" Dictatorship' does not mean the opposite of democracy, but democracy's own underlying mode of functioning - from the very beginning, the thesis on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' involved the presupposition that it was the opposite of other form(s) of dictatorship, since the entire field of state power is that of dictatorship. When Lenin designated liberal democracy as a form of bourgeois dictatorship, he did not imply a simplistic notion about how democracy is really manipulated, a mere facade, or how some secret clique is really in power and controls things, and that, if threatened with losing power in democratic elections, it would show its true face and assume direct control. What he meant is that the very form of the bourgeois-democratic state, the sovereignty of its power in its ideologico-political presuppositions, embodies a 'bourgeois' logic. "

― Maximilien Robespierre , Virtue and Terror