According to V.I. Lenin, the Supreme Soviet leader,
“…socialism is impossible without democracy,” averred Lenin in his Collected Works (Vol. 23), “because: (1) the proletariat cannot perform the socialist revolution unless it prepares for it by the struggle for democracy; (2) victorious socialism cannot consolidate its victory and bring humanity to the withering away of the state without implementing full democracy.”
Derived, as it must be, from Karl Marx.
“The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class to win the battle for democracy.” But democracy was only part of the process.
And Engels
“Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.”
Generally,
Engels, like Marx, and especially like Lenin, saw democracy as a cudgel to ensure communism. It was a vehicle to drive toward a communist state. It would be momentarily hailed and preached but ultimately exploited and abolished.
That is what the American left means by defending Democracy. It is Democrat-Socialism, which is socialism, whose only function is to arrive at communism.
Lenin, one more time.
The aim of socialism is to turn all the means of production into the property of the whole people, and that does not at all mean that the ships become the property of the ship workers or the banks the property of the bank clerks. If people take such paltry things seriously, then we must do away with nationalization, because the whole thing is preposterous. The task, the aim of socialism, as we see it, is to convert the land and the industrial enterprises into the property of the Soviet Republic.
Or, in our case, the American Marxist Republic.
H/T to Jim Bowman for stirring this pot enough to get me to hunt down a few quotes.
For more, check this out.
