Very out of it this week, so my retention of this chapter is probably going to be a little low.

The Communists do not merely reflect the will of the masses, as a ballot might, or a showing of hands. They do not merely analyze what the “majority want” and hand it out. It is their job to lead, to organize the people’s will. No group of unurged soldiers would ever vote to storm a trench. Certainly the workers of the Soviet Union would not have voted, unurged, unled, for the hardships of the Five-Year Plan of rapid industrialization taken out of their own food and comforts, for the painful speed of farm collectivization without adequate machines or organizers.

But this is a really good line explaining how communists aim to work, it's not just handing out whatever the working class wants like a spoiled child, but directing them towards a better future and making them understand the benefit of hard work and sacrifice. So many people's misunderstandings of communism are either "it's not liberal democracy, so it's bad because not enough "Freedom"" or "It gives people too much freedom and no one wants to work." So this simple explanation tackles both anti-communist viewpoints simultaneously. It's not about encouraging people to be lazy and blindly letting them do what they want, but nor is it a brutal top down repression of the people's wants and desires. It's a process, it asks the people "where do you want to be in the future" and then going "Ok, here's what we need to do to get there."