Lenin on the World Revolution

1911

February 8 (21), 1911.

Paul Singer

Died January 18 (31), 1911

Lenin Collected Works, Volume 17, pages 92-95.

It is true that the growth of the workers' party often attracts many opportunists to its ranks. It is also true that in our day socialists of bourgeois origin most often bring to the proletariat their timidity, narrow-mindedness and love of phrase-mongering rather than firmness of revolutionary convictions. But the rejoicing of the enemies is premature! The masses of workers in Germany, as well as in other countries, are becoming welded ever more strongly into an army of revolution, and this army will deploy its forces in the not far distant future—for the revolution is gaining momentum both in Germany and in other countries.

The old revolutionary leaders are passing away; but the young army of the revolutionary proletariat is growing and gaining strength.

April 15 (28), 1911

In Memory of the Commune

Lenin Collected Works, Volume 17, pages 139-143.

The memory of the fighters of the Commune is honoured not only by the workers of France but by the proletariat of the whole world. For the Commune fought, not for some local or narrow national aim, but for the emancipation of all toiling humanity, of all the downtrodden and oppressed. As a foremost fighter for the social revolution, the Commune has won sympathy wherever there is a proletariat suffering and engaged in struggle. The epic of its life and death, the sight of a workers' government which seized the capital of the world and held it for over two months, the spectacle of the heroic struggle of the proletariat and the torments it underwent after its defeat—all this raised the spirit of millions of workers, aroused their hopes and enlisted their sympathy for the cause of socialism. The thunder of the cannon in Paris awakened the most backward sections of the proletariat from their deep slumber, and everywhere gave impetus to the growth of revolutionary socialist propaganda. That is why the cause of the Commune is not dead. It lives to the present day in every one of us.

The cause of the Commune is the cause of the social revolution, the cause of the complete political and economic emancipation of the toilers. It is the cause of the proletariat of the whole world. And in this sense it is immortal.

December 8 (21), 1911

Speech Delivered in the Name of the R.S.D.L.P. at

The Funeral of Paul and Laura Lafargue November 20 (December 3), 1911

Lenin Collected Works, Volume 17, pages 304-305.

For the Russian worker Social-Democrats Lafargue symbolised two eras: the era in which the revolutionary youth of France, animated by republican ideas, marched shoulder to shoulder with the French workers to attack the Empire, and the era in which the French proletariat, under Marxist leadership, waged a sustained class struggle against the en tire bourgeois system and prepared for the final battle against the bourgeoisie to win socialism.

We, Russian Social-Democrats, who have experienced all the oppression of an absolutism impregnated with Asiatic barbarity, and who have had the good fortune, through the writings of Lafargue and his friends, directly to draw on the revolutionary experience and revolutionary thought of the European workers—we can now see with particular clarity how rapidly we are nearing the triumph of the cause to which Lafargue devoted all his life. The Russian revolution ushered in an era of democratic revolutions throughout Asia, and 800 million people are now joining in the democratic movement of the whole of the civilised world. In Europe, too, there are increasing signs that the era of so-called peaceful bourgeois parliamentarianism is drawing to an end, to give place to an era of revolutionary battles by a proletariat that has been organised and educated in the spirit of Marxist ideas, and that will overthrow bourgeois rule and establish a communist system.