Excerpts from the book "Reflections on the Failure of Socialism" Part 3

In his speeches before he seized power, Lenin promised the same wonderful things, and even more wonderful than [Robert] Owen [an English utopian socialist] had promised at New Harmony:

“Democracy from below!” he shouted. “Democracy without an officialdom, without police, without a standing army . . . Immediate preparation for a state of things where all shall fulfill the functions of control and superintendence, so that none shall have the opportunity of becoming bureaucrats at all. . . . The state itself will wither away, by virtue of the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the innumerable horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to the observation of the elementary rules of social life, known for centuries, repeated for thousands of years in all sermons. They will become accustomed to their observance without constraint, without subjection, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the State!”

Source: Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955) by Max Eastman.