* INSERTION FOR THE POLITICAL SECTION
PROGRAMS.
At the same time, the RCP must explain to the working masses,
in order to prevent the erroneous generalization of transient historical
needs, that the deprivation of electoral rights from certain citizens
by no means extends, as was the case in most bourgeois-democratic
republics, to a specific category of citizens who are permanently
denied political rights; rather, it applies solely to exploiters—only
to those who, in defiance of the fundamental laws of the socialist
Soviet republic, obstinately cling to their exploitative status and
strive to preserve capitalist relations. Consequently, in the Soviet
republic, on the one hand, with each passing day as socialism grows
stronger and the number of those who objectively still possess the
capacity to remain exploiters or to perpetuate capitalist relations
diminishes, the proportion of individuals deprived of electoral rights
naturally declines. Today, in Russia, this proportion is scarcely more
than two or three percent. On the other hand, in the not-too-distant
future, once external aggression has been brought to an end and the
expropriation of the expropriators is completed, under certain
conditions, a situation may arise in which the proletarian state—

state power will adopt alternative methods of suppressing the resistance
of the exploiters and will introduce universal suffrage without
any restrictions whatsoever.

*
The Program Commission incorporated this insertion when drafting
paragraph 27 of its draft, which reads as follows: “In contrast to bourgeois
democracy, which sought to conceal the class character of its state,
the Soviet power openly acknowledges the inevitability of the class
character of every state—as long as the division of society into classes
has not completely disappeared, and with it all forms of state power.
By its very nature, the Soviet state is directed toward the suppression
of the resistance of the exploiters, and the Soviet Constitution, taking
as its starting point the fact that any freedom is an illusion if it
contradicts the liberation of labor from the yoke of capital, does not
hesitate to strip exploiters of their political rights. The task of the
proletarian party is to relentlessly carry out the suppression of
exploiters’ resistance while, at the same time, ideologically combating
the deeply ingrained prejudices concerning the absolute value (the
unconditional nature) of bourgeois moral and legal freedoms—and to
explain, moreover, that the deprivation of political rights and any
form of restriction on freedom are necessary only as temporary measures
in the struggle against the exploiters’ attempts to defend or restore
their privileges. As the objective possibility of one human being
exploiting another gradually disappears, so too will the need for these
temporary measures, and the party will strive to narrow their scope and
eventually to abolish them entirely.” Ed.

Among Lenin’s drafts pertaining to the development of the political
section of the program, a handwritten passage has been preserved that
discusses the rapprochement between the state apparatus and the masses.
This passage appears to have been excised from some more detailed
text—not used by the Program Commission and never reaching us.
With the exception of the final paragraph, the passage was included
in the Commission’s draft without alteration, as paragraph 29. The text
is written in red ink.