Vladimir Lenin Quotes
To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament-this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.
Lenin, V. I. The State and Revolution. Lenin Collected Works, vol. 25, Progress Publishers, 1964, p. 422.
In Dolgoff’s era, his argument was that the political parties were so powerful that it was they who controlled who held public office, not the voters. And the parties were controlled by a few party leaders. However, when the system was reformed in the latter part of the 20th century, the individual incumbent member of Congress in America was so hard to dislodge due to the role of money and the advantage of incumbency, that the class of professional politicians was still very powerful. Reform had reduced the control of political parties but not politicians.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Soviet Communist Party. A Marxist, he developed a variant of this communist ideology known as Leninism.
