Lenin: The State and Revolution
The State and Revolution
V. I. Lenin (1917)
In capitalist society, under the conditions most favorable to its development, we have more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always bound by the narrow framework of capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in reality, a democracy for the minority, only for the possessing classes, only for the rich.
Freedom in capitalist society always remains just about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. The modern wage slaves, owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, are so much crushed by want and poverty that "democracy is nothing to them," "politics is nothing to them"; that, in the ordinary peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participating in social and political life...
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich - that is the democracy of capitalist society.
Now, let me make something crystal clear. I regard Lenin as a demagogic rascal, motivated by a cult of materialist-teleological-utopian violence, who committed a slew of unforgivable atrocities against the very peasants he claimed to be fighting for against the Tsarist, and then liberal, Russian state. He was the midwife of totalitarian Stalinism and its mass murder of millions of defenceless people, not to mention its ethnocide and forced relocation of minority nationalities, as well as the gulag terror system that decimated so many lives from Lithuania to Kazakhstan. I'm also a Christian, so his savage persecution of the Orthodox Church and other religions in the Soviet Union earns my added scorn.
He thus rates very poorly in my categorisation of influential historical personages, given that his legacy has been almost entirely negative (in my estimation).
So, needless to say, I don't take what I'm about to say lightly or with the remotest hint of relish....
but I think Lenin had a point. 
Due to his crimes, this is difficult to say.
But I can't deny it. The man had a point. His solution was terrible but his analysis of the sickness wasn't very far off the mark and is now rather prescient, like that of his ideological forbear Karl Marx.
21st century democracy has increasingly proven inept at restraining corporate power and monopoly. Between 1980 and 2016, the top 1% acquired 28% of the aggregate increase in real incomes in Westernized democracies. The wage disparity between the average chief executive and and the average employee rose tenfold from 1970 to circa. 400. Multinational companies hoard wealth and influence governments around they world, harvesting personal data on private citizens and manipulating social media to further a corporatist agenda. They circumvent the legislation of national, elected legislatures by means of investor-state arbitration. They harm and degradation the environment. They evade tax.
In case someone says, "
but wait, we've been here before - the gilded age in the 19th century! Laissez-faire Victorian Britain!", I would like to note that modern inequality is wedded to a shocking drop in social mobility not experienced even by in the 1800s, if measured by its sheer difference in scale. The U.S., which once boasted the most socially mobile lower middle class, is now the hardest Western society in which to climb the social ladder according to statistics. "
If you want to be smart and highly energetic, the most important single step you could take is to choose the right parents," said Robert Frank. He's right, unfortunately.
If we don't do something major, I fear that we are on a downward trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to bring about the Western European "
idea" in the first place, lack of feeling for society's losers and those left-behind by the rapacious onslaught of financial globalization (even though I support both it and free trade in principle), and crass complacency about our system's durability despite the solemn warning-shot of the 2009 banking crisis and the credit crunch.
The consequence of this generational - and I would add suicidal - misjudgement, is authoritarian populism and it's ever-rising appeal to young, socially dislocated men in particular. Jordan Peterson will be the first of many ideologues targeting impressionable young minds.
If we witness a whole generation of radicalised young men drawn to authoritarian nationalism (as we seem to be), their movement is
our monster.
Our system has created this distrust of "elites" (however nebulously defined). I would say that our liberal democratic system is as guilty as that of the aristocratic and mercantile one that preceded it, the policies of which - land enclosure and appropriation - fanned thievery and brigandage in sixteenth century England.
Are we really so far from the unequal, slave-holding, elitist democracy of classical Athens as we commonly assume? Lenin thought we weren't and with reluctance I'm starting to believe him. An extended franchise is not enough to provide real and effective equality.
Discuss.
