66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST ded nor impartial, though the judges individually must obey no command except that of the law. The bourgeois conception (or misconception) stems from the worn-out theory of the division of power between the legislature, the judiciary and the executive. It is as if the judiciary holds the balance, preventing the encroachment of the legislature on the executive or of the executive on the legislature. Marxist theory of the state does not admit of such division of power. If it has the narrow sense of division of administrative functions, such division is a necessity in the complex functioning of the modern state. Bourgeois theorists do, however, make a distinction between the three departments of the state as if they were sharers in power, whereas in fact power is indivisibly wielded by the ruling class and these are merely organs of power. According to Lenin, The court is an organ of power. The liberals sometimes forget this, but it is a sin for the Marxists to do so2. After the Bolsheviks took over power, Lenin had occasion to discuss the role of the courts in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government and he observed that, the work of the courts is one of the functions of the state administration ... the courts are an organ of the power of the proletariat and of the poor peasants3. But the bourgeois theorists fail to note that the independence of the judiciary is still not inconsistent, and can co-exist, with its character as an organ of the state. Certain adventitious characteristics, born out of past class struggle, have again stuck to the judiciary and tend to confuse its qualitative assessment. In Western countries the judges were appointed by the absolute monarch and feudal lords. When the bourgeoisie rose into prominence, their repesentatives, particularly the lawyers from their midst, got access to the posts of judges and in the words of Lenin, the bourgeois judges "defended themselves against the feudal lords by means of the principle of irremovability"4. This was really a result of class struggle between the ruling feudal nobles and the nascent bourgeois class, but it has now begun to be considerd an element of the independence of the judiciary. The reality is veiled and the veil becomes more important than the reality. This very irremovability is now used by the judiciary against democracy itself5 because democratisation of the judiciary requires that it must be responsible to the people or the representatives of the people, namely, parliament. It does not mean that the accountability of the judges to parliament which naturally includes the power of parliament to remove the judges would eliminate class justice. In reply to a similar dig by Justice Ginsberg at the International Conference of Judges in 1912, Lenin, with his devastating sarcasm, comments: Quite so, Your Honour! Democracy in general does not remove the class struggle but merely makes it more conscious, freer and more open. But this is no argument against democracy. It is an argument