Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/102

 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.

The Paris Commune, which is applauded by all who wish to be recognized as Socialists, since they know that the mass of the workers have a great and sincere sympathy with it,—the Paris Commune revealed most clearly the historical relativity and the limited value of bourgeois parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy which, in comparison with the Middle Ages, constitute very progressive institutions, to be sure, but which in this Age of Proletarian Revolution call inevitably for radical changes. Marx himself, who set the greatest store on the historical significance of the Commune, laid bare in his analysis of the movement the exploiting nature of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois parliamentarism, a system. which gives the oppressed class the right to decide, once in so many years, which ambassador of the owning classes is to stand for and upon the people in parliament. And it is at this time, when the soviet-movement is taking hold all over the world, carrying on the cause of the Commune everywhere, that the betrayers of Socialism forget both practical experience and the concrete lessons of the Paris Commune and repeat the ancient bourgeois nonsense about "essential democracy." The Commune was a non-parliamentary institution.

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. All of which proves, again and again, most plainly and clearly, that the outcry raised in