Socialism and the surveillance state, Lenin’s 1917 version

Socialism and the surveillance state, Lenin’s 1917 version:

“Only socialism will be the beginning of a rapid, genuine, truly mass forward movement, embracing first the majority, and then the whole of the population, in all spheres of public and private life. … [Then] the escape from this popular accounting and control will inevitably become so incredibly difficult, such a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental intellectuals), that the necessity of observing the … rules of the community will very soon become a habit.”

(Source: V. I. Lenin, “Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracy,” in Robert C. Tucker editor, The Lenin Anthology, New York: W. W. Norton, 1975, pp. 467-471)

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