II.
The whole bourgeois world blames the Communists for the destruction of freedom and of political democracy. This is not true. On achieving sovereignty, the proletariat only makes it completely impossible to employ the methods of bourgeois democracy, and creates the conditions and forms of a higher democracy of labour. The whole course of capitalist development has undermined, especially in the recent imperialist epoch, political democracy, not only by dividing the nations into two irreconcilable classes, but also by condemning numerous sections of the small middle-class and semi-proletariat, as well as the lower strata of the proletariat, to permanent social misery and political impotence.
The working class of those countries in which the historical development has given them that possibility has made use of the system of political democracy for organisation against Capital. The same thing will further happen in those countries where the pre-requisites to a labour revolution are not yet ripened. . . . .
But Capitalism hampers the historical development of the large middle sections on the flat land and in the towns, and they remain a whole epoch behind. The Bavarian peasant, who cannot see beyond his village steeple; the small French vine grower, ruined by the wine adulteration practised by large capital; the American small farmer, plundered and swindled by bankers and representatives: all these social sections, which are diverted by Capitalism from the main stream of development, are called on paper to the government of the State, under the regime of political democracy. In reality, however, all important questions which settle the destinies of peoples are decided behind the back of Parliamentary democracy by the financial oligarchy. This was so above all in the question of the war. The same thing is now happening in the question of the peace.
If the financial oligarchy considers it to be useful to cover their violence by Parliamentary sanction, the bourgeois State has at its disposal, for the achievement of the required object, all the means which have been inherited from previous centuries of class domination, multiplied by technical skill—lies, demagogy, calumny, snares, bribery, and terror. To ask of the proletariat that, in the last struggle with Capitalism, when it is a matter of life and death, it should, lamb-like, comply with the requirements of bour-
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