How does democracy amplify the class issue?

[Ritzy Cat]

As my reading continues in State & Revolution, I have a few questions about the issue in the thread title.


“No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against another, by one section of the population against another.”

Can someone explain to me why this is? It was probably explained earlier in the writing but I forgot some of it.

[Ocean Seal]

As my reading continues in State & Revolution, I have a few questions about the issue in the thread title.



Can someone explain to me why this is? It was probably explained earlier in the writing but I forgot some of it.

The way that this works is that there are more proletarians than bourgeoisie and the world tends itself towards proletarianization. The governance of the bourgeoisie is given by a bourgeois state which holds the power in the hands of a minority. The expression of proletarian democracy gives the power to the proletariat and hence the majority rules.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Can someone explain to me why this is? It was probably explained earlier in the writing but I forgot some of it.I don't know what the specific context here is, but I think this line is about how systemic forms of rule are needed in class divided societies. So, for example, the u.s. State is set up to allow popular input on a certain range of things, but is also set to to prevent popular input into the economy or military... The state creates beurocratic or legal barriers to working class input and so this ensures that private wealth is mostly in the hands of the super rich and military power in the hands of elites at the top. Capitalism will always have to organize itself in a way that allows the minority to rule over the majority. Lenin thought that democracy in a proletarian sense would be a society where there is a supremacy of the non-exploiting majority over the exploiting minority. But this would not be a constant feature of society because capitalism needs to reproduce class divisions whereas the non-exploited majority would have a class interest in ending these divisions. Lenin called this "overcoming democracy" or something like that.