Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/81

 It is not Marx's own sweet will which smuggled a scrap of bourgeois law into communism; he simply indicated what is economically and politically inevitable in a society issuing from the womb of capitalism.

Democracy is of great importance in the working-class struggle for freedom against the capitalists. But democracy is not a limit one may not overstep; it is merely one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, from capitalism to communism.

Democracy implies equality. The immense significance of the struggle of the proletariat for equality, and the power of attraction of such a battle-cry are obvious, if we but rightly interpret it as meaning the annihilation of classes. But the equality of democracy is formal equality—no more; and immediately after the attainment of the equality of all members of society in respect of the ownership of the means of production, that is, of equality of labor and equality of wages, there will inevitably arise before humanity the question of going further from equality which is formal to equality which is real, and of realizing in life the formula "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this higher aim,—this we do not and cannot know. But it is important that one should realize how infinitely mendacious is the usual capitalist representation of Socialism as something lifeless, petrified, fixed once for all. In reality, it is only with Socialism that there will commence a rapid, genuine, real mass advance, in which first the majority and then the whole of the population will take part—an advance in all domains of social and individual life.

Democracy is a form of the State—one of the varieties of the State; and, consequently, like every State, it stands as an organized, systematic application of force against mankind. That is its one aspect. But, on the other hand, it is the formal recognition of the equality of all citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure and administration of the State. Out of this forma] recognition there arises, in its turn, the stage in the development of democracy when it first rallies the proletariat as a revolutionary class against capitalism, and gives it an opportunity to crush, to break to atoms, to wipe off the face of the earth the capitalist government machine—even the republican variety; the standing army, police and bureaucracy. Second, it enables it to substitute for all this a more democratic, but still a State machinery, in the shape of armed masses of the working-class, which