Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/60

 in the sense of the present French Republic, which is neither more nor less than the Empire established in 1798, without the Emperor. From 1792 to 1798 each French Department, each municipality, enjoyed complete self-government on the American model, and this is what we, too, ought to have. How local self-government should be organized and how it is possible to do without a bureaucracy has been demonstrated to us by America and the first French Republic, and is still being demonstrated by Canada, Australia and other British Dominions. Such a provincial and communal self-government is a far freer institution than, for instance, the Swiss Federation under which, it is true, the Canton is very independent of the Bund (that is, of the Federal State as a whole), but is also independent of the district and the commune. The cantonal governments appoint the district stateholders and prefects, a feature which is quite absent in the English-speaking countries, and which we, in our own country, must in the future abolish as completely as the Prussian Landraete, Regierungsraete (that is, all officials appointed from above)."

In accordance with this, Engels suggests the following wording for the clause in the program regarding self-government: "Complete self-government for the provinces, districts and communes through officials elected by universal suffrage, the abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the State."

In the Pravda of May 28, 1917, suppressed by the Government of Kerensky and other "Socialist" ministers, I had already occasion to point out how in this connection (not by any means in this alone) our sham Socialist representatives of the sham revolutionary sham democracy, have scandalously departed from democracy. Naturally people who have allied themselves with the Imperialist capitalist class remained deaf to this criticism.

It is particularly important to note that Engels, armed with precise facts, disproves by a telling example the superstition prevalent especially among the lower middle class democracy that a Federal Republic necessarily means a larger amount of liberty than a centralized republic. This is not true. The facts cited by Engels regarding the centralized French Republic of 1792–1798, and Federal Switzerland disprove this. The really democratic centralized republic gave more liberty than the federal republic—in other words, the greatest amount of local freedom known in history was granted by a centralized republic, and not by a Federal Republic.

Insufficient attention has hitherto been paid in our party