, inspectors, clerks, and indeed, all persons employed, should receive no higher wage than the workingman, and the whole under the management of the armed proletariat—this is our immediate aim. This is the kind of State and economic basis we need. This is what will produce the destruction of Parliamentarism while retaining representative institutions. This is what will free the laboring classes from the prostitution of these institutions by the capitalist class. ”

“ The proletariat only needs the State temporarily. We do not at all disagree with the Anarchists on the question of the abolition of the State as a final aim. But we affirm that, for the attainment of this aim, we must make temporary use of the weapons and methods of the State against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the annihilation of all classes. Marx chooses the sharpest and clearest mode of stating the position against the Anarchists. ”

“ Now, however, when there is a ferment among the proletariat and a movement aimed at the destruction of this machine of oppression and at the conquest of a dictatorship for the proletariat, these traitors to Socialism place the matter in such a light as to make it seem that the bourgeoisie has actually made a gift of "pure democracy" to the workers, that the bourgeoisie are disposed to forego all resistance and to yield to ‘a majority of the workers, that a democratic republic is not a political instrument for the oppression of labor by capital. ”

“ And only then will democracy itself begin to wither away in virtue of the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the innumerable horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to the observation of the elementary rules of social life, known for centuries, repeated for thousands of years in all sermons. They will become accustomed to their observance without force, without constraint, without subjection, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the State. ”

“ Even now, most bourgeois "savants" deliver themselves of such sneers that thereby they only display at once their ignorance and their material interests in defending capitalism. Ignorance—for it has never entered the head of any Socialist "to promise" that the highest phase of Communism will actually arrive, while the anticipation of the great Socialists that it will arrive, assumes neither the present productive powers of labor, nor the present unthinking "man in the street," capable of spoiling, without reflection, the stores of social wealth and of demanding the impossible. ”

“ With this we can and must begin when we have accomplished the proletarian Revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large scale industry, will of itself lead to the gradual decay of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of a new order, an order bearing no similarity with wage slavery, an order in which the constant simplification of the functions of inspection and registration will admit of their being performed by each in turn, will then become a habit, and will finally die out as special functions of a special class. ”

“ It is not Marx's own sweet will which smuggled a scrap of bourgeois law into communism; he simply indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society issuing from the womb of capitalism.
Democracy is of great importance in the working-class struggle for freedom against the capitalists. But democracy is not a limit one may not overstep; it is merely one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, from capitalism to communism.
Democracy implies equality. ”

“ The importance of the Commune lay in the further fact that it made an attempt to destroy and uproot the bourgeois state-machinery, the bureaucratic, judicial, military, and police-machinery, and to replace it by the self-governing mass-organization of workers, rid of the separation of legislative and administrative power. All the bourgeois-democratic republics of our time, among them the German, which, by a mockery of the truth, is designated as a proletarian republic by the betrayers of Socialism, have retained this bourgeois state-machinery. ”

“ To-day, in 1917, in the epoch of the first great Imperialist war, this distinction of Marx's becomes unreal, and England and America, the greatest and last representatives of Anglo-Saxon "liberty" in the sense of the absence of militarism and bureaucracy, have to-day completely rolled down into the dirty, bloody morass of military-bureaucratic institutions common to all Europe, subordinating all else to themselves, crushing all else under themselves. ”

“ This expropriation will make it possible gigantically to develop the forces of production. And seeing how incredibly, even now, capitalism retards this development, how much progress could be made even on the basis of modern technique at the level it has reached, we have a right to say, with the fullest confidence, that the expropriation of the capitalists will result inevitably in a gigantic development of the productive forces of human society. ”

“ Hence arises the need of the bourgeois parties, even of the most democratic and "revolutionary democratic" sections, to intensify their repressive measures against the revolutionary proletariat, to strengthen the machinery of repression, that is, the power of the State. Such a course of events compels the Revolution "to concentrate all the forces of destruction" against the State, and to regard the problem as one not of perfecting the machinery of the State, but of breaking up and annihilating it. ”

“ In one of the most free and advanced republics of the world, in the German Republic, "freedom" consists in the freedom to kill, unpunished, the arrested leaders of the proletariat. Nor can things be otherwise so long as capitalism maintains itself, for the development of democracy does not diminish but heightens the war of the classes, which as a result and under the influence of the world war has now reached the boiling point. ”

“ From the standpoint of "essential democracy," it is simply ridiculous that progressive, civilized, democratic countries, armed to the teeth, should be afraid of a few dozen individuals coming from backward, hungry, ruined Russia, which is denounced as savage, and criminal in millions of copies of bourgeois newspapers. It is clear that the social condition which can produce so clamorous a contradiction is in reality a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. ”

“ The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg is an event of world-historical significance not only because the best leaders of the true proletariat Communist International came to tragic deaths, but also because the class-character of the first State in Europe—without exaggeration, the first State in the world—has defnitely revealed itself. ”

“ In this controversy it is Pannekoek, not Kautsky, who represents Marxism, seeing that it was Marx himself who taught that the mere transference of the old State machine into new hands is no conquest of power at all: the proletariat must smash up this apparatus and replace it by something altogether new. Kautsky rats from Marxism to the Opportunists because, under his hands, this destruction of the State, which is utterly repugnant to the Opportunists, completely disappears. Nothing remains but an opportunists loophole in his interpretation of "conquest" as the gaining of a majority. ”

“ And it is this communist society—a society which has just come into the world out of the womb of Capitalism, and which, in all respects, bears the stamp of the old society—that Marx terms the first, or lower, phase of communist society. ”

“ The main thing is whether we are still to have the old machinery of government saturated through and through with routine and inertia, and connected by thousands of threads with the capitalist class; or shall it be broken up andreplaced by something altogether new? The essence of revolution is not that a new class shall govern by means of the old governmental machinery, but that it shall smash up this machinery and govern by means of a new machine. ”