Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/35

 All privileges and representation allowances attached to the high offices of the State disappeared along with the offices themselves. … Having got rid of the standing army and police, the material weapons of the old Government, the Commune turned its attention, without delay, to breaking the weapons of spiritual oppression, the power of the priests. … The judicial functionaries lost their sham independence. … In the future, they were to be elected openly and be responsible and revocable."

And so the Commune would seem to have replaced the broken machinery of the State "only" by a fuller democracy: the aboltion of the standing army and the transformation of all officials into elective and revocable agents of the State. But, as a matter of fact this "only" represents a gigantic replacement of one type of institutions by others of a fundamentally different order. Here we see precisely a case of the "transformation of quantity into quality." Democracy, carried out with the fullest imaginable completeness and consistency, is transformed from capitalist democracy into proletarian democracy; from the State (that is, a special force for the suppression of a particular class) to something which is no longer really a form of the State.

It is still necessary to suppress the capitalist class and crush its resistance. This was particularly necessary for the Commune; and one of the reasons for its defeat was that it did not do this with sufficient determination. But the organ of suppression is now the majority of the population, and not a minority, as was always the case under slavery, serfdom and wage-labor. And, once the majority of the nation itself suppresses its oppressors, a special force for suppression is no longer necessary. In this sense the State begins to disappear. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officials and chiefs of a standing army), the majority can itself directly fulfill all these functions; and the more the discharge of the functions of the—State devolves upon the masses of the people, the less need is there for the existence of the State itself.

In this connection the special measures adopted by the Commune and emphasized by Marx, are particularly noteworthy: the abolition of all representative allowances, and of all special salaries in the case of officials; and the lowering of the payment of ail servants of the State to the level of the workmen's wages, Here is shown, more clearly than anywhere else, the break—from a bourgeois democracy to a proletarian democracy; from. the democracy of the oppressors to the democracy of the oppressed;