V. I. Lenin

www.marxists.org/archive/leni...

Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.

The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class.

whereas in reality only socialism will be the beginning of a rapid, genuine, truly mass forward movement, embracing first the majority and then the whole of the population, in all spheres of public and private life.

But it is important to realize how infinitely mendacious is the ordinary bourgeois conception of socialism as something lifeless, rigid, fixed once and for all,

The non-economic superstructure which grows up on the basis of finance capital, its politics and its ideology, stimulates the striving for colonial conquest. “Finance capital does not want liberty, it wants domination,” as Hilferding very truly says.

[The proletariat] is becoming increasingly aware of the criminal character of the war, and not only have the bourgeoisie been unable to shatter this popular conviction, but, on the contrary, awareness of the criminal character of the war is growing.

You cannot lead the people into a predatory war in accordance with secret treaties and expect them to be enthusiastic…

One is inseparable from the other—home policy is inseparable from foreign policy.

Only a thorough and consistent break with the capitalists in both home and foreign policy can save our revolution and our country, which is gripped in the iron vice of imperialism.

Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.

The diplomats are in a flurry. There is a shower of “Notes”, “Reports”, “Statements”; ministers whisper behind the backs of the crowned puppets who…are “working for peace”. But their “subjects” know perfectly well that when crows flock together there must be a smell of carrion about.

[What] constitutes the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism [is] a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.

which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.

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

There is a Latin tag cui prodest? meaning “who stands to gain?” When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: “Who stands to gain?”

This freedom is just as utterly false, serving to mask capitalist deception, coercion and exploitation, as are the other “freedoms” proclaimed and implemented by the bourgeoisie, such as the “freedom to work” (actually the freedom to starve), and so on.

For hundreds of years, freedom of trade and of exchange has been to millions of people the supreme gospel of economic wisdom, the most deep-rooted habit of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people.

It is not enough to describe these views as an expression of the politically spineless, flabby, and wavering petty bourgeoisie. They must be explained also from the standpoint of the existing state of affairs in the development of our revolution.

It is difficult to keep calm when reading outrageous speeches like these.

Actually, it is precisely the bourgeoisie that has always played the hypocrite by characterising formal equality as “democracy”, and in practice using force against the poor, the working people, the small peasants and the workers, by employing countless means of deception, oppression, etc.

Of course, finance capital finds most “convenient,” and derives the greatest profit from, a form of subjection which involves the loss of the political independence of the subjected countries and peoples.

But from this capitalist democracy–that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor…–forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards “greater and greater democracy", as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe.

Disunited, the workers are nothing. United, they are everything.

Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.

For that reason reformism, even when quite sincere, in practice becomes a weapon by means of which the bourgeoisie corrupt and weaken the workers. The experience of all countries shows that the workers who put their trust in the reformists are always fooled.

Of course one can use the expression “on the left” in this case only in a very relative sense, to characterise those who are inclined to play at Leftism.

Socialists cannot achieve their great aim without fighting against all oppression of nations

The Address pointed out that wars serve the interests of the propertied classes. The masses of the workers bear all the burdens of war. The propertied classes derive benefit from national calamities. Let the workers unite to fight militarism, to ensure peace!