Lenin on the World Revolution

1915

January 9, 1915.

What Next?

On the Tasks Confronting the Workers' Parties with Regard to Opportunism and Social-Chauvinism

Lenin Collected Works, Volume 21, pages 107-114.

The proletariat's unity is its greatest weapon in the struggle for the socialist revolution. From this indisputable truth it follows just as indisputably that, when a proletarian party is joined by a considerable number of petty-bourgeois elements capable of hampering the struggle for the socialist revolution, unity with such elements is harmful and perilous to the cause of the proletariat.

There is hardly a single Marxist of note who has not recognised many times and on various occasions that the opportunists are in fact a non-proletarian element hostile to the socialist revolution.

In every crisis the bourgeoisie will always aid the opportunists, will always try to suppress the revolutionary section of the proletariat, stopping short of nothing and employing the most unlawful and savage military measures. The opportunists are bourgeois enemies of the proletarian revolution, who in peaceful times carry on their bourgeois work in secret, concealing themselves within the workers' parties, while in times of crisis they immediately prove to be open allies of the entire united bourgeoisie, from the conservative to the most radical and democratic part of the latter, from the free thinkers, to the religious and clerical sections.

We are stating the indisputable fact that the workers in most European countries have been deceived by the fictitious unity of the opportunists and the revolutionaries

We permit ourselves the thought that internationalism consists only in an unequivocal internationalist policy within one's party. A genuinely proletarian internationalist policy cannot be pursued, active opposition to the war cannot be preached, and forces for such action cannot be mustered while we are in the company of the opportunists and the social-chauvinists. To find refuge in silence, or to wave this truth aside which, though bitter, is necessary to the socialist, is detrimental and ruinous to the working-class movement.

February 1, 1915

The Russian Brand of Südekum

Lenin Collected Works, Volume 21, pages 118-124.

By his pamphlet On the War, Pleklianov has definitely placed himself at the head of the latter. His arguments are a substitution of sophistry for dialectics all along the line. He sophistically denounces German opportunism so as to shield French and Russian opportunism. The result is not a struggle against international opportunism, but support for it. He sophistically bemoans the fate of Belgium, while saying nothing about Galicia. He sophistically confuses the period of imperialism (i.e., one in which, as all Marxists hold, the objective conditions are ripe for the collapse of capitalism, and there are masses of socialist proletarians), and the period of bourgeois-democratic national movements; in other words, he confuses a period in which the destruction of bourgeois fatherlands by an international revolution of the proletariat is imminent, and the period of their inception and consolidation.

Even "fraternisation" between workingmen clad in uniforms is possible in the trenches of the fighting armies!

Prattling about dialectics and Marxism while revealing inability to combine the temporary need to submit to the majority with revolutionary work under all conditions mean scoffing at the workers and jeering at socialism.

"While fatherlands exist, while, as at present, the proletariat's life and its movement are compressed into the framework of the fatherlands, and while the proletariat does not feel another and international soil under its feet, the question of patriotism and self-defence will continue to exist for the working class. (Marx)". Bourgeois fatherlands will exist until they are destroyed by the international revolution of the proletariat.