UK Election Polls Tighten to Three Points Between May and Corbyn plus Lenin in 1917 Remembered

Democracy and Class Struggle give reminders to Social Democrats about Democracy from Lenin in 1917 in quotes below.

The smashing of the British State has never been a social democratic aim - that was the aim of James Connolly and John Maclean and revolutionary communism but not of the "British" Communist Party from the 1920's despite its talk of a Soviet Britain. 

For the process of national and social liberation social forces are required to smash the British State - to liberate the nations of the British Isles.

Revolutionary communists have long recognised that necessity but revisionists and social democrats have opposed that lethal combination for the British State  under guise of a fake internationalism which turns out to be bourgeois cosmopolitanism.






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Our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks themselves share, and instil into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage “in the present-day state” is really capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realization.

Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)



the working class must break up, smash the “ready-made state machinery,” and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)



Democracy is a form of the state, it represents, on the one hand, the organized, systematic use of force against persons; but, on the other hand, it signifies the formal recognition of equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state. 

Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)



Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society.

Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)


The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.


Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)


The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. 

Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)

And so in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.

Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)