While a nice quote and possibly even true, Lenin's totalitarian "communism" is not the goal of socialism. Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and

While a nice quote and possibly even true, Lenin's totalitarian "communism" is not the goal of socialism. Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and Lenin definitely did not get rid of the state. His wasn't even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship by a small elite. Social democracy is much closer to a "dictatorship" of the proletariat, because there workers actually have a voice. It's important to realise that when Marx wrote his thing, many "democracies" still didn't allow poor people to vote. Marx would have been much happier about western capitalist denocracies than about Soviet communism. Although obviously the next step has to be to get money out of politics. And out of news media. Giving the people a voice doesn't help much if they're easily manipulated by the rich and powerful.