Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/108

 will yield a hitherto unknown extension of the actual application of democracy among those who are enslaved by capitalism, among the working classes.

And, as a matter of fact, the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which has already been worked out in practice, i. e., the Soviet Government in Russia, the Raete-system in Germany, the Shop Stewards' Committees and other analogous institutions in other countries, all these realize and signify for the working classes, i. e., for the overwhelming majority of the population, a practicable possibility of this sort for the achievement of democratic rights and privileges such as has never before existed in even approximately equal measure.

The nature of soviet-rule consists in the fact that the mass-organization of precisely those classes which have been oppressed by capital, i. e., the workers and the semi-proletariat (peasants who do not exploit the labor of others and who are compelled regularly to sell at least a part of their own labor power), constitute the permament and only basis of the whole state-power. Precisely those masses, which even in the most democratic bourgeois republics have equal rights under the law, but as a matter of fact are prevented by a thousand means and devices from participation in the political life and from enjoyment of democratic rights and liberties, are now enlisted in a permanent, unconditioned, and decisive participation in the democratic rule of the state.

The equality of citizens without regard to sex, religion, race, nationality, which has always and everywhere been the promise of bourgeois democracy, but which has nowhere been fulfilled and could nowhere be fulfilled because of the domination of capital, has been realized suddenly and completely by the soviet government, since only the power of the workers, who have no interests at stake in private property in the means of production, and in the struggle for their distribution and redistribution, can realize this ideal.

Bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism are so organized that it is precisely the working classes who have least to do with the administrative apparatus. The Soviet Power, i. e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other hand, is so organized that