ABSTRACT
We must realize, too, that in the eyes of the Communists our Western ‘Democracies,’ with all their apparent liberties of which we are so proud, appear a sham. Equality of voting power, even where this much has been attained, means very little, they argue, so long as the power of private wealth lies behind the power of the vote. In the bourgeois civilizations money is the greatest political power, and our proletarian voters become the dupes and tools of those who have this unlimited power to mislead them. Votes can only have equal value where education is universal and where there is no 53endowment of a particular class to advertise its own claims by buying up the means of propaganda, and to entrench itself by the exercise of social pressure. For among the privileges of wealth, and the argument I think is irresistible, this is the greatest—the power of perpetuating the social order which confers the privileges.
