GENERAL POLITICS.
A bourgeois republic, however democratic, hallowed by the watchwords of the will of the people, the will of the whole nation, the will of all classes, inevitably expresses — through the very fact that it is based upon the private ownership of the land and other means of production — the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, of a machine for the exploitation and oppression of the immense majority of the workers by the capitalist clique. In contrast with this, proletarian or soviet democracy transforms the mass organisations of those who are oppressed by the capitalist class, of the proletarians and the semi-proletarians (the poor peasants), that is to say, of the immense majority of the population, into the permanent and unified foundation of the entire State apparatus, local and central, from the bottom to the top. Thereby the Soviet State realises, among other things, in an immeasurably wider form than ever before, local self-government, without any sort of authority imposed from above. It is the task of our party to work indefatigably on behalf of the complete inauguration of that higher type of democracy which needs for its right functioning the continuous uplifting of the level of culture, organisation, and initiative power of the masses.[§46& 47.]
In contrast with bourgeois democracy, which conceals the class character of the capitalist State, the Soviet Power openly recognises that every State will inevitably have a class character until the division of society into classes shall have completely disappeared, and therewith all State authority shall have vanished. The Soviet State, which by its very nature has led to the crushing of the resistance of the exploiters, and the Soviet Constitution, which is based upon the idea that all freedom is a fraud in so far as it conflicts with the deliverance of labour from the yoke of capital, does not shrink from depriving the exploiters of political rights. Our party, the party of the proletariat, while inexorably crushing the resistance of the exploiters, and while fighting in the field of ideas against the deep-rooted prejudices in accordance with which bourgeois rights