“Democracy” and Dictatorship

In this short article, Lenin revealed the essence of bourgeois democracy and expounded the theory of dictatorship of the proletariat. This article was written on December 23, 1918, published in Pravda issue No.2 on January 3, 1919. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 35 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

Under the influence of October Revolution, revolutions broke out also in Austria and Germany, they overthrew the old regime and established the Soviet assemblies. However, the right-wing socialists of Austria and Germany tried every way to control the Soviet assemblies. They advocated the establishment of a bourgeois republic and fought to replace the dictatorship of the proletariat with a bourgeois parliamentary system. On December 23, 1918, Lenin wrote this article to point out the chief question of the German and Austrian revolutions, i.e., the Constituent Assembly or the Soviet type of government, and briefly explained the essence of this problem.

First of all, Lenin pointed out that the primary question of revolution lied in the political power. He dialectically analyzed the argument on “Constitutional Assembly or Soviet government”. Lenin argued that whether in Germany or Austria, the main question of the revolution was to have Constitutional Assembly or Soviet government. Lenin pointed out that the spokesmen of the bankrupt Second International, all the way from Scheidemann to Kautsky, stood for Constitutional Assembly and determined their stand point as defense of “democracy” as distinct from “dictatorship”, in fact they were rejecting the Soviet form of government.

Secondly, Lenin revealed the essence and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy. As long as the means of production and the political power were in the hands of the exploiters, there could be no real freedom and equality for the exploited, that is, for the vast majority of the population. The bourgeoisie concealed from the people the bourgeois character of modern democracy, to picture it as democracy in general or “pure democracy”. In order to illustrate this point, Lenin took the example of freedom of assembly and press and pointed out that capitalists, exploiters, landowners and the profiteers owned 9/10 of the best meeting halls, and 9/10 of the stocks of newsprint, printing presses, etc. The urban workers and the farm hands and day laborers were, in practice, debarred from democracy by the “sacred right of property” and by the bourgeois state apparatus, that is, bourgeois officials, bourgeois judges, and so on. The “freedom of assembly and the press” in the bourgeois democratic was in fact freedom for the rich to buy and bribe the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with venomous lies of the bourgeois press, freedom for the rich to keep as their “property” the landowners’ mansions, the best buildings, etc.

Thirdly, Lenin pointed out that democracy was linked to the ownership of the means of production and the state power. He said that the working class should not forget for one minute the bourgeois character of this “democracy”, it’s historical conditional and limited character. Never share the “superstitious belief” in the “state” and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another. The bourgeoisie were compelled to be hypocritical and to describe as “popular government”, democracy in general, or pure democracy, the (bourgeois) democratic republic which is, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the exploiters over the working people. But Marxists should expose this hypocrisy, and tell the workers and the working people in general this frank and straightforward truth: the democratic republic, the Constituent Assembly, general elections, etc., are, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for the emancipation of labor from the yoke of capital there is no other way but to replace this dictatorship with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Finally, Lenin refuted various fallacies attacking the dictatorship of the proletariat and discussed the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin pointed out that non-class or above-class democracy was only the stupid dream of the small proprietors. Because from a society in which one class opposes another there is no way out other than through the dictatorship of the oppressed class. Only philistines would think that the oppression of capital could be overthrown without a long and arduous process of suppressing the resistance of exploiters. Scheidemann and Kautsky concealed this by selling out the interests of the proletariat. Lenin pointed out that the proletariat would surely see that only the replacement of the bourgeois state by a state of the type of the Paris Commune or by a state of the Soviet type, could open the way to socialism. The dictatorship of the proletariat would deliver humanity from capitalist oppression and war. Lenin refuted the fallacies of the Second International opportunists on democracy and dictatorship. He revealed the essence of bourgeois democracy, and enriched Marxism’s theory about socialist revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat.