Lenin on Democracy and Class Struggle

Lenin did not write specifically about democracy. One has to infer from his scattered writings and his actions what his attitude towards democracy was. The basic difficulty about understanding Lenin’s position is epistemic. Lenin was not concerned as such with the ‘rules of the game’ for ‘governance’ in any society. His concern was with carrying class struggle forward; his attitude to the question of the form that the State should have, as indeed to every other issue, was dictated by the primacy of class struggle, that is from the perspective of revolutionary praxis. Lenin, as Lukacs ([1924] 1970) pointed out long ago, saw everything from the perspective of the ‘actuality of the revolution’ as a practical project.