Posts by V. I. Lenin
The interests of the bourgeoisie demand the embellishment of capitalism and the concealment of the gulf that divides the classes. The interests of the proletariat demand the exposure of capitalism and of the exploitation of wage-labour
The capitalists and landowners want, at all costs, to keep the workers of different nations apart while the powers that be live splendidly together as shareholders in profitable concerns involving millions
…The bourgeois know, first, that phrases about a democratic peace are an idle and foolish Utopia while the old “forces... really control the diplomacy”, i.e., until the class of capitalists has been expropriated.
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…Their programme is not socialist, but bourgeois-pacifist. Dreams of peace, without propaganda of revolutionary action, express only a horror of war, but have nothing in common with socialism.
Moreover, The Economist stands for peace just because it is afraid of revolution…
The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires, is pursuing a very instructive line in relation to the war.
Representatives of advanced capital in the oldest and richest capitalist country, are shedding tears over the war and incessantly voicing a wish for peace…
The workers realised from the very start that in order to fight for peace, bread, and freedom, the labouring classes, the workers, soldiers and peasants, must organise, close their ranks, unite independently of the capitalists and against the capitalists.
Is there a grain of Marxism in proclaiming the conduct of the capitalists “madness”, when, caught in the vise of…imperialist capital, they cannot act otherwise?
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To believe that the capitalist class will “mend its ways”, will cease to be a capitalist class, will give up its profits, is a fatuous hope, an idle dream, and in effect a deception of the people.
and as this participation in a struggle, which really rouses ever new and “untapped” sections of the proletariat to greater political consciousness, to a broader revolutionary struggle.
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We believe that even a hundred regicides can never produce so stimulating and educational an effect as this participation of tens of thousands of working people in meetings where their vital interests and the links between politics and these interests are discussed,
All efforts must be directed towards making it simultaneous, concentrated, full of that heroism of the masses which has marked all the great stages of the great Russian revolution.
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More audacity, comrades! More confidence in the strength of the revolutionary classes, especially the proletariat, enriched as they now are by new experience; more independent initiative! All the signs indicate that we are on the eve of a great struggle.
unable or unwilling to understand the path leading to the overthrow of the capitalist yoke, the only path that can rid the world of imperialism.
Confining himself to this mild, innocuous, wishy-washy declamation, the petty bourgeois, in practice, trail helplessly behind the bourgeoisie, “sympathising” in some things with the proletariat in words, remaining dependent on the bourgeoisie in deeds,
The petty-bourgeois viewpoint differs from the bourgeois one in that the petty bourgeois “renounces” annexations, “condemns” imperialism, “demands” from the bourgeoisie that it cease to be imperialistic while keeping within the framework of world-imperialist relations and the capitalist system…
Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.
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The only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology).
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His Liberal Highness would have known this had he possessed at least an elementary knowledge of the “fundamental principles of Marxism”, of which he speaks with such boundless aplomb and with equally boundless ignorance.
Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism
deeply hostile to the movement of the masses, to their initiative, their way of “storming heaven”, as Marx once described one of the mass movements in Europe in the last century
Hence the endless series of equivocations, falsehoods, hypocrisies and cowardly evasions in the entire policy of the liberals, who have to play at democracy to win the support of the masses but at the same time are deeply anti-democratic,
But the bourgeoisie is more afraid of the movement of the masses than of reaction. Hence the striking, incredible weakness of the liberals in politics, their absolute impotence.