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There's a segment in State and Rev that i'm having a little trouble with understanding Lenin's interpretation of Engels where he quotes Engels on his take of Universal Suffrage, that it's "the gauge of maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the present-day state."
He then continues to state that universal suffrage is not capable of "revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realization." He backs this point up with another Engels quote :
"The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
What i'm having trouble with is how this quote strengthens Lenin's argument that universal suffrage is incapable of revealing the will of the working people. Maybe I'm being a bit thick in the head here but if universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class wouldn't it lead us closer to the obsolescence of classes?
thanks in advance for any help!
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