V. I.

Lenin

DRAFT THIRD CLAUSE OF THE GENERAL POLITICAL SECTION OF THE PROGRAMME (FOR THE PROGRAMME COMMISSION OF THE EIGHTH PARTY CONGRESS)

Bourgeois democracy confined itself to proclaiming formal rights equally applicable to all citizens, e.g., the right
of assembly, of association, of the press. At best all legislative restrictions on these points were abolished in the
most democratic bourgeois republics. But, in reality, both
administrative practices and particularly the economic bondage of the working people always made it impossible
for them, under bourgeois democracy, to make any wide use of these rights and liberties.

By contrast, proletarian or Soviet democracy, instead of the formal proclamation of rights and liberties,
guarantees them in practice first and foremost to those classes
of the population who were oppressed by capitalism, i.e.,
the proletariat and the peasantry. For this purpose, the
Soviet power expropriates from the bourgeoisie premises,
printing presses and stocks of paper, and places them at
the entire disposal of the working people and their organisations.

The task of the Russian Communist Party is to draw ever wider masses of working people into the exercise of
their democratic rights and liberties, and to extend the
material possibilities for this.

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