I think it’s important to understand this quotation through the lens of the Russian Revolution. In the revolution, It was not that the Bolsheviks themselves had exhausted what they could do within the framework of bourgeois democracy, in fact it was quite the opposite and they called for proletarian democracy to forcefully overcome the emerging bourgeois democracy in its infancy. It was that the workers and peasants of Russia had no faith in the emerging Russian democracy. Lenin saw this which led to the April theses and the proclamation “All power to the Soviets!” While electoral politics were important to Lenin and the Bolshevik program, they never prioritized change through elections from 1906 to 1917 because they were not under the impression change was possible through electoral means. They saw elections as primarily a means to agitate the working class into organizing itself and fighting for its own liberation.
In our modern time, the lesson we should take from this is not that we should beat our heads against the bureaucracy to prove it doesn’t work, but rather the elected positions leftists win are platforms where people with authority can say “you workers must liberate yourselves”.
I think it’s important to understand this quotation through the lens of the Russian Revolution. In the revolution, It was not that the Bolsheviks themselves had exhausted what they could do within the framework of bourgeois democracy, in fact it was quite the opposite and they called for proletarian democracy to forcefully overcome the emerging bourgeois democracy in its infancy. It was that the workers and peasants of Russia had no faith in the emerging Russian democracy. Lenin saw this which led to the April theses and the proclamation “All power to the Soviets!” While electoral politics were important to Lenin and the Bolshevik program, they never prioritized change through elections from 1906 to 1917 because they were not under the impression change was possible through electoral means. They saw elections as primarily a means to agitate the working class into organizing itself and fighting for its own liberation.
In our modern time, the lesson we should take from this is not that we should beat our heads against the bureaucracy to prove it doesn’t work, but rather the elected positions leftists win are platforms where people with authority can say “you workers must liberate yourselves”.