Both Marx and Lenin abhorred the parliamentary systems of bourgeois democracy, but neither of them sought to abolish it. Lenin wrote that it would be impossible to develop proletarian democracy "without representative institutions." Both of them considered the governing model of the Paris Commune of 1871 in which executive and legislative were combined in one body to be ideal. More importantly, Marx applauded the election process by "universal suffrage in the various wards and town." While the institution of the socialist legislature might not be important in itself, they "have a place in the literature and rhetoric of the ruling parties which cannot be ignored—in the language of the party's intimacy with working masses, of its alleged knowledge about interests of working people, of social justice and socialist democracy, of the mass line and learning from the people."