Lenin on the World Revolution

1907

January 7, 1907

Plekhanov and Vasilyev

Published: Proletary, No 11

Lenin, Volume 11, pages 419 - 425

The Vasilyevs talk of a revolution which must give birth to a "constitution" and nothing more, and give birth to it without the aid of mid wives, without revolutionaries. No midwives, no revolutionaries, no revolutionary people—such is Vasilyev's slogan.

A revolution in the real, serious sense is inconceivable without "solution of economic programmes". A revolution can only be made by the masses, actuated by profound economic needs. The fall of absolutism in Russia, its real fall, would inevitably mean an economic revolution. Only those who are virginally innocent of socialism can fail to under stand this. To abandon economic programme means abandoning the fundamental economic causes of revolution, abandoning the economic interests which impel the masses of downtrodden, cowed, ignorant people to wage a great and unprecedentedly selfless struggle. It means abandoning the masses, leaving only a gang of intellectual spouters, and substituting liberal spouting for socialist policy.

Januar 15, 1907

"When You Hear the Judgement of a Fool... ."From the Notes of a Social-Democratic Publicist

Published in pamphlet form in January 1907 by the Novaya Duma Publishers

Lenin, Volume 11, pages 456 - 474

The basis of socialist tactics in time of revolution consists in the progressive class, the proletariat, marching at the head of the people's revolution (the revolution that is now taking place in Russia is a bourgeois revolution in the sense that the attainment of complete freedom and all the land for the people will not rid us in the least of the rule of the bourgeoisie; obviously, the fact that the revolution has this socio-economic character does not prevent it from being a people's revolution). The progressive class must therefore consistently expose to the masses the falsity of all hopes of negotiations and agreements with the old regime in general, and of agreements between landlords and peasants over the land question in particular. The progressive class must pursue its independent line of undeviating struggle, supporting only those who are really fighting, and only to the ex tent that they fight. (page 458)

Written: February 5, 1907

Preface to the Russian Translation of Karl Marx's Letters to Dr. Kugelmann

Published: Published in 1907 in the pamphlet: Karl Marx. Letters to Dr. Kugelmann, edited and with a preface by N. Lenin. Novaya Duma Publishers, St. Petersburg.

Lenin, Volume 12, pages 104 -112

In no other country in the world at this moment is there such a profound revolutionary crisis as in Russia— and in no other country are there "Marxists" (belittlers and vulgarisers of Marxism) who take up such a sceptical and philistine attitude towards the revolution. From the fact that the revolution is bourgeois in content they draw the shallow conclusion that the bourgeoisie is the driving force of the revolution, that the tasks of the proletariat in this revolution are of an ancillary, not independent, character and that proletarian leadership of the revolution is impossible! (page 106)

In September 1870 Marx had called the insurrection an act of desperate folly; but in April 1871, when he saw the mass movement of the people, he watched it with the keen attention of a participant in great events marking a step forward in the historic revolutionary movement.

The historical initiative of the masses was what Marx prized above everything else. Ah, if only our Russian Social-Democrats would learn from Marx how to appreciate the historical initiative of the Russian workers and peasants in October and December 1905! Compare the homage paid to the historical initiative of the masses by a profound thinker, who foresaw failure six months ahead—and the lifeless, soulless, pedantic: "They should not have taken up arms"! Are these not as far apart as heaven and earth? (page 109)