Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/14

 a salary of 120,000 roubles ($60,000) per annum, what was this? Direct or indirect bribery? A league of the Government with the capitalist syndicates, or "only" friendly relations? What is the precise role played by Tchernoff, Tseretelli, Avksentieff and Skobeleff? Are they "direct," or "only" the indirect, allies of the millionaire thieves who are plundering the public treasury? The omnipotence of "wealth" is also more "secure" in a democratic Republic, because it does not depend on the bad political form of capitalism. The democratic Republic is the best possible political form for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained control (through the Paltchinskis, Tchernoffs, Tseretellis & Co.) of this very best form, it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons or institutions or parties, in the bourgeois Republic, can shake it.

We must also note that Engels quite definitely regards universal suffrage as a means of capitalist domination. Universal suffrage, he says (summing up obviously the long experience of German Social Democracy), is "an index of the maturity of the working class; it cannot and never will give anything more in the present State." The lower middle-class democrats such as our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, and also their twin brothers, the Social-chauvinists and Opportunists of Western Europe, all expect a "great deal" from this universal suffrage. They themselves hold and instill into the minds of the people the wrong idea that universal suffrage in the "present State" is really capable of expressing the will of the majority of the laboring masses and of securing its realization.

Here we can only note this wrong idea, and point out that this perfectly clear, exact, and concrete statement by Engels is distorted at every step in the propaganda and agitation of the "official" (that is, Opportunist) Socialist parties. A detailed exposure of the falsity of this idea, which Engels simply brushes aside, is given in our further account of the views of Marx and Engels on the "modern" State.

A general summary of his views is given by Engels in the most popular of his works, in the following words:

"Thus, the State has not always existed. There were societies which did without it, which had no idea of the State or of State power. At a given stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the break-up of Society into classes, the State became a necessity as a result of this division. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production in which the existence of these classes is not only no longer